It is more likely the number of folds in the brain that predict intelligence, since folds imply a more complex wiring pattern.
Probably more the depth of the folds than their number. The folding pattern is pretty constant. Increasing depth of folding produces both increasing surface area and reduced connection length among some structures.
The brain tissue is organized into layers of neurons, with something like just a half-dozen on the top being responsible for most of the processing. So the more surface area the more neurons and the more interconnections between them.
Folding allows a much larger surface area in a given volume (imagine how big the head would be if the brain were a sphere of the same surface area). It also shortens any interconnections between distant sections that go directly rather than following the surface (cutting signal transit time).
Actually somebody already worked that out, comparing the body mass, brain mass, and some hacked-up intelligence measure of various animal species. Turns out it wasn't a straight ratio, but that some fractional power law was a good match.
(I don't recall the details but it was pretty straightforward and I seem to recall a 3/5ths.)
It would be a real scream if the comment that prompted the PHB to swtich from Linux to BSD was cloned from BSD to Linux. B-)
Not unless they fab brainwashing nanomachines...
on
Fab
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's pretty much inevitable that evildoers will acquire this technology, but Gershenfeld is optimistic that fab labs can help address the root causes for conflict, largely assuaging any threat.
I'm afraid that's a pretty materialistic analysis - assuming scarcity of goods is the root of all conflict - and it misses at least two other root causes that are not easily addressed by improved production.
The first is psychopathy. About 1% of the human race has a mental defect that amounts to having no conscience. Think "color blindness", but with moral behavior / internalizing others' pain, rather than color. (Another couple percent learn to act as if they have no conscience, but that's a social/upbringing issue.)
A large fraction of these people don't learn how to compensate, and a lot of those don't think ahead to long-term consequences to themselves from their actions. Such people will do whatever pleases them, which includes such things as creating a new virus (computer style or molecular, depending on available technology) just to see how much havoc it can cause.
Improving production won't address this root cause. Indeed, to address it directly may require brain surgery or its nanotechnological equivalent. This may be within the scope of the fabrication technology. But deploying technology to rewrite peoples' brains in order to suppress a class of destructive behavior starts down a very slippery slope.
A second is ideological: Adherence to a belief system (especially a political and/or religious belief system) allowing, or even prescribing, the initiation of deadly force in response in various situations.
If such a situation is perceived, the adherent with access to such technology may utilize it to create the deadly force. And in a classic case of asymmetric warfare, empowering individuals simply increases the ability of small numbers of people to create large amounts of damage. (Examples: Adherents to a confused splinter of such an ideology, mainstreamers who have perceived a threat where none existed, or mainstreamers who perceived an ACTUAL threat and overreacted).
"Addressing" this "root cause" would again involve attempting to modify peoples' mindsets. And most such ideologies include, at the top of the list of situations where deadly force is mandated, attempts to suppress the ideology. "Addressing the root cause" creates the very apocalypse you're trying to prevent.
This is not to say that the technology should be suppressed: On the contrary. It holds enormous promist for actually eliminating the root causes of many sorts of conflict. And it may be enabling for real solutions that would demotivate some of these hard cases. Cheaper resources are generally good for problem solving, making more solutions accessable.
But counting on it to "address", or even "help address", ALL the "root causes of conflict", IMHO, expects too much from it. Some of these will need solutions that don't come out of fabrication technology.
Note that this does NOT apply to standards unless they have been first proposed as legislation by the standards organization holding the copyright and then adopted as law by some US jurisdiction.
So if you go publishing your favorite ANSI, IEEE, ITU, or whatever standard without BOTH of those criteria being met you'll be breaking new legal ground. Expect to pay some very expensive lawyers to wield the shovels and picks for you when the standards committee in question comes after you.
I hear there was a federal court decision on this not long ago. (I may have seen it here on Slashdot.) As I recall:
Somebody put up a web site with the full text of the electrical code (as adopted by a local jurisdiction, which included the whole thing by reference). Code publishing organization sued. Ruling was to the effect of:
- The standards document itself is copyright, but
- The code as adopted (including the expansion of references into the full text itself) was law and as such not subject to copyright claims, so
- The code as adopted, even if it includes the full text of the standards document verbatim, is public domain, and
- The standards organization, by proposing the standard to be adopted into law, agreed to this (even if they obviously didn't intend to, as evidenced by their business model and suit), and thus
- Publishing the code as adopted by some US jurisdication - correctly annotated as such - does not violate the copyright on the standard (even if it includes the whole text of the standard).
Can't dig for it now, but perhaps somebody has a reference?
(Meanwhile, IANAL and my memory isn't perfect, so don't go publishing a code document without doing your own checking. B-) )
By the way, Teflon pans are deadly to birds when overheated. A gas is formed which can kill your pet in a matter of minutes. Does it affect humans? Dunno. You can read DuPont's assessment of the danger to birds here.
Story circulating in the '60s is that extremely overheated teflon depolymerizes back into TFE, which is EXTREMELY toxic. (And that slivers of teflon in a cigarette had been used as a murder weapon.)
Story circulating the chemestry department at the same time was about the discovery (not invention) of teflon:
Pair of scientists were doing work with TFE. They had set up their equipment, hooked up the gas bottle with the TFE in it, and opened the valve.
Nothing happened.
They weighed the bottle. Not empty.
So they took their lives in their hands and first opened the valve with nothing attached (no gas, which is good because if there had been they'd have been dead) then cut the bottle open (white powder, which is good because if the valve had been stuck and the tank full of gas they'd have been dead).
They realized that some impurity had gotten into the bottle and polymerized the TFE - and had a small amount of the polymer to play with to check that it really WAS poly-TFE and discover interesting properties.
Once they knew that polymerizing TFE could be done, it was only a short time before they figured out how to do it, first in the lab, then on an industrial scale.
Are you aware that "buckyballs" are "soot"?
on
Nanotech Protests Begin
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have heard a bit about how the BuckyBall carbon molecules don't break down and react strangely with the body. So nano tech is hardly inert. The BuckyBall issue, while made from simple carbon, is a different shaped molecule. And could result in another health issue like asbestos fibers.
Are you aware that buckyballs are a major component of soot? Along with many of the other carbon nanostructures (many of which are manufactured by sorting them out of soot).
Humans have had a very long time to evolve defenses against these particular carbon compounds that "react strangely" with the body - along with a lot of other combustion products.
One of the dioxins, for instance, is a low-grade carcinogen for humans, instant death for birds (as in they literally fall out of the sky, which is how a chem prof told me at least one accidental release was detected) at similar concentrations, and extremely toxic for just about all other animal life.
I'm sure nanotech will soon come up with something novel and nasty to humans - if it hasn't already. But, odd as they are, buckyballs aren't it. We've been breathing them in quantity since the domestication of fire.
I assume you're talking about the scopes trial, and this throws up heavy, heavy paranoid-misinformation alerts for me.
Got it from a person with a history degree and labor union experience, who studied that period. This is apparently a quite well-known piece of union history - among academia, not just lore within unions.
Check it out with your local history department if you don't believe me. (Be sure to ask someone who specializes in the history of unionization.)
Scopes was a local High School teacher,
Hired by a mine manager
and apparently he was pushed into challenging the law as a stunt by the local Chamber of Commerce
in a town where the major business is the mines, eh?
to get the town on the map.
At a time when the town was already "getting on the map" due to major labor unrest and attempted unionization, during a period when the major tools of "labor relations" were Pinkertons, Brownings, and Thompsons.
That is the Scopes we're talking about, right?
Right. The Scopes of the "Monkey Trial".
I don't see where anything you said contridicts anything I posted - with the history grad in question looking on and feeding me lines as I typed. (I must admit that I was unaware of that aspect the origin and history of the term "redneck" until said history grad pointed it out.)
It's not "paranoid" to believe in historical "dirty tricks" that are well documented and researched.
(You wouldn't consider it paranoid or misinformation to believe that a silversmith, a printer, some plantation owners, and a few hundred of their close friends once conspired to overthrow the government of their country, would you?)
That would have been funny if you'd said "to our neighbors in Georga". Instead you repeated and reenforced a racial and ethnic stereotype: That (all) white southerners are all racists. This ruined the joke for a lot of your readers.
I'm inclined to assume - THIS time - that it was ignorance rather than hatred-driven intent that led to this faux pas. But please be aware of how such statements might affect others - and that the same pun is available in a non-painful form.
By the way: If you're living in a subculture where that meaning of "cracker" is more common than the alternative I suggested, the people around you have probably set you up for the same problem with "redneck".
A "redneck" - as used by rednecks themselves - is a person who works outdoors, typically in a rural setting, typically with short hair, typically with ancestry predominantly white, indian, or a mix. It refers to the skin tone - sunburn or red undetne on the back of the neck. It does not have the connotaton of "moron" or "racist", and in fact real rednecks are actually of (at least) the normal range of intelligence (with plenty of high-achievement geniuses) and average far LESS racist than the inhabitants of the coastal urban areas. (For starters, the bulk of the actual rocket scientists on the moon shot were rednecks.)
The "racist moron" stereotype was initially promulgated by the eastern coal companies during the start of unionization. (They also made a big point of how these people were allegedly "mongrels", i.e. racially mixed - European, Indian, and African.) It was no accident that Darrow and Scopes were both hired by a mine manager to break the local religion, which supported the unions and provided a place where workers could meet to organize with little fear of attack by the companies' mercenary thugs. The remains of this propaganda campaign still hang over in the culture of US eastern cities and thus in the US media.
Was it just me, or did anyone else out there jump at the first mention of "crystals" in the article? My first thought was "OMG lightsabers".
My first thought was "Did they get the fusion to take place inside a crystal by some tunneling effect produced by the presence of multiple hydrogen ions properly positioned within the periodic lattice - potentially leading to a semiconductor fusion fuel-cell?"
Nope. The crystal was just an extreme high-voltage generator for something going on outside of it.
But why bother when digital is so much more precise?
Because quantiztion and roundoff error play HELL with derivatives. Bigger, faster, cheaper digital computers had to be developed and better algorithms discovered before digital could take over the job. Once that had been done, digital's flexibility won out.
Analog computer technology was an outgrowth of audio and radio, and developed quickly during and immediately after WW II. A couple dozen components would make the fundamental building block, which could do an accurate computation (weighted sum, integration, differentiation, or something more complex) at kilohertz to megahertz rates. A similar number of components, as a digital device, could make a couple flip-flops processing a bit at about the rate the op-amp could do the entire computation. Noise and offset could be controlled, and taken into account. (In a feedback system, as in the real-world device being modeled, offset and noise are suppressed by the feedback if the system is stable.)
Analog computational technology is STILL in heavy use - at high frequencies, and at the edges of digital systems. (Digital techniques are just starting to take over some of the functions of, for instance, radios.)
The main reason digital wins out is that the computational elements are sufficiently immune to noise that they can be miniatureized and placed close together without misbehaving. When you get enough orders of magnitude cost reduction from that, you can throw enough of them at an analog problem to get an acceptable answer for less money and engineer time than you'd need to spend doing it with purpose-built or purpose-wired analog parts. Then digital wins.
There are not 'morphing' connections, they tend to mostly stabilize within the first few years of life.
Sorry, that's wrong. It has recently been discovered that neurons are constantly growing and reabsorbing a fuzz of little proto-connections (whose name I can't recall just now) to adjacent neurons. Under some circumstances (presumed to be related to correlations between the firing times of the neuron with the fuzz and the neuron a fuzz hair is approaching) one of these hairs makes a connection and fattens up into a full-blown connection (presumably to reenforce and shortcut the processing).
Of course that's necessarily only a part of the story. There'd have to be a mechanism cutting the connections (or you'd eventually end up with a mess capable mostly of epileptic fits and squeezing out its own circulation).
It has also been discovered that the astrocytes in the brain are stem cells which actually spawn new, functioning, interconnecting-with-the-rest, neurons - far into old age, even in humans.
(Brain cell replacement in adults was not totally surprising. It has long been known that the portion of bird's brains responsible for mating calls actually grows considerably - by new cell production - as mating season approaches, and shrinks - by cell death - between seasons.)
Again it is hardly surprising that new cell production would be slower in adulthood (when the machine is functioning well and has limited space - so must sacrifice something else if it is to grow much) than in infancy and childhood (when the machine is still under construction and learning is progressing rapidly).
But these effects will certainly need to be taken into account in any accurate simulation. And they might not be just structural maintainence, but instead be fundamental to some of the processing functionality of the brain.
Yep, there is no chance this will get slashdotted, but in case it does, I think there is a mirror working here.
Nope - the mirror got slashdotted, too. (Or otherwise is "not working here" - which I presume is the import of an error message saying "unable to locate...".)
My vacation house is at a site where AT&T (and now Cingulair), the only service with a cell feeding the area, has stated that they have no intent to upgrade it (from TDMA) to current technology any time soon, if ever. This despite their apparent dedication to abandoning TDMA for GSM elsewhere in their network.
I have often wished for a modem using modulation schemes that make efficient use of the channel through the various cellphone/cell site audio codecs (as the 56k modems do the phone network's G.711 digitization scheme). That way I could use the unlimited night/evening voice service to hit a modem at my home, which also has DSL, and achieve an internet link at close to the underlying data rate of the cellphone, rather than having no data service at all.
Such a scheme would also be useful for companies with traveling employees, in this case relaying off the company datacenter. It would similarly provide a quality data link in areas where cellphone native data services aren't available (and possibly save a bunch of money by making such service add-ons unnecessary.)
so what do you do when your software requires an Intel chipset because of the DRM capabilities?
The same thing I have done when Wintel software was "required" for corresponding with certain businesses, browsing certain web sites, reading certain email, etc. (And the same thing I did with DVD players until I found one where the region lock could be bypassed.)
Do without.
Just as I have done with ALL Microsoft products since day one.
(I realized that Microsoft had a problem back in the very early days, when a letter appeared in Byte magazine describing how they had responded to a user report of a bug in their FORTRAN complier's formatted output handling - by eventually telling him that not only hadn't they fixed it, but they never would. I went straight from CPM on 80xx/z80/etc. to Unix on a Motorola 68xxx, and never found a need to bite Microsoft's wax tadpole.)
Humanity got along just fine without Internet Explorer, MS Office, Powerpoint, and Windows Media Player for millions of years. Individuals who have no attraction to them can continue to do without if they please for as long as they please.
Meanwhile, I have no worries that adequate DRM-free processor power will be available for the forseeable future. (If nothing else, FPGAs are getting to the point where you can program them to be a moderately powerful machine - and some models have decent DRM-free processors - ARM, Power PC, etc. - included. Try to tell a hardware engineer he has to work around a DRM-crippled processor in his FPGA and see how many designs use your part. B-) )
Isn't TIME magazine published by Time Warner - the media conglomerate that was formed by the merger of Time/Life (the publishing house) and Warner Brothers (the movie studio)?
Isn't that a conflict of interest?
(Or have I lost track of the merger/spinout dance in the media conglomerates?)
What i dont understand is why they equate searching the text with copying and reading the entire work...
A copy (albiet potentially a transient one) is made during the indexing process. And it (or pieces of it) would be retained online to provide the context-of-search-hit displays. They might object to that.
There are two potential objections I can see:
- Statutory damages for making that copy without permissions.
- They might claim that making it searchable themselves. or selling rights to do so, is a potential income source which is devalued by Google's competition, and claim actual damages. (Even if they have no intention of actually making it searchable, or licensing some kind of "search rights".)
As I said: It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Making the texts searchable - provided they only show a small snippet and a reference to the book for the rest - sounds EXACTLY like fair use to me.
Especially for academic papers, where being able to find the reference is critical to advancement of the field, and the citer would have to obtain and read more than the snippet anyhow.
How long till we have real time crime data showing up on Google's map?
How long before real estate interests make him pull the site down or make the agencies providing the crime data stop providing it - or stop providing it in a computer-useful form?
Not a purely academic question. My wife noticed that crimes we's heard about from other sources was not being reported in some areas of Silicon Valley and asked the San Jose paper in question about it. The person she reached said that they didn't want to depress real estate values. B-(
Then they wonder why we don't subscribe these days, and prefer to get our news from the web.
The Whiptails reproduce by one female taking the role of the male and going through the mating ritual to stimulate the other to produce eggs.
It's some salamanders (genus Ambystoma) that also reproduce only parthenogenically but require mating with and sperm from males of a closely related species to stimulate egg production. ("Gynogenesis".)
I thought all cloning species are small and fast-reproducing so they can filter out bad genes that way. Where did you learn about those lizards?
Don't recall exactly - I've seen it several places (including Animal Planet).
But a web search on "lizard virgin birth" quickly turned up a bunch.
It's the Whiptail Lizard. There are about 15 species of it that reproduce exclusively by parthenogenesis - the largest vertibrates to do so.
Apparently hybridization of two other lizard species sometimes results in a female offspring that can only reproduce that way, creating a new species. The hybrid vigor then lets the population establish, making up (at least in the geological short-term) for the lack of genetic mixing. (Downsides are lack of evolution and an entire population that has nearly identical immune response - probably leading eventually to extinction from some disease that would only wipe out part of a sexual species.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is more likely the number of folds in the brain that predict intelligence, since folds imply a more complex wiring pattern.
Probably more the depth of the folds than their number. The folding pattern is pretty constant. Increasing depth of folding produces both increasing surface area and reduced connection length among some structures.
The brain tissue is organized into layers of neurons, with something like just a half-dozen on the top being responsible for most of the processing. So the more surface area the more neurons and the more interconnections between them.
Folding allows a much larger surface area in a given volume (imagine how big the head would be if the brain were a sphere of the same surface area). It also shortens any interconnections between distant sections that go directly rather than following the surface (cutting signal transit time).
So more accurate would be: iq=brainsize/bodysize.
Actually somebody already worked that out, comparing the body mass, brain mass, and some hacked-up intelligence measure of various animal species. Turns out it wasn't a straight ratio, but that some fractional power law was a good match.
(I don't recall the details but it was pretty straightforward and I seem to recall a 3/5ths.)
"Does this belong here?" is in OpenBSD too.
It would be a real scream if the comment that prompted the PHB to swtich from Linux to BSD was cloned from BSD to Linux. B-)
It's pretty much inevitable that evildoers will acquire this technology, but Gershenfeld is optimistic that fab labs can help address the root causes for conflict, largely assuaging any threat.
I'm afraid that's a pretty materialistic analysis - assuming scarcity of goods is the root of all conflict - and it misses at least two other root causes that are not easily addressed by improved production.
The first is psychopathy. About 1% of the human race has a mental defect that amounts to having no conscience. Think "color blindness", but with moral behavior / internalizing others' pain, rather than color. (Another couple percent learn to act as if they have no conscience, but that's a social/upbringing issue.)
A large fraction of these people don't learn how to compensate, and a lot of those don't think ahead to long-term consequences to themselves from their actions. Such people will do whatever pleases them, which includes such things as creating a new virus (computer style or molecular, depending on available technology) just to see how much havoc it can cause.
Improving production won't address this root cause. Indeed, to address it directly may require brain surgery or its nanotechnological equivalent. This may be within the scope of the fabrication technology. But deploying technology to rewrite peoples' brains in order to suppress a class of destructive behavior starts down a very slippery slope.
A second is ideological: Adherence to a belief system (especially a political and/or religious belief system) allowing, or even prescribing, the initiation of deadly force in response in various situations.
If such a situation is perceived, the adherent with access to such technology may utilize it to create the deadly force. And in a classic case of asymmetric warfare, empowering individuals simply increases the ability of small numbers of people to create large amounts of damage. (Examples: Adherents to a confused splinter of such an ideology, mainstreamers who have perceived a threat where none existed, or mainstreamers who perceived an ACTUAL threat and overreacted).
"Addressing" this "root cause" would again involve attempting to modify peoples' mindsets. And most such ideologies include, at the top of the list of situations where deadly force is mandated, attempts to suppress the ideology. "Addressing the root cause" creates the very apocalypse you're trying to prevent.
This is not to say that the technology should be suppressed: On the contrary. It holds enormous promist for actually eliminating the root causes of many sorts of conflict. And it may be enabling for real solutions that would demotivate some of these hard cases. Cheaper resources are generally good for problem solving, making more solutions accessable.
But counting on it to "address", or even "help address", ALL the "root causes of conflict", IMHO, expects too much from it. Some of these will need solutions that don't come out of fabrication technology.
By the way:
Note that this does NOT apply to standards unless they have been first proposed as legislation by the standards organization holding the copyright and then adopted as law by some US jurisdiction.
So if you go publishing your favorite ANSI, IEEE, ITU, or whatever standard without BOTH of those criteria being met you'll be breaking new legal ground. Expect to pay some very expensive lawyers to wield the shovels and picks for you when the standards committee in question comes after you.
I hear there was a federal court decision on this not long ago. (I may have seen it here on Slashdot.) As I recall:
Somebody put up a web site with the full text of the electrical code (as adopted by a local jurisdiction, which included the whole thing by reference). Code publishing organization sued. Ruling was to the effect of:
- The standards document itself is copyright, but
- The code as adopted (including the expansion of references into the full text itself) was law and as such not subject to copyright claims, so
- The code as adopted, even if it includes the full text of the standards document verbatim, is public domain, and
- The standards organization, by proposing the standard to be adopted into law, agreed to this (even if they obviously didn't intend to, as evidenced by their business model and suit), and thus
- Publishing the code as adopted by some US jurisdication - correctly annotated as such - does not violate the copyright on the standard (even if it includes the whole text of the standard).
Can't dig for it now, but perhaps somebody has a reference?
(Meanwhile, IANAL and my memory isn't perfect, so don't go publishing a code document without doing your own checking. B-) )
By the way, Teflon pans are deadly to birds when overheated. A gas is formed which can kill your pet in a matter of minutes. Does it affect humans? Dunno. You can read DuPont's assessment of the danger to birds here.
Story circulating in the '60s is that extremely overheated teflon depolymerizes back into TFE, which is EXTREMELY toxic. (And that slivers of teflon in a cigarette had been used as a murder weapon.)
Story circulating the chemestry department at the same time was about the discovery (not invention) of teflon:
Pair of scientists were doing work with TFE. They had set up their equipment, hooked up the gas bottle with the TFE in it, and opened the valve.
Nothing happened.
They weighed the bottle. Not empty.
So they took their lives in their hands and first opened the valve with nothing attached (no gas, which is good because if there had been they'd have been dead) then cut the bottle open (white powder, which is good because if the valve had been stuck and the tank full of gas they'd have been dead).
They realized that some impurity had gotten into the bottle and polymerized the TFE - and had a small amount of the polymer to play with to check that it really WAS poly-TFE and discover interesting properties.
Once they knew that polymerizing TFE could be done, it was only a short time before they figured out how to do it, first in the lab, then on an industrial scale.
I have heard a bit about how the BuckyBall carbon molecules don't break down and react strangely with the body. So nano tech is hardly inert. The BuckyBall issue, while made from simple carbon, is a different shaped molecule. And could result in another health issue like asbestos fibers.
Are you aware that buckyballs are a major component of soot? Along with many of the other carbon nanostructures (many of which are manufactured by sorting them out of soot).
Humans have had a very long time to evolve defenses against these particular carbon compounds that "react strangely" with the body - along with a lot of other combustion products.
One of the dioxins, for instance, is a low-grade carcinogen for humans, instant death for birds (as in they literally fall out of the sky, which is how a chem prof told me at least one accidental release was detected) at similar concentrations, and extremely toxic for just about all other animal life.
I'm sure nanotech will soon come up with something novel and nasty to humans - if it hasn't already. But, odd as they are, buckyballs aren't it. We've been breathing them in quantity since the domestication of fire.
I assume you're talking about the scopes trial, and this throws up heavy, heavy paranoid-misinformation alerts for me.
Got it from a person with a history degree and labor union experience, who studied that period. This is apparently a quite well-known piece of union history - among academia, not just lore within unions.
Check it out with your local history department if you don't believe me. (Be sure to ask someone who specializes in the history of unionization.)
Scopes was a local High School teacher,
Hired by a mine manager
and apparently he was pushed into challenging the law as a stunt by the local Chamber of Commerce
in a town where the major business is the mines, eh?
to get the town on the map.
At a time when the town was already "getting on the map" due to major labor unrest and attempted unionization, during a period when the major tools of "labor relations" were Pinkertons, Brownings, and Thompsons.
That is the Scopes we're talking about, right?
Right. The Scopes of the "Monkey Trial".
I don't see where anything you said contridicts anything I posted - with the history grad in question looking on and feeding me lines as I typed. (I must admit that I was unaware of that aspect the origin and history of the term "redneck" until said history grad pointed it out.)
It's not "paranoid" to believe in historical "dirty tricks" that are well documented and researched.
(You wouldn't consider it paranoid or misinformation to believe that a silversmith, a printer, some plantation owners, and a few hundred of their close friends once conspired to overthrow the government of their country, would you?)
That would have been funny if you'd said "to our neighbors in Georga". Instead you repeated and reenforced a racial and ethnic stereotype: That (all) white southerners are all racists. This ruined the joke for a lot of your readers.
I'm inclined to assume - THIS time - that it was ignorance rather than hatred-driven intent that led to this faux pas. But please be aware of how such statements might affect others - and that the same pun is available in a non-painful form.
By the way: If you're living in a subculture where that meaning of "cracker" is more common than the alternative I suggested, the people around you have probably set you up for the same problem with "redneck".
A "redneck" - as used by rednecks themselves - is a person who works outdoors, typically in a rural setting, typically with short hair, typically with ancestry predominantly white, indian, or a mix. It refers to the skin tone - sunburn or red undetne on the back of the neck. It does not have the connotaton of "moron" or "racist", and in fact real rednecks are actually of (at least) the normal range of intelligence (with plenty of high-achievement geniuses) and average far LESS racist than the inhabitants of the coastal urban areas. (For starters, the bulk of the actual rocket scientists on the moon shot were rednecks.)
The "racist moron" stereotype was initially promulgated by the eastern coal companies during the start of unionization. (They also made a big point of how these people were allegedly "mongrels", i.e. racially mixed - European, Indian, and African.) It was no accident that Darrow and Scopes were both hired by a mine manager to break the local religion, which supported the unions and provided a place where workers could meet to organize with little fear of attack by the companies' mercenary thugs. The remains of this propaganda campaign still hang over in the culture of US eastern cities and thus in the US media.
Seriously, honest question. What's not to get about a language? It's just another language with different options, styles, formats, and uses...
Try learning Navajo, or Basq, starting at an age greater than two years. Then say that again. B-)
Was it just me, or did anyone else out there jump at the first mention of "crystals" in the article? My first thought was "OMG lightsabers".
My first thought was "Did they get the fusion to take place inside a crystal by some tunneling effect produced by the presence of multiple hydrogen ions properly positioned within the periodic lattice - potentially leading to a semiconductor fusion fuel-cell?"
Nope. The crystal was just an extreme high-voltage generator for something going on outside of it.
Fix your stupid DNS server. Apparently it doesn't understand DNAME records.
Tell that to SBC.
But why bother when digital is so much more precise?
Because quantiztion and roundoff error play HELL with derivatives. Bigger, faster, cheaper digital computers had to be developed and better algorithms discovered before digital could take over the job. Once that had been done, digital's flexibility won out.
Analog computer technology was an outgrowth of audio and radio, and developed quickly during and immediately after WW II. A couple dozen components would make the fundamental building block, which could do an accurate computation (weighted sum, integration, differentiation, or something more complex) at kilohertz to megahertz rates. A similar number of components, as a digital device, could make a couple flip-flops processing a bit at about the rate the op-amp could do the entire computation. Noise and offset could be controlled, and taken into account. (In a feedback system, as in the real-world device being modeled, offset and noise are suppressed by the feedback if the system is stable.)
Analog computational technology is STILL in heavy use - at high frequencies, and at the edges of digital systems. (Digital techniques are just starting to take over some of the functions of, for instance, radios.)
The main reason digital wins out is that the computational elements are sufficiently immune to noise that they can be miniatureized and placed close together without misbehaving. When you get enough orders of magnitude cost reduction from that, you can throw enough of them at an analog problem to get an acceptable answer for less money and engineer time than you'd need to spend doing it with purpose-built or purpose-wired analog parts. Then digital wins.
There are not 'morphing' connections, they tend to mostly stabilize within the first few years of life.
Sorry, that's wrong. It has recently been discovered that neurons are constantly growing and reabsorbing a fuzz of little proto-connections (whose name I can't recall just now) to adjacent neurons. Under some circumstances (presumed to be related to correlations between the firing times of the neuron with the fuzz and the neuron a fuzz hair is approaching) one of these hairs makes a connection and fattens up into a full-blown connection (presumably to reenforce and shortcut the processing).
Of course that's necessarily only a part of the story. There'd have to be a mechanism cutting the connections (or you'd eventually end up with a mess capable mostly of epileptic fits and squeezing out its own circulation).
It has also been discovered that the astrocytes in the brain are stem cells which actually spawn new, functioning, interconnecting-with-the-rest, neurons - far into old age, even in humans.
(Brain cell replacement in adults was not totally surprising. It has long been known that the portion of bird's brains responsible for mating calls actually grows considerably - by new cell production - as mating season approaches, and shrinks - by cell death - between seasons.)
Again it is hardly surprising that new cell production would be slower in adulthood (when the machine is functioning well and has limited space - so must sacrifice something else if it is to grow much) than in infancy and childhood (when the machine is still under construction and learning is progressing rapidly).
But these effects will certainly need to be taken into account in any accurate simulation. And they might not be just structural maintainence, but instead be fundamental to some of the processing functionality of the brain.
Yep, there is no chance this will get slashdotted, but in case it does, I think there is a mirror working here.
...".)
Nope - the mirror got slashdotted, too. (Or otherwise is "not working here" - which I presume is the import of an error message saying "unable to locate
will be swimming fish.
My vacation house is at a site where AT&T (and now Cingulair), the only service with a cell feeding the area, has stated that they have no intent to upgrade it (from TDMA) to current technology any time soon, if ever. This despite their apparent dedication to abandoning TDMA for GSM elsewhere in their network.
I have often wished for a modem using modulation schemes that make efficient use of the channel through the various cellphone/cell site audio codecs (as the 56k modems do the phone network's G.711 digitization scheme). That way I could use the unlimited night/evening voice service to hit a modem at my home, which also has DSL, and achieve an internet link at close to the underlying data rate of the cellphone, rather than having no data service at all.
Such a scheme would also be useful for companies with traveling employees, in this case relaying off the company datacenter. It would similarly provide a quality data link in areas where cellphone native data services aren't available (and possibly save a bunch of money by making such service add-ons unnecessary.)
so what do you do when your software requires an Intel chipset because of the DRM capabilities?
The same thing I have done when Wintel software was "required" for corresponding with certain businesses, browsing certain web sites, reading certain email, etc. (And the same thing I did with DVD players until I found one where the region lock could be bypassed.)
Do without.
Just as I have done with ALL Microsoft products since day one.
(I realized that Microsoft had a problem back in the very early days, when a letter appeared in Byte magazine describing how they had responded to a user report of a bug in their FORTRAN complier's formatted output handling - by eventually telling him that not only hadn't they fixed it, but they never would. I went straight from CPM on 80xx/z80/etc. to Unix on a Motorola 68xxx, and never found a need to bite Microsoft's wax tadpole.)
Humanity got along just fine without Internet Explorer, MS Office, Powerpoint, and Windows Media Player for millions of years. Individuals who have no attraction to them can continue to do without if they please for as long as they please.
Meanwhile, I have no worries that adequate DRM-free processor power will be available for the forseeable future. (If nothing else, FPGAs are getting to the point where you can program them to be a moderately powerful machine - and some models have decent DRM-free processors - ARM, Power PC, etc. - included. Try to tell a hardware engineer he has to work around a DRM-crippled processor in his FPGA and see how many designs use your part. B-) )
Wait a minute...
Isn't TIME magazine published by Time Warner - the media conglomerate that was formed by the merger of Time/Life (the publishing house) and Warner Brothers (the movie studio)?
Isn't that a conflict of interest?
(Or have I lost track of the merger/spinout dance in the media conglomerates?)
What i dont understand is why they equate searching the text with copying and reading the entire work...
A copy (albiet potentially a transient one) is made during the indexing process. And it (or pieces of it) would be retained online to provide the context-of-search-hit displays. They might object to that.
There are two potential objections I can see:
- Statutory damages for making that copy without permissions.
- They might claim that making it searchable themselves. or selling rights to do so, is a potential income source which is devalued by Google's competition, and claim actual damages. (Even if they have no intention of actually making it searchable, or licensing some kind of "search rights".)
As I said: It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Making the texts searchable - provided they only show a small snippet and a reference to the book for the rest - sounds EXACTLY like fair use to me.
Especially for academic papers, where being able to find the reference is critical to advancement of the field, and the citer would have to obtain and read more than the snippet anyhow.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
How long till we have real time crime data showing up on Google's map?
How long before real estate interests make him pull the site down or make the agencies providing the crime data stop providing it - or stop providing it in a computer-useful form?
Not a purely academic question. My wife noticed that crimes we's heard about from other sources was not being reported in some areas of Silicon Valley and asked the San Jose paper in question about it. The person she reached said that they didn't want to depress real estate values. B-(
Then they wonder why we don't subscribe these days, and prefer to get our news from the web.
Oops. Got them mixed up.
The Whiptails reproduce by one female taking the role of the male and going through the mating ritual to stimulate the other to produce eggs.
It's some salamanders (genus Ambystoma) that also reproduce only parthenogenically but require mating with and sperm from males of a closely related species to stimulate egg production. ("Gynogenesis".)
I thought all cloning species are small and fast-reproducing so they can filter out bad genes that way. Where did you learn about those lizards?
Don't recall exactly - I've seen it several places (including Animal Planet).
But a web search on "lizard virgin birth" quickly turned up a bunch.
It's the Whiptail Lizard. There are about 15 species of it that reproduce exclusively by parthenogenesis - the largest vertibrates to do so.
Apparently hybridization of two other lizard species sometimes results in a female offspring that can only reproduce that way, creating a new species. The hybrid vigor then lets the population establish, making up (at least in the geological short-term) for the lack of genetic mixing. (Downsides are lack of evolution and an entire population that has nearly identical immune response - probably leading eventually to extinction from some disease that would only wipe out part of a sexual species.)