I'm not equating them, I'm saying they're both heroes.
The difference is Turing was persecuted for what he was, Swartz was prosecuted for what he did. Turning was not trying to make a point, sadly Swartz probably was.
This is the first time since magic was invented the public has had to deal with something they are completely and utterly unable to understand or fell they can protect themselves from.
My grandparents generation treated electricity the same way.
When Einstein said it looked the same in every direction, what he meant was that it's all governed by the same laws.
Actually it's more than that, it's also about the distribution of matter and energy on a large scale. It's assumed that matter is homogenous throughout the universe, homogenous literally means "no lumps" (above a certain size defined as "local" in your post). It's like an ideal gas, at the microscopic level you have all sorts of random "pressure" (kinetic energy of the individual atoms), at the macroscopic level there is just one pressure that is the same no matter what part of the gas you measure. This is because the macroscopic measurements are an average of all the individual microscopic pressures, the central limit theorem of statistics says that that the average of a big enough sample from a large population will always be very close to the real population average.
In other words the reason it's "odd" is that statistics says the observation can't be brushed aside as a fluke, if the distribution of quasars is lumpy then either the basic assumption of large scale homogeneity is wrong, or the observation is flawed. The OP's stupid question is by far the most insightful thing I've read about it so far, how are they defining the word "structure".
I've never been to China but the recent mining boom here in Oz was said to be due to domestic growth in China. Apparently they are investing in infrastructure at a pace never seen before, for the past few years they have been using up 1/3 of the world's output in steel for domestic construction, that's construction alone, not the total consumption. They have stated they want to create a strong middle class to spur domestic growth, it appears to be working in a spectacularly fashion.
I don't think it will be very long in historical terms before China and the US have a similar standard of living. In "big picture" terms, since the time I was born, the USSR and the US have both blown their inheritance on military power to the point of domestic bankruptcy/extinction, China was bankrupt and experiencing regular famines when I was a kid, the year I left HS they kicked the gang of four to the curb and since that time they have have dragged more people out of abject poverty than the rest of the world combined.
Of course carefully selected "little picture" stories can make either place look like heaven or hell, but in historical terms I'd say the Chinese people won the cold war while the rest of the world were busy dancing on the remains of a wall in Germany.
Actually, the place in society where the wealth piles up pretty much defines who is part of the elite.
Excellent point and an interesting way of looking at the economy, the "temperature" would probably be directly related to how fast money circulates, the size of the economy would determine it's "thermal inertia".
As for social scientists they would look at this conversation and label us both "technocrats", however I remember the Iron Lady well, a chemist from Oxford I didn't like that much.;)
Regardless of where anyone learned to program, I'd ask the kid one question - "You say can't read it, so why should we trust you to rewrite it?" - Then offer him some help to understand it, or sack the arrogant little shit if he's pissing people off with his unwillingness to learn "what is".
I've been in the game for a long while, I have never seen anyone walk in and comprehend the inner workings of a non-trivial source tree in under 3 months, but I've seen plenty of inexperienced people that think they can. The real problem is that code is much easier to write than it is to read. When a coder rewrites something only one thing is certain, it will be an education for the coder. However that coder is now the SME for that application and other coders will have to try and read his code. An old friend of mine, an excellent coder and all round pragmatist, described this phenomena perfectly with the expression; "Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own".
Are you for real? You complain about "class warfare" and in the same paragraph basically claim that a class of people (successful business men) are the only class of people who can be trusted to lead properly. And you don't see a glaring contradiction?
Please don't take the above as an insult, my intention is to be blunt, not insulting. Politics requires "critical thinking skills" more so than science but rarely are they applied with the same rigor. The reason you fall for the "class warfare" bullshit is because your vote with your gut, not your brain. You actually need to use both, know your emotional triggers and question your own basic assumptions, such as the assumption you display in the post that says something like "governments and corporations are very similar", once you accept that assumption as gospel, what do you then do to balance the power that you have handed over to wealthy merchants?
Just remember one fact when people talk about "class warfare" - ALL governments redistribute wealth and they all claim their particular formula is for the "common good", it's not "class warfare" it's their purpose, it is the very definition of civilization itself. Sometimes the wealth piles up in great mounds on the "elite", sometimes it stolen and squandered by corrupt officials or angry mobs, every now and then a "booming middle class" appears as it did in the US after WW2, and is now doing in China after Mao's famines.
Yes, I have an assumption that a "booming middle class" is a GoodThing(TM), but I don't think anyone really knows exactly how to create one (please don't send me newsletters). Truth is, if you take the time to look there are good and bad ideas from all sides, politics should be about shaping society in OUR own image, that image should not be preemptively restricted to the economic heroes of of the day.
I would say it's more difficult for a politician these days to tell different groups different stories and not have anyone notice. I can't remember which Roman emperor it was but one of them had all these statues of himself erected in public places all over the empire. He wasn't a very handsome man, he was short, bald, and had only one tooth, luckily the statues were all carved on the one day he looked like a young Greek god.
Divorce rates peaked when no fault divorce came into effect due to the backlog of people hanging on because of finances. Most people are serial monogamists, that is they have a series of partners over a lifetime rather than a single life long partner.
a big part of the idea, as well, is that these for these revolutions to happen, the older generation of scientists have to die off.
That's ridiculous, what the older generation have to do is look at the evidence and change their mind, not die. Feynman diagrams are a wonderful example, he gave a presentation to some of the top physicist of the time and they literally laughed in his face and hurled insults at him, after mulling it over for a couple of days they were patting him on the back and calling him a genius.
There is also a huge difference in the way modern science is driven. Pre-20th century most science was performed by wealthy individuals and reflected their personal interest, public projects such as the 17th century competition to build a seaworthy clock were rare. Science is now a team sport and is largely driven by societies interests. The switch away from being an eccentric rich man's was exemplified by Edison's Menlo park which I believe was the first commercial "research center".
I haven't RTFA or the book but he seems to be defining "paradigm shift" as "acceptance of a new model". If so, "Sciences progresses in paradigm shifts" becomes "Science progressively refines it's model of the real word", hardly a paradigm shifting revelation.;)
The Black Saturday fire a couple of years back was also throwing spot fires 20km down wind. That was the hottest day on record for Victoria. The conditions are similar now, the day the fires started was the hottest day ever in Tasmania. I've lived in Oz for 50yrs, we used to get this sort of catastrophic bushfire once every 20yrs, it seems to be once every 4-5yrs since about the mid 90's. El-Nino conditions returned last April, I think people are going to stop complaining about the cost of the desal plants when this new drought starts to bite so soon after the last one.
Back burning in Oz rarely causes property damage even if it does get out of hand, it's the dry hot weather and strong winds that cause problems, similar conditions to California where 120km/h winds off the desert push the fire along faster than the fire trucks can travel, nobody is allowed to burn off in that kind of weather. Also we have just come out of El-Nina conditions, the two years up to last April were very wet and put a lot of growth in the bush that has now dried out due to it flipping back to dry El-Nino conditions.
Perhaps someone else will amend the bill to get rid of both distractions, then all it needs is an unrelated "earmark" for more than half the senators to ensure it passes.
Resignation is the "proper" thing to do, what happens in Canada when they refuse to do the proper thing? Australia's Gough Whitlam was a special case, he hesitated to do the "proper" thing so the GG ("Queen's representative") sacked him and installed a caretaker government who's first duty was to immediately call an election. I'm old enough to remember that election, I liked Whitlam and he left us some great things like UHC but he was wrong and he lost the forced election because he kept crying about the GG and let the opposition fight uncontested on the real issues. I believe (but haven't checked) that in the UK the Queen also still has the constitutional power to sack a government and call an election should the UK government of the day not do the "proper" thing and resign due to the "no confidence" expressed by the senate blocking supply.
The only social construct in existence that's worse than government is dysfunctional government. Whatever the details and phrases employed by various WM systems, the basic method of breaking a budgetary impasse via a snap election exists in all three countries. What could be a more transparent and elegant solution to a serious political stalemate other than to ask the people who will have to live with the result to arbitrate via a general election?
"If" is the operative word in your post. it has publicity stunt written all over it, it's intent is to make Obama look ridiculous and it's a distraction from the real issue, which is why does a modern super power need to have an annual self-induced budget crisis brought on by a self-enforced arbitrary "debt ceiling" that was defined in the previous budget? I can't think of another western government that recursively kicks itself in the budgetary balls like that?
In the Westminster system if the annual budget drawn up by the government of the day is rejected by the senate twice in a row you have what is known as a "double dissolution". A general election is held for both the house and the senate. The existing government goes into "caretaker" mode so as to keep the wheels turning until the new government is formed. Not sure but I believe that "caretaker" mode is like a pro-rata extension of the previous budget. Basically no "new" spending is allowed but the opposition cannot hold the government's agenda to ransom indefinitely, if they are serious about their objections then they must treat it seriously and take it to the ultimate arbitrator.
Thing is YOU don't get to define what future generations think of you and your civilization, if you want to help them to form an accurate view rather than just the image you want to portray then you need to leave some juicy rubbish dumps undisturbed, this is one such dump. I'd question the justification for the size of this particular dump but you make it sound like they are throwing out Mark Twain to make room for twitter. You know they have the resources to do both things at the same time, and that this project probably cost less than a single hand written Twain manuscript, right?
At the end of the day I see stuff like this as a GoodThing(TM). I'd much rather live in a society that over-values it's everyday trivia than one that under-values it's past, or worst still goes out of it's way to destroy it (Taliban). The Victorian English were the ones who started the drive for museums and preserving/understanding the past. Before that nobody really bothered about social heritage, it was all about family heritage. Egypt is a great example, they started looking after their own heritage after the British showed so much interest in digging up their monuments and taking the home with them. A large portion of the old city of Cairo is made from the lime that used to cover the pyramids (their sides were originally flat and white), all that's left is a little cap of lime on top of the largest one. Once the pyramid making fad and families had well and truly died, the people of Cario simply didn't care about a huge monument built by some long dead family, to them it was no more than a convenient source of building material that a long dead Pharaoh had left lying around.
Yep, the ancient rubbish pit is often the most informative part of an archeological dig, however this is more along the lines of Samuel Peeps' diary. Four years worth of tweets is a bit over the top, IMHO a few random days and a few significant days would be all you really need. I have something similar at home, it's a large coffee table book that has one page of newspaper clippings for every month of the 20th century.
I don't think they should pick and choose what to keep, the value is in the fact that they are everyday conversations and observations (much like Samuel peeps diary). However I can't think of a reason why an academic would want every tweet for four years, they could get the same insights from a much smaller random sample.
You really have to think about how many inches are in a yard
Actually you don't if you have had it drummed into your head at school. I was at HS when Australia changed in the 70's, metric is natural to me now but the imperial units are still burnt into my neurons from 45yrs ago.
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Yep, it's what other nations call "lobbying".
I'm not equating them, I'm saying they're both heroes.
The difference is Turing was persecuted for what he was, Swartz was prosecuted for what he did. Turning was not trying to make a point, sadly Swartz probably was.
This is the first time since magic was invented the public has had to deal with something they are completely and utterly unable to understand or fell they can protect themselves from.
My grandparents generation treated electricity the same way.
When Einstein said it looked the same in every direction, what he meant was that it's all governed by the same laws.
Actually it's more than that, it's also about the distribution of matter and energy on a large scale. It's assumed that matter is homogenous throughout the universe, homogenous literally means "no lumps" (above a certain size defined as "local" in your post). It's like an ideal gas, at the microscopic level you have all sorts of random "pressure" (kinetic energy of the individual atoms), at the macroscopic level there is just one pressure that is the same no matter what part of the gas you measure. This is because the macroscopic measurements are an average of all the individual microscopic pressures, the central limit theorem of statistics says that that the average of a big enough sample from a large population will always be very close to the real population average.
In other words the reason it's "odd" is that statistics says the observation can't be brushed aside as a fluke, if the distribution of quasars is lumpy then either the basic assumption of large scale homogeneity is wrong, or the observation is flawed. The OP's stupid question is by far the most insightful thing I've read about it so far, how are they defining the word "structure".
I've never been to China but the recent mining boom here in Oz was said to be due to domestic growth in China. Apparently they are investing in infrastructure at a pace never seen before, for the past few years they have been using up 1/3 of the world's output in steel for domestic construction, that's construction alone, not the total consumption. They have stated they want to create a strong middle class to spur domestic growth, it appears to be working in a spectacularly fashion.
I don't think it will be very long in historical terms before China and the US have a similar standard of living. In "big picture" terms, since the time I was born, the USSR and the US have both blown their inheritance on military power to the point of domestic bankruptcy/extinction, China was bankrupt and experiencing regular famines when I was a kid, the year I left HS they kicked the gang of four to the curb and since that time they have have dragged more people out of abject poverty than the rest of the world combined.
Of course carefully selected "little picture" stories can make either place look like heaven or hell, but in historical terms I'd say the Chinese people won the cold war while the rest of the world were busy dancing on the remains of a wall in Germany.
Marketing and economics are inexact "sciences", it's close enough to 1:1 for what they are doing.
I think your confusing a hippy love in with actual protesting.
No, I think your confusing picketing with protesting. It's ok though, just don't confuse rioting with civil disobedience.
they never read the EULA or the TOS
Who's controlling whom when you waste time reading that shit?
Actually, the place in society where the wealth piles up pretty much defines who is part of the elite.
Excellent point and an interesting way of looking at the economy, the "temperature" would probably be directly related to how fast money circulates, the size of the economy would determine it's "thermal inertia".
;)
As for social scientists they would look at this conversation and label us both "technocrats", however I remember the Iron Lady well, a chemist from Oxford I didn't like that much.
Regardless of where anyone learned to program, I'd ask the kid one question - "You say can't read it, so why should we trust you to rewrite it?" - Then offer him some help to understand it, or sack the arrogant little shit if he's pissing people off with his unwillingness to learn "what is".
I've been in the game for a long while, I have never seen anyone walk in and comprehend the inner workings of a non-trivial source tree in under 3 months, but I've seen plenty of inexperienced people that think they can. The real problem is that code is much easier to write than it is to read. When a coder rewrites something only one thing is certain, it will be an education for the coder. However that coder is now the SME for that application and other coders will have to try and read his code. An old friend of mine, an excellent coder and all round pragmatist, described this phenomena perfectly with the expression; "Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own".
Disclaimer: Self-taught coder, BSc CS/OR, 22yrs commercial experience, 28yrs coding experience.
Yeah right, civilization will collapse if those burgers aren't flipped. God forbid anyone take a day off from the rat race to ENJOY themselves.
Are you for real? You complain about "class warfare" and in the same paragraph basically claim that a class of people (successful business men) are the only class of people who can be trusted to lead properly. And you don't see a glaring contradiction?
Please don't take the above as an insult, my intention is to be blunt, not insulting. Politics requires "critical thinking skills" more so than science but rarely are they applied with the same rigor. The reason you fall for the "class warfare" bullshit is because your vote with your gut, not your brain. You actually need to use both, know your emotional triggers and question your own basic assumptions, such as the assumption you display in the post that says something like "governments and corporations are very similar", once you accept that assumption as gospel, what do you then do to balance the power that you have handed over to wealthy merchants?
Just remember one fact when people talk about "class warfare" - ALL governments redistribute wealth and they all claim their particular formula is for the "common good", it's not "class warfare" it's their purpose, it is the very definition of civilization itself. Sometimes the wealth piles up in great mounds on the "elite", sometimes it stolen and squandered by corrupt officials or angry mobs, every now and then a "booming middle class" appears as it did in the US after WW2, and is now doing in China after Mao's famines.
Yes, I have an assumption that a "booming middle class" is a GoodThing(TM), but I don't think anyone really knows exactly how to create one (please don't send me newsletters). Truth is, if you take the time to look there are good and bad ideas from all sides, politics should be about shaping society in OUR own image, that image should not be preemptively restricted to the economic heroes of of the day.
I would say it's more difficult for a politician these days to tell different groups different stories and not have anyone notice. I can't remember which Roman emperor it was but one of them had all these statues of himself erected in public places all over the empire. He wasn't a very handsome man, he was short, bald, and had only one tooth, luckily the statues were all carved on the one day he looked like a young Greek god.
Like an old boss of mine used to say, "They want a fucking big red arrow that points to the answer"
Divorce rates peaked when no fault divorce came into effect due to the backlog of people hanging on because of finances. Most people are serial monogamists, that is they have a series of partners over a lifetime rather than a single life long partner.
a big part of the idea, as well, is that these for these revolutions to happen, the older generation of scientists have to die off.
That's ridiculous, what the older generation have to do is look at the evidence and change their mind, not die. Feynman diagrams are a wonderful example, he gave a presentation to some of the top physicist of the time and they literally laughed in his face and hurled insults at him, after mulling it over for a couple of days they were patting him on the back and calling him a genius.
;)
There is also a huge difference in the way modern science is driven. Pre-20th century most science was performed by wealthy individuals and reflected their personal interest, public projects such as the 17th century competition to build a seaworthy clock were rare. Science is now a team sport and is largely driven by societies interests. The switch away from being an eccentric rich man's was exemplified by Edison's Menlo park which I believe was the first commercial "research center".
I haven't RTFA or the book but he seems to be defining "paradigm shift" as "acceptance of a new model". If so, "Sciences progresses in paradigm shifts" becomes "Science progressively refines it's model of the real word", hardly a paradigm shifting revelation.
The Black Saturday fire a couple of years back was also throwing spot fires 20km down wind. That was the hottest day on record for Victoria. The conditions are similar now, the day the fires started was the hottest day ever in Tasmania. I've lived in Oz for 50yrs, we used to get this sort of catastrophic bushfire once every 20yrs, it seems to be once every 4-5yrs since about the mid 90's. El-Nino conditions returned last April, I think people are going to stop complaining about the cost of the desal plants when this new drought starts to bite so soon after the last one.
Back burning in Oz rarely causes property damage even if it does get out of hand, it's the dry hot weather and strong winds that cause problems, similar conditions to California where 120km/h winds off the desert push the fire along faster than the fire trucks can travel, nobody is allowed to burn off in that kind of weather. Also we have just come out of El-Nina conditions, the two years up to last April were very wet and put a lot of growth in the bush that has now dried out due to it flipping back to dry El-Nino conditions.
It should just be eliminated.
Perhaps someone else will amend the bill to get rid of both distractions, then all it needs is an unrelated "earmark" for more than half the senators to ensure it passes.
Resignation is the "proper" thing to do, what happens in Canada when they refuse to do the proper thing? Australia's Gough Whitlam was a special case, he hesitated to do the "proper" thing so the GG ("Queen's representative") sacked him and installed a caretaker government who's first duty was to immediately call an election. I'm old enough to remember that election, I liked Whitlam and he left us some great things like UHC but he was wrong and he lost the forced election because he kept crying about the GG and let the opposition fight uncontested on the real issues. I believe (but haven't checked) that in the UK the Queen also still has the constitutional power to sack a government and call an election should the UK government of the day not do the "proper" thing and resign due to the "no confidence" expressed by the senate blocking supply.
The only social construct in existence that's worse than government is dysfunctional government. Whatever the details and phrases employed by various WM systems, the basic method of breaking a budgetary impasse via a snap election exists in all three countries. What could be a more transparent and elegant solution to a serious political stalemate other than to ask the people who will have to live with the result to arbitrate via a general election?
"If" is the operative word in your post. it has publicity stunt written all over it, it's intent is to make Obama look ridiculous and it's a distraction from the real issue, which is why does a modern super power need to have an annual self-induced budget crisis brought on by a self-enforced arbitrary "debt ceiling" that was defined in the previous budget? I can't think of another western government that recursively kicks itself in the budgetary balls like that?
In the Westminster system if the annual budget drawn up by the government of the day is rejected by the senate twice in a row you have what is known as a "double dissolution". A general election is held for both the house and the senate. The existing government goes into "caretaker" mode so as to keep the wheels turning until the new government is formed. Not sure but I believe that "caretaker" mode is like a pro-rata extension of the previous budget. Basically no "new" spending is allowed but the opposition cannot hold the government's agenda to ransom indefinitely, if they are serious about their objections then they must treat it seriously and take it to the ultimate arbitrator.
Thing is YOU don't get to define what future generations think of you and your civilization, if you want to help them to form an accurate view rather than just the image you want to portray then you need to leave some juicy rubbish dumps undisturbed, this is one such dump. I'd question the justification for the size of this particular dump but you make it sound like they are throwing out Mark Twain to make room for twitter. You know they have the resources to do both things at the same time, and that this project probably cost less than a single hand written Twain manuscript, right?
At the end of the day I see stuff like this as a GoodThing(TM). I'd much rather live in a society that over-values it's everyday trivia than one that under-values it's past, or worst still goes out of it's way to destroy it (Taliban). The Victorian English were the ones who started the drive for museums and preserving/understanding the past. Before that nobody really bothered about social heritage, it was all about family heritage. Egypt is a great example, they started looking after their own heritage after the British showed so much interest in digging up their monuments and taking the home with them. A large portion of the old city of Cairo is made from the lime that used to cover the pyramids (their sides were originally flat and white), all that's left is a little cap of lime on top of the largest one. Once the pyramid making fad and families had well and truly died, the people of Cario simply didn't care about a huge monument built by some long dead family, to them it was no more than a convenient source of building material that a long dead Pharaoh had left lying around.
Yep, the ancient rubbish pit is often the most informative part of an archeological dig, however this is more along the lines of Samuel Peeps' diary. Four years worth of tweets is a bit over the top, IMHO a few random days and a few significant days would be all you really need. I have something similar at home, it's a large coffee table book that has one page of newspaper clippings for every month of the 20th century.
I don't think they should pick and choose what to keep, the value is in the fact that they are everyday conversations and observations (much like Samuel peeps diary). However I can't think of a reason why an academic would want every tweet for four years, they could get the same insights from a much smaller random sample.
You really have to think about how many inches are in a yard
Actually you don't if you have had it drummed into your head at school. I was at HS when Australia changed in the 70's, metric is natural to me now but the imperial units are still burnt into my neurons from 45yrs ago.