The number of "dip switches" an organism has does not correlate well with the complexity of it's body or behaviour, for example humans have about 35k genes, amoeba have half a million or more. Mathematically evolution is an exercise in hill climbing, the environment the sulphur bug lives in is the same "hill" as it was 2B years ago. Once the bug has evolved to the top of it's local hill it will stay there until the environment changes, since by definition evolving downhill would imply "survival of the weakest". This is not to say there won't be downhill mutations, just that over time random mutations will always tend to climb upwards until they can climb no further.
This doesn't mean the creature is the best fit possible for that particular environment, there may be several "hills" to climb in the same environment, eg: sharks and Barracuda haven't changed for 10's of millions of years, they have climbed two different evolutionary hills to fill similar niches in the same environment. When that happens it's virtually impossible to climb down from one hill to get to the base of another hill even though they are in the same environment.
Canute was the non-mythical king of England in the early 9th century, it's not known if the incident actually happened or is just a parable. People have often misinterpreted the story to make Canute look like he was drunk on power, when in reality it was exactly the opposite. He knew he couldn't hold back the tide, what he was doing was demonstrating to his sycophant advisors that he was not omnipotent. In effect he was telling his court to stop blowing smoke up his arse and start thinking about practical solutions to the kingdoms problems.
Disclaimer: I'd never heard of him until I started looking after some code for a performance monitoring application called Canute.
Exactly, an artificial neuron is a mathematical model of a real neuron, it's the "spherical cow" of computer science.
They also tend to be directed at a single skill
Yes, The single skill problem is the main reason neural nets were seen as curious toys for 50ys but I think IBM solved that problem with Watson in the mid-noughties. How? - I'm not sure.
Right, it's not just one random dickhead or a press beat up, it's a vast conspiracy to hasten the onset of the idiocracy! - Although I must admit your post could be taken as evidence the conspiracy is working.
I would take a certain pleasure in seeing a massive doxxing campaign against principals and other officials on state payrolls who make such stupid decisions and hide behind bad policy.
Agree the story sounds bizzare, but if an angry mob of mouth breathers is your idea of natural justice then I for one am glad you are not a public servant or an educator.
There are two main types of air-conditioner, the most common type of ac unit works like your fridge, it has a compressor, the gas is compressed outside the fridge, compression heats it up and it is cooled back down to room temperature by the radiator at the back, the gas is then allowed to expand again inside the fridge, the drop in pressure causes the gas to re-absorb the heat lost in the external radiator. Metaphorically the heat is "pumped out" of the fridge.
OTOH an evaporative cooler works because the water changes state from a liquid to a gas, the state change itself absorbs energy from the surrounding environment resulting in a temperature drop. The problem with EC is that the air quickly becomes supersaturated with water vapour and both the EC and your sweat will stop cooling you, at this point you need to empty the humid air from the room and replace it with hot dry air from outside. or alternatively, die from heat exhaustion.
As the GP indicated, a large damp towel will do the same thing as a high tech, overpriced, 3D printed nano-scale heat sponge. As an old fart Aussie who's seen more than 50 summers I can tell you from experience that the damp towel is very effective if you hang it over a $20 room fan and put it near a shaded window opened just enough to keep the room ventilated. Tall sliding windows are the best since the fan pulls in hot dry air at the bottom and cools it down on the way in. Hot air that tends to accumulate near the ceiling is pushed out at the top of the window
Depends on the kind of desert and how much money you have, Australia is largely desert, much of it less than 500 meters above sea level, which is why you can drill a hole almost anywhere and find water in abundance (although it said the pressure has been dropping over the last century). That's how these giant cattle stations survive, the land is arid scrub and acacia trees, they drill a bunch of bore holes for watering stations and just turn the cattle loose. A year later they round up as many as they can find on the property, brand the calfs, harvest some yearlings, vet and release the rest for next year's harvest.
Termites have been successfully farming arid land using this technology for longer than humans have been on this planet. The high humidity climate is a benefit to the termites since termite farms grow a specific species of mold for food. The mold apparently evolved from a tropical species but is now totally dependent on termite climate control technology. The mounds themselves are built using technology similar to a 3D printer with 20 million print heads. They use spit and mud rather than hot plastic but the basic idea is the same.
I have termites on the brain since I recently visited the Kimberley in NW Australia, to say this termite technology has been successful is an understatement. The mounds are more closely packed than the apartments in the inner suburbs of Sydney, I'm not sure how far they stretch but I drove from Broome to Fitzroy crossing and they didn't thin out. Also note that the entire Kimberley region is under 2 meters of water in the wet season, the few people that live there survive the wet with tin boats to get between buildings on stilts or one of the few islands of high ground, not sure how termites survive the annual flood?
Our gun laws worked exactly as advertised, after a string of US style mass shootings in the late 80's / early 90's the laws banning semi-automatics were introduced, the catalyst being the Port Arthur massacre that claimed 30+ lives. Since the laws were introduced 20+yrs ago there has not been another mass shooting in this country. Since mass shooting had been rare the effect on the murder rate was insignificant. Gun deaths are still around 200 souls per year, there are towns in the US that have a higher rate than our entire country, this fact has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the culture inherited from our colonial past.
This may be extremely difficult for an American to understand but "self-defence" is not a valid reason for granting a gun license in this country. Nobody living here needs a semi-auto rifle/shotgun, and very few of us would want one anyway. However before you start raving how stupid we Aussie's are, what other country can you name where the leader can go for a regular morning jog in the street without a small army of heavily armed body guards following him around?
an unarmed population is easier to control than an armed one
Do you really believe a shotgun will deter the most powerful military machine the world has ever known from doing whatever the fuck it wants to do? Fact is, if they truly wanted to "trample your rights" they would have been trampled already.
"Free" - as in anyone is free to participate in the market.
"Market" - A set of rules governing trade, normally created and enforced by governments, eg: property law.
In other words the all too common Fox definition of "free market" is actually an oxymoron.
Coincidently the Slashdot 'thought of the day' below reads -"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann"
The best thing you can do for your kids is take their summers and make sure that for large portions of them they don't have access to media other than books.
That's just silly, I agree reading is a good habit to get your kids into but you don't broaden a child's education by restricting stimulation to your preferred mode of communication. If you want to "unplug your kids" take them camping, out of radio range on an unpowered site, and yeah, take some books for bedtime. I assure you they will gain more from the camping experience than the joy of curling up with a good book.
scientific models are in computer programs rather than mathematical equations
"Scientific computer models" ARE mathematical equations. The physics model in a FPS, the scientific one that simulates air pressure in climate models, or shoots a space probe through a gap in Saturn's rings, they are all using Newton's equations to model the behaviour of an object.
There are generally two types of equations used to build scientific models, whether it be on paper or silicon. The ones that bend to calculus are said to have an "analytical solution" and can be solved with pen and paper, but the majority of problems encountered in nature, engineering, FPS, etc, do not have an analytical solution, they require a supercomputer to crunch the numbers into an answer.
The proper name for "number crunching" is numerical calculus, which is why Babbage called his clockwork computer a "difference engine". In fact the term "computer" comes from the name of the first human job made obsolete by what was arguably the first modern computer, Turing and Co's computer was funded during the height of WW2 because it replaced large numbers of human computers that had the tedious and error prone job of "number crunching" artillery tables.
It's a concern that was addressed decades ago, nuclear batteries such as the one on Cassini are tested by shooting them out of an artillery gun directly into a block of steel several feet thick. The battery weighs about 35kg, the plutonium inside it weighs less than a kilo. Sure, nothing is truly indestructible, but you need more than an exploding rocket (or uncontrolled re-entry) to crack one of those things open.
The universe is finite, it's size is defined by the rate of cosmic expansion, we know this because we can observe it.
The Universe is probably infinite but we have no way of knowing other than math.
So it's a common thing for people to think they're a universe now?
Some people may interpret Sagan's musings that way, but most are just now coming to appreciate that the "self" is not a ghost that inhabits our bodies, it's actually the universe itself experiencing what it is to be human. Our physical and emotional experience is a tiny subset of the Universe's experience. More simply put, if you want to say the universe is god, then we are god's eyes.
Watson is an automated research department that extracts related facts from unstructured text much faster than any human, like any other research department it does not tell management what to do with those facts. Optimizing business processes like JIT supply chains is a branch of math called "operations research" (logistics if you are american). Much of it is closely related to computer science, which itself is a branch of maths, O/R and AI are only tangentially related to each other.
The problem with optimizing the bottom line of a company the size of IBM is "feedback", ie - optimising a market giant like IBM will induce a change in the market itself, the changed market changes the optimal solution. The other hassle is that the problem space of optimising IBM for profit is so big that any methods use to find the optimal solution will only ever be able to find local maxima. Some humans still do this better than computers, which is why humans are the ones building computers and asking them the questions.
I think you mean CO not CO2, carbon monoxide is deadly at low levels because it "steals" oxygen from your bloodstream to become CO2. Death from CO2 is simply suffocation, therefore it cannot cause problems if there is "sufficient oxygen",
I think what he is trying to say (and you are inadvertently trying to prove) is that - everyone thinks their way is the middle way. Realise that all the people you and I call extremist think that we are the crazy ones.
Slashdot Mirror
fewer dip switches in its DNA, so to speak
The number of "dip switches" an organism has does not correlate well with the complexity of it's body or behaviour, for example humans have about 35k genes, amoeba have half a million or more. Mathematically evolution is an exercise in hill climbing, the environment the sulphur bug lives in is the same "hill" as it was 2B years ago. Once the bug has evolved to the top of it's local hill it will stay there until the environment changes, since by definition evolving downhill would imply "survival of the weakest". This is not to say there won't be downhill mutations, just that over time random mutations will always tend to climb upwards until they can climb no further.
This doesn't mean the creature is the best fit possible for that particular environment, there may be several "hills" to climb in the same environment, eg: sharks and Barracuda haven't changed for 10's of millions of years, they have climbed two different evolutionary hills to fill similar niches in the same environment. When that happens it's virtually impossible to climb down from one hill to get to the base of another hill even though they are in the same environment.
Canute was the non-mythical king of England in the early 9th century, it's not known if the incident actually happened or is just a parable. People have often misinterpreted the story to make Canute look like he was drunk on power, when in reality it was exactly the opposite. He knew he couldn't hold back the tide, what he was doing was demonstrating to his sycophant advisors that he was not omnipotent. In effect he was telling his court to stop blowing smoke up his arse and start thinking about practical solutions to the kingdoms problems.
Disclaimer: I'd never heard of him until I started looking after some code for a performance monitoring application called Canute.
The password protected pdf thing is pretty common, they ask you to pick a password when you call to request the paperwork.
They also tend to be directed at a single skill
Yes, The single skill problem is the main reason neural nets were seen as curious toys for 50ys but I think IBM solved that problem with Watson in the mid-noughties. How? - I'm not sure.
Right, it's not just one random dickhead or a press beat up, it's a vast conspiracy to hasten the onset of the idiocracy! - Although I must admit your post could be taken as evidence the conspiracy is working.
I would take a certain pleasure in seeing a massive doxxing campaign against principals and other officials on state payrolls who make such stupid decisions and hide behind bad policy.
Agree the story sounds bizzare, but if an angry mob of mouth breathers is your idea of natural justice then I for one am glad you are not a public servant or an educator.
On second thoughts, don't answer that, a link to it would be too depressing..
There are two main types of air-conditioner, the most common type of ac unit works like your fridge, it has a compressor, the gas is compressed outside the fridge, compression heats it up and it is cooled back down to room temperature by the radiator at the back, the gas is then allowed to expand again inside the fridge, the drop in pressure causes the gas to re-absorb the heat lost in the external radiator. Metaphorically the heat is "pumped out" of the fridge.
OTOH an evaporative cooler works because the water changes state from a liquid to a gas, the state change itself absorbs energy from the surrounding environment resulting in a temperature drop. The problem with EC is that the air quickly becomes supersaturated with water vapour and both the EC and your sweat will stop cooling you, at this point you need to empty the humid air from the room and replace it with hot dry air from outside. or alternatively, die from heat exhaustion.
As the GP indicated, a large damp towel will do the same thing as a high tech, overpriced, 3D printed nano-scale heat sponge. As an old fart Aussie who's seen more than 50 summers I can tell you from experience that the damp towel is very effective if you hang it over a $20 room fan and put it near a shaded window opened just enough to keep the room ventilated. Tall sliding windows are the best since the fan pulls in hot dry air at the bottom and cools it down on the way in. Hot air that tends to accumulate near the ceiling is pushed out at the top of the window
Depends on the kind of desert and how much money you have, Australia is largely desert, much of it less than 500 meters above sea level, which is why you can drill a hole almost anywhere and find water in abundance (although it said the pressure has been dropping over the last century). That's how these giant cattle stations survive, the land is arid scrub and acacia trees, they drill a bunch of bore holes for watering stations and just turn the cattle loose. A year later they round up as many as they can find on the property, brand the calfs, harvest some yearlings, vet and release the rest for next year's harvest.
Termites have been successfully farming arid land using this technology for longer than humans have been on this planet. The high humidity climate is a benefit to the termites since termite farms grow a specific species of mold for food. The mold apparently evolved from a tropical species but is now totally dependent on termite climate control technology. The mounds themselves are built using technology similar to a 3D printer with 20 million print heads. They use spit and mud rather than hot plastic but the basic idea is the same.
I have termites on the brain since I recently visited the Kimberley in NW Australia, to say this termite technology has been successful is an understatement. The mounds are more closely packed than the apartments in the inner suburbs of Sydney, I'm not sure how far they stretch but I drove from Broome to Fitzroy crossing and they didn't thin out. Also note that the entire Kimberley region is under 2 meters of water in the wet season, the few people that live there survive the wet with tin boats to get between buildings on stilts or one of the few islands of high ground, not sure how termites survive the annual flood?
Oh, you want to claim the first amendment protects you? funny how you cant count to 2 though....
The first amendment guarantees he can say whatever the hell he wants about the other numbered rights, nobody is forcing you to agree with him.
Our gun laws worked exactly as advertised, after a string of US style mass shootings in the late 80's / early 90's the laws banning semi-automatics were introduced, the catalyst being the Port Arthur massacre that claimed 30+ lives. Since the laws were introduced 20+yrs ago there has not been another mass shooting in this country. Since mass shooting had been rare the effect on the murder rate was insignificant. Gun deaths are still around 200 souls per year, there are towns in the US that have a higher rate than our entire country, this fact has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the culture inherited from our colonial past.
This may be extremely difficult for an American to understand but "self-defence" is not a valid reason for granting a gun license in this country. Nobody living here needs a semi-auto rifle/shotgun, and very few of us would want one anyway. However before you start raving how stupid we Aussie's are, what other country can you name where the leader can go for a regular morning jog in the street without a small army of heavily armed body guards following him around?
an unarmed population is easier to control than an armed one
Do you really believe a shotgun will deter the most powerful military machine the world has ever known from doing whatever the fuck it wants to do? Fact is, if they truly wanted to "trample your rights" they would have been trampled already.
Free market is exactly absence of government...
Sorry but that's the Fox news definition.
"Free" - as in anyone is free to participate in the market.
"Market" - A set of rules governing trade, normally created and enforced by governments, eg: property law.
In other words the all too common Fox definition of "free market" is actually an oxymoron.
what exactly do we accomplish by taxing the corporation itself?
We get to tax arseholes who think drawing a taxable wage from their company is for schmucks.
Coincidently the Slashdot 'thought of the day' below reads -"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann"
The best thing you can do for your kids is take their summers and make sure that for large portions of them they don't have access to media other than books.
That's just silly, I agree reading is a good habit to get your kids into but you don't broaden a child's education by restricting stimulation to your preferred mode of communication. If you want to "unplug your kids" take them camping, out of radio range on an unpowered site, and yeah, take some books for bedtime. I assure you they will gain more from the camping experience than the joy of curling up with a good book.
scientific models are in computer programs rather than mathematical equations
"Scientific computer models" ARE mathematical equations. The physics model in a FPS, the scientific one that simulates air pressure in climate models, or shoots a space probe through a gap in Saturn's rings, they are all using Newton's equations to model the behaviour of an object.
There are generally two types of equations used to build scientific models, whether it be on paper or silicon. The ones that bend to calculus are said to have an "analytical solution" and can be solved with pen and paper, but the majority of problems encountered in nature, engineering, FPS, etc, do not have an analytical solution, they require a supercomputer to crunch the numbers into an answer.
The proper name for "number crunching" is numerical calculus, which is why Babbage called his clockwork computer a "difference engine". In fact the term "computer" comes from the name of the first human job made obsolete by what was arguably the first modern computer, Turing and Co's computer was funded during the height of WW2 because it replaced large numbers of human computers that had the tedious and error prone job of "number crunching" artillery tables.
It's a concern that was addressed decades ago, nuclear batteries such as the one on Cassini are tested by shooting them out of an artillery gun directly into a block of steel several feet thick. The battery weighs about 35kg, the plutonium inside it weighs less than a kilo. Sure, nothing is truly indestructible, but you need more than an exploding rocket (or uncontrolled re-entry) to crack one of those things open.
you must also assume that our universe is finite
The universe is finite, it's size is defined by the rate of cosmic expansion, we know this because we can observe it.
The Universe is probably infinite but we have no way of knowing other than math.
So it's a common thing for people to think they're a universe now?
Some people may interpret Sagan's musings that way, but most are just now coming to appreciate that the "self" is not a ghost that inhabits our bodies, it's actually the universe itself experiencing what it is to be human. Our physical and emotional experience is a tiny subset of the Universe's experience. More simply put, if you want to say the universe is god, then we are god's eyes.
What do you mean "dinosaurs failed to adapt", there are several of them flying around in my garden right now!
Watson is an automated research department that extracts related facts from unstructured text much faster than any human, like any other research department it does not tell management what to do with those facts. Optimizing business processes like JIT supply chains is a branch of math called "operations research" (logistics if you are american). Much of it is closely related to computer science, which itself is a branch of maths, O/R and AI are only tangentially related to each other.
The problem with optimizing the bottom line of a company the size of IBM is "feedback", ie - optimising a market giant like IBM will induce a change in the market itself, the changed market changes the optimal solution. The other hassle is that the problem space of optimising IBM for profit is so big that any methods use to find the optimal solution will only ever be able to find local maxima. Some humans still do this better than computers, which is why humans are the ones building computers and asking them the questions.
I think you mean CO not CO2, carbon monoxide is deadly at low levels because it "steals" oxygen from your bloodstream to become CO2. Death from CO2 is simply suffocation, therefore it cannot cause problems if there is "sufficient oxygen",
I think what he is trying to say (and you are inadvertently trying to prove) is that - everyone thinks their way is the middle way. Realise that all the people you and I call extremist think that we are the crazy ones.