While Dolphins and birds are undoubtedly intelligent, and many birds can vocalise human speech (and to some degree use it as intended) they don't have hands. And while chimps and other primates do have hands and can learn to use human sign language they do not have the amazingly refined motor control over their rib cage that enables humans to communicate ideas (as opposed to emotions). There's also "hive minds" such as a termite nest which had evolved agriculture, climate control and many other advanced technologies long before we started rubbing sticks together.
We tend to point at our technology and dismiss all other evolved technologies as "unintelligent" which I think smacks of hubris, Having said that, something happened in a small population of S African humans 60-100kya and it spread thru the global human population like a dose of the flu. All of a sudden the "fifth great ape" went from obscurity to the top of the food chain so fast that we now literally outweigh all other mammals on the planet put together, several times over!
Most of this happened in the last 500yrs or so and it seems fairly obvious to me that we cannot continue to treat our only practical life support system with the same disregard for another 500yrs. Unlike the termites we can no longer move to a fresh territory. Perhaps human style technology is something that evolves to a certain point and then the civilizations it produces start oscillating between enlightenment and dark ages as resource are used up and squabbling intensifies. Given that we are the only species in Earth's 4Byr history to have evolved formal education, and assuming periods of enlightenment such as now and ancient greece are a sign of resource oscillations, the chances of Mork meeting Mindy sound pretty slim to me.
Single celled life is a whole different ball game, it was here on Earth virtually as soon as the oceans formed and preceded multi-celled life forms by at least 2Byrs. There's no reason to think that primordial single celled life is not currently being spontaneously created near undersea vents and gobbled up by modern bugs and worms, of course it's currently impossible to observe that happening, even in a laboratory setting it's very difficult to remove every single celled critter from an experiment. However, from what we know about the chemical origins of life and the chemical composition of the universe, it seems absurd to speculate that life only exists on our tiny spec of cosmic dust.
I grew up the days where most kids would be down the record store every saturday to pick up that weeks "top 40" leaflet and spend their pocket money on singles. At one time I had a couple of hundred vinyl albums and a stack of singles, then everything went digital and I collected 100 or so CD's. Once the CD's took over it became almost impossible to buy needles for my turntable so there was some overlap in the CD/Vinyl titles. I love music more than most people my age but I haven't bought a single track this century, I mainly listen to radio/CD when in the car, and my old vinyls via a "full album" search on youtube when at home.
Personally I've never seen the point in owning a movie, once I've seen it I normally have no urge to see it again for another decade or so. Most movies that I have bought or been given in the past I've simply given to someone else after having watched it. I know that sharing physical media is an anti-capitalist thing to do but somehow I just can't feel ashamed about doing it.
That's kind of what they do. Not sure about other cards but Nvidia cards handle compatibility with something called compute capability. A developer then makes the trade-off that will land somewhere between....
Extreme compatibility -- work on all nvidia cards and use none of the new hardware features.
Extreme performance -- work on only the latest cards and use all of the latest hardware features.
Nobody is buying $3K cards to play video games, they are using them to solve engineering problems, video games are just a convenient way to benchmark performance that is easily understood by laymen.
Video cards are not just for games these days, my $150 GTX 750 maxes out at just over a teraflop, which is significantly faster than any multi-million dollar pre-Y2K super computer ever built. I really can't see how vector processing can help anyone to adjust their fonts, but it can solve all sorts of difficult engineering, logistics, AI, and design problems. The fact you can do calculations on a commodity video card that (even with unlimited military budget) were simply not practical in the 1990's is nothing short of a technological miracle.
But hey, if you want to install a private sub-station and a 1990's super computer in your shed because your too tight to buy a new PC, who am I to judge?
The problem with all intelligence tests regardless of whether they are applied to man of machine is the term intelligence is usually left undefined. The turing test itself is an empirical definition of intelligence, however it measures a qualitative judgement by the humans.
To give an example of what I mean - An ant colony can solve the travelling salesman problem faster that any human or computer (who does not 'ape' the ant algorithm), in fact there are number of ant algorithms that solve complex logistical problems more efficiently than we can using traditional maths, does any of that make an ant colony more or less intelligent than a human?
Embezzlement sounds a reasonable charge to me but we don't have all the details of what was considered. Maybe he bargained the charge down to the equivalent of a "dishonorable discharge". $150K is about 2-3 man years of research wages, which sounds like a lot but is little more that a rounding error in the bigger picture, ~0.01 cents per American. He may also have personal problems, gambling/drug addiction, neither side would have much to gain from criminal proceedings unless the practice was rampant and they wanted to set an example.
He points out that 'race' is a construct much like 'species' - outdated and not particularly useful.
...unless you want to find a suitable mate. I haven't read the book but it sounds like he has it upside down to me. Xenophobia is an evolutionary trait in humans that has largely outlived it's prehistoric (probably even pre-human) usefulness. Denying our natural predisposition toward xenophobia won't help eliminate racism anymore than a priest denying his sexual urges will eliminate sex. A civilization that loudly proclaims it will not tolerate it is your only hope to control it's detrimental effect on our species as a whole. In other words I'd argue that it's the "all men are created equal" bit that is a social construct (and IMO a very useful one).
The idea that there is 'no such thing as a species' is not new, it can easily be demonstrated with Ring Species. However, the term 'species' does have a very useful definition, ie: Organisms that can produce fertile offspring with each other.
Even before boats and rafts were invented, humans have always expanded their territory along the coast and up the rivers, we were never fond of living in the woods and it takes a certain level of technology to navigate over deserts and high mountains. The ancient trade routes followed the people along the coast, before boats they could not cross large rivers, so they went up one river bank and came down the other side.
The first maps for exploring the interior of a continent were carved in stone by Australian aborigines ~40kya, they are stylized pictures showing the location of water holes, soaks, and game. Incredibly the map symbols were understood by tribes thousands of miles apart. Early European desert explorers who had major problems finding water on their journey were amazed to see healthy aborigines eating wild duck for dinner. Unfortunately the Europeans did not understand that the elder's were singing and painting patterns on bark to inform them, not to entertain them. AFAIK, it was David Attenborough who first pointed out the communicative significance of aboriginal song and 'art' in the 1950's. He saw an aboriginal stockman painting on bark and chanting, a common sight in those days. Attenborough then did something radical, something no other white man had ever contemplated - he asked him what he was doing.
Allow me to butt in:) I can see your POV but that's not how I read the thread, naturally I haven't read TFA so I'm not going to comment on their experiment or the level of hyperbole. The way I read this thread is that many of the posters are claiming that the TT itself is a meaningless test. Thing is none of them seem capable of stating why they disagree with Turing - That's what I and a few others, are complaining about.
Who pissed in your cornflakes? Calling it "fundamentally flawed" is meaningless without an explanation. Why do you appear to believe these people went to the Uri Geller school of wizardry, what are the false claims you are objecting to? - Assuming you actually know something about AI, please don't say Searl's "Chinese room" because it's a philosophical strawman.
Not these days, natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge, they can even distinguish a heroic victory from a pyrrhic victory. They can do this without words such as "revenge" and "victory" appearing anywhere in the text. Turns out the most difficult text for a NLP to "understand" is the text found in children's stories, seems that (for some reason) kids stories have more complicated back references than either journalism or adult stories.
As to TFA: Anyone poo-poo-ing this result either does not understand it or has not bothered to look at the advances in AI over the last decade or so.We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days.
There are also a lot of posts claiming the Turing test doesn't mean anything. However none of them I have read so far actually explain their statement, so I assume they are parroting their philosophy proffessor who was probably referring to Searle's Chinese translation room argument.
The problem with Searle's argument (aside from lacking a definition of intelligence) is that it is assumed the intelligence is either embedded in the human or the books, it then goes on to show that neither is true, it's basically an unintentional strawman argument. It completely misses the point that the intelligence is embedded in the entire system of human + books. In other words the room itself is a black-box that displays intelligent behaviour, in much the same way as the human brain is a black box that (sometimes) produces intelligent behaviour. Like it or not your soul is a mathematical object.
So now we have Searl out the way, has anybody got an actual argument that supports the notion that the Turing Test is broken by design? - Seriously, I would like to hear a good one!
The fact remains that the bulk of the excess CO2 that is already there was put there by the West, in particular the US. It's good that you guys are starting to get your shit together but considering your track record of opposition, it's a bit early to start lecturing other countries.
The town of Nimbin in Northern NSW is famous for it's weed, they try to attract tourists from the gold coast, they have a weed museum, fashionable hemp clothing, tourist trinkets, and once a year they have a weed Mardi Gras. It's located in the Tweed valley and the main road out of town leads to a town on the coast called Tweed heads. There's been an uneasy "live and let live" relationship with the local police for decades, the practical outcome is there's much less crime and vandalism than (say) the gold coast.
Having said that, there isn't a single road sign in the district that still has the 'T' intact.:)
Your confusing transparency with vigilance, in my 25yrs experience working in commercial software houses, I have rarely seen anyone attempt to review, debug, or modify OSS code, they just plug it in to their own application and wait for a patch to be released if something goes wrong, which is exactly what they do with CSS. Why? - Because as soon as you apply your homespun patch to the source you have forked the OSS source and you now have yet another ball of spaghetti to maintain. The unspoken principle of "you touched the source, so you own the problem" comes into force.
Aside from the fact that spreadsheet formulas cannot (easily) be ported to different spreadsheets via csv, there's a very simple supply and demand explanation, client says: "We only use MS office, that's the way we have done business for over a decade, it's what we are set up to handle now, if you can't deliver we will have to find someone who can". - Actually in the "real world" they would probably just laugh their asses off and walk away.
obig car analogy: It's like a mechanic saying I can't work on your Mazda because it's not a Ford.
It's not about what the client prefers, it about the system the client already owns. Business only cares about two things when they look at competing software with similar functionality, how much and how long. Many businesses get stuck in a time warp when backwards compatibility is broken (eg:IE6, Python, PHP). IE6 aside, this is actually a strength of Windows and one of the (non-evil) reasons why they were able to dominate the market in the first place, overall they maintain a much higher degree of backwards compatibility than (say) solaris.
Sure if you have one PC that you do your accounts on then the expense and time to swap may be trivial. However let's take an example from my own workplace that has nothing to do with windows, we run a CVS repository that has 5-6 large applications and about 30 different product/version combinations stretching all the way back to the 90's. This giant spaghetti ball is wrapped in python scripts to make it comprehensible. There are significant organisational benefits to be had by switching our ~25 devs to subversion, git, clearcase, or any other modern revision control system. However there are 2 perfectly rational reasons why we won't do that, namely time and money.
Look around, and the misery increases, globally. Tensions, stupidity, misguided masculinity, religious stupidity; all those are coming closer by the day; encircle us.
I'm in my 50's, born in England but have lived in Oz since childhood. My informal understanding and experience of history, limited as that may be, is that your assertion has not been true since sometime before the enlightenment. The fact that such follies are noticed today is actually strong evidence they are becoming LESS common.
At the end of the day we are evolved creatures, our speciality is persistence hunting. Like wolves we can't outrun an antelope but we can certainly outsmart and outlast them, If we compare ourselves to the other large predators found in our anscestral home then we stack up pretty well, we can outlast just about any other predator running around the plains of Africa. Not only that but our brains can and do intimidate even most powerful competitors into giving up a meal.
We are clearly the fifth and most successful great ape, we are successful because we spontaneously evolved the capacity for unlimited symbolic processing about 60Kya, which lead to the invention of agriculture and civilization about 12Kya (although it can be argued the Australian aborigines invented civilization 40Kya). Either way we are talking about a rounding error on geologic time scales, so it's kind of unsurprising that in evolutionary terms our brains are still getting used to the idea of living in close proximity to each other.
Draw me a nice picture I can stick on my wall. That has value! That I will pay for!
That's an excellent point. Baldrick has certainly stirred interest in history with his "Time team" show and Stephen Fry seems to be doing ok these days. Come to think of it when you look at politics, journalism, advertising, and entertainment as a whole it's practitioners are very skewed towards the humanities. So while it might be tough to get an academic post after your humanities degree, there's plenty of opportunities for employment. This is less true for the legal profession, many lawyers nowadays hold a BSc as their primary degree, it's a fairly recent development brought about by the need to use (and abuse) scientific evidence presented in court.
We can't all be professional researchers working on exactly what we want to work on. I've been working full-time for 40yrs, I'm fortunate enough to have a job I like, but I have plenty of experience with jobs I hated. Doing something you like is not "real work", at my age I'm content with doing what I like for a living and doing what I love in my own time, in my book it means I'm hardly "working" at all, which is an entirely different thing to being "unproductive".
Having said that, I do like my Heisenberg laces, and I can tell you it wasn't easy getting that waiter to part with them.:)
We have had automated killers for centuries, they go by the names "man trap", "land mine", "electric fence", etc. Humans have (for good evolutionary reasons) a built in suspicion of people (or machines) that are smarter than themselves. Also to a large degree "intelligence" seems to be in the eye of the beholder, which is why the AI goal posts keep moving. For example, I recently heard a story from a professor who was working on early differential solver software. A maths student could not believe such an artificial intelligence could exist so the professor gave him a demo, the student was stunned and convinced it was "intelligent". After an hour long discussion about how it worked the student finally understood the algorithm and said..."I take it back. It's not intelligent, it's doing calculs the same way I do".:)
Two plus two equals four isn't a fact
Ummm, yes it is.
numbers themselves are defined by theories
No, maths is an axiomatic system, it has theorems not theories. An easy way to see the difference is that you can prove theorems in maths but you cannot prove theories in science (beyond reasonable doubt). Maths also has the interesting property that it is "incomplete", meaning it holds unknowable truths. There are 4-5 axioms (arbitrary) that all of maths is built on, at least the appear to be arbitrary since it's unclear if a different set of axioms would be able to match reality so accurately.
You could make Science into an axiomatic system by just accepting some basic properties of the universe as a given (ie an axiom), which is essentially what is done in practise when an experiment assumes "all else is equal". For Science to work in practice there are things that must be taken as a "given", things like the fundamental forces and spacetime don't have an explanation. Mother nature, god, whatever you call the universe, it is under no obligation to obey our axioms, and can break them without notice just for "shits and giggles".
Slashdot Mirror
While Dolphins and birds are undoubtedly intelligent, and many birds can vocalise human speech (and to some degree use it as intended) they don't have hands. And while chimps and other primates do have hands and can learn to use human sign language they do not have the amazingly refined motor control over their rib cage that enables humans to communicate ideas (as opposed to emotions). There's also "hive minds" such as a termite nest which had evolved agriculture, climate control and many other advanced technologies long before we started rubbing sticks together.
We tend to point at our technology and dismiss all other evolved technologies as "unintelligent" which I think smacks of hubris, Having said that, something happened in a small population of S African humans 60-100kya and it spread thru the global human population like a dose of the flu. All of a sudden the "fifth great ape" went from obscurity to the top of the food chain so fast that we now literally outweigh all other mammals on the planet put together, several times over!
Most of this happened in the last 500yrs or so and it seems fairly obvious to me that we cannot continue to treat our only practical life support system with the same disregard for another 500yrs. Unlike the termites we can no longer move to a fresh territory. Perhaps human style technology is something that evolves to a certain point and then the civilizations it produces start oscillating between enlightenment and dark ages as resource are used up and squabbling intensifies. Given that we are the only species in Earth's 4Byr history to have evolved formal education, and assuming periods of enlightenment such as now and ancient greece are a sign of resource oscillations, the chances of Mork meeting Mindy sound pretty slim to me.
Single celled life is a whole different ball game, it was here on Earth virtually as soon as the oceans formed and preceded multi-celled life forms by at least 2Byrs. There's no reason to think that primordial single celled life is not currently being spontaneously created near undersea vents and gobbled up by modern bugs and worms, of course it's currently impossible to observe that happening, even in a laboratory setting it's very difficult to remove every single celled critter from an experiment. However, from what we know about the chemical origins of life and the chemical composition of the universe, it seems absurd to speculate that life only exists on our tiny spec of cosmic dust.
I grew up the days where most kids would be down the record store every saturday to pick up that weeks "top 40" leaflet and spend their pocket money on singles. At one time I had a couple of hundred vinyl albums and a stack of singles, then everything went digital and I collected 100 or so CD's. Once the CD's took over it became almost impossible to buy needles for my turntable so there was some overlap in the CD/Vinyl titles. I love music more than most people my age but I haven't bought a single track this century, I mainly listen to radio/CD when in the car, and my old vinyls via a "full album" search on youtube when at home.
Personally I've never seen the point in owning a movie, once I've seen it I normally have no urge to see it again for another decade or so. Most movies that I have bought or been given in the past I've simply given to someone else after having watched it. I know that sharing physical media is an anti-capitalist thing to do but somehow I just can't feel ashamed about doing it.
That's kind of what they do. Not sure about other cards but Nvidia cards handle compatibility with something called compute capability. A developer then makes the trade-off that will land somewhere between....
Extreme compatibility -- work on all nvidia cards and use none of the new hardware features.
Extreme performance -- work on only the latest cards and use all of the latest hardware features.
Nobody is buying $3K cards to play video games, they are using them to solve engineering problems, video games are just a convenient way to benchmark performance that is easily understood by laymen.
Video cards are not just for games these days, my $150 GTX 750 maxes out at just over a teraflop, which is significantly faster than any multi-million dollar pre-Y2K super computer ever built. I really can't see how vector processing can help anyone to adjust their fonts, but it can solve all sorts of difficult engineering, logistics, AI, and design problems. The fact you can do calculations on a commodity video card that (even with unlimited military budget) were simply not practical in the 1990's is nothing short of a technological miracle.
But hey, if you want to install a private sub-station and a 1990's super computer in your shed because your too tight to buy a new PC, who am I to judge?
Every war is a failure of politics, the Vietnam war was a war of attrition fought to score a ideological point.
not to downgrade the definition of intelligent
The problem with all intelligence tests regardless of whether they are applied to man of machine is the term intelligence is usually left undefined. The turing test itself is an empirical definition of intelligence, however it measures a qualitative judgement by the humans.
To give an example of what I mean - An ant colony can solve the travelling salesman problem faster that any human or computer (who does not 'ape' the ant algorithm), in fact there are number of ant algorithms that solve complex logistical problems more efficiently than we can using traditional maths, does any of that make an ant colony more or less intelligent than a human?
Embezzlement sounds a reasonable charge to me but we don't have all the details of what was considered. Maybe he bargained the charge down to the equivalent of a "dishonorable discharge". $150K is about 2-3 man years of research wages, which sounds like a lot but is little more that a rounding error in the bigger picture, ~0.01 cents per American. He may also have personal problems, gambling/drug addiction, neither side would have much to gain from criminal proceedings unless the practice was rampant and they wanted to set an example.
He points out that 'race' is a construct much like 'species' - outdated and not particularly useful.
...unless you want to find a suitable mate. I haven't read the book but it sounds like he has it upside down to me. Xenophobia is an evolutionary trait in humans that has largely outlived it's prehistoric (probably even pre-human) usefulness. Denying our natural predisposition toward xenophobia won't help eliminate racism anymore than a priest denying his sexual urges will eliminate sex. A civilization that loudly proclaims it will not tolerate it is your only hope to control it's detrimental effect on our species as a whole. In other words I'd argue that it's the "all men are created equal" bit that is a social construct (and IMO a very useful one).
The idea that there is 'no such thing as a species' is not new, it can easily be demonstrated with Ring Species. However, the term 'species' does have a very useful definition, ie: Organisms that can produce fertile offspring with each other.
Even before boats and rafts were invented, humans have always expanded their territory along the coast and up the rivers, we were never fond of living in the woods and it takes a certain level of technology to navigate over deserts and high mountains. The ancient trade routes followed the people along the coast, before boats they could not cross large rivers, so they went up one river bank and came down the other side.
The first maps for exploring the interior of a continent were carved in stone by Australian aborigines ~40kya, they are stylized pictures showing the location of water holes, soaks, and game. Incredibly the map symbols were understood by tribes thousands of miles apart. Early European desert explorers who had major problems finding water on their journey were amazed to see healthy aborigines eating wild duck for dinner. Unfortunately the Europeans did not understand that the elder's were singing and painting patterns on bark to inform them, not to entertain them. AFAIK, it was David Attenborough who first pointed out the communicative significance of aboriginal song and 'art' in the 1950's. He saw an aboriginal stockman painting on bark and chanting, a common sight in those days. Attenborough then did something radical, something no other white man had ever contemplated - he asked him what he was doing.
If you have a source, thatd be one thing, but otherwise...
IIRC Lecture 23 has the demo. Of course there's also Watson, but I don't have the source for that either....
Allow me to butt in :) I can see your POV but that's not how I read the thread, naturally I haven't read TFA so I'm not going to comment on their experiment or the level of hyperbole. The way I read this thread is that many of the posters are claiming that the TT itself is a meaningless test. Thing is none of them seem capable of stating why they disagree with Turing - That's what I and a few others, are complaining about.
Who pissed in your cornflakes? Calling it "fundamentally flawed" is meaningless without an explanation. Why do you appear to believe these people went to the Uri Geller school of wizardry, what are the false claims you are objecting to? - Assuming you actually know something about AI, please don't say Searl's "Chinese room" because it's a philosophical strawman.
Not these days, natural language parsers have reached the point where they can find motives such as revenge, they can even distinguish a heroic victory from a pyrrhic victory. They can do this without words such as "revenge" and "victory" appearing anywhere in the text. Turns out the most difficult text for a NLP to "understand" is the text found in children's stories, seems that (for some reason) kids stories have more complicated back references than either journalism or adult stories.
As to TFA: Anyone poo-poo-ing this result either does not understand it or has not bothered to look at the advances in AI over the last decade or so.We are at the point where a computer can read a novel and spit out a high school book report that would both fool and impress most english teachers, and it can do it in seconds not days.
There are also a lot of posts claiming the Turing test doesn't mean anything. However none of them I have read so far actually explain their statement, so I assume they are parroting their philosophy proffessor who was probably referring to Searle's Chinese translation room argument.
The problem with Searle's argument (aside from lacking a definition of intelligence) is that it is assumed the intelligence is either embedded in the human or the books, it then goes on to show that neither is true, it's basically an unintentional strawman argument. It completely misses the point that the intelligence is embedded in the entire system of human + books. In other words the room itself is a black-box that displays intelligent behaviour, in much the same way as the human brain is a black box that (sometimes) produces intelligent behaviour. Like it or not your soul is a mathematical object.
So now we have Searl out the way, has anybody got an actual argument that supports the notion that the Turing Test is broken by design? - Seriously, I would like to hear a good one!
The fact remains that the bulk of the excess CO2 that is already there was put there by the West, in particular the US. It's good that you guys are starting to get your shit together but considering your track record of opposition, it's a bit early to start lecturing other countries.
The town of Nimbin in Northern NSW is famous for it's weed, they try to attract tourists from the gold coast, they have a weed museum, fashionable hemp clothing, tourist trinkets, and once a year they have a weed Mardi Gras. It's located in the Tweed valley and the main road out of town leads to a town on the coast called Tweed heads. There's been an uneasy "live and let live" relationship with the local police for decades, the practical outcome is there's much less crime and vandalism than (say) the gold coast.
:)
Having said that, there isn't a single road sign in the district that still has the 'T' intact.
Your confusing transparency with vigilance, in my 25yrs experience working in commercial software houses, I have rarely seen anyone attempt to review, debug, or modify OSS code, they just plug it in to their own application and wait for a patch to be released if something goes wrong, which is exactly what they do with CSS. Why? - Because as soon as you apply your homespun patch to the source you have forked the OSS source and you now have yet another ball of spaghetti to maintain. The unspoken principle of "you touched the source, so you own the problem" comes into force.
I am still confounded
Aside from the fact that spreadsheet formulas cannot (easily) be ported to different spreadsheets via csv, there's a very simple supply and demand explanation, client says: "We only use MS office, that's the way we have done business for over a decade, it's what we are set up to handle now, if you can't deliver we will have to find someone who can". - Actually in the "real world" they would probably just laugh their asses off and walk away.
obig car analogy: It's like a mechanic saying I can't work on your Mazda because it's not a Ford.
It's not about what the client prefers, it about the system the client already owns. Business only cares about two things when they look at competing software with similar functionality, how much and how long. Many businesses get stuck in a time warp when backwards compatibility is broken (eg:IE6, Python, PHP). IE6 aside, this is actually a strength of Windows and one of the (non-evil) reasons why they were able to dominate the market in the first place, overall they maintain a much higher degree of backwards compatibility than (say) solaris.
Sure if you have one PC that you do your accounts on then the expense and time to swap may be trivial. However let's take an example from my own workplace that has nothing to do with windows, we run a CVS repository that has 5-6 large applications and about 30 different product/version combinations stretching all the way back to the 90's. This giant spaghetti ball is wrapped in python scripts to make it comprehensible. There are significant organisational benefits to be had by switching our ~25 devs to subversion, git, clearcase, or any other modern revision control system. However there are 2 perfectly rational reasons why we won't do that, namely time and money.
I'm not sure what is mysterious, it gives of plenty of EM as light
This is Slashdot, what the hell has TFA got to do with the conversation - noob!
Look around, and the misery increases, globally. Tensions, stupidity, misguided masculinity, religious stupidity; all those are coming closer by the day; encircle us.
I'm in my 50's, born in England but have lived in Oz since childhood. My informal understanding and experience of history, limited as that may be, is that your assertion has not been true since sometime before the enlightenment. The fact that such follies are noticed today is actually strong evidence they are becoming LESS common.
At the end of the day we are evolved creatures, our speciality is persistence hunting. Like wolves we can't outrun an antelope but we can certainly outsmart and outlast them, If we compare ourselves to the other large predators found in our anscestral home then we stack up pretty well, we can outlast just about any other predator running around the plains of Africa. Not only that but our brains can and do intimidate even most powerful competitors into giving up a meal.
We are clearly the fifth and most successful great ape, we are successful because we spontaneously evolved the capacity for unlimited symbolic processing about 60Kya, which lead to the invention of agriculture and civilization about 12Kya (although it can be argued the Australian aborigines invented civilization 40Kya). Either way we are talking about a rounding error on geologic time scales, so it's kind of unsurprising that in evolutionary terms our brains are still getting used to the idea of living in close proximity to each other.
...or as W. H. Auden put it, "We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know".
Draw me a nice picture I can stick on my wall. That has value! That I will pay for!
That's an excellent point. Baldrick has certainly stirred interest in history with his "Time team" show and Stephen Fry seems to be doing ok these days. Come to think of it when you look at politics, journalism, advertising, and entertainment as a whole it's practitioners are very skewed towards the humanities. So while it might be tough to get an academic post after your humanities degree, there's plenty of opportunities for employment. This is less true for the legal profession, many lawyers nowadays hold a BSc as their primary degree, it's a fairly recent development brought about by the need to use (and abuse) scientific evidence presented in court.
:)
We can't all be professional researchers working on exactly what we want to work on. I've been working full-time for 40yrs, I'm fortunate enough to have a job I like, but I have plenty of experience with jobs I hated. Doing something you like is not "real work", at my age I'm content with doing what I like for a living and doing what I love in my own time, in my book it means I'm hardly "working" at all, which is an entirely different thing to being "unproductive".
Having said that, I do like my Heisenberg laces, and I can tell you it wasn't easy getting that waiter to part with them.
We have had automated killers for centuries, they go by the names "man trap", "land mine", "electric fence", etc. Humans have (for good evolutionary reasons) a built in suspicion of people (or machines) that are smarter than themselves. Also to a large degree "intelligence" seems to be in the eye of the beholder, which is why the AI goal posts keep moving. For example, I recently heard a story from a professor who was working on early differential solver software. A maths student could not believe such an artificial intelligence could exist so the professor gave him a demo, the student was stunned and convinced it was "intelligent". After an hour long discussion about how it worked the student finally understood the algorithm and said..."I take it back. It's not intelligent, it's doing calculs the same way I do". :)
Two plus two equals four isn't a fact Ummm, yes it is.
numbers themselves are defined by theories
No, maths is an axiomatic system, it has theorems not theories. An easy way to see the difference is that you can prove theorems in maths but you cannot prove theories in science (beyond reasonable doubt). Maths also has the interesting property that it is "incomplete", meaning it holds unknowable truths. There are 4-5 axioms (arbitrary) that all of maths is built on, at least the appear to be arbitrary since it's unclear if a different set of axioms would be able to match reality so accurately. You could make Science into an axiomatic system by just accepting some basic properties of the universe as a given (ie an axiom), which is essentially what is done in practise when an experiment assumes "all else is equal". For Science to work in practice there are things that must be taken as a "given", things like the fundamental forces and spacetime don't have an explanation. Mother nature, god, whatever you call the universe, it is under no obligation to obey our axioms, and can break them without notice just for "shits and giggles".
an argument about what "reality" is
Perception is everything, or at least it appears that way. :)