Oh, Lord - the Unternet still pays no attention to the rules of spelling. If you guys had to have your thoughts compiled, you'd never run.
Is that consciousness or conscientiousness?
if you choose the management route of advancement, then somewhere between level 4 and level 5 you will be taught about "Change Theory" (you will be taught this by those who have taken the psychologist route of advancement, though they learn it at level 2).
This is not about evolutionary change, but about how humans view change in general. There are two very simple conclusions that the psychologists present as their starting point (the training is on how to overcome the obstacles presented by their starting points!). They are:
1) Humans view any change similarly - it really doesn't matter what's changing;
2) In every population, for any change, the population will be spilt into 20% leaders of change, 30% supporters of change, 30% supporters of the status quo, and 20% luddite resistors of change (the really odd thing is that the same people are in the same groups, regardless of what the change is).
Now, the kite is - are the anti-Darwinists simply the 20% that are so agin change that they simply cannot believe in a world that changes?
Surely the most adaptable creature (genome) is one that is "programmed" (has evolved) to be able to adapt rapidly when circumstances require it? We assume that DNA codes for a static equilibrium - "this is how your children will be", however, a really well evolved species would have the built in ability to adapt when things got tough. The "code" that did this would appear meaningless in the context of static equilibrium.
Of course, for that to have been an evolutionary advantage, our ancestors would have had to have lived through many long periods where circumstances changed.:)
Watches? You folk wear watches? Those wrist-time-pieces?
If I was a 19th century businessman, I would see the point.
For those of you who want to live in linear time there are a thousand ways to know when you should be doing something for somebody else - your computer, cell phone, PDA, wall clock, car, oven, radio...
How much was a good clock worth in 1700? £10,000.
How much is a similar clock worth now? Approximately zero.
How can I say this nicely - you are nearly right:)
Radians are the SI unit of angle, but they are not the international (or even any national) standard for geographical coordinates. The document you need to read is the International Standards Organisation's "ISO 6709:1983" which defines the standard. The Open GIS Consortium also should have material on coordinate representation.
Have you ever tried working in radians for map coordinates? Ouch! it's difficult (I have, for reasons that are too arcane to go into).
Dearie me! It's not just altitude that's missing, of course! There's a whole pile of other information that is just assumed...
Let's start with units (amusingly, the poster thought that specifying "decimal degrees" as well as sexagesimal was clarification)... just naming a unit is not enough - who these days remembers how long a Scotch Ell is? Degrees are not God-given, any more than Fahrenheit is, so an explanation of what a degree is would ensure better comprehension so many eons in the future (past?).
Then we move on to the axes of the coordinate system... where is zero longitude? Is it the Prime Meridian that runs through Greenwich? Or the one that runs through Paris? Or Rome, or Oslo or any one of a dozen that have been used in the past? And what about sign? American surveyors, disappointed that the Europeans considered America to have lowly negative longitudes reversed the convention and considered west positive and east negative until only a few years abo (whoops! how inexact considering this may be read in 1,000 years time!).
At the risk of boring you all to tears, we need also to define which datum & spheroid we are using, for latitudes require us to "know" where the centre of the earth is, and what shape it is - this requires mathematical modelling, and there are scores of different models - not a big error compared to using the wrong Prime Meridian, but still a few hundred metres on the ground for the "same" coordinates (the cause of several US military blunders - take coordinates from local map, assume they are WGS, program missile, fire, miss - why Gaddafi is alive today).
Many of you will say "Ah! But GPS sorted all that confusion out! Nowadays we all use WGS84, and it's all defined in the DoD's book!" and you would be right, nearly. Ignoring irritations like the leap-seconds, the non-linearities in the equation of time, precession & the Milankovitch cycles that will all make it VERY difficult to recover the actual position of satellites in the 21st century once a few millenia have passed, we still have one big gotcha - folk raised on Star Trek think that coordinates refer to positions in space - or perhaps in a rotating frame like a planet's surface, and maybe in the future they will, but on earth, they refer to, quite literally, ground positions - GPS still depends on transferring coordinates from the fixed ground reference stations.
Why is this important? Because the ground moves. Specifically, if your time travellers are coming from Europe, they must take account of the integrated continental drift vector that moves Greenwich and New York apart by 25 metres per century!
A guy falls dying on a glacier up a mountain. He gets covered in snow & frozen. So what? The article tries to use this as proof of climate change, when in fact it simply proves that it's bloody cold at the top of the Alps.
I read the article, too, and not only is there no evidence, but the one thing I do know a little about (the alpine mummy, "Ötzi" the Iceman) is plain wrong.
The article implies that his body being found in a receding glacier is proof that he was flash frozen, however, it is widely understood that he died of wounds after a skirmish (see, for example, National Geographical).
Sorry, you deserved more. I was stung by your continued misinterpretation of not-turing equals super-turing, and I did not fully address your middle point, which is truly interesting.
If I can paraphrase, you conjecture that a small part of the universe (your head, but it could be any small part) bounded in space & time can be simulated *exactly*. Again, good luck. No one has ever succeeded in simulating anything exactly, not for reasons of computational inadequacy, but because of either ignorance of or unobservability of parameters / boundary conditions / undiscovered physical "laws". But, as you say, simulations teach us stuff. So I guess it depends whether you are happy with a simulation of limited accuracy - I would see little benefit, but you may see more (did I pick up earlier that you were in the cognitive sciences?).
You still have to deal with the Second Law, now not only in your computer, but also simulate its effect on your simulated head. You also have, now, to deal with quantum theory and chaos theory, because the first limits what boundary conditions you can know, and the second amplifies inaccuracies in your measurement of them to erroneous proportions.
At no point did I say, imply or mean that deficient Turing machines are super-turing. They're just broken. They come to wrong conclusions, and the mathematical equivalence rules no longer apply. The Second Law trumps Church-Turing.
Answering "the universe does not obey physics, physics tries to describe the universe" by nominating Neverwinter Nights as a simulated universe is breathtakingly lame. If you accept incorrect, inaccurate and limited in your whole-universe computation why bother?
Call me when you've simulated a universe. I'll concede, I promise.
And by the way, "part of" doesn't count - Kepler did that in 1609 for a very large part, but there are always things to learn.
This nonsense (or "bullshit" in your parlance) is simply this generation's brush with Platonism. It all boils down to whether you believe that folk invented mathematics or mathematics invented folk.
The universe does not "obey" the laws of physics. The universe is, and physics tries to describe it.
You are correct. That is not what I am claiming. In fact, the reason you can't make computers out of Descartes' hydraulics is the same reason Babbage failed to make one out of gears - however much we might dream of massively complicated machines, no technology is indefinitely scalable.
The Second Law is immutable. Ultimately, massively scaled systems (like human brains) will fall prey to small unpredictable errors, and, as a consequence, will cease (have already ceased, I believe) to be even close approximations of an ideal Turing machine.
Your argument hinges on your "if our mental substrate is composed of computable medium". I grant your inferences beyond that, but disagree with the premise. I guess we won't change each other's minds...
Duh! The Church-Turing thesis proves "computational equivalence" of algorithmic machines of a certain standard. To validate your incorrect claim, you have to first prove that we are error-free, insight-free algorithmic machines. Error-free means no inferential errors (some humans make them), and Insight-free means no trans-rational mechanisms are involved in the inference: like drugs, madness, religion, fear, inspiration, individual experience (many humans' logics are trans-rational, maybe mine).
We are no more computers than we were when Descartes conjectured that a thinking machine could be constructed by hydraulics, so impressed were the folk of the day with the achievments of that technology!
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Code Rocket - this is what it's for.
One lack of attention to detail begets others... :)
Oh, Lord - the Unternet still pays no attention to the rules of spelling. If you guys had to have your thoughts compiled, you'd never run. Is that consciousness or conscientiousness?
OK, here's a kite -
if you choose the management route of advancement, then somewhere between level 4 and level 5 you will be taught about "Change Theory" (you will be taught this by those who have taken the psychologist route of advancement, though they learn it at level 2).
This is not about evolutionary change, but about how humans view change in general. There are two very simple conclusions that the psychologists present as their starting point (the training is on how to overcome the obstacles presented by their starting points!). They are:
1) Humans view any change similarly - it really doesn't matter what's changing;
2) In every population, for any change, the population will be spilt into 20% leaders of change, 30% supporters of change, 30% supporters of the status quo, and 20% luddite resistors of change (the really odd thing is that the same people are in the same groups, regardless of what the change is).
Now, the kite is - are the anti-Darwinists simply the 20% that are so agin change that they simply cannot believe in a world that changes?
Surely the most adaptable creature (genome) is one that is "programmed" (has evolved) to be able to adapt rapidly when circumstances require it? We assume that DNA codes for a static equilibrium - "this is how your children will be", however, a really well evolved species would have the built in ability to adapt when things got tough. The "code" that did this would appear meaningless in the context of static equilibrium.
:)
Of course, for that to have been an evolutionary advantage, our ancestors would have had to have lived through many long periods where circumstances changed.
If you want to work in Edinburgh (Scotland) send me your CV (resumé). I'm hiring.
Watches? You folk wear watches? Those wrist-time-pieces?
If I was a 19th century businessman, I would see the point.
For those of you who want to live in linear time there are a thousand ways to know when you should be doing something for somebody else - your computer, cell phone, PDA, wall clock, car, oven, radio...
How much was a good clock worth in 1700? £10,000.
How much is a similar clock worth now? Approximately zero.
How can I say this nicely - you are nearly right :)
Radians are the SI unit of angle, but they are not the international (or even any national) standard for geographical coordinates. The document you need to read is the International Standards Organisation's "ISO 6709:1983" which defines the standard. The Open GIS Consortium also should have material on coordinate representation.
Have you ever tried working in radians for map coordinates? Ouch! it's difficult (I have, for reasons that are too arcane to go into).
Dearie me! It's not just altitude that's missing, of course! There's a whole pile of other information that is just assumed...
:>
Let's start with units (amusingly, the poster thought that specifying "decimal degrees" as well as sexagesimal was clarification)... just naming a unit is not enough - who these days remembers how long a Scotch Ell is? Degrees are not God-given, any more than Fahrenheit is, so an explanation of what a degree is would ensure better comprehension so many eons in the future (past?).
Then we move on to the axes of the coordinate system... where is zero longitude? Is it the Prime Meridian that runs through Greenwich? Or the one that runs through Paris? Or Rome, or Oslo or any one of a dozen that have been used in the past? And what about sign? American surveyors, disappointed that the Europeans considered America to have lowly negative longitudes reversed the convention and considered west positive and east negative until only a few years abo (whoops! how inexact considering this may be read in 1,000 years time!).
At the risk of boring you all to tears, we need also to define which datum & spheroid we are using, for latitudes require us to "know" where the centre of the earth is, and what shape it is - this requires mathematical modelling, and there are scores of different models - not a big error compared to using the wrong Prime Meridian, but still a few hundred metres on the ground for the "same" coordinates (the cause of several US military blunders - take coordinates from local map, assume they are WGS, program missile, fire, miss - why Gaddafi is alive today).
Many of you will say "Ah! But GPS sorted all that confusion out! Nowadays we all use WGS84, and it's all defined in the DoD's book!" and you would be right, nearly. Ignoring irritations like the leap-seconds, the non-linearities in the equation of time, precession & the Milankovitch cycles that will all make it VERY difficult to recover the actual position of satellites in the 21st century once a few millenia have passed, we still have one big gotcha - folk raised on Star Trek think that coordinates refer to positions in space - or perhaps in a rotating frame like a planet's surface, and maybe in the future they will, but on earth, they refer to, quite literally, ground positions - GPS still depends on transferring coordinates from the fixed ground reference stations.
Why is this important? Because the ground moves. Specifically, if your time travellers are coming from Europe, they must take account of the integrated continental drift vector that moves Greenwich and New York apart by 25 metres per century!
Having followed the previous poster's advice, I found this page to be most illuminating. Check out the graphs.
All Mac OS X apps can export as PDF if they use the system print dialog - one of the print options is "Print to PDF File".
A guy falls dying on a glacier up a mountain. He gets covered in snow & frozen. So what? The article tries to use this as proof of climate change, when in fact it simply proves that it's bloody cold at the top of the Alps.
Not so. It is estimated that as late as the start of the mammalian era C02 levels were between 4 and 8 times higher than they currently are.
I read the article, too, and not only is there no evidence, but the one thing I do know a little about (the alpine mummy, "Ötzi" the Iceman) is plain wrong.
The article implies that his body being found in a receding glacier is proof that he was flash frozen, however, it is widely understood that he died of wounds after a skirmish (see, for example, National Geographical).
Sorry, you deserved more. I was stung by your continued misinterpretation of not-turing equals super-turing, and I did not fully address your middle point, which is truly interesting.
If I can paraphrase, you conjecture that a small part of the universe (your head, but it could be any small part) bounded in space & time can be simulated *exactly*. Again, good luck. No one has ever succeeded in simulating anything exactly, not for reasons of computational inadequacy, but because of either ignorance of or unobservability of parameters / boundary conditions / undiscovered physical "laws". But, as you say, simulations teach us stuff. So I guess it depends whether you are happy with a simulation of limited accuracy - I would see little benefit, but you may see more (did I pick up earlier that you were in the cognitive sciences?).
You still have to deal with the Second Law, now not only in your computer, but also simulate its effect on your simulated head. You also have, now, to deal with quantum theory and chaos theory, because the first limits what boundary conditions you can know, and the second amplifies inaccuracies in your measurement of them to erroneous proportions.
No, you missed my point.
At no point did I say, imply or mean that deficient Turing machines are super-turing. They're just broken. They come to wrong conclusions, and the mathematical equivalence rules no longer apply. The Second Law trumps Church-Turing.
Answering "the universe does not obey physics, physics tries to describe the universe" by nominating Neverwinter Nights as a simulated universe is breathtakingly lame. If you accept incorrect, inaccurate and limited in your whole-universe computation why bother?
Call me when you've simulated a universe. I'll concede, I promise.
And by the way, "part of" doesn't count - Kepler did that in 1609 for a very large part, but there are always things to learn.
This nonsense (or "bullshit" in your parlance) is simply this generation's brush with Platonism. It all boils down to whether you believe that folk invented mathematics or mathematics invented folk.
The universe does not "obey" the laws of physics. The universe is, and physics tries to describe it.
You are correct. That is not what I am claiming. In fact, the reason you can't make computers out of Descartes' hydraulics is the same reason Babbage failed to make one out of gears - however much we might dream of massively complicated machines, no technology is indefinitely scalable. The Second Law is immutable. Ultimately, massively scaled systems (like human brains) will fall prey to small unpredictable errors, and, as a consequence, will cease (have already ceased, I believe) to be even close approximations of an ideal Turing machine. Your argument hinges on your "if our mental substrate is composed of computable medium". I grant your inferences beyond that, but disagree with the premise. I guess we won't change each other's minds...
Duh! The Church-Turing thesis proves "computational equivalence" of algorithmic machines of a certain standard. To validate your incorrect claim, you have to first prove that we are error-free, insight-free algorithmic machines. Error-free means no inferential errors (some humans make them), and Insight-free means no trans-rational mechanisms are involved in the inference: like drugs, madness, religion, fear, inspiration, individual experience (many humans' logics are trans-rational, maybe mine).
We are no more computers than we were when Descartes conjectured that a thinking machine could be constructed by hydraulics, so impressed were the folk of the day with the achievments of that technology!
"foriegn" l [fx: glass house being hit by stones] Could be an American spelling, of course [fx: checks dictionary] No. It's not. [fx: SLaP!]