Hi
This probably isn't the kind of advice you're looking for, but what the hell, this is an open forum.
I'm a total idiot when it comes to astronomy, but I still love stargazing.
Something that helped my motivation on particularly cold nights was having friends over to my house, where I could talk about some of the things I've managed to identify.
One of my most useful acquisitions was a laser pointer, mostly for helping point out stars and constellations to friends. If you've ever had the experience of somebody who knows what they're doing saying "see that there... no there... no look where I'm pointing" and been frustrated by it, then get a pointer. A reasonably cheap green one has a range of several metres, long enough for the casual observer to work out what it is you're referring to. If you don't believe me that this actually works, then borrow one and try it!
Because it will allow us to know a bit more about CMEs, specifically where they are headed. Now CME direction prediction is rather poor at the moment, we're mostly confined to "it's coming towards us / it's going away from us" (us being "planet Earth"). These 3D views will enable us to determine the direction of CME events far more accurately than before.
Now CMEs are rather energetic things. They destroy satellites. They can know out power grids here on earth, even through our magnetosphere. Consider also that one of NASA's current goals is to land people on the surface of Mars. Do you want the astronauts to be hit by a CME? I bet they don't. They would be exposed to incredible levels of dangerous radiation.
So, the STEREO project directly affects future NASA projects, which includes the colonisation you're talking about.
aha! a fellow pissed off UK-citizen...
i'll travel with my new passport for the first time soon. the only thing i'm worried about is what i'm going to say to the guy at the security gate when he wants an explanation of why i am carrying my passport around smothered in tin-foil.
they might view it as a bit suspicious...
I recently had to renew my passport, and much to my annoyance, received one of the UKs new passports with a chip containing biometric information about the shape of my face inserted into the back. There is a great big solid lump of plastic where the details page used to be, it's probably about 1mm thick, and makes the passport less comfortable to carry and flick through.
That aside, one mine the chip is quite clearly visible on the other side of the details page (the plastic is transparent on that side), and looks rather tough. I reckon it would take more than a whack with a hammer, I'm quite keen on using a microwave or similar to disable it.
My only concern with this is that they will say "your passport has stopped working, please pay for a new one". I'm currently a PhD student, and I don't have £51 (about 95$ US) to waste on a new passport.
not true, by your definition all forms of charity would be stealing
it's copyright infringement, it may seem like stealing to you, but the law here in blighty says thats it's copyright infringement
i admit i'm no expert on this, but I understood that most press organisations just take newswire reports and alter them in minor ways to create their stories. thus, plagiarism seems to be part of their job, if you know what I mean. true, they do pay for the newswire text, wheras this guy didn't pay for the right to reproduce wikipedia content, but the i would argue that the mindset in the press is one of "copying is ok"
already been done, many years ago
this guy presents nothing new. there are a host of such vector-space techniques, such as Latent Sematnic Analaysis, which all depend on this crucial reduction of dimensions to collapse similar vectors in such a way that they move closer to each other.
article here. Not a great article to be honest, but I can't be bothered to edit it.
ok... well
it seems to me linus is stuck on the problem of conflict between spec and reality. In this situation it's very simple - the spec is wrong. The problem with many bad SEs is that they don't accept that Specs and other documents need to evolve during the project as everyone's understanding of the problem grows as well.
David Parnas' work on the US Navy's A7 aircraft is a brilliant example of how a spec worked. The Spec was so good that when the rights to reproduce and own the plane was sold to the US Army the Spec was used as the contract. It was a thorough description of what the plane did.
on a side note the French govornment were less than chuffed with the minitel system when paris based studeents used it to organise their rallys, which almost inevitably lead to riots.
this is of course, somewhat offtopic.
That was put far more elegantly to djeaux then i was able to in my earlier thread.:-)
I do agree, just because we're not including some all-encopassing immesely complex fitness function that would allow possible reverse traits to become manifest in the population does not mean that this is not a genetic method, nor that what we are doing is not a simulation of nature.
Re:forget the anti-evolution argument
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 1
"natural selection determines if it works & survives"
indeed it does. how do we model natural selection in a computer system? via a fitness function that determines that population member's ability to perform the desired task. for humans this could have once been hunting, hut building or being an attractive mate.
for adaptive compression you have to tell you population members how they're doing, which ones are closer to the source than others. the fitness function essentially shapes the population, it is the "natural selection that determines if it works and survives". without this you get a bunch of crap, or maybe strike lucky.
of course, just mutating things and seeing if they get better is pretty crude, and pretty far from biology. more sophisticated methods exist such as selection & crossover to repopulate your test population.
also remember that you don't have to use GAs to create code... they are equally adept at manipulating schemas.
so in short... if you're applying a GA, you're applying it for a purpose. you check that it tends towards its purpose by way of a selection of appropriate fitness/selection/crossover functions.
it would of course be amazing if we could just throw these things out in the wild and see if they work, but we have to model the survival too.
oh, an no, there's no grant involved. i'm moving into parallel computation architectures, GAs give me a headache now:-)
forget the anti-evolution argument
on
Digital Darwin
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
having just successfully completed an undergraduate project in which i have used genetic algorithms to achieve full adaptive image compression, i have learnt rather a lot about these curious beasts that is seldom mentioned in modern text.
the use of genetic algorithms in a computer does in no way prove or disprove any evloution/anti-evolution argument. these algorithms do not magically evolve new creatures, or new solutions. they just search the solution space in a highly parallel manner, and they surprise people because they come up with solutions they did not consider. the solution is there waiting in solution space - but you can't find it because your brain is not capapble, you don't spend enough time on it... whatever. this is not new, its not intelligent, its not the creation of a new species. think of genetic algorithms as exploiting adaptive characteristics, simple as that, i.e. skin colour changing due to intensity of sunlight.
of course... there are fields of research that involve using one class of genetic algorithms to derive the schemata (structure) of another class, but the research has come up with nothing to date.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi
This probably isn't the kind of advice you're looking for, but what the hell, this is an open forum.
I'm a total idiot when it comes to astronomy, but I still love stargazing.
Something that helped my motivation on particularly cold nights was having friends over to my house, where I could talk about some of the things I've managed to identify.
One of my most useful acquisitions was a laser pointer, mostly for helping point out stars and constellations to friends. If you've ever had the experience of somebody who knows what they're doing saying "see that there... no there... no look where I'm pointing" and been frustrated by it, then get a pointer. A reasonably cheap green one has a range of several metres, long enough for the casual observer to work out what it is you're referring to. If you don't believe me that this actually works, then borrow one and try it!
really? I'm just about to apply to Google Zurich. Is there anything I should know?
somebody is trying it over at the KittenAuth project
http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth
Because it will allow us to know a bit more about CMEs, specifically where they are headed. Now CME direction prediction is rather poor at the moment, we're mostly confined to "it's coming towards us / it's going away from us" (us being "planet Earth"). These 3D views will enable us to determine the direction of CME events far more accurately than before. Now CMEs are rather energetic things. They destroy satellites. They can know out power grids here on earth, even through our magnetosphere. Consider also that one of NASA's current goals is to land people on the surface of Mars. Do you want the astronauts to be hit by a CME? I bet they don't. They would be exposed to incredible levels of dangerous radiation. So, the STEREO project directly affects future NASA projects, which includes the colonisation you're talking about.
aha! a fellow pissed off UK-citizen...
i'll travel with my new passport for the first time soon. the only thing i'm worried about is what i'm going to say to the guy at the security gate when he wants an explanation of why i am carrying my passport around smothered in tin-foil.
they might view it as a bit suspicious...
I recently had to renew my passport, and much to my annoyance, received one of the UKs new passports with a chip containing biometric information about the shape of my face inserted into the back. There is a great big solid lump of plastic where the details page used to be, it's probably about 1mm thick, and makes the passport less comfortable to carry and flick through.
That aside, one mine the chip is quite clearly visible on the other side of the details page (the plastic is transparent on that side), and looks rather tough. I reckon it would take more than a whack with a hammer, I'm quite keen on using a microwave or similar to disable it.
My only concern with this is that they will say "your passport has stopped working, please pay for a new one". I'm currently a PhD student, and I don't have £51 (about 95$ US) to waste on a new passport.
doh! just rememberd, McLaren did use Honda engines back in the 1980s....
McLaren Honda? Since when have those two worked together?
It's McLaren-Mercedez or Team Honda
you could always give Media Player Classic (aka guliverkli) a go. I've found it to be much better.
link
i have to agree with you about the unsubstantiated claims business
nothing appears to bring out the cranks like mathematics does
not true, by your definition all forms of charity would be stealing
it's copyright infringement, it may seem like stealing to you, but the law here in blighty says thats it's copyright infringement
i admit i'm no expert on this, but I understood that most press organisations just take newswire reports and alter them in minor ways to create their stories. thus, plagiarism seems to be part of their job, if you know what I mean. true, they do pay for the newswire text, wheras this guy didn't pay for the right to reproduce wikipedia content, but the i would argue that the mindset in the press is one of "copying is ok"
doh! spelling mistake! ;-)
you're absolutely right, spelling mistakes do throw techniques such as this off a little
already been done, many years ago
this guy presents nothing new. there are a host of such vector-space techniques, such as Latent Sematnic Analaysis, which all depend on this crucial reduction of dimensions to collapse similar vectors in such a way that they move closer to each other. article here. Not a great article to be honest, but I can't be bothered to edit it.
whoa! no more caffeine for you
No no no... aluminium is NOT the right material, just ask this guy : click. The right material is clearly 3M's "Velostat".
ok... well
it seems to me linus is stuck on the problem of conflict between spec and reality. In this situation it's very simple - the spec is wrong. The problem with many bad SEs is that they don't accept that Specs and other documents need to evolve during the project as everyone's understanding of the problem grows as well.
David Parnas' work on the US Navy's A7 aircraft is a brilliant example of how a spec worked. The Spec was so good that when the rights to reproduce and own the plane was sold to the US Army the Spec was used as the contract. It was a thorough description of what the plane did.
on a side note the French govornment were less than chuffed with the minitel system when paris based studeents used it to organise their rallys, which almost inevitably lead to riots.
this is of course, somewhat offtopic.
agreed :-)
a compromise
nice to hear from somebody with a biological background to this problem
That was put far more elegantly to djeaux then i was able to in my earlier thread. :-)
I do agree, just because we're not including some all-encopassing immesely complex fitness function that would allow possible reverse traits to become manifest in the population does not mean that this is not a genetic method, nor that what we are doing is not a simulation of nature.
"natural selection determines if it works & survives" indeed it does. how do we model natural selection in a computer system? via a fitness function that determines that population member's ability to perform the desired task. for humans this could have once been hunting, hut building or being an attractive mate. for adaptive compression you have to tell you population members how they're doing, which ones are closer to the source than others. the fitness function essentially shapes the population, it is the "natural selection that determines if it works and survives". without this you get a bunch of crap, or maybe strike lucky. of course, just mutating things and seeing if they get better is pretty crude, and pretty far from biology. more sophisticated methods exist such as selection & crossover to repopulate your test population. also remember that you don't have to use GAs to create code... they are equally adept at manipulating schemas. so in short... if you're applying a GA, you're applying it for a purpose. you check that it tends towards its purpose by way of a selection of appropriate fitness/selection/crossover functions. it would of course be amazing if we could just throw these things out in the wild and see if they work, but we have to model the survival too. oh, an no, there's no grant involved. i'm moving into parallel computation architectures, GAs give me a headache now :-)
having just successfully completed an undergraduate project in which i have used genetic algorithms to achieve full adaptive image compression, i have learnt rather a lot about these curious beasts that is seldom mentioned in modern text. the use of genetic algorithms in a computer does in no way prove or disprove any evloution/anti-evolution argument. these algorithms do not magically evolve new creatures, or new solutions. they just search the solution space in a highly parallel manner, and they surprise people because they come up with solutions they did not consider. the solution is there waiting in solution space - but you can't find it because your brain is not capapble, you don't spend enough time on it... whatever. this is not new, its not intelligent, its not the creation of a new species. think of genetic algorithms as exploiting adaptive characteristics, simple as that, i.e. skin colour changing due to intensity of sunlight. of course... there are fields of research that involve using one class of genetic algorithms to derive the schemata (structure) of another class, but the research has come up with nothing to date.