Math is the foundation of modeling all processes we can't hold in our two hands.
Forget competence with computers. Who would need that in the 21st century?
Forget probability. Forget statistics. Forget risk. Forget data. Forget the ability to make rational decisions in public policy, economics, medicine, or any field requiring understanding of an aggregate. And of course, forget any understanding of science.
Who needs any of that?
Having said that, there is plenty wrong with math education in school. Besides the clear failure to teach what they try to teach, they're generally trying to teach the wrong things. Kids are still basically learning how to use the slide rule. Everything is about analytic hand calculation, which computers do just fine.
People need understanding of modeling, process, data, process, statistics. Math is the language of understanding reality. Those who understand that language use it all the time, every day as the fundamental building blocks of their thought. Those who don't understand that language don't know what they're missing, just as monkeys don't understand what they're missing lacking a spoken language.
Math puts a person two languages away from flinging poo on the savannah. And probably, one language away from the Dark Ages.
How is that for hypergeeky speculative technology solution that saves the day?
Should be able to have a solar wind collector on the surface of the moon, instead of in orbit. Use the solar wind collector to mine Helium-3 on the moon, and send it back to earth for IEC fusion reactors.
I had high hopes for google voice, and love it as a message phone number, because of the transcript it produces, but the latency is unbearable for an actual call.
I haven't had problems with latency on skype, and mainly just want to use this on wifi at home.
An android app that is accessible from the title bar (the bar at the top of the screen). I routinely open it and kill all background processes. And of course, you can set some processes on a Do Not Kill list.
It seemed my phone would get a little sticky and slow sometimes. Not anymore.
Is this just another article written by an idiot know nothing journalist, completely distorting the conclusions of scientific studies, or are there really researchers this moronic?
The original study with the artificial game was bad enough, if it really claimed that by rejecting the lowball offers, one was acting against one's interest. That ignores established research on fairness and assertiveness. It is not surprising that testosterone would correlate with either.
But this second study would have so many obvious confounding variables, and was so completely uncontrolled, that their conclusions are ridiculous. And finally, the biggest problem is the claim that they were acting against their interests. Really? How exactly did they scientifically measure that? The Self-Interest-Meter? Where can I pick up one of those?
### "whose research relies on the established correlation between relative youth and increased levels of testosterone"
“For instance, young CEOs, who have higher levels of testosterone, tend to reject offers even when this is against their interest.” ###
Spectacularly dumb. Maybe the paper itself is not this idiotic, but if the broad outlines of the data collected and analyzed are correct, and they really think they can conclude something about testosterone and decision making from this data, I don't see any reason to read the paper.
So we determine the dance moves women most like by showing them avatars of booty shaking frat boys? What next, determine what art they like by having them choose between stick figures of 4 year olds? I suppose the article had some point to it - it showed what style of incompetent dance women hate less.
I've been social dancing for 15 years, and being the technonerd slashdot type, I naturally have been compulsively analyzing the mechanics and aesthetics of dance. Head carriage is very important, as is posture and body rhythm.
Of course, the "bad robot" was bad. Repetitive, stiff, and with his head down. Doing the Rainman (a reference to a Dustin Hoffman movie, younguns - now get offa my lawn.) The "good robot" has a little body rhythm and fluidity. Other than that, bad news. You don't want your head flopping and lolling all over the place. It is not a good look to have your elbows plastered to your sides, with your arms flailing about beyond them. Little flat footed kickies to the side - what the hell was that? The only thing missing on the Avatar was the White Man's overbite.
Recall the recent story about a school district where no one was found criminally liable for tapping the cameras of student laptops while they were at home. I think there was something like 50k images taken. You think maybe some of those were of minors partially clothed, or entirely nude? Masturbating? Having sex?
Would anyone but the government get away with wiretapping, video surveillance, and kiddie porn?
I tend to agree with Kurzweil, but I don't think the analogy with the genome project holds up very well, and he is missing the argument with respect to information complexity and the genome.
The genome project required us to brute force the same problem a zillion times; determine the nucleic acid sequence of some very long molecules. A well defined problem at the outset, with huge opportunity for parallelization. A similar project would be a complete molecular scan of a brain. Then building a brain molecule by molecule. If we want to approach simulating a brain from something other than such a brute force approach, we have to be smarter, and figure things out that we have been working on for decades already. We have to have a method, we have to have approaches, and we have to try them all out. Kurzweil's charts are of progress in well defined, scalable technologies. When he can make a meanignful chart of the progress of building a mind, in terms of a well defined scalable technology, then we can have more confidence in his prognostications.
Basically, the genome can avail itself of the complexity of cells and molecules in it's construction of a brain. In more information theoretic terms, it starts from a set of incredibly rich basis functions that we don't have a digital representation for.
Information content is always relative to your encoding scheme. I don't see Kurzweil recognizing this fact of information theory.
But my caveats on Kurzweil's argument don't lead me to reject his conclusions much. Maybe it takes a decade longer. Maybe two decades. But our brains are finite, and we are making progress along multiple lines of attack. It is just a matter of time, and time in decades, not centuries.
On the other hand, Myers expressed that we must understand how all the molecular and protein processes work to be able to simulate a brain. This is wrong on multiple levels.
First, you don't need to understand all the details of a functional process in order to replicate those functions. Second, it's unlikely that our brains make use of all the functional complexity of the molecules involved, so a set of simpler basis functions can probably do the job.
Maybe much simpler. The genome includes code for all the body, and the basis elements are used by the entire body. Though I generally believe that our minds only have meaning and function in the context of our bodies, I'd think you can get a mind without *all* the complexity of a body.
I'm glad we've cleared that up. Finally, we can be honest and open about how all this works.
Law is a power of government employees, by government employees, and for government employees. Citizens (a.k.a. tax livestock) have no power or rights before the law.
But home schooling pretty much fails to develop a kid's social skills. And I've always felt that one of the more important things that public schooling does is develop social skills.
I've always found this argument peculiar. It amounts to the claim that Lord of the Flies is the model of proper socialization. Is the accumulated wisdom and practice of society better learned from those who haven't yet acquired it, or those who have? From my rather limited experience, the maturity of a child is in direct proportion to the time he has spent interacting with adults.
By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
Unless the racist hated whites. Unless the racist believed that blacks were inherently inferior, and *therefore* supported ideas like racial preferences, and applied it to his selection of president. Unless the racist believed that Obama's tendencies toward central planning would further his racist cause better than the alternatives - and he could believe that no matter which race he hated.
These kinds of racists generally lean Democratic, while while the stereotypical "screw the blacks" racists lean Republican.
>>> The third choice is for the CIA to stop trying to project power beyond the US border. They should not be interfering with foreign affairs,
RIght on!
We should be neutral in the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. It's none of our business what a Stalinist Mafia does to it's slaves. I'm sure they won't ever interfere in the foreign affairs of other nations, and we'll always be safe in Fortress America no matter what happens in the rest of the world regardless. All Hail Pat Buchanan!
I would have bought a nexus one if it would allow me to shop from vendor to vendor. That could have changed things. As it is, a nexus one is really just a tmobile phone, so it becomes just a question of how to finance a tmobile phone, not a fundamental change of buying a phone, then choosing a cell phone service.
The problem here is exactly government interference in the market. BP is operating on government land with a legal limit of $75 million on liability for damages from a spill.
It's peculiar what when government regulators distort markets by limiting corporate liability, Free Markets get blamed instead of the distorting regulations. It is entirely predictable - limit liability, and people take bigger risks than they would otherwise. It's like going to a casino, and every time you lose, the government forces the casino to give you back your money. Who wouldn't play that game?
Free Markets have plenty of mechanisms for dealing with externalities, the main being liability law. Reason.com has a couple of good articles on this, with links to more in depth articles.
You don't think this is a serious suit? Go count the number of labels on your ladder sometime. For a laugh, I went to look at mine. Almost all the exterior surface that you don't step on is covered in labels.
I've wished that Google would put medical diagnostic expert systems online. It makes perfect sense - bring us information we can use about ourselves. But in the US, you can't bring a sick person information, or a hungry person a sandwich, for that matter, without opening yourself to huge legal liability.
I hope Google can fight this off. If they aren't big enough, no one is. They were willing to saddle up the lawyers to bring books online. Let's hope they just see this as a cost of doing business.
But never underestimate the absurdity of our liability laws, or the power of Bad Laws to frak up a good thing. It is not a joke.
What about using the cards for general image processing? What about morphological transforms? Image segmentation?
How about FFTs? Convolutions? Multi-dimensional integrals? Matrix math?
I would think a lot of general calculations could be could be isomorphic to some video operation on some contrived image.
For example, take a large vector dot product. Could that be implemented using OpenGL calls to a video card? Would it be faster than using the main CPU?
Slashdot Mirror
In a true socialist state, no one can force anyone to do anything,...
Uh huh. Might as well say:
In a true socialist state, we all have everything we want for the price of wishing for it.
When you get that to work, call me over. Until then, not interested.
Math is the foundation of modeling all processes we can't hold in our two hands.
Forget competence with computers. Who would need that in the 21st century?
Forget probability. Forget statistics. Forget risk. Forget data. Forget the ability to make rational decisions in public policy, economics, medicine, or any field requiring understanding of an aggregate. And of course, forget any understanding of science.
Who needs any of that?
Having said that, there is plenty wrong with math education in school. Besides the clear failure to teach what they try to teach, they're generally trying to teach the wrong things. Kids are still basically learning how to use the slide rule. Everything is about analytic hand calculation, which computers do just fine.
People need understanding of modeling, process, data, process, statistics. Math is the language of understanding reality. Those who understand that language use it all the time, every day as the fundamental building blocks of their thought. Those who don't understand that language don't know what they're missing, just as monkeys don't understand what they're missing lacking a spoken language.
Math puts a person two languages away from flinging poo on the savannah. And probably, one language away from the Dark Ages.
There is a spiffy ppt presentation spelling all this out.
http://web.mit.edu/22.012/www/presentations/Helium-3%20version%202.ppt
How is that for hypergeeky speculative technology solution that saves the day?
Should be able to have a solar wind collector on the surface of the moon, instead of in orbit. Use the solar wind collector to mine Helium-3 on the moon, and send it back to earth for IEC fusion reactors.
See article touching on Helium-3 and IEC fusion reactors.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19296/
I had high hopes for google voice, and love it as a message phone number, because of the transcript it produces, but the latency is unbearable for an actual call.
I haven't had problems with latency on skype, and mainly just want to use this on wifi at home.
An android app that is accessible from the title bar (the bar at the top of the screen). I routinely open it and kill all background processes. And of course, you can set some processes on a Do Not Kill list.
It seemed my phone would get a little sticky and slow sometimes. Not anymore.
Is this just another article written by an idiot know nothing journalist, completely distorting the conclusions of scientific studies, or are there really researchers this moronic?
The original study with the artificial game was bad enough, if it really claimed that by rejecting the lowball offers, one was acting against one's interest. That ignores established research on fairness and assertiveness. It is not surprising that testosterone would correlate with either.
But this second study would have so many obvious confounding variables, and was so completely uncontrolled, that their conclusions are ridiculous. And finally, the biggest problem is the claim that they were acting against their interests. Really? How exactly did they scientifically measure that? The Self-Interest-Meter? Where can I pick up one of those?
###
"whose research relies on the established correlation between relative youth and increased levels of testosterone"
“For instance, young CEOs, who have higher levels of testosterone, tend to reject offers even when this is against their interest.”
###
Spectacularly dumb. Maybe the paper itself is not this idiotic, but if the broad outlines of the data collected and analyzed are correct, and they really think they can conclude something about testosterone and decision making from this data, I don't see any reason to read the paper.
So we determine the dance moves women most like by showing them avatars of booty shaking frat boys? What next, determine what art they like by having them choose between stick figures of 4 year olds? I suppose the article had some point to it - it showed what style of incompetent dance women hate less.
I've been social dancing for 15 years, and being the technonerd slashdot type, I naturally have been compulsively analyzing the mechanics and aesthetics of dance. Head carriage is very important, as is posture and body rhythm.
Of course, the "bad robot" was bad. Repetitive, stiff, and with his head down. Doing the Rainman (a reference to a Dustin Hoffman movie, younguns - now get offa my lawn.) The "good robot" has a little body rhythm and fluidity. Other than that, bad news. You don't want your head flopping and lolling all over the place. It is not a good look to have your elbows plastered to your sides, with your arms flailing about beyond them. Little flat footed kickies to the side - what the hell was that? The only thing missing on the Avatar was the White Man's overbite.
Recall the recent story about a school district where no one was found criminally liable for tapping the cameras of student laptops while they were at home. I think there was something like 50k images taken. You think maybe some of those were of minors partially clothed, or entirely nude? Masturbating? Having sex?
Would anyone but the government get away with wiretapping, video surveillance, and kiddie porn?
I tend to agree with Kurzweil, but I don't think the analogy with the genome project holds up very well, and he is missing the argument with respect to information complexity and the genome.
The genome project required us to brute force the same problem a zillion times; determine the nucleic acid sequence of some very long molecules. A well defined problem at the outset, with huge opportunity for parallelization. A similar project would be a complete molecular scan of a brain. Then building a brain molecule by molecule. If we want to approach simulating a brain from something other than such a brute force approach, we have to be smarter, and figure things out that we have been working on for decades already. We have to have a method, we have to have approaches, and we have to try them all out. Kurzweil's charts are of progress in well defined, scalable technologies. When he can make a meanignful chart of the progress of building a mind, in terms of a well defined scalable technology, then we can have more confidence in his prognostications.
Basically, the genome can avail itself of the complexity of cells and molecules in it's construction of a brain. In more information theoretic terms, it starts from a set of incredibly rich basis functions that we don't have a digital representation for.
Information content is always relative to your encoding scheme. I don't see Kurzweil recognizing this fact of information theory.
But my caveats on Kurzweil's argument don't lead me to reject his conclusions much. Maybe it takes a decade longer. Maybe two decades. But our brains are finite, and we are making progress along multiple lines of attack. It is just a matter of time, and time in decades, not centuries.
On the other hand, Myers expressed that we must understand how all the molecular and protein processes work to be able to simulate a brain. This is wrong on multiple levels.
First, you don't need to understand all the details of a functional process in order to replicate those functions. Second, it's unlikely that our brains make use of all the functional complexity of the molecules involved, so a set of simpler basis functions can probably do the job.
Maybe much simpler. The genome includes code for all the body, and the basis elements are used by the entire body. Though I generally believe that our minds only have meaning and function in the context of our bodies, I'd think you can get a mind without *all* the complexity of a body.
Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse
Unless you work in law enforcement
http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/02/ignorance-of-the-law-is-no-exc
"Police Officers Don't Check Their Civil Rights at the Station House Door"
Three law enforcement officials defend the arrest of citizens who record on-duty cops.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/09/police-officers-dont-check-the
I'm glad we've cleared that up. Finally, we can be honest and open about how all this works.
Law is a power of government employees, by government employees, and for government employees. Citizens (a.k.a. tax livestock) have no power or rights before the law.
But home schooling pretty much fails to develop a kid's social skills. And I've always felt that one of the more important things that public schooling does is develop social skills.
I've always found this argument peculiar. It amounts to the claim that Lord of the Flies is the model of proper socialization.
Is the accumulated wisdom and practice of society better learned from those who haven't yet acquired it, or those who have?
From my rather limited experience, the maturity of a child is in direct proportion to the time he has spent interacting with adults.
By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
Unless the racist hated whites.
Unless the racist believed that blacks were inherently inferior, and *therefore* supported ideas like racial preferences, and applied it to his selection of president.
Unless the racist believed that Obama's tendencies toward central planning would further his racist cause better than the alternatives - and he could believe that no matter which race he hated.
These kinds of racists generally lean Democratic, while
while the stereotypical "screw the blacks" racists lean Republican.
>>> The third choice is for the CIA to stop trying to project power beyond the US border. They should not be interfering with foreign affairs,
RIght on!
We should be neutral in the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. It's none of our business what a Stalinist Mafia does to it's slaves. I'm sure they won't ever interfere in the foreign affairs of other nations, and we'll always be safe in Fortress America no matter what happens in the rest of the world regardless. All Hail Pat Buchanan!
I would have bought a nexus one if it would allow me to shop from vendor to vendor. That could have changed things. As it is, a nexus one is really just a tmobile phone, so it becomes just a question of how to finance a tmobile phone, not a fundamental change of buying a phone, then choosing a cell phone service.
The problem here is exactly government interference in the market. BP is operating on government land with a legal limit of $75 million on liability for damages from a spill.
It's peculiar what when government regulators distort markets by limiting corporate liability, Free Markets get blamed instead of the distorting regulations. It is entirely predictable - limit liability, and people take bigger risks than they would otherwise. It's like going to a casino, and every time you lose, the government forces the casino to give you back your money. Who wouldn't play that game?
Free Markets have plenty of mechanisms for dealing with externalities, the main being liability law. Reason.com has a couple of good articles on this, with links to more in depth articles.
http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/04/liability-vs-regulation
http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/03/limited-liability-oil-spills-a
You don't think this is a serious suit? Go count the number of labels on your ladder sometime. For a laugh, I went to look at mine. Almost all the exterior surface that you don't step on is covered in labels.
I've wished that Google would put medical diagnostic expert systems online. It makes perfect sense - bring us information we can use about ourselves. But in the US, you can't bring a sick person information, or a hungry person a sandwich, for that matter, without opening yourself to huge legal liability.
I hope Google can fight this off. If they aren't big enough, no one is. They were willing to saddle up the lawyers to bring books online. Let's hope they just see this as a cost of doing business.
But never underestimate the absurdity of our liability laws, or the power of Bad Laws to frak up a good thing. It is not a joke.
Where's the safeguard against this switch being installed in us?
When Ion Tiger took flight on October, it exceeded any demonstration of electrically powered flight so far, flying 23 hours and 17 minutes.
No it didn't. Have they never heard of the Qinetiq Zephyr? It flew for 82 hours.
The article claims that it is record for a fuel cell powered flight - not an electrically powered flight.
Could you set up an open source project that qualified for tax deductible donations, and have them donate the code?
What about using the cards for general image processing? What about morphological transforms? Image segmentation? How about FFTs? Convolutions? Multi-dimensional integrals? Matrix math? I would think a lot of general calculations could be could be isomorphic to some video operation on some contrived image. For example, take a large vector dot product. Could that be implemented using OpenGL calls to a video card? Would it be faster than using the main CPU?