For me, as a math whiz, i just did it, straight through to trig and prob/stat in high school, 800 math sat. i stopped in the middle of calculus in college, when my interests focused more on the humanities and psychology. i am biased towards math as a diversion and a way of modeling the world. But i am in a minority. my father was a frickin rocket scientist. I really didnt know i would not become a scientist, so learning it was fine, good discipline and all, but now almost none of my math past decimals, fractions, simple algebra and word problems is utterly useless to me. I suspect that our educational system is designed to ferret out the asperger leaning math savants, to get them into industry and the military (nuclear weapons design for one). For most of us, i believe, the educational system is a total failure. you either get into a phd track and pray you can maintain your focus, or you just live with stupid debts and wonder why you did what you did. we need practical math education, as part of a real world based learning system, where problems from our lives are solved with educational tools. math: taxes, understanding economics, understanding science reporting, understanding polls, making budgets for a family or small business. a multi tiered educational track, with each track leading to good jobs. my high school was later nearly decertified due to having a twin track system where the less gifted (read:black) were put into a failure oriented track. seriously, and this was Berkeley High in the 80's. Oh, and we need free college education or its equivalent. And none of this will happen. there is no hope to reform or reinvent our educational system. most of us are now low grade morons, having grown up with the equivalent of alcohol in our blood surrogate. (and if you dont get the reference, its only proof i am right). dumb, dumber, dumbest. go to a thrift store, note some of the serious topics that Mass Market books covered in the 50's, 60' and 70's. now its all vampire romance novels. Im not even sure i trust anyone to build anything anymore, like the new Bay Bridge. oh, and you kids get off my lawn.
actually, most of whats happening would have offended Reagan. he did have a polite, civilized public image, probably from his days in hollywood. the teabaggers, et al have stripped away all social niceties. its absolutely appalling, and most citizens are probably blindsided by the level of blind vitriol and hatred. I cant even imagine how historians will record this. its like we are suffering from some mass disease. hey, maybe thats it. could it be flouridation did this?
Based on this and a previous comment, i think we all know what to do: construct self sufficient wilderness cabins and start leasing tracts of wilderness and subdivide the land under bridges, cause thats where an awful lot of people are going to be living soon.
Have you considered that maybe google ISNT being manipulated... by humans, that is... I for one welcome the Providers, and would like to place a side bet of 12 quatloos that the natives will defeat the invaders. now where is my green skinned alien babe? or at least my Angelique Pettyjohn clone?
the male brain is highly responsive to visual stimulation of the sex response. in the real world, this was limited by the relatively low numbers of proximate, real, naked humans. with the advent of streaming porn, the male brain is faced with a surplus and no instinct to stop. most men can voluntarily control this, but those that cant are like people who overeat. we are programmed to eat as much as we can as food often went scarce in prehistoric times. until we evolve a few more instincts (which will take millenia, and wont happen if people have access to childrearing resources who arent good genetic choices for furthering the species), we are stuck with impulse control disorders related to the surpluses our industrial society creates. thats why voluntary simplicity may be necessary, unless someone can genetically engineer us to be more controlled...
Me too. i met paula kelly backstage after her LA performance in "dont bother me i cant cope" when the director of andromeda strain visited her to discuss her upcoming role. the director and producer took me and my dad out for drinks (i was 11), and the producer ordered me a horses neck. saw robert wises oscar, and watched a bad movie at his malibu beach mansion movie theatre ("public eye", from the 70's). andromeda strain rocks, and not just cause im a frickin insider.
OK, ive figured out what you are all REALLY trying to say, in your carefully coded statements (my comments in {})
How does putting Valleywag (quoted in mailers ):... and Mashable, you can reverse time {time travel, or turning women into girls?} by reading the works in 2000. Title in Germany is: "pornography for children" The meaning "is pornography for children." Google in rough translation from the nature of the paper [, type title] is clear enough: The mailer harmful not advocate violent child pornography. He was not concerned about receiving a cool reception at a conference put this view in 2000 in Nuremberg {aha, he was a defendent at the original nuremburg trials. how'd he get away?} him.
Mashable Valleywag quotes a summary of the machine-generated translation of the article to us for 10 years, originally in German, it is fairly obvious. Translation, especially if you are very clear:
This is an abuse of the rest of therapist statements are to be quoted without critical distance theory in any way.
Please discuss this only. You can not. Or this:
"The opinion that children, even with sexuality, can enjoy this / could not be distributed," and has said more Schweer. This is a scientific fact that this is an opinion, but many parents would not question a child, he is silent.
Monster. He / prison, or otherwise provide {provide what? child pornography through the prison system?}.
Jesus Christ. im calling the FBI immediately. this was relatively easy to discover. just take the original statements, in God's english, translate into the evil german language, then into the evil japanese empire language, then back to english. worldwide conspiracy of pedophiles based in the axis of evil.
Its odd that the poster says, "unfortunately". if we found a true pattern in pi after a certain number of digits (and not just a statistical anomaly), then the entire basis for our mathematical understanding of this universe would seriously be threatened. I for one dont welcome our new masters who didnt create a universe with internal consistency. that would be like living in star wars or start trek. eep.
well, not coding, but close. at a book wholesaler, we had a foxpro database to generate specialized lists of books for our bookstore customers. problem was, it wasnt user friendly, only 2 people understood how to use it, and one of them was our cranky pc programmer who kept a bottle in his desk drawer. buyers had requested help with a project, and had been told it was on its way, until they learned it wasnt. tough as nails female buyer reduced to tears over this, but purchased filemaker pro and created her own tool. i found out about this program, had it installed on our shared pc (our desks had remote terminals, no capacity to do other tasks), and played with it. i created a customizable database of our titles, in between phone orders (5-30 minutes work at a time, constant interruptions to go to my proper desk 30 feet away), without the main pc programmers permission, without the manual, with no experience in such matters. what i created rocked, but was limited in scope. pc programmer found out, was apoplectic, gave me a lecture about how we were migrating to foxpro because filemaker pro couldnt work with.dbf's, which was what we needed to use for a proper list generator(i was using a.txt file with very limited parameters: title, author, isbn). i actually agreed with him: if we were going to move entirely to foxpro, i would eat my own child. BUT, while playing around with filemaker, i discovered it could IMPORT dbf's, which he either didnt know or was hiding from me to be the big phallic symbol on campus. i then found the.dbf he had been using for his database, which had the books subjects and sales records. i then expanded my database (again, without support, training, manual, or anything but a wink and a nod from my boss, who thought the main programmer was a dickwad), and it was a total hit with customers, who finally got what they and i knew they needed. of course, it all failed miserably when i tried to offer the lists and got swamped with requests (list generation could not be automated), but the customers still loved us. this made me feel like a semi-geek (demi-geek?)
ive read "darwins black box" by michael behe. its a fascinating book that presents, in an apparently scientifically honest manner, some problems in evolutionary biochemistry that the author says are not addressed by any of the research in this field. the ability for our blood clotting mechanism to evolve from a simpler form is questioned with some intelligence. the problem, if i may summarize, is this: there appear to be some holes in the fabric of evolutionary theory which may not be explainable by the current theory. the idea of a conscious, intelligent designer (not necessarily "god" but definitely something many orders of intelligence beyond our own) may help to explain these holes.
i am not as interested in the debate about whether creationists are trying to use scientific language to infiltrate their religious dogma. yes, they exist. for me, the question is: can such a theory of intelligent design be proven, or be falsifiable, and if not, what class of idea is it?
i would say the idea is similar to the Gaia hypothesis, by james lovelock, where he proposes that the biosphere can be viewed as a single living entity, self regulating, that maintains optimal conditions for life. can this be proved? doubtful, but the search for evidence to support it may lead to new discoveries. its more of a paradigm shift.
also, the history of combining science and theology has some very bright spots. pierre teilhard de chardin, a jesuit priest, tried to combine christian cosmology with scientific evidence, and his books, including "phenomenon of man" are full of interesting ideas of the nature of evolution. are we moving towards an Omega point? is there purpose hidden within evolution? again, this may not be provable or falsifiable, but it creates a new way of thinking, which may be necessary as we try to incorporate our own personal experiences of the divine (entheogens, anyone?) with our scientific training.
we may be at a genuinely new, or novel, point in our thinking. old ways of thought (materialism, scientific rationalism, religious fanaticism, mysticism) may have reached their end of life. people married to rigid ways of thinking will overstate their case, deny truth in others views, to bolster their false sense of security. can we truly have any security in this world? are we not challenged every day to consider alternatives to our own well entrenched thought patterns? i know i am. its exhausting, but also exhilarating. and i dont see any slowdown.
of course, im probably just insane. after all, dec 21 2012 is just around the corner, and the I ching told me that the king wen sequence has personal meaning to me by giving me the 3rd hexagram back as an answer to my question "does the king wen sequence have any relevance to me, and should i be worrying about these big issues at all?" the third hexagram is the key to king wen, as the first two are logical beginnings to any ordering of the i ching, while the third doesnt appear to have any logic. see terrance mckennas books for more on this.
i have a collection of over 1000 discounted vhs tapes. im not a videophile, i watch movies for their emotional content (2001 counts as emotional), i dont NEED widescreen to be moved. and movies are narratives, so i dont need the jump feature of dvd. thats good for music, or for a collection of video shorts. i dont need commentary on a movie. and i can still find lots of good vhs at thrift stores, etc. i do have a dvd player, and own 2 dvds: koyaanisqatsi, and orgasm: faces of ecstasy (got it for free as a participant, its a great movie, buy it!). so vhs will last a long long time, until everyone who actually has to live within a real world budget wears out their vhs collection. i of course refuse to tape movies at condensed speed. i used to do this, but now cant stand the loss of quality. i will buy the lotr on dvd eventually, but am in no rush. ive seen it already, and watching a movie over and over for me is a sign of addictive behavior. enjoy the experience, then move on (the 1000 vids is more addictive behavior, i know, but im only human)
to summarize: dvd is overkill, the nonsequential nature is unnecessary for narrative structures, and its just more capitalistic hooey.
if you place a person in front of a keyboard and ask them to give answers to questions as accurately as they can, and then try to determine whether they, or a computer programmed to do the same thing, is more or less intelligent than the other, you may be measuring something that will be equalled to some degree by computers but it is not human intelligence. if you place a person in front of a keyboard and ask them to do their damndest to really communicate with the entity at the other end, you will discover, i believe, that humans show awareness, or an ability to self-transcend, that we cannot even conceive of computers (as we understand them) being capable of. q: are you a computer or a human? a (human): tell me something about yourself. q: i like to pick roses with my fingers because of the risk of pricking myself. a: well, a computer might be able to reply with a phrase about masochistic tendencies, or write a poem about a subject tangentially related to flowers (like vermeer, cause he was dutch and they went crazy over tulips). i will simply ask you why you want to want to test a belief in the power of AI vs humans by using this infantile procedure? are you afraid you are not yourself human, because you cannot give a sufficiently intelligent answer to any question put to you? dont you realize that your intelligence, your self awareness, includes, and is utterly dependent upon, your bodies emotional responses, your existence in physical reality, your ability to dream, your access to archetypal knowledge, your transcendental experiences, feelings about death, and your desire to touch the person you are talking to, among many other immeasurables? AI wont exist until we have androids made of dna and proteins whose form is a result of a long process of mutation and evolution, and whose minds have lived in bodies long enough to produce quirks of human awareness like schizophrenia. we may create machines who can build faster machines ad infinitum, but this is not true AI, precipitous and singularitous as it is. q: oh. do you want to go out some time? a: only if you promise to not talk about turing tests and von neumann in a totally serious manner. and only if you admit right now that you are secretly afraid you ARE a computer. q: uh, yeah, i can do that. and i suppose that might be true. i guess im not just a robot, right? hey, are you sure YOU arent just a computer programmed really cleverly? a: well, duh! the mind as reflected in lines of text is a funhouse mirror. dont worry, be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
um, you forgot the true top level threat designator:
-"My mom is evicting me from the basement"
For me, as a math whiz, i just did it, straight through to trig and prob/stat in high school, 800 math sat. i stopped in the middle of calculus in college, when my interests focused more on the humanities and psychology. i am biased towards math as a diversion and a way of modeling the world. But i am in a minority. my father was a frickin rocket scientist. I really didnt know i would not become a scientist, so learning it was fine, good discipline and all, but now almost none of my math past decimals, fractions, simple algebra and word problems is utterly useless to me. I suspect that our educational system is designed to ferret out the asperger leaning math savants, to get them into industry and the military (nuclear weapons design for one). For most of us, i believe, the educational system is a total failure. you either get into a phd track and pray you can maintain your focus, or you just live with stupid debts and wonder why you did what you did. we need practical math education, as part of a real world based learning system, where problems from our lives are solved with educational tools. math: taxes, understanding economics, understanding science reporting, understanding polls, making budgets for a family or small business. a multi tiered educational track, with each track leading to good jobs. my high school was later nearly decertified due to having a twin track system where the less gifted (read:black) were put into a failure oriented track. seriously, and this was Berkeley High in the 80's. Oh, and we need free college education or its equivalent. And none of this will happen. there is no hope to reform or reinvent our educational system. most of us are now low grade morons, having grown up with the equivalent of alcohol in our blood surrogate. (and if you dont get the reference, its only proof i am right). dumb, dumber, dumbest. go to a thrift store, note some of the serious topics that Mass Market books covered in the 50's, 60' and 70's. now its all vampire romance novels. Im not even sure i trust anyone to build anything anymore, like the new Bay Bridge. oh, and you kids get off my lawn.
actually, most of whats happening would have offended Reagan. he did have a polite, civilized public image, probably from his days in hollywood. the teabaggers, et al have stripped away all social niceties. its absolutely appalling, and most citizens are probably blindsided by the level of blind vitriol and hatred. I cant even imagine how historians will record this. its like we are suffering from some mass disease. hey, maybe thats it. could it be flouridation did this?
Based on this and a previous comment, i think we all know what to do: construct self sufficient wilderness cabins and start leasing tracts of wilderness and subdivide the land under bridges, cause thats where an awful lot of people are going to be living soon.
I want to live in a home modeled after Project Wildfire in Andromeda Strain. Maybe then ill be safe. just watch out for tweets saying "theres a fire"
Have you considered that maybe google ISNT being manipulated... by humans, that is... I for one welcome the Providers, and would like to place a side bet of 12 quatloos that the natives will defeat the invaders. now where is my green skinned alien babe? or at least my Angelique Pettyjohn clone?
the male brain is highly responsive to visual stimulation of the sex response. in the real world, this was limited by the relatively low numbers of proximate, real, naked humans. with the advent of streaming porn, the male brain is faced with a surplus and no instinct to stop. most men can voluntarily control this, but those that cant are like people who overeat. we are programmed to eat as much as we can as food often went scarce in prehistoric times. until we evolve a few more instincts (which will take millenia, and wont happen if people have access to childrearing resources who arent good genetic choices for furthering the species), we are stuck with impulse control disorders related to the surpluses our industrial society creates. thats why voluntary simplicity may be necessary, unless someone can genetically engineer us to be more controlled...
Me too. i met paula kelly backstage after her LA performance in "dont bother me i cant cope" when the director of andromeda strain visited her to discuss her upcoming role. the director and producer took me and my dad out for drinks (i was 11), and the producer ordered me a horses neck. saw robert wises oscar, and watched a bad movie at his malibu beach mansion movie theatre ("public eye", from the 70's). andromeda strain rocks, and not just cause im a frickin insider.
no, its the former dictator of Albania, Enver Whuxga. boy, did he have Chutzpah
OK, ive figured out what you are all REALLY trying to say, in your carefully coded statements (my comments in {})
How does putting Valleywag (quoted in mailers ):... and Mashable, you can reverse time {time travel, or turning women into girls?} by reading the works in 2000. Title in Germany is: "pornography for children" The meaning "is pornography for children." Google in rough translation from the nature of the paper [, type title] is clear enough: The mailer harmful not advocate violent child pornography. He was not concerned about receiving a cool reception at a conference put this view in 2000 in Nuremberg {aha, he was a defendent at the original nuremburg trials. how'd he get away?} him.
Mashable Valleywag quotes a summary of the machine-generated translation of the article to us for 10 years, originally in German, it is fairly obvious. Translation, especially if you are very clear:
This is an abuse of the rest of therapist statements are to be quoted without critical distance theory in any way.
Please discuss this only. You can not. Or this:
"The opinion that children, even with sexuality, can enjoy this / could not be distributed," and has said more Schweer. This is a scientific fact that this is an opinion, but many parents would not question a child, he is silent.
Monster. He / prison, or otherwise provide {provide what? child pornography through the prison system?}.
Jesus Christ. im calling the FBI immediately.
this was relatively easy to discover. just take the original statements, in God's english, translate into the evil german language, then into the evil japanese empire language, then back to english. worldwide conspiracy of pedophiles based in the axis of evil.
Its odd that the poster says, "unfortunately". if we found a true pattern in pi after a certain number of digits (and not just a statistical anomaly), then the entire basis for our mathematical understanding of this universe would seriously be threatened. I for one dont welcome our new masters who didnt create a universe with internal consistency. that would be like living in star wars or start trek. eep.
well, not coding, but close. at a book wholesaler, we had a foxpro database to generate specialized lists of books for our bookstore customers. problem was, it wasnt user friendly, only 2 people understood how to use it, and one of them was our cranky pc programmer who kept a bottle in his desk drawer. buyers had requested help with a project, and had been told it was on its way, until they learned it wasnt. tough as nails female buyer reduced to tears over this, but purchased filemaker pro and created her own tool. i found out about this program, had it installed on our shared pc (our desks had remote terminals, no capacity to do other tasks), and played with it. i created a customizable database of our titles, in between phone orders (5-30 minutes work at a time, constant interruptions to go to my proper desk 30 feet away), without the main pc programmers permission, without the manual, with no experience in such matters. what i created rocked, but was limited in scope. pc programmer found out, was apoplectic, gave me a lecture about how we were migrating to foxpro because filemaker pro couldnt work with .dbf's, which was what we needed to use for a proper list generator(i was using a .txt file with very limited parameters: title, author, isbn). i actually agreed with him: if we were going to move entirely to foxpro, i would eat my own child. BUT, while playing around with filemaker, i discovered it could IMPORT dbf's, which he either didnt know or was hiding from me to be the big phallic symbol on campus. i then found the .dbf he had been using for his database, which had the books subjects and sales records. i then expanded my database (again, without support, training, manual, or anything but a wink and a nod from my boss, who thought the main programmer was a dickwad), and it was a total hit with customers, who finally got what they and i knew they needed. of course, it all failed miserably when i tried to offer the lists and got swamped with requests (list generation could not be automated), but the customers still loved us. this made me feel like a semi-geek (demi-geek?)
ive read "darwins black box" by michael behe. its a fascinating book that presents, in an apparently scientifically honest manner, some problems in evolutionary biochemistry that the author says are not addressed by any of the research in this field. the ability for our blood clotting mechanism to evolve from a simpler form is questioned with some intelligence. the problem, if i may summarize, is this: there appear to be some holes in the fabric of evolutionary theory which may not be explainable by the current theory. the idea of a conscious, intelligent designer (not necessarily "god" but definitely something many orders of intelligence beyond our own) may help to explain these holes.
i am not as interested in the debate about whether creationists are trying to use scientific language to infiltrate their religious dogma. yes, they exist. for me, the question is: can such a theory of intelligent design be proven, or be falsifiable, and if not, what class of idea is it?
i would say the idea is similar to the Gaia hypothesis, by james lovelock, where he proposes that the biosphere can be viewed as a single living entity, self regulating, that maintains optimal conditions for life. can this be proved? doubtful, but the search for evidence to support it may lead to new discoveries. its more of a paradigm shift.
also, the history of combining science and theology has some very bright spots. pierre teilhard de chardin, a jesuit priest, tried to combine christian cosmology with scientific evidence, and his books, including "phenomenon of man" are full of interesting ideas of the nature of evolution. are we moving towards an Omega point? is there purpose hidden within evolution? again, this may not be provable or falsifiable, but it creates a new way of thinking, which may be necessary as we try to incorporate our own personal experiences of the divine (entheogens, anyone?) with our scientific training.
we may be at a genuinely new, or novel, point in our thinking. old ways of thought (materialism, scientific rationalism, religious fanaticism, mysticism) may have reached their end of life. people married to rigid ways of thinking will overstate their case, deny truth in others views, to bolster their false sense of security. can we truly have any security in this world? are we not challenged every day to consider alternatives to our own well entrenched thought patterns? i know i am. its exhausting, but also exhilarating. and i dont see any slowdown.
of course, im probably just insane. after all, dec 21 2012 is just around the corner, and the I ching told me that the king wen sequence has personal meaning to me by giving me the 3rd hexagram back as an answer to my question "does the king wen sequence have any relevance to me, and should i be worrying about these big issues at all?" the third hexagram is the key to king wen, as the first two are logical beginnings to any ordering of the i ching, while the third doesnt appear to have any logic. see terrance mckennas books for more on this.
hope this was entertaining.
this was my first thought as well. of course, slashdot readers that may want to purchase used tubes are in a quandary...
i have a collection of over 1000 discounted vhs tapes. im not a videophile, i watch movies for their emotional content (2001 counts as emotional), i dont NEED widescreen to be moved. and movies are narratives, so i dont need the jump feature of dvd. thats good for music, or for a collection of video shorts. i dont need commentary on a movie. and i can still find lots of good vhs at thrift stores, etc. i do have a dvd player, and own 2 dvds: koyaanisqatsi, and orgasm: faces of ecstasy (got it for free as a participant, its a great movie, buy it!). so vhs will last a long long time, until everyone who actually has to live within a real world budget wears out their vhs collection. i of course refuse to tape movies at condensed speed. i used to do this, but now cant stand the loss of quality. i will buy the lotr on dvd eventually, but am in no rush. ive seen it already, and watching a movie over and over for me is a sign of addictive behavior. enjoy the experience, then move on (the 1000 vids is more addictive behavior, i know, but im only human) to summarize: dvd is overkill, the nonsequential nature is unnecessary for narrative structures, and its just more capitalistic hooey.
if you place a person in front of a keyboard and ask them to give answers to questions as accurately as they can, and then try to determine whether they, or a computer programmed to do the same thing, is more or less intelligent than the other, you may be measuring something that will be equalled to some degree by computers but it is not human intelligence. if you place a person in front of a keyboard and ask them to do their damndest to really communicate with the entity at the other end, you will discover, i believe, that humans show awareness, or an ability to self-transcend, that we cannot even conceive of computers (as we understand them) being capable of.
q: are you a computer or a human?
a (human): tell me something about yourself.
q: i like to pick roses with my fingers because of the risk of pricking myself.
a: well, a computer might be able to reply with a phrase about masochistic tendencies, or write a poem about a subject tangentially related to flowers (like vermeer, cause he was dutch and they went crazy over tulips). i will simply ask you why you want to want to test a belief in the power of AI vs humans by using this infantile procedure? are you afraid you are not yourself human, because you cannot give a sufficiently intelligent answer to any question put to you? dont you realize that your intelligence, your self awareness, includes, and is utterly dependent upon, your bodies emotional responses, your existence in physical reality, your ability to dream, your access to archetypal knowledge, your transcendental experiences, feelings about death, and your desire to touch the person you are talking to, among many other immeasurables? AI wont exist until we have androids made of dna and proteins whose form is a result of a long process of mutation and evolution, and whose minds have lived in bodies long enough to produce quirks of human awareness like schizophrenia. we may create machines who can build faster machines ad infinitum, but this is not true AI, precipitous and singularitous as it is.
q: oh. do you want to go out some time?
a: only if you promise to not talk about turing tests and von neumann in a totally serious manner. and only if you admit right now that you are secretly afraid you ARE a computer.
q: uh, yeah, i can do that. and i suppose that might be true. i guess im not just a robot, right? hey, are you sure YOU arent just a computer programmed really cleverly?
a: well, duh! the mind as reflected in lines of text is a funhouse mirror. dont worry, be happy.