By any chance, are you not a chemical machine, however complex, but just a machine? No reasoning, no choices, is like having something implemented in hardware instead of a software driver - the instinctual path is faster, more efficient.
Have you ever been chased by a dog where you had to run like hell, and jump a fence? Have you felt your animal instincts kick in, automatically, without getting a chance to deliberate things, except when you were past that fence, which was the point you really got scared looking back at what just happened?
One definition of intelligence is fitness to solving problems at hand. Would a deliberating philosopher be more intelligent pondering how to run from a dog, when he has 3 milliseconds to act? How about the astronomer who falls into a well while walking and looking up at the stars, how intelligent is he? What's really intelligence? They say a wise man will trip many times a day, but never twice in the same spot, because he learns.
A philosopher, getting chased by dogs all the time, might come up with an anti-chase-dog device, technique or solution, as a long term solution, which could be even more intelligent than running. For now, life came up with its hardwired, solve the problem before it happens solution, by providing you with a hardware path to solve an often encountered problem in the past, escaping a chase, or having to chase something - eat but not get eaten.
In this sense, an apache helicopter is very intelligent at dishing out bullets, because that's the problem it gets to solve. Pondering and deliberation wouldn't help it, compared to the efficience in the fast response hardware path, being good at what it was designed to do.
The nice part is that when it comes to human life, we don't know what the purpose of our design is, to test against. In the beginning, there was the DNA that copied itself, and there were molecules that didn't, and there was no special bias. Time did the rest. These days there are mutations left and right, without bias toward anything, and time does the rest. But just like these mutations don't have any bias, why would the purpose of human life have any bias? We hold a bunch of set of biases that time accumulated into us, but it does not mean that these biases are something absolute, that they cannot be overcome or shouldn't be overcome. In a sense, as the existentialists would say it, man is "doomed" to freedom in his purpose for life, and in this sense you're doomed to failure in devising an IQ test, when what to pick as the test is so arbitrary.
The biases we hold that time accumulated into us are not absolute. Everyone feels the need for right to life, survival is important, but there are often choices that are put above survival, such as freedom, the right to be the way you want to be. Take the jews at Masada for example, or the Chinese student staring down a tank? How good are they at survival, at keeping up the 'bias' that time built into them as individuals, compared to sticking to their grander scale survival principles, or simply to their inner freedom?
For whatever whacky reason, men ended up with the mutation of a need for freedom, besides the fact of being doomed to freedom anyway. A peacock ended up with a large tail. You can argue pro and contra how such things can affect survival, or the long term effects of time. Peacocks ended up with a large tail, while men ended up with wanting freedom, individual freedom, instead of mindless outside controlled drones like ants or The Borg. Are you gonna do an IQ test on peacocks, measure their intelligence based on their tail?
It's kind of nice that IQ tests can test something, but nothing assures you that that something is the right thing to test.
It achieves the goal of dumbing down the whole population, and only the special, select people getting a true education. It's a way of their parents to care, making sure they can better compete in the coming world, because one way to compete is not to do better than the rest, but concentrate all your effort on making sure the rest really sucks, and then you, even mediocre, get to shine. School desegregation that buses were supposed to achieve was always a half-hearted, halfassed thing, the administration was always against it, and said, ok, if they want the education system, let them have it. Public education, which, according to the spirit of the founding fathers, should be a human right, is replaced by private education that gets to be a privilege. What's an education provided as a right, for free, worth, if it's crap? How about these 'grass-roots' efforts to divert education money to 'faith-based' organizations, because we still can't deal with Darwin's evolution? How about the 'get-your-GED' places, outside the school system but publicly funded, that are just means to offload all the troubled kids, so the school system's statistics still look good, while all the skeletons are hidden in the closet, 'offshored' like Enron would do it. It's just a problem waiting to blow up in your face, especially when the Japanese make better cars, when Europeans donate more to tsunami victims, and the Chinese and Indians are about to step up on the global scale. How you gonna make it in this world, when you screw yourself first, without screwing everyone else at the same time? Aha, let's screw up all the others too, problem solved, then we can still rely on this divine-right-privilege-education world. Good luck trying to screw up the chinese and indians, cultures that lasted the longest on earth - it's not impossible, but good luck. For one, I can't believe the buses are still 1960's design. How about getting modern school buses, that run on natural gas even, and don't look anything like a dinosaur? At least that would show that the administration cares, even if it doesn't.
Well, there is a reason why the powers that be decided that women's suffrage is important, and we need to 'liberate' women, but now they are bitching that the rewards were not quite as stellar as they expected, because female scientific genius comets, just like male ones, don't come around every year. When you had one, you should have cherished and respected her more.
So, what is your definition of intelligence? I bet you sooner of later the top IQ test-scorer in the world will be a computer, well before we recognize it as artificial intelligence, because, while it will excel and pattern recognition, abstract conceptual manipulation and encyclopedic knowledge, it will be a while before it also excels at social interactions. I feel in this sense women hold the last bastillon of "human intelligence" instead of men, who already had to yield with such things as accountant and slide rule math-skills to simple calculators.
The Polgar sisters got to that point, because they were practically 'bred' for that function, their father taught them and educated them chess ever since they were born. Very few women get exposed to such education, and how much is that chance that the very girl you pick to pump full of chess, will happen to be a genius? Given such odds, it's still quite remarkable how far up the ladder the Polgar's got. You can't really breed geniuses - with the exception of the swiss Bernoulli family for a few generations a few centuries ago, genius does not follow genetics, but it's often born into the most unlikely places. Equal opportunity and letting everyone do what they are best at is very important because it's a benefit to all. Statistics of how many females are chess champions are meaningless, because of the 'opportunity' provided to them is statistically so skewed, compared to the opportunity that men are provided, by cultural forces.
Increase in disorder is pitted on our idea of "order." We are partial or biased toward a single state of a system (say a configuration of atoms in a gas) and label it "order", compared to all the myriad of other possible states. By statistics, rules of equivalence, chances of the system taking up any of the other "disorder" states are equal, but since there are so many more "disorder" states, overall the system tends to "disorder". Even a single state that you consider "disorder" is just as highly unlikely as your "order" states, so in effect there is no bias against order, but there is bias against statistical improbability. Is life, given enough time, a statistical improbability? Yes, unless you give it enough time, then, if conditions are right, sooner or later...
In low energy systems, such as a lottery urn without the balls bouncing much, most balls accumulate on the bottom, and "order" is the dominant feature, if you prefer bunching all the low-lying states in the single "order" term. In a fully operating high energy lottery urn, disorder is dominant, and to maintain any kind of order by any kind of device, it would constantly need to consume energy, and create disorder somewhere else while maintaining its own order.
Life is such an improbability, ordered state, but the very essence of life is maintaining improbability - there is a constant consumption of energy to repair and maintain order. Order is not improbable if the system corrects itself, and time natural-selects those systems that do correct themselves.
In the beginning there was no special bias towards any kind of "life," there randomly formed molecules that did copy themselves, like DNA does, and those that did not copy themselves. Nobody cared. Time did the rest. Why do you need to summon an intelligent spectator to create these self-copying molecules, when they happen on their own? If you must look for "cause", you have to look at who caused the rules of nature that end up creating life, why are such rules there? Who caused the cause?
Darwin said nothing about who caused the rules, he simply stated that if these rules exist, everything follows. He simply answered those questions which he could answer, without taking an arbitrary side on the questions he could not answer.
As you say it, looking for cause of causes is where ultimately all philosophical discussions of God end up, pitted on the argument that everything must have a cause, therefore God is the root cause of it all. But such statements don't stand against the "if everything must have a cause, then what's the cause of the root cause?" Oh, the root cause is special, it's the only exemption. Says who? Why can't the laws of nature that cause everything, be the special, root cause? Basically, when it comes to religion, you have to leave logic and arguing alone, and it's just faith that you can go by.
"Is it not humiliating to think that impersonal blind chance is better at creating life than the best efforts of intelligent human scientists?"
No it's not, or yes it is, because there is nothing wrong with humility. I'm not special, you're not special, that's one thing darwinism teaches you, that's one thing that the heliocentric copernican astronomy teaches you, and the more we look around us, the more we realize just how much just a part of the whole we are, without being special, or above it all. You get to be less arrogant.
"Belief in a loving, personal God just makes a more satisfying explanation of what we observe all around than blind, impersonal chance."
Religion should concern the inner world, inner satisfaction, inner health. When it comes to the external world, religion is pitted against cruel science, that respects no stability, no dogmas, and religion keeps getting hurt, ouch! The World is only 6000 years old? The Earth is the center of the Universe? God provided you with the Earth, and all its animals and plants to feed yourself? (how easy do you want to make casting aside moral dilemmas?) Life is special, there is a livin
Communism didn't work because it assumed that people are kind spiritied, altruistic and selfless. The law erected as an ideal was that everyone produce and exert effort according to their abilities, and everyone consume according to their needs. For instance, a young punk full of stamina would just produce, but not consume much, while an 90-year old lady in a wheelchair wouldn't produce much, but consume quite a bit, including medical resources.
Capitalism assumes the opposite, that people are the nasty selfish creatures, and the law erected is self-interest and greed. They are actually values in a capitalist economy, because they are the foundation, everything rests upon them. When you can't count on this foundation to function as the dominant, overall behavior, the system collapses. For instance, donation would be the cardinal sin, while in communism greed and selfishness would be the cardinal sin. See, us, people, even in capitalism we still donate, we don't get so easily be swayed by ideologies of any kind. Look at the GPL software - in spite of the efforts of the holy prophets of greed and self-interest, people donate code, if for nothing else, for a collective self interest, that capitalism doesn't recognize well, when there is no collective self interest 'against' some market that you can sell to - where is the greed when everyone gets it for free, instead of a select few, investors, then the 'company' outsiders get to buy it?
The problem with selflessness-relying systems is the lesser ability to self control. Capitalism truly excels at robustness, because it's tolerant of selfless behavior - people donate, there are volunteer firemen, but when worst comes to worst, and people stop being nice, things still chug along, at optimum pace. Do not underestimate robustness, stable equilibrium points. Communism can't deal with such misbehaviour - if the young punk full of cum and stamina doesn't behave as prescribed, selflessly, but changes into a selfish mode, the whole system collapses pretty fast. In this sense, communism would be a very unstable equilibrium point, like a ball balanced at the tip of the mountain, compared to the low point in the valley that capitalism holds.
Software is interesting to watch, because knowledge is something eternal, and you only need about say 0.01% of selfless beings, 0.01% of the time, and there is still enough critical mass.
Unfortunately the rest of society other than intellectual value-generation cannot function well at these 0.01% levels of selflessness, without some form of efficient self correction - tyranny of public opinion - until, say most mundane jobs are fulfilled by robots, just like telephone switchboards were automated, and then people can go to the "clubs" like them english lords used to, and then be either way they want to be, selfish or selfless, go ahead, be the freak you wanna be - as long as everyone gets fed, clothed and sheltered, and there are no wars.
When people get bored and have nothing to do, it's a very dangerous situation. They become frustrated, discontent, and seek out challenges, heroism, fame. For instance, the native americans lived fairly poorly until they were introduced to the horse by the europeans, to the "sun-dogs", which let them conquer their greatest enemy, distance. With a horse, suddenly they were able to solve all their sustenance needs in 2 months instead of a full year, per year, and spent 10 months bored, or more exactly, fighting each other. And it wasn't just the men's fault for trying to be heroes, when women get bored, they incite their men too, to go be something better, climb up that ladder, get a promotion, be a hero, bring home fame. As one indian warrior described it: My legs were tremoring and I was about to shit my pants from having to face the oncoming enemy tribe, but to turn back and run, and have to face the women at home, that would have been even worse.
You think these days people couldn't sustain themselves on 2 months worth of work, instead of such an economy in overdrive, th
Intelligence? Intelligent at what? An apache helicopter is pretty intelligent at dishing out bullets. Women are intelligent at reading minds. I think women are a lot more intelligent at social interactions, which are pretty complex tasks - computers suck at social interactions. Women also excel at spreading their attention, because, historically, they always had to keep an eye on a child, while doing everything else. Men excel at concentrating on single item tasks such as hunting and focusing on prey and nothing else for hours. Men also have the ability to gang, to undertake large-scope grand-scale single item task such as building something big or going to war, and these gangs function more by rule or code, than by fine and subtle sensing of each other's needs. Somebody says that we only use 10% of our brain capacity - I think it's more like 101% - and you can only get so much complexity out of a brain - those who have a very "high IQ" when it comes to science, technology, codes, rules, law, and abstract conceptual operations often find it very difficult to handle the simplest social interactions. The single item concentration plus spatial awareness means men might be on average better for science and technology, but still men can be real dummies at social things. Duh. You know, computers and automated machines will probably replace men at their single item roles first, because math/spatial/single item concentration things are easier to target and automate, and computers are tireless at concentrating their attention.
Men and women fulfill slightly different roles in humanity, if for nothing else, one gets to be pregnant, and breastfeed. There are interesting studies about women in jails - they form little families, and they constantly nest - they invent all kinds of little devices to decorate and make their environment functional, transform it into a "home." You know how you tell if a guy is not married? Go visit his apartment. Men in prison, on the other hand, they just gang up. Women in prison don't gang. When it comes to adapting to prison life, I'd say women are more intelligent.
Still, you have to watch these kinds or any kinds of of generalizations, because, did you know, that perhaps the smartest science "man" that ever lived was actually a woman? Equal opportunity given to everyone to flourish at what they love doing is the key, and just because averages say something, that doesn't mean anything. Even if a study says concludes something as arrogant as 99.999% women are dumber than 99.999% men, you never know which next female will be the one to outdo Newton, or which male will be the next "social genius" or "priest." I've seen all kinds of people, both social genius men, and excellent science genius women. You always have to keep an open mind when it comes to individuals, even if being aware of the group-statistics, so basically, group statistics go out the door when dealing with an individual at say a job interview, still, we don't need to hunt for something 'fishy' if only say 30% of certain 'male' jobs are filled by women, when their population distribution is 50/50%. Equal opportunity is the key, and letting everyone excel at what they are best at. If someone is a musician and not a phd physicist, that's at least as important a function - what's life worth without good music?
Yes, there are such companies, at the mercy of the fabbed companies. If you have a killer design, and nobody is willing to make it for you, what options do you have? And when something is $40B, it's a very nice target to be taken over and be monopolized in the end. What incentive will you have then to be a fabless company, and create, create magic, when the fab will dictate all the terms for you and stomp and shit all over the magic? Competition would be the answer, and it is for now, the fab companies are at the mercy of each other. But while in a competitive free market there is an "invisible hand" at play, this invisible hand can do nothing about the monopoly vulnerability, there is no self-regulating control against that, and ultimately in a free market everything falls into that 'monopoly low energy point', even with the constant human intervention. When there is a will, there is a way, the free market will always find ways around the human regulations, and it's a neverending vigilant battle, unless you provide some culture that exerts automatic feedback to correct such swings. Then the free market low energy entities will go fight culture and subdue the 'tyranny of public opinion,' getting everyone boozed up on hip-hop and uneducated, but then you wonder why external free markets that still have the 'tyranny of public opinion' with culture and education in place, can outcompete you, in a 'greater free market,' until even that greater free market is subdued into monopolistic entitites, and the anti-monopoly-feedback-culture fully eradicated, so that there is no 'even greater free market' to compete in anymore, including no more creation of magic. What an idillic stability point.
Remember Wohler and urea? Only life can create organic chemicals? Only a MIND can create life? Quit thinking you're special, and recognize your true situation, become aware of your awareness without self glorifying bloat. You still are special because you are aware, but how about a dose of the attitude of the great indian chief, saying : "The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to it." You belong, you don't own. You are part of a bigger whole, and while you do have the 'self' functioning selfishly in this bigger whole, you'll lose your balance quickly if you turn arrogant and assert this 'self' too much, even in abstract ways, calling it MIND. Religion as the ultimate neurosis? Some kind of harmony is crucial. Even lions, sharks and wolves live in some kind of harmony with their environment, being an integral part of it, and without them the whole thing would collapse. If you pay attention listen closely, harmony is at the core of most religions, but sometimes things get taken out of context and people lose their "MINDs" very quickly.
Proof of God.. here we go again. It's still a nonanswerable question. If you notice what Darwin said, was that you just put the rules and the right soup in place, the "software", or "chemical life" automatically appears, given billions of years. Throwing random data at a computer chip does not guarantee that a 'functioning' software will appear, 'functioning' meaning self-replicating, but given enough complexity - i.e. memory, processing power, and a few million years, I bet you some self replicating code will appear, without a 'programmer' in the picture. Should make a nice experiment. Of course if you have a programmer you can write that self replicating code in a few minutes, instead of having to wait a few million years, but don't underestimate the effectiveness of the impersonal and mindless time. The impersonal and mindless time can come up with very "intelligent designs", as long as you let it go through all the noninteligent ones too, and selectively filter the intelligent ones out. Natural selection - what's simpler than that? How we got here is one thing, even answerable, but what it means to be a human or conscious or sansient being, what the purpose of life is, that's quite another, unanswerable question category.
They use foam to "insulate" the thing not to keep it warm, as an electric warmer would, but to keep it cool. You'd need an electric cooler for that, but good luck keeping up with the heat generated on atmospheric reentry. Atmospheric reentry should foam-insulation issue, because metal would get molten, just like meteorite "falling stars" end up molten on atmospheric entry. Actually the foam insulation is a special kind, 'ablative', meaning it gets consumed as it functions, it ablates or vaporizes away as it insulates in high heat, providing a gas/foam/char layer, that flies away and takes the heat with it as the insulation gets consumed, keeping the layer underneath it still at a temperature below the melting point of the metal frame. The metal underneath thus never gets a chance to melt.
More like ask the female soldiers to send their used underpants to your prison inmates. Little do they know you just want those panties for your massive silver extraction operation!
That reminds me the joke:
I'll do anything
A man was sitting at a bar enjoying an after-work cocktail when an exceptionally gorgeous young woman entered. She was so striking that the man could not take his eyes away from her. The young woman noticed his overly-attentive stare & walked directly toward him.
Before he could offer his apologies for being so rude, the young woman said to him, 'I'll do anything, absolutely anything, that you want me to do, no matter what it is, for $100 on one condition.'
Flabbergasted, the man asked what the condition was.
The young woman replied, 'You have to tell me what you want me to do in just three words.'
The man considered her proposition for a moment, withdrew his wallet from his pocket & slowly counted out five $20 bills, which he pressed into the young woman's hand.
He looked deeply into her eyes & slowly, meaningfully said, 'Paint my house.'
Silicon chip computers will be life from scratch, as soon as they get the capability to replicate themselves. We better regulate in advance, before someone does it. All this DNA hacking is just plagiarizing life from somewhere, unless they can really cook up a self replicating molecule, but that would start out something simple, that would only copy itself, probably even without some sophisticated cell structure like a bacteria would have it, but just pure DNA-like crap, like a virus.
Because plants don't have a conscience, just like a PLC or computer doesn't have a conscience. You have no problem tossing a rock over the edge and letting it shatter in two, but you don't do that with your buddy, your cat, and you wouldn't do it with Data from Startrek (being a computer with conscience/awareness on par with humans), nor the holographic doctor, nor robocop or terminator 2. Plants are life, but we have a much bigger ethical problem with killing sansient beings than nonsansient ones. Still, a tree comes above a piece of rock, when you consider smashing the two.
Specieism? How about consciencism? Problem is what if we get visited by some extraterrestrials, whose conscience/awareness/intelligence surpasses ours to the point where ours is relegated to the equivalent of trees in comparison to theirs? SETI? Shhhhh.. listen but don't talk!
"It's easy to learn a programming language, and hard to make good programs. Full stop. If you honestly believe otherwise, you're probably one of those stupid hacks whose code I'm always being hired to fix, and likely have no business being in IT."
Specialization is a good thing, that's how we have always had an economy and productivity - instead of everyone baking their own pottery jugs, or making their own horseshoes, you had a village potter and a village blacksmith, who could do it more efficiently, and the farmers could feed them. However, to forcibly create a world where you're not allowed to fix anything for yourself, including baking a pottery jug, if you want to, just because it's not gonna be the same quality as the potter would have made it, well, I don't like that world. When people are not allowed to touch and try to fix their cars, computers, or whatever, or even doink up some halfass recorded VBA macro with a few lines that bend over backwards, it's a hell of a world. Why shouldn't people be allowed to write bad code, if it helps their lives, compared to "pure" code that they would never pay for in the first place, because they wouldn't even dream of wandering down that route of "let me tinker with this taks a little because I can record a macro"? How about banning kids drawing, because people who got art degrees can do it better? I bet you even Picasso started out with bad drawings when they were kids.
But we cannot expect big companies
like Intel, AMD and IBM to be truly innovative. Their approach is
evolutionary, not revolutionary. Hopefully a bright upstart will get
the message and make a killing while the behemoths are busy fighting
each other for market share. They won't know what hit them until it is
too late.
With a chip-fab nearing $40 billion startup capital, it's hard to
imagine anyone from their garages coming up with a competing chip. The
days of Tesla and Edison playing in a garage are gone, my friend. These
days the things like the hybrid cars are made by teams and armies of
cooperation inside very well funded companies. After all that's how
it's always been with big things - even Tesla and Edison wouldn't have gone far without
Faraday, and all the international scientific community buzz going
roundtrips around the globe. As Newton put it, standing on shoulders of giants. Chiseling away at the little things is
very important while working on big things - wax on, wax off, is the
way that chips are created. Newton was just an outstanding chiseler.
I have no problem with private space exploration - go ahead, fly if you want, nobody's stopping you, and if the FAA/FCC/FDA is stopping you, I'll be yelling foul on your side.
But I don't like the rule that everything has to be rushed to commercialization as fast as possible. Some things take a while to become commercial and profitable, and require quite a long period of nurturing first, such as raising kids, or space mining/space energy production/space self-sustaining ecosystems as life insurance against a nuclear catastrophy/war on Earth. I don't like making it a rule that when NASA develop something, then they must hand it over to someone unqualified as fast as possible. Someone whose only goal is to make profit off of it, even it it means running it into the ground. Yeah, listen to the profitmonger vultures drooling, ready to take a bite, when they see some value somewhere, that took immense effort to creat, but it's free for them if they could get their hands on it. And when they get it, they just suck the life out of it, turn it inside out, leaving a carcass behind, and move on to destroy something else. The free market privatized economy is not kind to nonprofitable things, yet some things still have to be done, even if not profitable, such as education, basic research, etc. It's very profitable in the long run, but the market only cares about this very quarter's earnings, the bottom line right now, not something that will turn economic benefits 50 years from now, not the bottom line decades from now. At $500 million per shuttle launch, how are you going to squeeze profit out of it? OK, maybe the russians can launch a nonreusable polluting space capsule for $50 million, still, so what? Where is the money, the return, other than communication satellites? There is no space energy production, nor moon-mining yet. We'll send millionares into space to pay the ticket? Remember how the Concord tanked? Even millionares don't care that much for fancy stuff. NASA is doing basic research, which is a very important thing, and it's seldom profitable. I don't think there is a problem with commercial companies launching satellites, even these days, and the Shuttle will cooperate and piggyback a few of these satellites on its trips, or even go make a pitstop to fix a few, just like your neighbour might pick up a jug of milk for you on his way to the grocery store. But NASA's and the Shuttle's major function is basic infrastructure, to get out there, and provide basic research, to pave the way. Remember the satellite radio business that tanked? - and they were about to let their satellites fall into the atmosphere, when the military came to the rescue and took over, because what a waste of value, what a decision that the freemarket came up with - burn up the satellites.
There are also other things that shold not be privatized/free market - such as police and military - because then all you have is feudalism/dictatorship/oppression all over again, with those who got the guns milking everyone else dry, and not fairly providing security/order in return. Who owns the police? Who owns the military? The people do, or should. Who owns the space shuttle? Well, until it's not profitable, the people do, cuz anyone else will just run this wonder into the ground.
Instead let private space companies build something equivalent to the shuttle, and run it for a while, and when they do better/cheaper/more efficiently, don't worry, NASA won't be messing with the shuttle anymore, just like NASA uses UPS and Fedex, besides the USPS.
Yeah, but each of those panels is 1.2x1.0 meters, or 1.2 a square meter, which makes a 20 square meter (730 sq ft) "sail" installed on whatever you're riding. Make sure you put an "oversize load" sign at your behind.
The issue here is that a lot of slashdot linxors don't use the shockwave plugin, which is a very a very nonopen, nonnonproprietary "internet standard." How else are you gonna incite them to "take a peek" and install the dam thing? Aren't ya'll curious? Curiosity killed the kitten.
Slashdot Mirror
By any chance, are you not a chemical machine, however complex, but just a machine? No reasoning, no choices, is like having something implemented in hardware instead of a software driver - the instinctual path is faster, more efficient.
Have you ever been chased by a dog where you had to run like hell, and jump a fence? Have you felt your animal instincts kick in, automatically, without getting a chance to deliberate things, except when you were past that fence, which was the point you really got scared looking back at what just happened?
One definition of intelligence is fitness to solving problems at hand. Would a deliberating philosopher be more intelligent pondering how to run from a dog, when he has 3 milliseconds to act? How about the astronomer who falls into a well while walking and looking up at the stars, how intelligent is he? What's really intelligence? They say a wise man will trip many times a day, but never twice in the same spot, because he learns.
A philosopher, getting chased by dogs all the time, might come up with an anti-chase-dog device, technique or solution, as a long term solution, which could be even more intelligent than running. For now, life came up with its hardwired, solve the problem before it happens solution, by providing you with a hardware path to solve an often encountered problem in the past, escaping a chase, or having to chase something - eat but not get eaten.
In this sense, an apache helicopter is very intelligent at dishing out bullets, because that's the problem it gets to solve. Pondering and deliberation wouldn't help it, compared to the efficience in the fast response hardware path, being good at what it was designed to do.
The nice part is that when it comes to human life, we don't know what the purpose of our design is, to test against. In the beginning, there was the DNA that copied itself, and there were molecules that didn't, and there was no special bias. Time did the rest. These days there are mutations left and right, without bias toward anything, and time does the rest. But just like these mutations don't have any bias, why would the purpose of human life have any bias? We hold a bunch of set of biases that time accumulated into us, but it does not mean that these biases are something absolute, that they cannot be overcome or shouldn't be overcome. In a sense, as the existentialists would say it, man is "doomed" to freedom in his purpose for life, and in this sense you're doomed to failure in devising an IQ test, when what to pick as the test is so arbitrary.
The biases we hold that time accumulated into us are not absolute. Everyone feels the need for right to life, survival is important, but there are often choices that are put above survival, such as freedom, the right to be the way you want to be. Take the jews at Masada for example, or the Chinese student staring down a tank? How good are they at survival, at keeping up the 'bias' that time built into them as individuals, compared to sticking to their grander scale survival principles, or simply to their inner freedom?
For whatever whacky reason, men ended up with the mutation of a need for freedom, besides the fact of being doomed to freedom anyway. A peacock ended up with a large tail. You can argue pro and contra how such things can affect survival, or the long term effects of time. Peacocks ended up with a large tail, while men ended up with wanting freedom, individual freedom, instead of mindless outside controlled drones like ants or The Borg. Are you gonna do an IQ test on peacocks, measure their intelligence based on their tail?
It's kind of nice that IQ tests can test something, but nothing assures you that that something is the right thing to test.
It achieves the goal of dumbing down the whole population, and only the special, select people getting a true education. It's a way of their parents to care, making sure they can better compete in the coming world, because one way to compete is not to do better than the rest, but concentrate all your effort on making sure the rest really sucks, and then you, even mediocre, get to shine. School desegregation that buses were supposed to achieve was always a half-hearted, halfassed thing, the administration was always against it, and said, ok, if they want the education system, let them have it. Public education, which, according to the spirit of the founding fathers, should be a human right, is replaced by private education that gets to be a privilege. What's an education provided as a right, for free, worth, if it's crap?
How about these 'grass-roots' efforts to divert education money to 'faith-based' organizations, because we still can't deal with Darwin's evolution? How about the 'get-your-GED' places, outside the school system but publicly funded, that are just means to offload all the troubled kids, so the school system's statistics still look good, while all the skeletons are hidden in the closet, 'offshored' like Enron would do it. It's just a problem waiting to blow up in your face, especially when the Japanese make better cars, when Europeans donate more to tsunami victims, and the Chinese and Indians are about to step up on the global scale. How you gonna make it in this world, when you screw yourself first, without screwing everyone else at the same time? Aha, let's screw up all the others too, problem solved, then we can still rely on this divine-right-privilege-education world. Good luck trying to screw up the chinese and indians, cultures that lasted the longest on earth - it's not impossible, but good luck.
For one, I can't believe the buses are still 1960's design. How about getting modern school buses, that run on natural gas even, and don't look anything like a dinosaur? At least that would show that the administration cares, even if it doesn't.
Well, there is a reason why the powers that be decided that women's suffrage is important, and we need to 'liberate' women, but now they are bitching that the rewards were not quite as stellar as they expected, because female scientific genius comets, just like male ones, don't come around every year. When you had one, you should have cherished and respected her more.
So, what is your definition of intelligence? I bet you sooner of later the top IQ test-scorer in the world will be a computer, well before we recognize it as artificial intelligence, because, while it will excel and pattern recognition, abstract conceptual manipulation and encyclopedic knowledge, it will be a while before it also excels at social interactions. I feel in this sense women hold the last bastillon of "human intelligence" instead of men, who already had to yield with such things as accountant and slide rule math-skills to simple calculators.
The Polgar sisters got to that point, because they were practically 'bred' for that function, their father taught them and educated them chess ever since they were born. Very few women get exposed to such education, and how much is that chance that the very girl you pick to pump full of chess, will happen to be a genius? Given such odds, it's still quite remarkable how far up the ladder the Polgar's got. You can't really breed geniuses - with the exception of the swiss Bernoulli family for a few generations a few centuries ago, genius does not follow genetics, but it's often born into the most unlikely places. Equal opportunity and letting everyone do what they are best at is very important because it's a benefit to all.
Statistics of how many females are chess champions are meaningless, because of the 'opportunity' provided to them is statistically so skewed, compared to the opportunity that men are provided, by cultural forces.
Increase in disorder is pitted on our idea of "order." We are partial or biased toward a single state of a system (say a configuration of atoms in a gas) and label it "order", compared to all the myriad of other possible states. By statistics, rules of equivalence, chances of the system taking up any of the other "disorder" states are equal, but since there are so many more "disorder" states, overall the system tends to "disorder".
Even a single state that you consider "disorder" is just as highly unlikely as your "order" states, so in effect there is no bias against order, but there is bias against statistical improbability. Is life, given enough time, a statistical improbability? Yes, unless you give it enough time, then, if conditions are right, sooner or later...
In low energy systems, such as a lottery urn without the balls bouncing much, most balls accumulate on the bottom, and "order" is the dominant feature, if you prefer bunching all the low-lying states in the single "order" term. In a fully operating high energy lottery urn, disorder is dominant, and to maintain any kind of order by any kind of device, it would constantly need to consume energy, and create disorder somewhere else while maintaining its own order.
Life is such an improbability, ordered state, but the very essence of life is maintaining improbability - there is a constant consumption of energy to repair and maintain order. Order is not improbable if the system corrects itself, and time natural-selects those systems that do correct themselves.
In the beginning there was no special bias towards any kind of "life," there randomly formed molecules that did copy themselves, like DNA does, and those that did not copy themselves. Nobody cared. Time did the rest. Why do you need to summon an intelligent spectator to create these self-copying molecules, when they happen on their own? If you must look for "cause", you have to look at who caused the rules of nature that end up creating life, why are such rules there? Who caused the cause?
Darwin said nothing about who caused the rules, he simply stated that if these rules exist, everything follows. He simply answered those questions which he could answer, without taking an arbitrary side on the questions he could not answer.
As you say it, looking for cause of causes is where ultimately all philosophical discussions of God end up, pitted on the argument that everything must have a cause, therefore God is the root cause of it all. But such statements don't stand against the "if everything must have a cause, then what's the cause of the root cause?" Oh, the root cause is special, it's the only exemption. Says who? Why can't the laws of nature that cause everything, be the special, root cause? Basically, when it comes to religion, you have to leave logic and arguing alone, and it's just faith that you can go by.
"Is it not humiliating to think that impersonal blind chance is better at creating life than the best efforts of intelligent human scientists?"
No it's not, or yes it is, because there is nothing wrong with humility. I'm not special, you're not special, that's one thing darwinism teaches you, that's one thing that the heliocentric copernican astronomy teaches you, and the more we look around us, the more we realize just how much just a part of the whole we are, without being special, or above it all. You get to be less arrogant.
"Belief in a loving, personal God just makes a more satisfying explanation of what we observe all around than blind, impersonal chance."
Religion should concern the inner world, inner satisfaction, inner health. When it comes to the external world, religion is pitted against cruel science, that respects no stability, no dogmas, and religion keeps getting hurt, ouch! The World is only 6000 years old? The Earth is the center of the Universe? God provided you with the Earth, and all its animals and plants to feed yourself? (how easy do you want to make casting aside moral dilemmas?) Life is special, there is a livin
OK.
Hold on to your hats! Weeee!
Communism didn't work because it assumed that people are kind spiritied, altruistic and selfless. The law erected as an ideal was that everyone produce and exert effort according to their abilities, and everyone consume according to their needs. For instance, a young punk full of stamina would just produce, but not consume much, while an 90-year old lady in a wheelchair wouldn't produce much, but consume quite a bit, including medical resources.
Capitalism assumes the opposite, that people are the nasty selfish creatures, and the law erected is self-interest and greed. They are actually values in a capitalist economy, because they are the foundation, everything rests upon them. When you can't count on this foundation to function as the dominant, overall behavior, the system collapses. For instance, donation would be the cardinal sin, while in communism greed and selfishness would be the cardinal sin. See, us, people, even in capitalism we still donate, we don't get so easily be swayed by ideologies of any kind. Look at the GPL software - in spite of the efforts of the holy prophets of greed and self-interest, people donate code, if for nothing else, for a collective self interest, that capitalism doesn't recognize well, when there is no collective self interest 'against' some market that you can sell to - where is the greed when everyone gets it for free, instead of a select few, investors, then the 'company' outsiders get to buy it?
The problem with selflessness-relying systems is the lesser ability to self control. Capitalism truly excels at robustness, because it's tolerant of selfless behavior - people donate, there are volunteer firemen, but when worst comes to worst, and people stop being nice, things still chug along, at optimum pace. Do not underestimate robustness, stable equilibrium points. Communism can't deal with such misbehaviour - if the young punk full of cum and stamina doesn't behave as prescribed, selflessly, but changes into a selfish mode, the whole system collapses pretty fast. In this sense, communism would be a very unstable equilibrium point, like a ball balanced at the tip of the mountain, compared to the low point in the valley that capitalism holds.
Software is interesting to watch, because knowledge is something eternal, and you only need about say 0.01% of selfless beings, 0.01% of the time, and there is still enough critical mass.
Unfortunately the rest of society other than intellectual value-generation cannot function well at these 0.01% levels of selflessness, without some form of efficient self correction - tyranny of public opinion - until, say most mundane jobs are fulfilled by robots, just like telephone switchboards were automated, and then people can go to the "clubs" like them english lords used to, and then be either way they want to be, selfish or selfless, go ahead, be the freak you wanna be - as long as everyone gets fed, clothed and sheltered, and there are no wars.
When people get bored and have nothing to do, it's a very dangerous situation. They become frustrated, discontent, and seek out challenges, heroism, fame. For instance, the native americans lived fairly poorly until they were introduced to the horse by the europeans, to the "sun-dogs", which let them conquer their greatest enemy, distance. With a horse, suddenly they were able to solve all their sustenance needs in 2 months instead of a full year, per year, and spent 10 months bored, or more exactly, fighting each other. And it wasn't just the men's fault for trying to be heroes, when women get bored, they incite their men too, to go be something better, climb up that ladder, get a promotion, be a hero, bring home fame. As one indian warrior described it: My legs were tremoring and I was about to shit my pants from having to face the oncoming enemy tribe, but to turn back and run, and have to face the women at home, that would have been even worse.
You think these days people couldn't sustain themselves on 2 months worth of work, instead of such an economy in overdrive, th
Intelligence? Intelligent at what? An apache helicopter is pretty intelligent at dishing out bullets. Women are intelligent at reading minds. I think women are a lot more intelligent at social interactions, which are pretty complex tasks - computers suck at social interactions. Women also excel at spreading their attention, because, historically, they always had to keep an eye on a child, while doing everything else. Men excel at concentrating on single item tasks such as hunting and focusing on prey and nothing else for hours. Men also have the ability to gang, to undertake large-scope grand-scale single item task such as building something big or going to war, and these gangs function more by rule or code, than by fine and subtle sensing of each other's needs. Somebody says that we only use 10% of our brain capacity - I think it's more like 101% - and you can only get so much complexity out of a brain - those who have a very "high IQ" when it comes to science, technology, codes, rules, law, and abstract conceptual operations often find it very difficult to handle the simplest social interactions. The single item concentration plus spatial awareness means men might be on average better for science and technology, but still men can be real dummies at social things. Duh. You know, computers and automated machines will probably replace men at their single item roles first, because math/spatial/single item concentration things are easier to target and automate, and computers are tireless at concentrating their attention. Men and women fulfill slightly different roles in humanity, if for nothing else, one gets to be pregnant, and breastfeed. There are interesting studies about women in jails - they form little families, and they constantly nest - they invent all kinds of little devices to decorate and make their environment functional, transform it into a "home." You know how you tell if a guy is not married? Go visit his apartment. Men in prison, on the other hand, they just gang up. Women in prison don't gang. When it comes to adapting to prison life, I'd say women are more intelligent. Still, you have to watch these kinds or any kinds of of generalizations, because, did you know, that perhaps the smartest science "man" that ever lived was actually a woman? Equal opportunity given to everyone to flourish at what they love doing is the key, and just because averages say something, that doesn't mean anything. Even if a study says concludes something as arrogant as 99.999% women are dumber than 99.999% men, you never know which next female will be the one to outdo Newton, or which male will be the next "social genius" or "priest." I've seen all kinds of people, both social genius men, and excellent science genius women. You always have to keep an open mind when it comes to individuals, even if being aware of the group-statistics, so basically, group statistics go out the door when dealing with an individual at say a job interview, still, we don't need to hunt for something 'fishy' if only say 30% of certain 'male' jobs are filled by women, when their population distribution is 50/50%. Equal opportunity is the key, and letting everyone excel at what they are best at. If someone is a musician and not a phd physicist, that's at least as important a function - what's life worth without good music?
Yes, there are such companies, at the mercy of the fabbed companies. If you have a killer design, and nobody is willing to make it for you, what options do you have? And when something is $40B, it's a very nice target to be taken over and be monopolized in the end. What incentive will you have then to be a fabless company, and create, create magic, when the fab will dictate all the terms for you and stomp and shit all over the magic? Competition would be the answer, and it is for now, the fab companies are at the mercy of each other. But while in a competitive free market there is an "invisible hand" at play, this invisible hand can do nothing about the monopoly vulnerability, there is no self-regulating control against that, and ultimately in a free market everything falls into that 'monopoly low energy point', even with the constant human intervention. When there is a will, there is a way, the free market will always find ways around the human regulations, and it's a neverending vigilant battle, unless you provide some culture that exerts automatic feedback to correct such swings. Then the free market low energy entities will go fight culture and subdue the 'tyranny of public opinion,' getting everyone boozed up on hip-hop and uneducated, but then you wonder why external free markets that still have the 'tyranny of public opinion' with culture and education in place, can outcompete you, in a 'greater free market,' until even that greater free market is subdued into monopolistic entitites, and the anti-monopoly-feedback-culture fully eradicated, so that there is no 'even greater free market' to compete in anymore, including no more creation of magic. What an idillic stability point.
Remember Wohler and urea? Only life can create organic chemicals? Only a MIND can create life? Quit thinking you're special, and recognize your true situation, become aware of your awareness without self glorifying bloat. You still are special because you are aware, but how about a dose of the attitude of the great indian chief, saying : "The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to it." You belong, you don't own. You are part of a bigger whole, and while you do have the 'self' functioning selfishly in this bigger whole, you'll lose your balance quickly if you turn arrogant and assert this 'self' too much, even in abstract ways, calling it MIND. Religion as the ultimate neurosis? Some kind of harmony is crucial. Even lions, sharks and wolves live in some kind of harmony with their environment, being an integral part of it, and without them the whole thing would collapse. If you pay attention listen closely, harmony is at the core of most religions, but sometimes things get taken out of context and people lose their "MINDs" very quickly.
Proof of God.. here we go again. It's still a nonanswerable question. If you notice what Darwin said, was that you just put the rules and the right soup in place, the "software", or "chemical life" automatically appears, given billions of years. Throwing random data at a computer chip does not guarantee that a 'functioning' software will appear, 'functioning' meaning self-replicating, but given enough complexity - i.e. memory, processing power, and a few million years, I bet you some self replicating code will appear, without a 'programmer' in the picture. Should make a nice experiment. Of course if you have a programmer you can write that self replicating code in a few minutes, instead of having to wait a few million years, but don't underestimate the effectiveness of the impersonal and mindless time. The impersonal and mindless time can come up with very "intelligent designs", as long as you let it go through all the noninteligent ones too, and selectively filter the intelligent ones out. Natural selection - what's simpler than that? How we got here is one thing, even answerable, but what it means to be a human or conscious or sansient being, what the purpose of life is, that's quite another, unanswerable question category.
They use foam to "insulate" the thing not to keep it warm, as an electric warmer would, but to keep it cool. You'd need an electric cooler for that, but good luck keeping up with the heat generated on atmospheric reentry. Atmospheric reentry should foam-insulation issue, because metal would get molten, just like meteorite "falling stars" end up molten on atmospheric entry. Actually the foam insulation is a special kind, 'ablative', meaning it gets consumed as it functions, it ablates or vaporizes away as it insulates in high heat, providing a gas/foam/char layer, that flies away and takes the heat with it as the insulation gets consumed, keeping the layer underneath it still at a temperature below the melting point of the metal frame. The metal underneath thus never gets a chance to melt.
More like ask the female soldiers to send their used underpants to your prison inmates.
Little do they know you just want those panties for your massive silver extraction operation!
That reminds me the joke:
I'll do anything
A man was sitting at a bar enjoying an
after-work cocktail when an exceptionally
gorgeous young woman entered. She was so
striking that the man could not take his
eyes away from her. The young woman noticed
his overly-attentive stare & walked directly
toward him.
Before he could offer his apologies for
being so rude, the young woman said
to him, 'I'll do anything, absolutely
anything, that you want me to do, no
matter what it is, for $100 on one
condition.'
Flabbergasted, the man asked what the
condition was.
The young woman replied, 'You have to tell
me what you want me to do in just three
words.'
The man considered her proposition for a
moment, withdrew his wallet from his pocket &
slowly counted out five $20 bills, which he
pressed into the young woman's hand.
He looked deeply into her eyes & slowly,
meaningfully said, 'Paint my house.'
Silicon chip computers will be life from scratch, as soon as they get the capability to replicate themselves. We better regulate in advance, before someone does it. All this DNA hacking is just plagiarizing life from somewhere, unless they can really cook up a self replicating molecule, but that would start out something simple, that would only copy itself, probably even without some sophisticated cell structure like a bacteria would have it, but just pure DNA-like crap, like a virus.
Time to switch to the metric system, ain't it? At least you can put a dollar cost on the dam thing this way?
Better than that, you need female astronauts!! Maybe lack of female pheromones in the space cabin air is what's causing their bone loss.
Because plants don't have a conscience, just like a PLC or computer doesn't have a conscience. You have no problem tossing a rock over the edge and letting it shatter in two, but you don't do that with your buddy, your cat, and you wouldn't do it with Data from Startrek (being a computer with conscience/awareness on par with humans), nor the holographic doctor, nor robocop or terminator 2. Plants are life, but we have a much bigger ethical problem with killing sansient beings than nonsansient ones. Still, a tree comes above a piece of rock, when you consider smashing the two. Specieism? How about consciencism? Problem is what if we get visited by some extraterrestrials, whose conscience/awareness/intelligence surpasses ours to the point where ours is relegated to the equivalent of trees in comparison to theirs? SETI? Shhhhh.. listen but don't talk!
"It's easy to learn a programming language, and hard to make good programs. Full stop. If you honestly believe otherwise, you're probably one of those stupid hacks whose code I'm always being hired to fix, and likely have no business being in IT."
Specialization is a good thing, that's how we have always had an economy and productivity - instead of everyone baking their own pottery jugs, or making their own horseshoes, you had a village potter and a village blacksmith, who could do it more efficiently, and the farmers could feed them. However, to forcibly create a world where you're not allowed to fix anything for yourself, including baking a pottery jug, if you want to, just because it's not gonna be the same quality as the potter would have made it, well, I don't like that world. When people are not allowed to touch and try to fix their cars, computers, or whatever, or even doink up some halfass recorded VBA macro with a few lines that bend over backwards, it's a hell of a world. Why shouldn't people be allowed to write bad code, if it helps their lives, compared to "pure" code that they would never pay for in the first place, because they wouldn't even dream of wandering down that route of "let me tinker with this taks a little because I can record a macro"? How about banning kids drawing, because people who got art degrees can do it better? I bet you even Picasso started out with bad drawings when they were kids.
But we cannot expect big companies like Intel, AMD and IBM to be truly innovative. Their approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Hopefully a bright upstart will get the message and make a killing while the behemoths are busy fighting each other for market share. They won't know what hit them until it is too late.
With a chip-fab nearing $40 billion startup capital, it's hard to imagine anyone from their garages coming up with a competing chip. The days of Tesla and Edison playing in a garage are gone, my friend. These days the things like the hybrid cars are made by teams and armies of cooperation inside very well funded companies. After all that's how it's always been with big things - even Tesla and Edison wouldn't have gone far without Faraday, and all the international scientific community buzz going roundtrips around the globe. As Newton put it, standing on shoulders of giants. Chiseling away at the little things is very important while working on big things - wax on, wax off, is the way that chips are created. Newton was just an outstanding chiseler.
I'd rather have both Intel and AMD going at it, instead of either one alone. Monopolies are not kind.
I have no problem with private space exploration - go ahead, fly if you want, nobody's stopping you, and if the FAA/FCC/FDA is stopping you, I'll be yelling foul on your side.
But I don't like the rule that everything has to be rushed to commercialization as fast as possible. Some things take a while to become commercial and profitable, and require quite a long period of nurturing first, such as raising kids, or space mining/space energy production/space self-sustaining ecosystems as life insurance against a nuclear catastrophy/war on Earth. I don't like making it a rule that when NASA develop something, then they must hand it over to someone unqualified as fast as possible. Someone whose only goal is to make profit off of it, even it it means running it into the ground. Yeah, listen to the profitmonger vultures drooling, ready to take a bite, when they see some value somewhere, that took immense effort to creat, but it's free for them if they could get their hands on it. And when they get it, they just suck the life out of it, turn it inside out, leaving a carcass behind, and move on to destroy something else. The free market privatized economy is not kind to nonprofitable things, yet some things still have to be done, even if not profitable, such as education, basic research, etc. It's very profitable in the long run, but the market only cares about this very quarter's earnings, the bottom line right now, not something that will turn economic benefits 50 years from now, not the bottom line decades from now. At $500 million per shuttle launch, how are you going to squeeze profit out of it? OK, maybe the russians can launch a nonreusable polluting space capsule for $50 million, still, so what? Where is the money, the return, other than communication satellites? There is no space energy production, nor moon-mining yet. We'll send millionares into space to pay the ticket? Remember how the Concord tanked? Even millionares don't care that much for fancy stuff. NASA is doing basic research, which is a very important thing, and it's seldom profitable. I don't think there is a problem with commercial companies launching satellites, even these days, and the Shuttle will cooperate and piggyback a few of these satellites on its trips, or even go make a pitstop to fix a few, just like your neighbour might pick up a jug of milk for you on his way to the grocery store. But NASA's and the Shuttle's major function is basic infrastructure, to get out there, and provide basic research, to pave the way. Remember the satellite radio business that tanked? - and they were about to let their satellites fall into the atmosphere, when the military came to the rescue and took over, because what a waste of value, what a decision that the freemarket came up with - burn up the satellites.
There are also other things that shold not be privatized/free market - such as police and military - because then all you have is feudalism/dictatorship/oppression all over again, with those who got the guns milking everyone else dry, and not fairly providing security/order in return. Who owns the police? Who owns the military? The people do, or should. Who owns the space shuttle? Well, until it's not profitable, the people do, cuz anyone else will just run this wonder into the ground.
Instead let private space companies build something equivalent to the shuttle, and run it for a while, and when they do better/cheaper/more efficiently, don't worry, NASA won't be messing with the shuttle anymore, just like NASA uses UPS and Fedex, besides the USPS.
Yeah, but each of those panels is 1.2x1.0 meters, or 1.2 a square meter, which makes a 20 square meter (730 sq ft) "sail" installed on whatever you're riding. Make sure you put an "oversize load" sign at your behind.
The issue here is that a lot of slashdot linxors don't use the shockwave plugin, which is a very a very nonopen, nonnonproprietary "internet standard." How else are you gonna incite them to "take a peek" and install the dam thing? Aren't ya'll curious? Curiosity killed the kitten.