Ostwald in early 1900 still doubted the existence of atoms, he thought matter is fully continuous. This was in spite of the tremedous successes of the kinetic theory of gases, chemical formulas and Avogadro's stoichiometric rules of combination, etc. but no hard proof. Then came Millikan's and Rutherford's experiments, together with the steam chamber particle traces. Today we can pretty much 'take a picture' of an atom via a scanning-tunneling microscope. This is not to say Ostwald was wrong to doubt. Those who doubted the classical theories of caloric and phlogiston, though in minority first, they ended up being right in the end. This is the way of science - you have to be willing to give up everything you thought to be true in face of new facts, and while things are uncertain, the proper way to be is to have a division of opinions. At least we don't live in the time of Copernicus, Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, when doubting the majority opinion could get you roasted at the stake.
Yeah, the biggest benefit of a printed doc is that I can take it to the toilet and digest it while sitting on the throne for an hour. For whatever reason that's where I can absorb the most, and I sit there for an hour not because my biological functions require it, but because I get lost in reading and relaxing. It's hard to do the same thing with laptops, they are too clunky in your lap compared to 5 pages of printed paper, or even fat books. I haven't tried these tablet pc's, mostly cuz of the expense, but as soon as they are affortable and are as comfortable as 5 sheets of printed paper, I won't be needing to destroy trees anymore. If it had 1 GB of ram, and a USB2 port to which to attach my portable 40Gig drive, where all the ebooks reside, then I'm happy. Question is then, how much do ebooks cost. If they cost 2 bux a piece that's one thing, 10 bux a piece is quite another.
I think this topic is the most urgent area that needs gov't regulation - before even the stem cell stuff, because stem cell tinkering can only create chemical machines like we are, and it's relatively hard to beat millions of years of self-tinkering. But once raw materials like steel, semiconductors, diamond, etc. are made available to an evolutionary process,who knows what kind of thing evolution can come up with: imagine a scary 2 ton metal bug that has an IQ of 1,600,000. Would such a creature like, and cherish us, humans, like we cherish and protect the amimals, plants and the environment?
"Scoring 100,000 boards per second" is the catch - there is no good way to score. How do you know what a move is worth without knowing its effect? A move that looks seemingly awful, and suicidal, might be a brilliant move whose effect develops 25 moves later, or 50 moves later. The only true way to "solve" is not to consider all game states, but to consider all possible paths, or sequence of states to a state where no more moves are made.
(note: the board never gets completely full, game stops before, when no more territory can be made, and playing into enemy territory would be suicide inviting a pass from the opponent while the invasion stones still being dead, increasing the enemies points.) Now take those 847,288,609,443 possible states, and consider all the sequences through which you can travel because you can't just look at a position and "evaluate it" without knowing the "future" it holds (don't forget captures that give you back empty spots that can be played again.) Actually, knowing all the possible "reasonable" end states, then tree searching backwards on how you can arrive at them might be a better way than starting forward from an empty board. Basically knowing the "future" of a position, or all the "futures" that you get to from a given position, could be a better way to go about things.
That's bullshit. You do not need constancy of material/molecules to keep a memory - in a sense you can exchange a building brick by brick, one at a time, with new bricks, and maintain your building like new, for millenia. Of course nobody does this kind of maintenance to buildings, but that's how your body works. Your whole body constantly exchanges molecules, and that doesn't mean that your liver forgets how to function, or your heart forgets how to beat, or your synapses forget the stuff they are supposed to remember.
Actually, the US gov't has been pretty much the only spender in this area, and it's only fair to ask other countries like EU, Japan, China, Russia and India to pitch in. If fusion was fully developped and commercialized in the US, the rest of the world would just take a free ride. Right now the whole world uses the Internet, Intel/Amd PC's, at an incredibly low cost to them considering they didn't have to spend on the development. But we're past the point of talking prices and rates of return when it comes to energy. When you run out of oil, gas, coal and uranium, cost is a mute issue. $6 billion is petty cash compared to having to pay $10000 for a barrel of oil, when there is no oil left on the planet. Sure, right now nothing can compete with oil, because we're living off millions of years of work, we're sort of robbing the bank for 150 years, all you do is tap into the earth and free oil is gushing from it. But there is no more commercial oil left in the lower US states, soon Alaska will run out, and in about 5 years you will free the price pinch because of the expectations of supply. Price is about expectations and options, and if the fusion alternative is proven workable, that automatically quells fears and keeps oil and gas prices low, while we're using up the last bits. Renewable energy sources don't even come close to what we need - wind, solar, biomass, they have too low an energy density, but we might be able to live off of it, but not a 100 billion world population, probably closer to 5 billion or so. As far as uranium goes, there is enough to supply the world for about 20 years, on the planet, unless you find a way to extract the ppm levels from seawater, economically, and then there is 800 years worth. As far as fusion goes, we'll never run out of hydrogen - if all the water on Earth has been converted to helium and oxygen, we can tap into Jupiter next door, and by the time we eat up Jupiter, we can probably haul another planet from another galaxy to the solar system.
You know what bugs me? The world is squabbling over where to build the 6 billion dollar ITER (international thermonuclear reactor.) See http://fire.pppl.gov/ They've been negotiating over locations between France and Japan, neither party willing to yield, for over a year now. 6 billion dollars? Screw it, build two of them, one in Japan, one in France, but that's not the point. They don't want to build it, because if anyone can make cheap energy out of rainwater, then how do you control them? The powers that be actually like the setup where they can fight and take over any limited resources, then have people come beg them for a piece of the pie. It doesn't matter to them if billions of people die, as long as they are not one of them. But civil war and social chaos is not picky.
Ya know, that's how the brain works, lots of little neurons doing something simpler. You probably can't pull it off with a bunch of transistors, because they don't have enough legs, or dendrites - just one in/one out, and one for regulating flow.. but a few million cores, yeah, and we can cook up something that even nature couldn't cook up, because now you can make your neurons do sophisticated things, besides simple additions.
This isn't gonna work unless the rest of the world, and especially EU will do software patents. MS might be able kill Linux in the US, but it's no good if they can't kill it in the EU, and JP, and BR, and everywhere else. And right now there is a tremendous resistance against it in the EU, and different comittees are overturning each other's decisions. There is huge money in it, and there is a huge fight going on. Software patents go like this: the way of obtaining the number 3 by adding 2+1 is hereby patented. Therefore if you're in a school, you must do 3+0 or 4+(-1), unless you're willing to pay license for 2+1 additions, at $0.05/action. You're welcome to prove that it's prior art, if you got the lawyers, but beware, we got more lawyers and deeper pockets and we can drag it out for 10 years in court. We will patent the stupidest things, because the patent examiner is on our team, we regularly take him out to golf, plus we inundate him with so many stupid claims, that even if he tries to pick on the details and fight them one by one, something WILL get through, sooner or later, and what doesn't get through, we'll keep reapplying until it gets through, SOONER OR LATER. Real inventions don't happen in patents, they happen at universities, in published science articles, and they come out no matter what, out of ego, whether patented or not. Talk about stupid things patented like the 1-click shopping patent for amazon? Can you say "DUH?"
Check this out: http://telosnet.com/wind/recent.html and look at the California map.
That windfarm looks like a sizeable area of the total state, yet even at peak output it will only power a city of 300,000. That's not enough, and even if you fill the whole state with wind farms, you may barely break even, assuming demand stays constant.
According to current law, as far as trademark goes, that's perpetual as long as it's upkept, but as far as copyright goes, that should have expired in 70 years for works done before 1920. Therefore you should be able to copy and use the dewey decimal system, except you can't call it dewey cecimal, because that's a trademark, you have to call it some generic name. Patents and copyrights expire, as they should, trademarks don't. After 70 years (90 years for works after 1920) you can do what you want with a copyrighted work, copy it as much as you want, post it wherever you want to, or shove it wherever you want to.
I agree, it's in the interest of the business to get you hooked on their products at home. But as far as only going after the corporate dollar, that's not so - once you got really hooked, they will go after your home dollar too - see mandatory registration for Win XP, per computer at home.
Unfortunately there isn't enough uranium on the planet to support the population past a decade or two, based on current energy consumption of fossil fuels, that are about to run out in a few decades too. The only real energy reservoir around here that would last past a millenium is hydrogen and fusion, unless you're willing to cut the world population to 0.5 billion, and go back to riding horses. Solar energy, biomass energy, wind and all these other ones don't have enough density/efficiency to support us. For instance more energy is put into making a solar panel than it will ever produce in its entire lifetime. For reference, see this awesome article: http://fire.pppl.gov/science_adv_energy_103102.pdf
Awesome post, man. My scoop: The articles above consider 'survival' and the drive to it as top priority, which leads to those conclusions, self interest being top above all and everything. Revenge and other darwinistically explained social behaviors that exist, do so because the other behaviours simply died out, over time. But why is survival, or passing on of genes so important? Yes, we were born with these drives to operate selfishly, maximizing the individual "profit" even if it's irrational from a society's perspective, from the group perspective. But that doesn't mean we can't go against these drives - for instance, have these people study suicide - it's definitely not a good long term strategy for species. Basically, we're free beings, as the existentialists say it, in all of our actions we're doomed to freedom, everything we do comes down to a choice. They talk about the selfish gene, and biological beings simply being vehicles for the genes to create more copies, and all the complexity of life roots from these genes trying to make copies. Yes, after a certain time, only those tendencies will survive that aim to survive, but that doesn't mean at any point in time, a tendency like this is an absolute goal. If anyone chooses not to follow it, will simply die off, or his surivors will, sooner or later - so what? Who cares? Genes don't hold the answer to ethics, the way to live life, the bible doesn't hold the answer, and in this sense, we're left out in the open, to explore, without guidance. As far as stimulating that pleasure center, there are many ways to do it more intensly. We can love, if we want to. We can hate if we want to. We can admire nature, help others, we can sacrifice ourselves for something we believe in - treehuggers will sit in trees and starve themselves in order to protect trees. You may say this is just a compassion-malfunction, that humans developed towards each other, redirected to trees, but I don't think it's that simple. Most things happen random, without purpose, gene mutations happen without purpose. Time is the great judge, and makes random things into rules, purposes, drives, motives. But that doesn't mean these drives are absolute, something to take as a dogma. For instance, peacocks went down this dead end street of huge male tailfeathers, and they can't break from it. Nothing says they couldn't, if they really really wanted to - there could be a new epidemic, or fashion craze among peackocks, for whatever reason, where males with large feathers aren't preferred. Well ok, maybe not for peacock's, unless they get hit with a funny virus or something, but yes for humans - this illustrates how much freer we are simply because we can think more abstractly, instead of being just automatons. (Note: I don't think animals are complete automatons, and I detect feelings of love, and needs for, how ya say it, "self actualization", and other such human traits, even if very little.) Yes we retain the animal functions, the peacock-tailfeather nonsense things, we still get horny, hungry, sleepy, and all that, simply to exist and function, but once we step up on the hierarchy of needs,, these physiological things fall out of perspective, and the psychological needs become more the focus. As far as explaining the psychology through darwinism, through survival of the species, I don't completely go for it - I think nature is on an exploration, on a journey, with us, without clear direction. We can admire the world, admire mountains, cats, for no reason, and pretty much live freely. I'd like to think that our minds are not 100% slaves to our instincts, and we can rise above our instincts, and if we clearly see that a certain behavior, as a group, if made into a widely accepted status quo, collectively benefits us, then we can go for it, even if all the game theories and nash equilibriums predict it's a bad strategy. So what, what's so important about winning? Sometimes you just play a game, such as chess, for the sake of playing, you enjoy the be
Entanglement, mixed states, and parallel universes, they all smell like phlogiston and caloric. Phewww! Yeah they explain a lot of phenomena very "intuitively," just like caloric and phlogiston did. Go read up on those two, then read quantum mechanics and see if you get an eerie, deja-vu feeling. Problem is once your mind is poisoned with a wrong model, it's hard to rid yourself to a clean state. Unfortunately it's hard to describe what's up in QM without abstractly describing the phenomena in it using the language that may already be biased. And how about doing these stupid thought experiements that seldom lead anywhere, because you don't see the surpises that nature throws you. Thought experiments will always give you what you expect, what you think is right, what you think would happen, just like they did with phlogiston and caloric. But only roll your shirt sleeves up kind of measurement means anything, just like with phlogiston and caloric it did, that's where the unexpected shock is that may help you cleanse your head and show, that there, what I've been assuming to be true for ages, that's gotta be wrong.. Unfortunately QM measurements are not as simple as Joule's heat experiments were, with a bucket and a pulley, and most likely, whoever gets do conduct QM experiemtns has an already well poisoned mind because they are a University professor or some other bigshot. But I bet you 5 bux we'll figure all this mess out, just give it time., just like we figured everything out. Just give it time, and watch out for the crazy people, the radical voices. They'll be the Joule of this century. Nevertheless, as far as quantum computing is concered what the real cause for these quantum phenomena is is unimportant, the same rules would still apply, just like the randomness rules still apply to the "deterministic" kinetic gas theory.
And so we realize that we're less and less special in the universe - first we thought that the Earth was in the center, everything else revolving around us, and we roasted a few guys for saying we go round the Sun. How arrogant. Then we thought there was some vital force that makes things alive, must be the stuff souls are made of - because naturally we must live forever after we die - and it seemed that only living beings can synthethize organic chemical compounds. That is until Woehler synthesized urea (found in piss) from inorganic ammonium carbonate. Now it seems that there is no need to postulate the existence of a soul, a human being is just a chemical machine, and the whole chemical machine, however complex, could simply be synthesized from elements. And there is one last stronghold, ahh, we're still special cuz we're "intelligent" and animals are not. Dude, it's the same biology, same instincts, even same feelings of sorrow, hate, rage, happiness, in every mammal I see. Okay, as far as bugs are concerned, it's harder to identify the same way, or say when salmon get horny, they get so kinky they die, it's a little strange, but at least as far as mammals go, we're all pretty much the same, some just excel in tree climbing, some in thinking. Just because we think the best it doesn't mean others don't think at all. Probably all mammals build a model of reality in their heads, because that's simply how the brain works, and that's how you can predict. All I know is that I'm no special, just part of this whole thing called life on planet Earth.
I fully agree with you. Greed is a value I was taught in economics class, greed is the foundation that the free market economy stands on, but yes, the free market economy leaves ethics out of the picture, unless you think of the lawsuits and the billions of cash you have to pay down the road. If the risk of getting sued it small, or paying out the penalties is financially profitable, then ethics flies right out the door. We think the McDonalds making people fat lawsuit did not deserve the billion dollar penalty, but frankly that's the only way to make ethics count where only greed counts.
And I thought I was bad when it came to skepticism and pointing the finger at foul play, but now I don't feel that bad because all of you guys see it even better.
One more note: there is some life living on energy sources not ultimately derivable from fusion in the Sun, just as these bacteria show, or some bacteria and life living near the underwater vulcanic eruptions, at the bottom of the ocean. Those bacteria and the animals that feed on them derive their energy ultimately from fission, which is what heats the insides of this plante (Potassium 40.) There are some sulfur compounds there that go through a cycle of picking up and storing energy near the hot vulcanic eruptions, then diffuse away, and bacteria inhale these compounds, bring them to a lower energy state, and then the cycle repeats itself, sufur compounds go back to near the eruptions, pick up energy, and so on. And then the fish or moving plants or whatever you wanna call those organisms living down there, they feed on the bacteria. But the bulk of life on the planet has been supported by the Sun, and if we mined all the Uranium out, there'd be only enough for like 10 years to supply the world with energy, without oil.
The problem with nuclear waste is that it's not chemically processable. And all bacteria, or life, can do is process chemically. For atomic, nuclear degradation you simply have to wait it all out to decay on its own. So bacteria cannot eradicate the problem, however they could be efficient separators of nuclear waste, as follows. Problem with nuclear waste is that you get a zoo of atoms, some of which are highly radiating with a short half life, say 2 years, but they run out of juice in say 10 years, so after 10 years they'd be safe. Then there are some atoms that are radiating less intensely, but their halflife is 500 years, and they run out of juice in 2 millenia. If we could chemically separate each and every one and categorize them by halflife, that would get rid of half the problem as far as nuclear waste goes - you'd keep the fast decomposing compounds in a shielded lead (Pb) bin for 10 years, then it's "safe"(careful here) to dispose of as regular waste, and you would only have to bury the slow decomposing junk underground for 2 millenia, but that junk, though not safe for direct exposure to humans, it's safer to bury. Fission waste is an extremely problematic "goo" to deal with, and bacteria could only help, but not alleviate the problem. This brings me to the other topic you mentioned: fusion. Fusion on the other hand has no harmful waste, but if a fusion reactor blows up it causes an order of magnitude more damage than a uranium plant. The only hydrogen bomb test done so far had to be done in the Pacific Ocean because there is not enough room in the Nevada desert far enough from a populated area, because fusion is just so energy rich. The fusion bomb used a uranium bomb "fuse" to light the hydrogen reaction, and when it blew up, it took out 3 islands, one of them being "Eniwek Atoll." If a uranium plant blows up somewhere on the planet, it takes out some life, plus it renders that area unlivable for some time - but there are people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki these days. Life is tough, as the bacteria show, and human life is tough too. On the other hand, if a fusion reactor blows, it takes out a lot more life and land area, but the land is a lot more livable afterwards, because there isn't much toxic degradation waste. So far no uranium plants have resulted in a meltdown - we got close at 3 Mile Island and at Chernobyl, mostly because of people problems and stupidity. However fusion might be inherently safer because it's so difficult to keep the conditions under which it happens going, while in a uranium plant all you need is enough uranium together unshielded from each other, and if things go wrong, the reaction accelerates. Uranium has a critical mass, where radiation from one part causes radiation from another part of the same blob, and if enough is brought together - 19.5 kg or so for pure uranium, more for the less enriched kind - it self explodes, even in cold. Deuterium and hydrogen don't self-fusion-explode cold, or in storage, and the reaction byproducts of He3 and a little bit of Lithium, Beryllium and such, are all safe. There is of course some radioactivity generated in the steel and cement structures that would shield the reactors, but at least you don't generate piles and piles of junk, and the energy per lb of hydrogen is at least 10x that you get from lb of uranium. I'm confident fusion is the future, because without it we'll all go hungry. It's the risk vs. the benefits that counts, and if we had oil on the planet forever without this global warming side effect, then we wouldn't even have to think about uranium or fusion and the risks that come with it. But there is no more oil in Texas, and in 50 years there is no more oil on the planet, then we're back to coal if we're stupid and incapable to get fusion going by then. The Earth's population could hit 6 billion today because of oil and coal, and when we run out of both, the Lord help us to have something else to live on, or there will be a population collapse and hunger, and the worst wars we've ever seen because of the tremendous frustra
That is all true, except the answer to "if it costs more to insure some piece of tech as you would hope to benefit from it" is not necessarily "no". Science is full of risks, and you and me would not have the comfortable lives we have without science - think about living without electricity, without cars, having to be out in the fields and using your body as a pile of muscle just to produce enough food to sustain yourself, and forgetting about your mind, or sitting before a computer screen. Yes, the discoverers of radioactivity died from their own discovery, and that shouldn't have been so, had they been more careful. But science is full of risks no matter what, but so is life: stepping out into the street has the risk of getting struck by lightning, or even sitting at home sleeping in your bed has the risk of a lucky cosmic ray particle that got through the atmosphere and the walls penetrating your body causing an unlucky mutation in your DNA that gives you cancer and you die. It's the ratio of risks to benefits that counts, and the answer is not necessarily the same as for asbestos. That is not to say I don't have my doubts about nanotechnology, I think it's an important technology, but it's a buzzword these days, just like the dotcom and its "new economy where hard cash, revenue and profit doesn't matter, only growth and market share does" were buzzwords and blew up in our face. The internet didn't save the world, it didn't revolutionize the economy to the extent it was expected, yet the benefit of the internet is unquestionable in my mind, and I hope yours too.
I think the real reason we're going to Mars is to evaluate it for inhabitation. The moon doesn't have enough gravity to walk on, Venus is too hot, and Mars is cold but sounds quite livable - heating is much easier than cooling - as long as you keep everything inside a space station and hermetically sealed. Then you can make a big ecosystem greenhouse, add extra lightbulbs that shine by putting some solar panels out in the desert outside the "bubble". Also if the polar regions are made of CO2 + H2O, then even if you get a leak in your big bubble, you can replenish your atmosphere with oxygen from electrolyzing water - but we need to get helium or nitrogen from somewhere, because, though humans can breathe 100% oxygen, it's very dangerous because the trees would catch on fire spontaneously in it. Hydrogen cannot be used either, because it's also a bomb ready to blow - just think of the Zeppelin baloons. Perhaps we'll have fusion tamed soon, making helium out of hydrogen as a byproduct. Not much, but enough to patch a leak, and also gain enough energy to heat the martian globe with it. Helium is actually good for you, as deep sea divers use it instead of nitrogen. Just imagine all martian humans talking in that high pitched chipmunk voice from helium! (Becayse velocity of sound is greater in it, so for same length dimensions the velocity/length=frequency is higher.) So anyway, some of the real paranoid people can go live on Mars, and in case of a global nuclear war or sickness outbreak there'd be a chance that humans survive either on Mars, or on Earth. Remember the dinosaurs? They just diappeared. But actually, as of now, nuclear weapons are a way to peace, because nobody is willing to pull the nuclear trigger because on earth there are no winners, everybody dies. Hence the great pacifying effect especially if you don't believe in 7 virgins waiting for you in afterlife, and stick to this life as long as you can. But if you got Mars and Earth, now martian people won't care so much about earthly ones, and vice versa. Interplanetary war, dude. The good thing is that you got like 10 minutes for light to pass between Earth and Mars, and everything else travels slower through this huge distance, and you can peek through telescopes at an incoming bomb and shoot it out of the sky with them patriot rockets or laser cannons. You'll probably have weeks to prepare to make up your mind whether it's a passanger cargo coming at you or a nuke, unlike on earth, where if someone pulls a cruise missile trigger, it gets to the destination in an hour. That's why it's important to have space stations around both Mars and Earth, so the incoming cargo would pass through a checkpoint at a safe distance. I'm all for Mars exploration, and sooner or later it will happen. There is an overpopulation problem on earth anyway, so we could ship the extra to Mars. But you couldn't really do it by shipping the prisoners there as the Brits did to Australia, cuz the crazy ones might mess up the carefully controlled bubble. At least in Australia inmates didn't have much to mess up, comparatively speaking.
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Ostwald in early 1900 still doubted the existence of atoms, he thought matter is fully continuous. This was in spite of the tremedous successes of the kinetic theory of gases, chemical formulas and Avogadro's stoichiometric rules of combination, etc. but no hard proof. Then came Millikan's and Rutherford's experiments, together with the steam chamber particle traces. Today we can pretty much 'take a picture' of an atom via a scanning-tunneling microscope.
This is not to say Ostwald was wrong to doubt. Those who doubted the classical theories of caloric and phlogiston, though in minority first, they ended up being right in the end.
This is the way of science - you have to be willing to give up everything you thought to be true in face of new facts, and while things are uncertain, the proper way to be is to have a division of opinions.
At least we don't live in the time of Copernicus, Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, when doubting the majority opinion could get you roasted at the stake.
Yeah, the biggest benefit of a printed doc is that I can take it to the toilet and digest it while sitting on the throne for an hour. For whatever reason that's where I can absorb the most, and I sit there for an hour not because my biological functions require it, but because I get lost in reading and relaxing. It's hard to do the same thing with laptops, they are too clunky in your lap compared to 5 pages of printed paper, or even fat books. I haven't tried these tablet pc's, mostly cuz of the expense, but as soon as they are affortable and are as comfortable as 5 sheets of printed paper, I won't be needing to destroy trees anymore. If it had 1 GB of ram, and a USB2 port to which to attach my portable 40Gig drive, where all the ebooks reside, then I'm happy. Question is then, how much do ebooks cost. If they cost 2 bux a piece that's one thing, 10 bux a piece is quite another.
I have a hard enough time deciphering what I'm thinking, especially subconscious things - now they can maybe help me better understand.
I think this topic is the most urgent area that needs gov't regulation - before even the stem cell stuff, because stem cell tinkering can only create chemical machines like we are, and it's relatively hard to beat millions of years of self-tinkering. But once raw materials like steel, semiconductors, diamond, etc. are made available to an evolutionary process,who knows what kind of thing evolution can come up with: imagine a scary 2 ton metal bug that has an IQ of 1,600,000. Would such a creature like, and cherish us, humans, like we cherish and protect the amimals, plants and the environment?
How about patenting someone else's ideas?
"Scoring 100,000 boards per second" is the catch - there is no good way to score. How do you know what a move is worth without knowing its effect? A move that looks seemingly awful, and suicidal, might be a brilliant move whose effect develops 25 moves later, or 50 moves later. The only true way to "solve" is not to consider all game states, but to consider all possible paths, or sequence of states to a state where no more moves are made. (note: the board never gets completely full, game stops before, when no more territory can be made, and playing into enemy territory would be suicide inviting a pass from the opponent while the invasion stones still being dead, increasing the enemies points.) Now take those 847,288,609,443 possible states, and consider all the sequences through which you can travel because you can't just look at a position and "evaluate it" without knowing the "future" it holds (don't forget captures that give you back empty spots that can be played again.) Actually, knowing all the possible "reasonable" end states, then tree searching backwards on how you can arrive at them might be a better way than starting forward from an empty board. Basically knowing the "future" of a position, or all the "futures" that you get to from a given position, could be a better way to go about things.
That's bullshit. You do not need constancy of material/molecules to keep a memory - in a sense you can exchange a building brick by brick, one at a time, with new bricks, and maintain your building like new, for millenia. Of course nobody does this kind of maintenance to buildings, but that's how your body works. Your whole body constantly exchanges molecules, and that doesn't mean that your liver forgets how to function, or your heart forgets how to beat, or your synapses forget the stuff they are supposed to remember.
Actually, the US gov't has been pretty much the only spender in this area, and it's only fair to ask other countries like EU, Japan, China, Russia and India to pitch in. If fusion was fully developped and commercialized in the US, the rest of the world would just take a free ride. Right now the whole world uses the Internet, Intel/Amd PC's, at an incredibly low cost to them considering they didn't have to spend on the development. But we're past the point of talking prices and rates of return when it comes to energy. When you run out of oil, gas, coal and uranium, cost is a mute issue. $6 billion is petty cash compared to having to pay $10000 for a barrel of oil, when there is no oil left on the planet. Sure, right now nothing can compete with oil, because we're living off millions of years of work, we're sort of robbing the bank for 150 years, all you do is tap into the earth and free oil is gushing from it. But there is no more commercial oil left in the lower US states, soon Alaska will run out, and in about 5 years you will free the price pinch because of the expectations of supply. Price is about expectations and options, and if the fusion alternative is proven workable, that automatically quells fears and keeps oil and gas prices low, while we're using up the last bits. Renewable energy sources don't even come close to what we need - wind, solar, biomass, they have too low an energy density, but we might be able to live off of it, but not a 100 billion world population, probably closer to 5 billion or so. As far as uranium goes, there is enough to supply the world for about 20 years, on the planet, unless you find a way to extract the ppm levels from seawater, economically, and then there is 800 years worth. As far as fusion goes, we'll never run out of hydrogen - if all the water on Earth has been converted to helium and oxygen, we can tap into Jupiter next door, and by the time we eat up Jupiter, we can probably haul another planet from another galaxy to the solar system.
You know what bugs me? The world is squabbling over where to build the 6 billion dollar ITER (international thermonuclear reactor.) See http://fire.pppl.gov/ They've been negotiating over locations between France and Japan, neither party willing to yield, for over a year now. 6 billion dollars? Screw it, build two of them, one in Japan, one in France, but that's not the point. They don't want to build it, because if anyone can make cheap energy out of rainwater, then how do you control them? The powers that be actually like the setup where they can fight and take over any limited resources, then have people come beg them for a piece of the pie. It doesn't matter to them if billions of people die, as long as they are not one of them. But civil war and social chaos is not picky.
Ya know, that's how the brain works, lots of little neurons doing something simpler. You probably can't pull it off with a bunch of transistors, because they don't have enough legs, or dendrites - just one in/one out, and one for regulating flow.. but a few million cores, yeah, and we can cook up something that even nature couldn't cook up, because now you can make your neurons do sophisticated things, besides simple additions.
This isn't gonna work unless the rest of the world, and especially EU will do software patents. MS might be able kill Linux in the US, but it's no good if they can't kill it in the EU, and JP, and BR, and everywhere else. And right now there is a tremendous resistance against it in the EU, and different comittees are overturning each other's decisions. There is huge money in it, and there is a huge fight going on.
Software patents go like this: the way of obtaining the number 3 by adding 2+1 is hereby patented. Therefore if you're in a school, you must do 3+0 or 4+(-1), unless you're willing to pay license for 2+1 additions, at $0.05/action. You're welcome to prove that it's prior art, if you got the lawyers, but beware, we got more lawyers and deeper pockets and we can drag it out for 10 years in court. We will patent the stupidest things, because the patent examiner is on our team, we regularly take him out to golf, plus we inundate him with so many stupid claims, that even if he tries to pick on the details and fight them one by one, something WILL get through, sooner or later, and what doesn't get through, we'll keep reapplying until it gets through, SOONER OR LATER.
Real inventions don't happen in patents, they happen at universities, in published science articles, and they come out no matter what, out of ego, whether patented or not. Talk about stupid things patented like the 1-click shopping patent for amazon? Can you say "DUH?"
Check this out:
http://telosnet.com/wind/recent.html and look at the California map.
That windfarm looks like a sizeable area of the total state, yet even at peak output it will only power a city of 300,000. That's not enough, and even if you fill the whole state with wind farms, you may barely break even, assuming demand stays constant.
Yeah, it's easily prevented. Just use lots of scarecrows.
According to current law, as far as trademark goes, that's perpetual as long as it's upkept, but as far as copyright goes, that should have expired in 70 years for works done before 1920. Therefore you should be able to copy and use the dewey decimal system, except you can't call it dewey cecimal, because that's a trademark, you have to call it some generic name. Patents and copyrights expire, as they should, trademarks don't. After 70 years (90 years for works after 1920) you can do what you want with a copyrighted work, copy it as much as you want, post it wherever you want to, or shove it wherever you want to.
I agree, it's in the interest of the business to get you hooked on their products at home. But as far as only going after the corporate dollar, that's not so - once you got really hooked, they will go after your home dollar too - see mandatory registration for Win XP, per computer at home.
Unfortunately there isn't enough uranium on the planet to support the population past a decade or two, based on current energy consumption of fossil fuels, that are about to run out in a few decades too. The only real energy reservoir around here that would last past a millenium is hydrogen and fusion, unless you're willing to cut the world population to 0.5 billion, and go back to riding horses. Solar energy, biomass energy, wind and all these other ones don't have enough density/efficiency to support us. For instance more energy is put into making a solar panel than it will ever produce in its entire lifetime.f
For reference, see this awesome article: http://fire.pppl.gov/science_adv_energy_103102.pd
Awesome post, man.
My scoop:
The articles above consider 'survival' and the drive to it as top priority, which leads to those conclusions, self interest being top above all and everything. Revenge and other darwinistically explained social behaviors that exist, do so because the other behaviours simply died out, over time. But why is survival, or passing on of genes so important? Yes, we were born with these drives to operate selfishly, maximizing the individual "profit" even if it's irrational from a society's perspective, from the group perspective. But that doesn't mean we can't go against these drives - for instance, have these people study suicide - it's definitely not a good long term strategy for species. Basically, we're free beings, as the existentialists say it, in all of our actions we're doomed to freedom, everything we do comes down to a choice. They talk about the selfish gene, and biological beings simply being vehicles for the genes to create more copies, and all the complexity of life roots from these genes trying to make copies. Yes, after a certain time, only those tendencies will survive that aim to survive, but that doesn't mean at any point in time, a tendency like this is an absolute goal. If anyone chooses not to follow it, will simply die off, or his surivors will, sooner or later - so what? Who cares? Genes don't hold the answer to ethics, the way to live life, the bible doesn't hold the answer, and in this sense, we're left out in the open, to explore, without guidance. As far as stimulating that pleasure center, there are many ways to do it more intensly. We can love, if we want to. We can hate if we want to. We can admire nature, help others, we can sacrifice ourselves for something we believe in - treehuggers will sit in trees and starve themselves in order to protect trees. You may say this is just a compassion-malfunction, that humans developed towards each other, redirected to trees, but I don't think it's that simple. Most things happen random, without purpose, gene mutations happen without purpose. Time is the great judge, and makes random things into rules, purposes, drives, motives. But that doesn't mean these drives are absolute, something to take as a dogma. For instance, peacocks went down this dead end street of huge male tailfeathers, and they can't break from it. Nothing says they couldn't, if they really really wanted to - there could be a new epidemic, or fashion craze among peackocks, for whatever reason, where males with large feathers aren't preferred. Well ok, maybe not for peacock's, unless they get hit with a funny virus or something, but yes for humans - this illustrates how much freer we are simply because we can think more abstractly, instead of being just automatons. (Note: I don't think animals are complete automatons, and I detect feelings of love, and needs for, how ya say it, "self actualization", and other such human traits, even if very little.) Yes we retain the animal functions, the peacock-tailfeather nonsense things, we still get horny, hungry, sleepy, and all that, simply to exist and function, but once we step up on the hierarchy of needs,, these physiological things fall out of perspective, and the psychological needs become more the focus. As far as explaining the psychology through darwinism, through survival of the species, I don't completely go for it - I think nature is on an exploration, on a journey, with us, without clear direction. We can admire the world, admire mountains, cats, for no reason, and pretty much live freely. I'd like to think that our minds are not 100% slaves to our instincts, and we can rise above our instincts, and if we clearly see that a certain behavior, as a group, if made into a widely accepted status quo, collectively benefits us, then we can go for it, even if all the game theories and nash equilibriums predict it's a bad strategy. So what, what's so important about winning? Sometimes you just play a game, such as chess, for the sake of playing, you enjoy the be
Entanglement, mixed states, and parallel universes, they all smell like phlogiston and caloric. Phewww! Yeah they explain a lot of phenomena very "intuitively," just like caloric and phlogiston did. Go read up on those two, then read quantum mechanics and see if you get an eerie, deja-vu feeling. Problem is once your mind is poisoned with a wrong model, it's hard to rid yourself to a clean state. Unfortunately it's hard to describe what's up in QM without abstractly describing the phenomena in it using the language that may already be biased. And how about doing these stupid thought experiements that seldom lead anywhere, because you don't see the surpises that nature throws you. Thought experiments will always give you what you expect, what you think is right, what you think would happen, just like they did with phlogiston and caloric. But only roll your shirt sleeves up kind of measurement means anything, just like with phlogiston and caloric it did, that's where the unexpected shock is that may help you cleanse your head and show, that there, what I've been assuming to be true for ages, that's gotta be wrong.. Unfortunately QM measurements are not as simple as Joule's heat experiments were, with a bucket and a pulley, and most likely, whoever gets do conduct QM experiemtns has an already well poisoned mind because they are a University professor or some other bigshot. But I bet you 5 bux we'll figure all this mess out, just give it time., just like we figured everything out. Just give it time, and watch out for the crazy people, the radical voices. They'll be the Joule of this century. Nevertheless, as far as quantum computing is concered what the real cause for these quantum phenomena is is unimportant, the same rules would still apply, just like the randomness rules still apply to the "deterministic" kinetic gas theory.
And so we realize that we're less and less special in the universe - first we thought that the Earth was in the center, everything else revolving around us, and we roasted a few guys for saying we go round the Sun. How arrogant. Then we thought there was some vital force that makes things alive, must be the stuff souls are made of - because naturally we must live forever after we die - and it seemed that only living beings can synthethize organic chemical compounds. That is until Woehler synthesized urea (found in piss) from inorganic ammonium carbonate. Now it seems that there is no need to postulate the existence of a soul, a human being is just a chemical machine, and the whole chemical machine, however complex, could simply be synthesized from elements. And there is one last stronghold, ahh, we're still special cuz we're "intelligent" and animals are not. Dude, it's the same biology, same instincts, even same feelings of sorrow, hate, rage, happiness, in every mammal I see. Okay, as far as bugs are concerned, it's harder to identify the same way, or say when salmon get horny, they get so kinky they die, it's a little strange, but at least as far as mammals go, we're all pretty much the same, some just excel in tree climbing, some in thinking. Just because we think the best it doesn't mean others don't think at all. Probably all mammals build a model of reality in their heads, because that's simply how the brain works, and that's how you can predict. All I know is that I'm no special, just part of this whole thing called life on planet Earth.
I fully agree with you. Greed is a value I was taught in economics class, greed is the foundation that the free market economy stands on, but yes, the free market economy leaves ethics out of the picture, unless you think of the lawsuits and the billions of cash you have to pay down the road. If the risk of getting sued it small, or paying out the penalties is financially profitable, then ethics flies right out the door. We think the McDonalds making people fat lawsuit did not deserve the billion dollar penalty, but frankly that's the only way to make ethics count where only greed counts.
And I thought I was bad when it came to skepticism and pointing the finger at foul play, but now I don't feel that bad because all of you guys see it even better.
One more note: there is some life living on energy sources not ultimately derivable from fusion in the Sun, just as these bacteria show, or some bacteria and life living near the underwater vulcanic eruptions, at the bottom of the ocean. Those bacteria and the animals that feed on them derive their energy ultimately from fission, which is what heats the insides of this plante (Potassium 40.) There are some sulfur compounds there that go through a cycle of picking up and storing energy near the hot vulcanic eruptions, then diffuse away, and bacteria inhale these compounds, bring them to a lower energy state, and then the cycle repeats itself, sufur compounds go back to near the eruptions, pick up energy, and so on. And then the fish or moving plants or whatever you wanna call those organisms living down there, they feed on the bacteria. But the bulk of life on the planet has been supported by the Sun, and if we mined all the Uranium out, there'd be only enough for like 10 years to supply the world with energy, without oil.
The problem with nuclear waste is that it's not chemically processable. And all bacteria, or life, can do is process chemically. For atomic, nuclear degradation you simply have to wait it all out to decay on its own. So bacteria cannot eradicate the problem, however they could be efficient separators of nuclear waste, as follows. Problem with nuclear waste is that you get a zoo of atoms, some of which are highly radiating with a short half life, say 2 years, but they run out of juice in say 10 years, so after 10 years they'd be safe. Then there are some atoms that are radiating less intensely, but their halflife is 500 years, and they run out of juice in 2 millenia. If we could chemically separate each and every one and categorize them by halflife, that would get rid of half the problem as far as nuclear waste goes - you'd keep the fast decomposing compounds in a shielded lead (Pb) bin for 10 years, then it's "safe"(careful here) to dispose of as regular waste, and you would only have to bury the slow decomposing junk underground for 2 millenia, but that junk, though not safe for direct exposure to humans, it's safer to bury. Fission waste is an extremely problematic "goo" to deal with, and bacteria could only help, but not alleviate the problem. This brings me to the other topic you mentioned: fusion. Fusion on the other hand has no harmful waste, but if a fusion reactor blows up it causes an order of magnitude more damage than a uranium plant. The only hydrogen bomb test done so far had to be done in the Pacific Ocean because there is not enough room in the Nevada desert far enough from a populated area, because fusion is just so energy rich. The fusion bomb used a uranium bomb "fuse" to light the hydrogen reaction, and when it blew up, it took out 3 islands, one of them being "Eniwek Atoll." If a uranium plant blows up somewhere on the planet, it takes out some life, plus it renders that area unlivable for some time - but there are people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki these days. Life is tough, as the bacteria show, and human life is tough too. On the other hand, if a fusion reactor blows, it takes out a lot more life and land area, but the land is a lot more livable afterwards, because there isn't much toxic degradation waste. So far no uranium plants have resulted in a meltdown - we got close at 3 Mile Island and at Chernobyl, mostly because of people problems and stupidity. However fusion might be inherently safer because it's so difficult to keep the conditions under which it happens going, while in a uranium plant all you need is enough uranium together unshielded from each other, and if things go wrong, the reaction accelerates. Uranium has a critical mass, where radiation from one part causes radiation from another part of the same blob, and if enough is brought together - 19.5 kg or so for pure uranium, more for the less enriched kind - it self explodes, even in cold. Deuterium and hydrogen don't self-fusion-explode cold, or in storage, and the reaction byproducts of He3 and a little bit of Lithium, Beryllium and such, are all safe. There is of course some radioactivity generated in the steel and cement structures that would shield the reactors, but at least you don't generate piles and piles of junk, and the energy per lb of hydrogen is at least 10x that you get from lb of uranium. I'm confident fusion is the future, because without it we'll all go hungry. It's the risk vs. the benefits that counts, and if we had oil on the planet forever without this global warming side effect, then we wouldn't even have to think about uranium or fusion and the risks that come with it. But there is no more oil in Texas, and in 50 years there is no more oil on the planet, then we're back to coal if we're stupid and incapable to get fusion going by then. The Earth's population could hit 6 billion today because of oil and coal, and when we run out of both, the Lord help us to have something else to live on, or there will be a population collapse and hunger, and the worst wars we've ever seen because of the tremendous frustra
That is all true, except the answer to "if it costs more to insure some piece of tech as you would hope to benefit from it" is not necessarily "no". Science is full of risks, and you and me would not have the comfortable lives we have without science - think about living without electricity, without cars, having to be out in the fields and using your body as a pile of muscle just to produce enough food to sustain yourself, and forgetting about your mind, or sitting before a computer screen. Yes, the discoverers of radioactivity died from their own discovery, and that shouldn't have been so, had they been more careful. But science is full of risks no matter what, but so is life: stepping out into the street has the risk of getting struck by lightning, or even sitting at home sleeping in your bed has the risk of a lucky cosmic ray particle that got through the atmosphere and the walls penetrating your body causing an unlucky mutation in your DNA that gives you cancer and you die. It's the ratio of risks to benefits that counts, and the answer is not necessarily the same as for asbestos. That is not to say I don't have my doubts about nanotechnology, I think it's an important technology, but it's a buzzword these days, just like the dotcom and its "new economy where hard cash, revenue and profit doesn't matter, only growth and market share does" were buzzwords and blew up in our face. The internet didn't save the world, it didn't revolutionize the economy to the extent it was expected, yet the benefit of the internet is unquestionable in my mind, and I hope yours too.
I think the real reason we're going to Mars is to evaluate it for inhabitation. The moon doesn't have enough gravity to walk on, Venus is too hot, and Mars is cold but sounds quite livable - heating is much easier than cooling - as long as you keep everything inside a space station and hermetically sealed. Then you can make a big ecosystem greenhouse, add extra lightbulbs that shine by putting some solar panels out in the desert outside the "bubble". Also if the polar regions are made of CO2 + H2O, then even if you get a leak in your big bubble, you can replenish your atmosphere with oxygen from electrolyzing water - but we need to get helium or nitrogen from somewhere, because, though humans can breathe 100% oxygen, it's very dangerous because the trees would catch on fire spontaneously in it. Hydrogen cannot be used either, because it's also a bomb ready to blow - just think of the Zeppelin baloons. Perhaps we'll have fusion tamed soon, making helium out of hydrogen as a byproduct. Not much, but enough to patch a leak, and also gain enough energy to heat the martian globe with it. Helium is actually good for you, as deep sea divers use it instead of nitrogen. Just imagine all martian humans talking in that high pitched chipmunk voice from helium! (Becayse velocity of sound is greater in it, so for same length dimensions the velocity/length=frequency is higher.)
So anyway, some of the real paranoid people can go live on Mars, and in case of a global nuclear war or sickness outbreak there'd be a chance that humans survive either on Mars, or on Earth. Remember the dinosaurs? They just diappeared.
But actually, as of now, nuclear weapons are a way to peace, because nobody is willing to pull the nuclear trigger because on earth there are no winners, everybody dies. Hence the great pacifying effect especially if you don't believe in 7 virgins waiting for you in afterlife, and stick to this life as long as you can. But if you got Mars and Earth, now martian people won't care so much about earthly ones, and vice versa. Interplanetary war, dude. The good thing is that you got like 10 minutes for light to pass between Earth and Mars, and everything else travels slower through this huge distance, and you can peek through telescopes at an incoming bomb and shoot it out of the sky with them patriot rockets or laser cannons. You'll probably have weeks to prepare to make up your mind whether it's a passanger cargo coming at you or a nuke, unlike on earth, where if someone pulls a cruise missile trigger, it gets to the destination in an hour. That's why it's important to have space stations around both Mars and Earth, so the incoming cargo would pass through a checkpoint at a safe distance.
I'm all for Mars exploration, and sooner or later it will happen. There is an overpopulation problem on earth anyway, so we could ship the extra to Mars. But you couldn't really do it by shipping the prisoners there as the Brits did to Australia, cuz the crazy ones might mess up the carefully controlled bubble. At least in Australia inmates didn't have much to mess up, comparatively speaking.