She comes on to Tony, but tension is also resolved when Tony reluctantly informs Annalisa that to have a sexual relationship with a business partner would be bad for business and states he does not want to "shit where he eats".
120 fps with FSAA / rock solid stability / effective driver support: pick any 2-arctan(epsilon)
Blob support: Basically a coin flip. You might get a "works for me" you can live with, or you might not. When things go wrong, they usually stay wrong. Harmful to the open source ecosystem in the long run.
Open driver support: Good to great for carefully selected older product lines a generation behind the performance curve; sometimes excellent if you can shed the most extreme features; Chinese water torture otherwise.
I'll never build a game machine again that I'm also intending to use for real work. Tony knows.
Don't we all love to assign misspent money to our favourite cause? And they worked so damn hard for their misbegotten windfall. Suck it up DoD. We going to space. Cry babies.
> (I don't believe in private armies) Believe in them or not, they are allowed under the second amendment.
A mall cop by any other name is still a mall cop, and the credibility gap endures.
It strikes me that space exploration is not the highest priority when your home planet has a burgeoning fever unless you're the sort of person pathologically averse to hanging around and nursing the sick.
Another decade or five and we'll know for certain whether the flowers are blooming in Houston. Space will still be there, waiting for us, I suspect.
I have no commercial relationship with Facebook. I've never visited their site. If they are maintaining information about me, it's entirely without my consent. I'd like to click a box to disappear myself from their incidental radar screen (such as if people I know unwisely divulge my image or personal details), but it appears that I'd first have to agree to the Facebook TOS to do so.
Let's have a law that enables divorce without TOS.
Meanwhile, the countries who were targeted by anti-proliferation measures have all either developed the bomb anyway or proven that they can do so if they choose.
Having lost that battle, let's lower the bar of admission, and recruit ever smaller and more volatile states to join the nuclear club.
Seriously, did you snag that four digit UID on eBay?
I actually suspect that thorium proliferation is manageable enough given the potential benefits, but I won't be pressing forward at the level of analysis you seem to find adequate.
1000 people brave enough to brag about putting their names on a non-binding list. News at 11.
How many would even make it up a naked gantry ladder to the Apollo crew cabin? Mount the podium with the list on top of the naked ladder. One side of the ladder for going up, the other side for going down. No cage. No occupancy limit. The total gantry height was a bit over 100m, so that's about the right height. Make it sturdy and relatively stiff to crossing breezes.
At the time of the release of WinNT (mid 1990s), Linux was not an alternative.
It was a superb alternative to getting any work done. I'm sure that many of the people who chose to fight those battles saw some upside from their foolish devotion further down the road. But it was a long road. WinNT wasn't even much of a lock-in all by itself. But so many corporations just couldn't wait (this was the dotcom boom, remember?) to encapsulate mission critical business-logic in VB for IE4. Fifteen years later, their successors are wailing "will this rogering ever stop?" Convenience, self-determination, market relevance: pick any two. Lesson learned.
What Microsoft is presently doing is established practice in the enterprise life cycle. When lock-in is your cash cow, and competitors are making your technology irrelevant, take all you can get. Few corporations with a cash cow as large as Microsoft's are found at the innovative fore-front until the cash cow is slaughtered.
If they must kill the beast to re-invent themselves, it makes good sense to first fill their pockets. The only real question here is whether they should pay this windfall out to their existing shareholders, or reinvest these funds to stick around at the top of the heap.
Disencumbered of the cash cow, does Microsoft still have what it takes to remain technologically relevant?
Man's pollution on a cosmic scale is essentially zero, the universe is already pre-polluted
The average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. The vast majority of the visible universe is pristine vacuum. Plus, nearly every galaxy holds at its core a matter-disposal rip-heap of eternal safe-keeping.
Bear in mind that we now know there's a very small leak into the surrounding environment at around 60 nano-kelvin (*). Before we route too much of our crap to the galactic disposal unit, perhaps we should learn from our mistakes on the slimy blue marble and perform a rigorous environmental impact study on anthropogenic black-hole warming, just in case bumping it up to 61 nano-kelvins triggers a dark matter landslide. (By the "it's all about us, every time, and in every way" anthropic principle, every bulk coefficient of our local environment is fluttering around a precarious and exquisitely tuned value optimal to survival as we presently know it.)
(*) For simplicity I use the Hawking temperature for a solar mass black hole. From the equation at Wikipedia, this appears to scale inversely with mass. Possibly the right temperature involves division by another factor of 4 million to account for the correct mass of the galactic darth Timbit (local idiom for doughnut hole). I'm getting 15 femto-kelvins without a napkin. Let's not be brash and mess with this number anthropogenically without really thinking things through, to solve some minor problem with space-based pollution in some gossamer filigree of the pristine vacuum.
One would think it might be easier just to toss our junk in the direction of the Local Void. This, however, amounts to carting your garbage uphill.
Wikipedia: The Milky Way's velocity away from the Local Void is 270 kilometres per second (600,000 mph). Voids are hugely repulsive.
Contribution is not a complex thing. It just requires the will to pay what was promised.
You've contradicted yourself in two short sentences. Contradiction often sneaks in right behind the word "just".
But I agree with you in the long run. Once we eliminate death, insolvency, greed, stupidity, usury, and politics there will be nothing to it. This is only half as hard as it sounds. There's a fair amount of overlap among those items.
Hells bells, they removed the progress bar on mini player. I don't use my partner's iMac all that much, but I do use it to manage voice diction and to sync podcasts onto our iPod. Some of my dictation files are long. Without a progress bar, it's really difficult to note and return to critical thoughts. But I only used iTunes as a stopgap measure, so I can sit back and enjoy the suffering of others more deeply invested.
What a triumph of populist design over broad-minded utility. There's a fair amount of frustration, annoyance, and anger out there over Apple's random feature regression of the moment. I used to tell people to install Ubuntu because, you know, we had continuity all figured out. Since the Unity debacle, I keep my mouth shut.
Apple also removed the multiple window feature. So much for workflow equity. How do people live in a world with no feature continuity? I would have never guessed at the outset of PC era thirty years ago that things could go this direction, and people would stand for it. It's pretty much my personal definition of low self-esteem to see someone suffer a major setback in their workflow equity and go "oh, well". Maybe I should have completed Learned Helplessness 101 after all. I'm starting to think it really is a life skill _and_ you save a fortune in Tums.
The foolishness we all felt back in the day that upgrades were built on top of what you had already delivered. Turns out we could have just randomly discarded any feature that bored us or seemed inconvenient to maintain, and without any explanation to the customer, either. Shit, did we ever do things the hard way.
It's only evolution if there's a reasonably clear link between your genetic makeup and your ability/probability to reproduce.
Two errors here. First, you mean fitness, not evolution. Second, only the charismatic megafauna of our genetic endowment has a "reasonably clear" one paragraph synopsis. Try to figure out whether a small affinity change of some obscure serotonin receptor involved in bone growth regulation is deleterious or not. I dare you.
The rest of your post seems to be spinning around the observation that the genetic fitness function is shaped by cultural memes, which are themselves co-evolving. It's almost as if natural selection has no master plan.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you have a cluster of ten genes where having eight of the A alleles makes you a genius, nine make you more than a little batshit, and the full set of ten make you A Scanner Darkly on a bad trip. On the other side, having five or fewer amounts to destination short bus. Clearly the A alleles of these genes code for smartness, and we all want that.
But then, if two eights pair up and start a family, you end up with The Royal Tenenbaums.
What happens within the population to the proportion of A alleles of this gene cluster? For the vast majority of people, an extra dose of the A allele would boost their intellectual powers and presumably their reproductive fitness. There would broadly be an increase. But then you lose enough to Van Gogh attrition that it cancels out the bulk upward drift.
Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.
I listened to a podcast recently where a professor said that his students are routinely shocked to discover that simple voting systems contain cycling majorities.
If Condorcet's paradox disorients, what's really going on in evolution is Kowloon Walled City (which had a population density of 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer before it was torn down, roughly what you'd get if everyone in Texas moved to Manhattan, as they framed it at 99% Invisible).
We really ought to step back most of the time and view evolution as a kind of ideal gas law, as something best understood at the sweep of statistical mechanics. Yes, every atom is doing something explicable if you prefer to drill down. So was every inhabitant of Kowloon Walled City, more or less.
A cubic lightyear of lead has roughly 4.3e21 solar masses. We're talking fourth floor penthouse of the H-R diagram. Finding out what happens when this block of material is released from the uniform density tractor beam is probably harder than achieving an accurate regatta start on a windy day the day after an epic pub crawl. You'd need an assload of litz wire to release the uniform density tractor beam instantaneously over such a large volume.
Sure it is. In fact, it's almost always wrong. But it's wrong in a useful way, and it's steadily getting less wrong.
You're having so much fun being glib because you can no longer remember that you're missing the point.
There's something deeply wrong about using "wrong" as a synonym for "could be improved". Why don't we just standardize the terminology and refer to an AAA- credit rating as "defective"?
The people who try to make hay out of science being "wrong" barely believe in the circumstances where the wrongness of science would come into play: the first minute after the big bang, the billion year evolution of black holes. It's almost like your optician flashing up the fine print then observing when you stumble over a few words that your literacy is suspect.
So true. We're a tiny bit sketchy on the behaviour of matter heated to 200 billion degrees. Say it now, I know we can: science is wrong. Not wrong like your aunt, but wrong in the most rigorous conceivable sense.
We don't have a problem with wrong. We sometimes have a problem with glamorous batshit.
Is the anthropic principle even science? I've heard mention recently from two distinct source a "change of substrate" novel entitled Dragon's Egg. My conjecture is that any interesting life form will view its universe as "finely tuned". Seth Lloyd has a definition of complexity oriented toward where the action occurs: complexity that results from short programs, but only after they run for a long time. You end up with a frothy foam of tractability and intractability. I conjecture that's where life becomes possible, in any substrate. And it will always appear finely tuned. But when we finally meet the cheela, we'll discover no common ground whatsoever in how we construe the fine tuning. The cheela will be totally obsessed with some filigree of gluon plasma structure and our wonderful periodic table and its ionic oddball partnerships will appear to them as some totally arbitrary patten expressed by Rule 30.
We're pretty sure that universes that don't exist are lifeless. Does this observation belong at the far end of the spectrum of very weak anthropic principles? What a crock of flamboyant batshit.
The coolest thing I've come across recently that had somehow not come to my attention is the Helium flash.
This runaway reaction quickly climbs to about 100 billion times the star's normal energy production (for a few seconds) until the temperature increases to the point that thermal pressure again becomes dominant, eliminating the degeneracy.
OK, this is normal.
The helium flash is not directly observable on the surface by electromagnetic radiation. The flash occurs in the core deep inside the star, and the net effect will be that all released energy is absorbed by the entire core, leaving the degenerate state to become nondegenerate.
Wait a minute, here, I'm accustomed to factors of 100 billion showing up on the instruments. The neutrino flux is spectacular enough to act as a cooling mechanism. They're bombarding us in numbers we can barely conceive, yet our science is so weak we can barely detect them. Well, they do slip out of maximum security solar confinement like a hot knife through butter.
The mean free path of a photon in intergalactic space is about 10^23 km (10 billion years), and these are positively garrulous by comparison. The mean free path of a neutrino is one light year of solid lead, whereas the average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. To a neutrino, the entire universe is about as substantial as Bruce Willis in a movie where every review begins with a spoiler alert.
You aunt is wrong about some object in front of her very eyes, yet we apply no statute of limitations on wrongness 50 magnitudes out.
When Ian McKellen couldn't make a sufficiently robust "ugh" for his beat-down by Sauramon, they carted him off to a screening room, slapped on some headphones, set up some microphones, and starting playing the Phantom Menace.
I think the original Star Wars was a virtual particle emitted from the vacuum state followed by a long foreclosure by the Bank of Heisenberg. The whole experience integrates to zero.
The reason is simple, it's because Lucas is getting to viewers at a much younger age, with a more widely distributed product.
So the calibration pinnacle on your scale of cultural importance is Dr Seuss, Bugs Bunny, Walt Disney, and Norman Rockwell? I'm pretty sure that Kubrick and Kurosawa were important influences on both Spielberg and Lucas. By your metric, it's surprising we remember Newton at all.
I've grown to hate just about any idea with an immediacy transform embedded inside, because its so much a tool of the newly wealthy to forget that they ever stood on the shoulders of giants whatsoever. In the immortal words of Finding Nemo: "Mine." Seagull logic 101.
Lucas chose a curious path to illustrate the foreboding nature dark side of the force: by making the next five movies. When we were slow to catch on, he added Jar Jar. No wonder artists drink.
We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.
I don't mind so much about the decline in the participation standards, if there has in fact been a decline (not counting the glory days when the lamers had five digit ids).
What I tremendously resents is the decline in the wording of the story summaries, which become ever more useless and trollish by the minute. It's not the people here that will drive me away. It's the decline in story summaries and the attitude of the editorial oversight which permits this to happen.
If we had a moderation system to assign "vague-assed trollery" to the story submissions, I would instantly tweak my filter such that I never see these stories again (and the 300 comments out of 500 adjusting the crookered picture frame).
The only reason I haven't jumped ship already is that most of the alternatives have been violently Twitterized. I'm determined to think in full paragraphs. I just can't wait for the headline "Generation Z rediscovers the paragraph." Maybe if I'm lucky--and live long enough to see it--the paragraph will become retro cool.
I've thought hard about this for a long time, and I don't agree. Biological systems can't be so fragile as all that, or we wouldn't be here. The central feature of positions like yours is that you think every change or set-back is additive (if not multiplicative). I don't think this turns out to be true in complex systems. Fermi estimation argues against it. It could potentially be pretty rough. Rough enough that you can even remember the time when life without coffee seemed like a big deal. I don't think one can know how rough it might get without living through it.
On the other side, we have no precedent to believe we're capable of pulling off the political solutions required to forestall global warming. Many people seem to think that if we run around shouting about how we have a climate change gun pointed at our heads, that we'll suddenly become able to engage in global consensus like never before. This seems to come from a similar place as the belief that capital punishment deters crime. The majority of criminals aren't rational when committing the most serious crimes. They become more rational when facing arrest. What's the rational action when arrest leads fairly directly to the electric chair?
Between our political capacity to forestall global warming and our ability to cope with the mess that results, I put longer odds on the former. Maybe in the next iteration of collective planet destruction we can build on our (failed) effort this time around to take the wise action. Perhaps 300 years from now global collective action to avert nasty outcomes will seem like child's play. I don't think we're that species yet.
In its last quarter, Apple made about 50 billions and achieved an increase of around 25% of its earnings. Yet the value of its stock dropped because analysts expected more. What kind of message do you think this situation sends to executive?
If the executive is math literate, it sends the message that the street's valuation lead the harvesting of value.
For example, on an apple farm, one might survey the number of apples on the trees in August and predict an all-time bumper crop, but then the weather does something funky in early September and the harvest is only the best harvest of the past decade.
Wow, isn't that amazing. Smart people anticipate future fairly accurately, then make corrections on the day.
I hope you've got youth, because you're light on discernment. Or maybe you're wealthy enough to retire whatever age you might be because you shrewdly jumped on the Apple IPO six months before they delivered the first iPhone. Isn't it amazing what Apple has managed to accomplish in six short years with no previous history or market reputation.
Maybe the common thread behind the similarity is the method of reducing the problem so as to run efficiently on your favorite big iron.
I don't trust their portrayal of what they've discovered as far as I can spit. The details given are far below the threshold of critical thinking. Properly, a claim like this needs a triple helping of sharp knives.
It should be illegal, because the harm it does to society beats all terrorists there can ever be.
You added that to get your post through the AC filter, didn't you? Your starkly worded post was veering into the territory of a sane and deeply held perspective on life. But it turns out you were man enough to rebalance the force, with your cross-category rampage. FYI you're deep into Chapter 8, "How Judgments Happen" from Thinking Fast and Slow.
An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft.
Intensity matching is used to answer profound questions such as this:
Julie read fluently when she was four years old.
How tall is a man who is as tall as Julie was precocious?
Kahneman adds "Not very hard, was it?" and "We will also see why this mode of prediction matching is statistically wrong..."
bad_math_education worse than UniversalQuantifier(toxic_misapplication_of_force)
There's a pattern here your math seems not to detect.
Let me summarize my previous post with a question.
Has there ever been a society where the lazy melted away where women didn't die in childbirth--no matter how young or how beautiful--over random weaknesses of constitution?
When your wife is dying in childbirth, that must be about the most helpless feeling a man can experience. I suspect it's bad enough to make a man re-invent civilization all over again, when we've only barely rid ourselves of the beast.
I have had no more success trying to convince them that conducting an economy based on precious metals after the collapse of American society will be difficult than I have had convincing them that the collapse of society -- for which they have also been stockpiling assault rifles, BTW -- is unlikely to occur in their lifetimes.
These behaviours have very little to do with rational belief systems. These are wish fulfillment attitudes. Some people get a boner over survival of the fittest. Or they feel crowded by the success of the human race. Part of this is valuing relative advantage over absolute advantage. But hey, won't that assault rifle look tremendously less cool when their wife dies in childbirth.
I don't have any great bias against the delusions of others... until it interferes with making a positive contribution to avoiding the worst. But why worry? Of course, with the big assault rifle you can kidnap a doctor. "What do you mean, you've never delivered a baby? You're a doctor, aren't you?" Many people with assault rifles have shit for brains. This contributes to making a single-use tool so appealing.
I suspect this movie doesn't stray too far from actual events. To Live:
Since all doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being "reactionary academic authorities", the students are left as the only ones in charge, despite being so young.
They doubt that this is a good state of affairs, so they find a real doctor (starving), feed him some steamed buns so that he can function. Problem solved. Almost.
However, Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious.
I was in the mood to buy a DRM-free ebook or two at the discount price, but after five minutes at O'Reilly I gave up the hunt. There's no category in the subject index for big data / machine learning. And neither did I quickly identify a filter on level of presentation. No, I don't need a quick review of the data structures in R.
I found a free download entitled "Big Data Now: 2012 Edition". There are some tidbits of interest in here, but over all it's a little too button-down for my tastes. It mentioned Apache Mahoot for machine learning. Hey, I'd buy an intermediate to advanced book on that at half price--if such a book existed.
One of the problems with buying on price opportunity is that you frame the problem of "given this pile, what's best for me" instead of "given what's best for me, is there anything of note in this pile at all". I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and presently basking in the availability glow of just how stupid humans are, most of the time. We're idiots for framing and anchoring effects.
I mean, I nearly rolled off the bed in hysterics last night when I read that most people find it easy enough to list six occasions where they have behaved assertively (and this activity causes them to report having an assertive personality) but asking people to list twelve occasions where they've been assertive is hard work and causes people to doubt that they are really so assertive after all. Twelve considered difficult? I don't need no book on big data, I can type it in by hand in JSON notation wherever the need arises. I'm assertive pretty much whenever I sit at a keyboard or open my mouth or pull up to a four-way traffic control. You know, in a group setting you don't need to control the outcome. One can accomplish a lot by quietly (yet assertively) trimming away the worst stupidities. Well-timed application of the pruning shears to group psychology seems assertive enough to me.
I have a recommendation shelf at Goodreads for the narrow category "Computer Science". This presently includes many O'Reilly book: Regular Expressions, Haskell, JavaScript, TCP/IP. Someday, if Goodreads exploits big data in some useful way, this might actually feature the books from O'Reilly where there was any chance in hell of me making a purchase.
First suggestion: refine the "not interested" button to include "been there, done that". Regular expressions are way cool for the first decade of one's programming career.
Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.
This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.
Knock, knock. Who's there? Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass. Oh, yeah? You and who else?
It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.
If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.
The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.
Knock, knock. Who's there. F18. Oh, yeah? Yeah. OK, let's talk business. Name your price.
But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.
With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.
Slashdot Mirror
Commendatori
120 fps with FSAA / rock solid stability / effective driver support: pick any 2-arctan(epsilon)
Blob support: Basically a coin flip. You might get a "works for me" you can live with, or you might not. When things go wrong, they usually stay wrong. Harmful to the open source ecosystem in the long run.
Open driver support: Good to great for carefully selected older product lines a generation behind the performance curve; sometimes excellent if you can shed the most extreme features; Chinese water torture otherwise.
I'll never build a game machine again that I'm also intending to use for real work. Tony knows.
Don't we all love to assign misspent money to our favourite cause? And they worked so damn hard for their misbegotten windfall. Suck it up DoD. We going to space. Cry babies.
A mall cop by any other name is still a mall cop, and the credibility gap endures.
It strikes me that space exploration is not the highest priority when your home planet has a burgeoning fever unless you're the sort of person pathologically averse to hanging around and nursing the sick.
Another decade or five and we'll know for certain whether the flowers are blooming in Houston. Space will still be there, waiting for us, I suspect.
I have no commercial relationship with Facebook. I've never visited their site. If they are maintaining information about me, it's entirely without my consent. I'd like to click a box to disappear myself from their incidental radar screen (such as if people I know unwisely divulge my image or personal details), but it appears that I'd first have to agree to the Facebook TOS to do so.
Let's have a law that enables divorce without TOS.
Having lost that battle, let's lower the bar of admission, and recruit ever smaller and more volatile states to join the nuclear club.
Seriously, did you snag that four digit UID on eBay?
I actually suspect that thorium proliferation is manageable enough given the potential benefits, but I won't be pressing forward at the level of analysis you seem to find adequate.
1000 people brave enough to brag about putting their names on a non-binding list. News at 11.
How many would even make it up a naked gantry ladder to the Apollo crew cabin? Mount the podium with the list on top of the naked ladder. One side of the ladder for going up, the other side for going down. No cage. No occupancy limit. The total gantry height was a bit over 100m, so that's about the right height. Make it sturdy and relatively stiff to crossing breezes.
The naked sign-up ladder would be on roughly the height scale of Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial.
It was a superb alternative to getting any work done. I'm sure that many of the people who chose to fight those battles saw some upside from their foolish devotion further down the road. But it was a long road. WinNT wasn't even much of a lock-in all by itself. But so many corporations just couldn't wait (this was the dotcom boom, remember?) to encapsulate mission critical business-logic in VB for IE4. Fifteen years later, their successors are wailing "will this rogering ever stop?" Convenience, self-determination, market relevance: pick any two. Lesson learned.
What Microsoft is presently doing is established practice in the enterprise life cycle. When lock-in is your cash cow, and competitors are making your technology irrelevant, take all you can get. Few corporations with a cash cow as large as Microsoft's are found at the innovative fore-front until the cash cow is slaughtered.
If they must kill the beast to re-invent themselves, it makes good sense to first fill their pockets. The only real question here is whether they should pay this windfall out to their existing shareholders, or reinvest these funds to stick around at the top of the heap.
Disencumbered of the cash cow, does Microsoft still have what it takes to remain technologically relevant?
The average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. The vast majority of the visible universe is pristine vacuum. Plus, nearly every galaxy holds at its core a matter-disposal rip-heap of eternal safe-keeping.
Bear in mind that we now know there's a very small leak into the surrounding environment at around 60 nano-kelvin (*). Before we route too much of our crap to the galactic disposal unit, perhaps we should learn from our mistakes on the slimy blue marble and perform a rigorous environmental impact study on anthropogenic black-hole warming, just in case bumping it up to 61 nano-kelvins triggers a dark matter landslide. (By the "it's all about us, every time, and in every way" anthropic principle, every bulk coefficient of our local environment is fluttering around a precarious and exquisitely tuned value optimal to survival as we presently know it.)
(*) For simplicity I use the Hawking temperature for a solar mass black hole. From the equation at Wikipedia, this appears to scale inversely with mass. Possibly the right temperature involves division by another factor of 4 million to account for the correct mass of the galactic darth Timbit (local idiom for doughnut hole). I'm getting 15 femto-kelvins without a napkin. Let's not be brash and mess with this number anthropogenically without really thinking things through, to solve some minor problem with space-based pollution in some gossamer filigree of the pristine vacuum.
One would think it might be easier just to toss our junk in the direction of the Local Void. This, however, amounts to carting your garbage uphill.
Wikipedia: The Milky Way's velocity away from the Local Void is 270 kilometres per second (600,000 mph). Voids are hugely repulsive.
You've contradicted yourself in two short sentences. Contradiction often sneaks in right behind the word "just".
But I agree with you in the long run. Once we eliminate death, insolvency, greed, stupidity, usury, and politics there will be nothing to it. This is only half as hard as it sounds. There's a fair amount of overlap among those items.
Hells bells, they removed the progress bar on mini player. I don't use my partner's iMac all that much, but I do use it to manage voice diction and to sync podcasts onto our iPod. Some of my dictation files are long. Without a progress bar, it's really difficult to note and return to critical thoughts. But I only used iTunes as a stopgap measure, so I can sit back and enjoy the suffering of others more deeply invested.
What a triumph of populist design over broad-minded utility. There's a fair amount of frustration, annoyance, and anger out there over Apple's random feature regression of the moment. I used to tell people to install Ubuntu because, you know, we had continuity all figured out. Since the Unity debacle, I keep my mouth shut.
Apple also removed the multiple window feature. So much for workflow equity. How do people live in a world with no feature continuity? I would have never guessed at the outset of PC era thirty years ago that things could go this direction, and people would stand for it. It's pretty much my personal definition of low self-esteem to see someone suffer a major setback in their workflow equity and go "oh, well". Maybe I should have completed Learned Helplessness 101 after all. I'm starting to think it really is a life skill _and_ you save a fortune in Tums.
The foolishness we all felt back in the day that upgrades were built on top of what you had already delivered. Turns out we could have just randomly discarded any feature that bored us or seemed inconvenient to maintain, and without any explanation to the customer, either. Shit, did we ever do things the hard way.
Two errors here. First, you mean fitness, not evolution. Second, only the charismatic megafauna of our genetic endowment has a "reasonably clear" one paragraph synopsis. Try to figure out whether a small affinity change of some obscure serotonin receptor involved in bone growth regulation is deleterious or not. I dare you.
The rest of your post seems to be spinning around the observation that the genetic fitness function is shaped by cultural memes, which are themselves co-evolving. It's almost as if natural selection has no master plan.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you have a cluster of ten genes where having eight of the A alleles makes you a genius, nine make you more than a little batshit, and the full set of ten make you A Scanner Darkly on a bad trip. On the other side, having five or fewer amounts to destination short bus. Clearly the A alleles of these genes code for smartness, and we all want that.
But then, if two eights pair up and start a family, you end up with The Royal Tenenbaums.
What happens within the population to the proportion of A alleles of this gene cluster? For the vast majority of people, an extra dose of the A allele would boost their intellectual powers and presumably their reproductive fitness. There would broadly be an increase. But then you lose enough to Van Gogh attrition that it cancels out the bulk upward drift.
Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.
I listened to a podcast recently where a professor said that his students are routinely shocked to discover that simple voting systems contain cycling majorities.
If Condorcet's paradox disorients, what's really going on in evolution is Kowloon Walled City (which had a population density of 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer before it was torn down, roughly what you'd get if everyone in Texas moved to Manhattan, as they framed it at 99% Invisible).
We really ought to step back most of the time and view evolution as a kind of ideal gas law, as something best understood at the sweep of statistical mechanics. Yes, every atom is doing something explicable if you prefer to drill down. So was every inhabitant of Kowloon Walled City, more or less.
1 light year ^ 3 * 10 kg/liter / mass of sun
And it works.
A cubic lightyear of lead has roughly 4.3e21 solar masses. We're talking fourth floor penthouse of the H-R diagram. Finding out what happens when this block of material is released from the uniform density tractor beam is probably harder than achieving an accurate regatta start on a windy day the day after an epic pub crawl. You'd need an assload of litz wire to release the uniform density tractor beam instantaneously over such a large volume.
Hamilton reaches for the jack-knife he forgot to bring. I wonder why that came to mind.
You're having so much fun being glib because you can no longer remember that you're missing the point.
There's something deeply wrong about using "wrong" as a synonym for "could be improved". Why don't we just standardize the terminology and refer to an AAA- credit rating as "defective"?
The people who try to make hay out of science being "wrong" barely believe in the circumstances where the wrongness of science would come into play: the first minute after the big bang, the billion year evolution of black holes. It's almost like your optician flashing up the fine print then observing when you stumble over a few words that your literacy is suspect.
So true. We're a tiny bit sketchy on the behaviour of matter heated to 200 billion degrees. Say it now, I know we can: science is wrong. Not wrong like your aunt, but wrong in the most rigorous conceivable sense.
We don't have a problem with wrong. We sometimes have a problem with glamorous batshit.
Is the anthropic principle even science? I've heard mention recently from two distinct source a "change of substrate" novel entitled Dragon's Egg. My conjecture is that any interesting life form will view its universe as "finely tuned". Seth Lloyd has a definition of complexity oriented toward where the action occurs: complexity that results from short programs, but only after they run for a long time. You end up with a frothy foam of tractability and intractability. I conjecture that's where life becomes possible, in any substrate. And it will always appear finely tuned. But when we finally meet the cheela, we'll discover no common ground whatsoever in how we construe the fine tuning. The cheela will be totally obsessed with some filigree of gluon plasma structure and our wonderful periodic table and its ionic oddball partnerships will appear to them as some totally arbitrary patten expressed by Rule 30.
We're pretty sure that universes that don't exist are lifeless. Does this observation belong at the far end of the spectrum of very weak anthropic principles? What a crock of flamboyant batshit.
The coolest thing I've come across recently that had somehow not come to my attention is the Helium flash.
OK, this is normal.
Wait a minute, here, I'm accustomed to factors of 100 billion showing up on the instruments. The neutrino flux is spectacular enough to act as a cooling mechanism. They're bombarding us in numbers we can barely conceive, yet our science is so weak we can barely detect them. Well, they do slip out of maximum security solar confinement like a hot knife through butter.
The mean free path of a photon in intergalactic space is about 10^23 km (10 billion years), and these are positively garrulous by comparison. The mean free path of a neutrino is one light year of solid lead, whereas the average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. To a neutrino, the entire universe is about as substantial as Bruce Willis in a movie where every review begins with a spoiler alert.
You aunt is wrong about some object in front of her very eyes, yet we apply no statute of limitations on wrongness 50 magnitudes out.
When Ian McKellen couldn't make a sufficiently robust "ugh" for his beat-down by Sauramon, they carted him off to a screening room, slapped on some headphones, set up some microphones, and starting playing the Phantom Menace.
I think the original Star Wars was a virtual particle emitted from the vacuum state followed by a long foreclosure by the Bank of Heisenberg. The whole experience integrates to zero.
So the calibration pinnacle on your scale of cultural importance is Dr Seuss, Bugs Bunny, Walt Disney, and Norman Rockwell? I'm pretty sure that Kubrick and Kurosawa were important influences on both Spielberg and Lucas. By your metric, it's surprising we remember Newton at all.
I've grown to hate just about any idea with an immediacy transform embedded inside, because its so much a tool of the newly wealthy to forget that they ever stood on the shoulders of giants whatsoever. In the immortal words of Finding Nemo: "Mine." Seagull logic 101.
Lucas chose a curious path to illustrate the foreboding nature dark side of the force: by making the next five movies. When we were slow to catch on, he added Jar Jar. No wonder artists drink.
I don't mind so much about the decline in the participation standards, if there has in fact been a decline (not counting the glory days when the lamers had five digit ids).
What I tremendously resents is the decline in the wording of the story summaries, which become ever more useless and trollish by the minute. It's not the people here that will drive me away. It's the decline in story summaries and the attitude of the editorial oversight which permits this to happen.
If we had a moderation system to assign "vague-assed trollery" to the story submissions, I would instantly tweak my filter such that I never see these stories again (and the 300 comments out of 500 adjusting the crookered picture frame).
The only reason I haven't jumped ship already is that most of the alternatives have been violently Twitterized. I'm determined to think in full paragraphs. I just can't wait for the headline "Generation Z rediscovers the paragraph." Maybe if I'm lucky--and live long enough to see it--the paragraph will become retro cool.
Surprises me they chose an island as the the northern terminus. I'm suspecting the undersea observation network has something to do with it.
I've thought hard about this for a long time, and I don't agree. Biological systems can't be so fragile as all that, or we wouldn't be here. The central feature of positions like yours is that you think every change or set-back is additive (if not multiplicative). I don't think this turns out to be true in complex systems. Fermi estimation argues against it. It could potentially be pretty rough. Rough enough that you can even remember the time when life without coffee seemed like a big deal. I don't think one can know how rough it might get without living through it.
On the other side, we have no precedent to believe we're capable of pulling off the political solutions required to forestall global warming. Many people seem to think that if we run around shouting about how we have a climate change gun pointed at our heads, that we'll suddenly become able to engage in global consensus like never before. This seems to come from a similar place as the belief that capital punishment deters crime. The majority of criminals aren't rational when committing the most serious crimes. They become more rational when facing arrest. What's the rational action when arrest leads fairly directly to the electric chair?
Between our political capacity to forestall global warming and our ability to cope with the mess that results, I put longer odds on the former. Maybe in the next iteration of collective planet destruction we can build on our (failed) effort this time around to take the wise action. Perhaps 300 years from now global collective action to avert nasty outcomes will seem like child's play. I don't think we're that species yet.
If the executive is math literate, it sends the message that the street's valuation lead the harvesting of value.
For example, on an apple farm, one might survey the number of apples on the trees in August and predict an all-time bumper crop, but then the weather does something funky in early September and the harvest is only the best harvest of the past decade.
Wow, isn't that amazing. Smart people anticipate future fairly accurately, then make corrections on the day.
I hope you've got youth, because you're light on discernment. Or maybe you're wealthy enough to retire whatever age you might be because you shrewdly jumped on the Apple IPO six months before they delivered the first iPhone. Isn't it amazing what Apple has managed to accomplish in six short years with no previous history or market reputation.
Maybe the common thread behind the similarity is the method of reducing the problem so as to run efficiently on your favorite big iron.
I don't trust their portrayal of what they've discovered as far as I can spit. The details given are far below the threshold of critical thinking. Properly, a claim like this needs a triple helping of sharp knives.
You added that to get your post through the AC filter, didn't you? Your starkly worded post was veering into the territory of a sane and deeply held perspective on life. But it turns out you were man enough to rebalance the force, with your cross-category rampage. FYI you're deep into Chapter 8, "How Judgments Happen" from Thinking Fast and Slow.
Intensity matching is used to answer profound questions such as this:
Kahneman adds "Not very hard, was it?" and "We will also see why this mode of prediction matching is statistically wrong ..."
bad_math_education worse than UniversalQuantifier(toxic_misapplication_of_force)
There's a pattern here your math seems not to detect.
Time to break out The Half-Life of Facts. I love the implied syllogism behind this kind of statement.
contingent_fact => radical_change
Of course, radical_change has no impact on contingent_fact. Just not going to happen.
Let me summarize my previous post with a question.
Has there ever been a society where the lazy melted away where women didn't die in childbirth--no matter how young or how beautiful--over random weaknesses of constitution?
When your wife is dying in childbirth, that must be about the most helpless feeling a man can experience. I suspect it's bad enough to make a man re-invent civilization all over again, when we've only barely rid ourselves of the beast.
These behaviours have very little to do with rational belief systems. These are wish fulfillment attitudes. Some people get a boner over survival of the fittest. Or they feel crowded by the success of the human race. Part of this is valuing relative advantage over absolute advantage. But hey, won't that assault rifle look tremendously less cool when their wife dies in childbirth.
I don't have any great bias against the delusions of others ... until it interferes with making a positive contribution to avoiding the worst. But why worry? Of course, with the big assault rifle you can kidnap a doctor. "What do you mean, you've never delivered a baby? You're a doctor, aren't you?" Many people with assault rifles have shit for brains. This contributes to making a single-use tool so appealing.
I suspect this movie doesn't stray too far from actual events. To Live:
They doubt that this is a good state of affairs, so they find a real doctor (starving), feed him some steamed buns so that he can function. Problem solved. Almost.
Welcome to your future life.
I was in the mood to buy a DRM-free ebook or two at the discount price, but after five minutes at O'Reilly I gave up the hunt. There's no category in the subject index for big data / machine learning. And neither did I quickly identify a filter on level of presentation. No, I don't need a quick review of the data structures in R.
I found a free download entitled "Big Data Now: 2012 Edition". There are some tidbits of interest in here, but over all it's a little too button-down for my tastes. It mentioned Apache Mahoot for machine learning. Hey, I'd buy an intermediate to advanced book on that at half price--if such a book existed.
One of the problems with buying on price opportunity is that you frame the problem of "given this pile, what's best for me" instead of "given what's best for me, is there anything of note in this pile at all". I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and presently basking in the availability glow of just how stupid humans are, most of the time. We're idiots for framing and anchoring effects.
I mean, I nearly rolled off the bed in hysterics last night when I read that most people find it easy enough to list six occasions where they have behaved assertively (and this activity causes them to report having an assertive personality) but asking people to list twelve occasions where they've been assertive is hard work and causes people to doubt that they are really so assertive after all. Twelve considered difficult? I don't need no book on big data, I can type it in by hand in JSON notation wherever the need arises. I'm assertive pretty much whenever I sit at a keyboard or open my mouth or pull up to a four-way traffic control. You know, in a group setting you don't need to control the outcome. One can accomplish a lot by quietly (yet assertively) trimming away the worst stupidities. Well-timed application of the pruning shears to group psychology seems assertive enough to me.
I have a recommendation shelf at Goodreads for the narrow category "Computer Science". This presently includes many O'Reilly book: Regular Expressions, Haskell, JavaScript, TCP/IP. Someday, if Goodreads exploits big data in some useful way, this might actually feature the books from O'Reilly where there was any chance in hell of me making a purchase.
First suggestion: refine the "not interested" button to include "been there, done that". Regular expressions are way cool for the first decade of one's programming career.
Cheap labour is the way of the future and has been for the past 3000 years. It's also referred to as trade, growth, and prosperity.
This is not to say that America hasn't made some blunders. American manufacturing was in the catbird seat until Detroit happened. Want a small, fuel-efficient car that doesn't fall to pieces the minute your service contract expires? The Japanese will make one (eventually). Detroit could have matched the Honda Civic while the Civic still sucked, but they had their heads up their ass-hats. It would have cut into selling overpriced and oversized cars you really didn't need. Why sell utility when you can sell dreams.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Jap-Crap. Jap-Crap with a plan. Jap-Crap planning to kick your ass.
Oh, yeah? You and who else?
It takes a real genius to spin the globe and miss China. Well done, Detroit, well done.
If it weren't for Asia, America would still be making oversized shit that breaks like clock-work. Outside of high tech, that's mainly what America was good at. We don't bring out our A game until we have a trillion dollar sustainment program on the boondoggle warpath.
The golden era of high domestic wages and low productivity was paved by the global petroleum monopoly. Did the Arabs really want to sell us all those barrels for half the net proceeds accruing to what we could manufacture by its consumption? Hint: they didn't have many great choices.
Knock, knock.
Who's there.
F18.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
OK, let's talk business. Name your price.
But go ahead and spin your weird little protectionist narratives.
With the F35 we're now balanced on the knife edge at the post-knock knock end of history.