Though I'm a fan of the film, I think War Games was hardly a realistic portrait of hacking, at least in the traditional sense that Levy was after. At best, some social engineering, and some wardialing (the name comes from the film actually), but these are not really connected to what people were doing at places like MIT and Sillicon Valley.
Steven Levy deserves a lot of credit for his book Hackers, which was the first place to publicly discuss "the hacker ethic." He really "got" a lot of the things that journalists today still don't get. You can disagree with a lot of what he says, and his "ethic" list is a little goofy, but as a "third" generation hacker (someone who grew up hacking on an Apple ][e), I found his interpretation of what was going on in the golden age deeply insightful. IMO, "computer journalism" has never really produced someone like him again -- today it's all David Pogue type "gadget reviewers" who really don't get what was, and still is, revolutionary about computing and the people involved in it.
A remarkable new algorithm for raising children! It's open source too -- free as in speech, and free as in sippy-cups of beer.
When I do become a parent (o happy day!) the computer will sit in the living room for many, many years. This is one suggestion in the parenting algorithm.
Here's his stuff on "inflation and its discontents." Sean -- of course, he's not sitting here, so really "Sean according to Simon" -- doesn't want to dump inflation, but rather considers the standard story about how it works to be flawed. He wraps this up in a much larger thesis on the origin of the arrow of time. But you're right that Sean is not claiming that all inflation stories are wrong, and I was wrong to suggest that.
This is data coming from an observatory -- i.e., off of a CCD or other kind of detector. Even after it's reduced to, say, a list of galaxies and information about them, however, there is still an enormous amount of it.
Re:please actually read my review, it's not that l
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No, neither of us claim that. In the past, if you wanted to get your news about subject X, you did so through a GII and were thus also exposed to news about subject Y and opinions Z and not-Z about X. You could certainly prevent exposure to the GII, but you would do so at the cost of most, if not all, of your news. That's Cass's argument, and I think it carries a lot of weight.
Re:please actually read my review, it's not that l
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· Score: 1
What do you think of RedState? I'm a liberal, but I found their discussions quite interesting to join in. They are pretty strict about trolling, but on the other hand I was able to join the discussion as long as I was careful and uberpolite about disagreements. (I stopped visiting because my account was deactivated, and while part of my paranoia assumed it was because of my POV, I think actually it was just technical incompetence.)
This was a few years ago, however, and stopping back in it seems they've declined a little -- in particular, they've gone over more to aggressive talking points-defense in the manner of a lot of other sites, left and right.
The anthropic principle -- I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. That way lies madness. To me it is a fundamental abdication of the scientific method. To put it another way, we could have invoked the anthropic principle at any point in the history of physics. Why is gravity an inverse square law? Because if not the solar system would have different properties and it would be unable to support life. (That's not a perfect example, but it's OK I think.) Literally. It's a universal tool. If we did, we'd have stopped science in its tracks. As bizarre as it seems, looking for deeper explanations than the anthropic principle can ever provide has paid off for centuries.
If you're still interested in the anthropic principle and want to go deeper despite my rather condescending tone above, consider Boltzmann brains. The problem is that if you believe Boltzmann brains are logically possible (and I do), then you would use the anthropic principle to predict a very different kind of universe. In other words, you disprove empirically the anthropic principle!
As for uniqueness question. I think inflation is more of a "paradigm" (ugh) or "mechanism" than a theory. Nobody really believes the details of anybody's particular inflation model. That's one of the reasons why I was looking for alternatives: because maybe alternatives would have less wiggle room. But it's so damn hard, and the mechanism works so well -- it's just that one of its effects is to "wipe out" most of the information that could tell us how it worked!
Sean's also a good friend, and I like people to think I have smart friends! And, while he is very smart, he is also a terrific explainer. Check his blog!
Yes, this is definitely a question -- the problem of how to configure the background, see my previous comment to this one (in time) about the "landscape." But you have exhausted my knowledge of the string theory side of things to a certain extent. Sorry I can't be more helpful on this!
1. I have many many positive things to say about Lee. He is a terrific guy, and one thing he deserves special praise for is that he loves talking to, and taking seriously, younger researchers like me. I buttonholed him on his last vist and we talked for a while about my inflation alternative and he was critical but also encouraging -- a hard note to strike.
Lee is also a great "cherrypicker", he finds neat things in different parts of physics and brings them in. We actually had (twenty or thirty years apart) stumbled on a couple unusual facts in the literature for condensed matter and had a good chat about applying them to cosmology. That said (you could see this coming huh?) Lee's criticisms of string theory have angered a lot of string theorists -- and in such a way that I think Lee maybe should take some of the blame for being overly confrontational.
String theory these days is looking for ideas and data, and so lots of people do so-called "string cosmology". It is very much in its infancy, and many (including myself) consider it something to dabble in but not to build a career on (yet.)
2. cosmology has some "big" questions. Essentially, many all boil down to some uber fine tuning. The universe needs to be expanding at just the right rate to have survived this long, and it's very strange that it is. To put it another way, OK: we believe that when the universe was very young, all the physics had to do with the very tiny Planck scale -- the scale at which quantum fluctuations form black holes. You can just combine the constants G, c, and h together in different ways to get the length, time and mass associated with this phenomenon. For example, if you accelerated an electron until it's (relativistic) mass became about 10^-5 grams and crashed it in to something, you would expect that in order to describe the event correctly you would need to describe how the crash produced miniblackholes.
So instead of making the Planck mass, change the constants around to get the Planck time. It's unbelievably short -- 10^-44 seconds. We expect all the physics back then to have roughly this timescale. Basically, you assume that whatever the equations are, the terms are going to have dimensionless coefficients of order unity, and then the rest pops out. (In the same way, say you had a funny oscillating system -- not a simple harmonic oscillator, but something wayyy more complicated. There will still be a constant in there with dimensions (force)/(distance), call it "k", and there will be a mass for the system. From that you can make a rough guess at the period -- sqrt(m/k) is the only combination that gives you time.) Sorry to belabor this if it's obvious to you!
Anyway, there's something glaringly obvious. The Planck time (10^-44) is much smaller than the age of the Universe today (10 billion years.) How did the physics back then "conspire" to give an answer so wildly different? That's how we know it's going to be a tough problem.
As for the 10^500 thing -- that's the question of the string theory "landscape". The basic thing is that string theory is a perturbative theory right now (one of Lee's big criticisms, and potentially very valid, although it's how every other non-gravitational quantum theory works) -- you can basically do calculations against a "background". Perturb the background a little, and gravitons are produced -- string theory can tell you their scattering amplitude, a massive victory. We used to think that the choice of the background would end up being "obvious". Now there's the suggestion that there are maybe 10^500 different choices and it makes a difference. Still a controversial thesis however!
3. Ah, yes, I see you already know about this whole background thing. I think Lee is going down a bit of a rabbit hole with the whole background indepedence thing. We've been doing thing perturbatively for years, and it's enabled us to calculate all sorts of things that go on in colliders (although
I'm not a string theorist, but I am a cosmologist. Here are some thoughts:
Inflation has not been "confirmed" in away way. It's the best explanation for a very very limited number of datapoints we have on the "early" Universe. Very smart people (e.g., Sean Carroll, now at CalTech) have made convincing cases that inflation is actually incoherent in important ways. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with alternatives to inflation, and it's damn hard -- it "works" very well, in the sense that it solves a bunch of problems all at once that are hard to solve individually. But it does invoke plenty of nonstandard physics we've never seen in the Universe, let alone the lab.
Inflation and dark energy are deeply connected. They both require something called "negative pressure". Negative pressure is bizarre, and actually is from a Newtonian perspective a violation of the conservation of energy (in General Relativity, energy is not conserved -- rather a complicated combination of numbers some of which refer to what we'd measure as energy is conserved.) Negative pressure means that if you take a box of the stuff, and let it expand, at the end of the day there's actually more stuff in there than you started with.
String theory should better be known as "a collection of approaches." It does not have the coherence of, say General Relativity, which is a mathematically closed system. Talking about "giving up string theory" is kind of dumb -- essentially what you are saying is "do not try to do the following large class of calculation." There are definitely competitors to string theory, but none have captured the attention of a highly fractious community the way string theory has.
Not sure if anyone's still reading this thread, but I'm happy to talk more about it. Reply with questions if you like!
please actually read my review, it's not that long
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Republic.com 2.0
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· Score: 2, Informative
I live in Chicago, but coming from New York it sometimes feels that way.
Do read my review, instead of cherrypicking quotes out of context. This is "new" (Cass claims) because of technology that allows one to bypass the usual routes to encountering views and opinions different from your own: the public forum (e.g., speaker's corner) and the "general interest intermediaries" -- places like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or CBS, &c..
quick message from the author of the review
on
Republic.com 2.0
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· Score: 2, Informative
A sentence was inadvertently taken out from the above review; it contains a reference and link to a detailed study of blog linkage patterns done by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller. Here's the paragraph in full (I've e-mailed the eds to fix, but they may be too busy.)
His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on overinterpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I try not to stress too much about getting consumable goods. If I don't like a hoop I have to jump through -- whether it's watching some horrible flash ad or popup -- I won't jump. I believe that business -- and "the economy" in general -- exists to serve me and the rest of the public; they are not charities even in part. I love Apple Computer's products, for example, but I'm not going to throw out various opinions I have on how I want to live my life just to continue buying their products.
You are suggesting (I think) that the only way to support online content is to watch ads I find irritating. You are incorrect! The various places I do go include many that are subscriber-supported (e.g., the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books), that make sufficient money off of amazon affiliation (many full-time bloggers), that sell merchendise (many webcomics), that are run as a "loss leader" for a larger corporation (The New Republic, many literary sites) or that are supported by a non-profit (The Nation, all of my scientific journals.)
To put it another way: I have the legal right to use my computer as I please, and to prevent display of things I do not want to see. When has a company ever done something for me they don't want to do without being legally obligated? Calling me "immoral" for not doing them a favor is offensive.
A good rule of dealing with businesses is as follows. If they ask you for something as a favor, flip the situation around and see what would happen. If I walked into an average store and asked to borrow busfare because my wallet was stolen, what do you think they'd say? Keeping this in mind keeps things clear -- I very rarely get upset when some random store goes broke and complains that people weren't subsidizing it and going on the internet instead. (On occasion, however, the "busfare" experiment comes out nicely -- there are a number of independent bookstores around the country that I "favor" by paying a premium to because they do, in fact, do plenty of favors for me.)
I remember when I (and everyone I knew) had a pirated copy of Microsoft Word 5.1 (best damn wordprocessor ever written.) The legend was that Microsoft didn't care that we and every other student in the galaxy had pirated it, because it helped their market penetration. If they gave it away free, they'd get in trouble for unfair competition or something.
I haven't followed Microsoft's silliness for many years (pretty much ever since they rewrote MS Word so that there was a noticable delay between the keypress and the letter appearing on the screen on a contemporary top-of-the-line mac.) But I have two questions. Is my legend true? And what dark shifts in Mordor politics led to MS changing its ways?
Fair enough on the foe thing. I think it's kind of weird. As for the suggestion that my analysis is wrong -- hey, there's one datapoint in this discussion, and I provided it. Your turn! But seriously, looking at a random article can be quite enlightening. I'm quite familiar with wikipedia myself, have created and edited a lot of non-trivial articles, and think about wikis in a meta way quite a bit.
Regarding the AfD discussion, how is that a particularly bureaucratic process? Everyone gets a chance to voice their concerns, and they are evaluated. Can you think of a method that is better?
That, well, seems to be the epitome of bureaucracy? Lots of (virtual) paper generated, with the actual decision left in the hands of an official. I don't think a majoratarian rule is the way to go of course, but the direction of wikipedia in the last few years has trended towards greater and greater bureaucratic and centralized control. If I had to suggest one major change to improve wikipedia right now, it would be to have administrators serve only for a limited time (order of months), and require a wait period (order of months) before an exadmin can return to RFA.
This problem -- with user-generated content not being properly vetted by marketing departments before being juxaposed with ads -- is common to the "Web 2.0". Nobody has a "solution" to it, and the true solution is that advertisers need to buck up and learn that they can't micromanage every single waking moments of our day. Not to be some kind of bizarre technoutopian, but actually people think and act in ways that may be unpleasant to their fellows. The world doesn't actually look like one of those 1980s "Buy the World a Coke" ads.
Entropy is fascinating. It's proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates, but until the advent of quantum mechanics, there was not good way to number the microstates of a given physical system. Once you have the uncertainty principle, you can divide the phase space up into little chunks of volume (Planck's constant)^(dimensions) and count it that way.
Another way to put it is that before the advent of quantum mechanics, every measurement of entropy was only meaningful in a relative, differential sense. S is arbitrary up to a constant. You can see that from the definition you use, which when you integrate is ambiguous up to a constant.
[Thanks for adding me as a "foe". Warning contrary opinion to yours follows, avert your eyes!]
I find it telling (in as much as a stratified sample can tell you anything) that the two millionth article:
1. was a rather trivial piece on a TV show.
2. triggered a bureaucratic response.
Contrary to what you may believe, bureaucracy is not a good thing in most circumstances. It is certaintly not the only source of fairness in the world, and indeed in many cases it actually generates large amounts of unfairness as a by-product.
There was a fantastic, grotesque story on kuro5hin a few years ago -- I can't remember the title or author -- a very well worked out novella on the notion of post-singularity AI that endeavours to protect mankind, against its wishes in many cases, from death. The novella focuses on a cult of people who "push" the system as far as possible. Really one of the best SF pieces I've read in years.
Funnily enough, I have just been advocating forserif fonts for body text on the web (check my blog.) The font size thing may be a browser dependent thing -- on the latest version of Safari, the lowercase (!) in the stories is taller than the standard mouse pointer. That's way too large for me. I am way way sympathetic to browser-dependent bugs, we just finished laying out absent, a poetry journal, and it took far longer than expected because Safari's treatment of word breaks in <pre> tags is broken w/r/t to the spec. (Not to slam Safari in particular -- IE also was a horror to deal with.)
Slashdot Mirror
Though I'm a fan of the film, I think War Games was hardly a realistic portrait of hacking, at least in the traditional sense that Levy was after. At best, some social engineering, and some wardialing (the name comes from the film actually), but these are not really connected to what people were doing at places like MIT and Sillicon Valley.
Steven Levy deserves a lot of credit for his book Hackers, which was the first place to publicly discuss "the hacker ethic." He really "got" a lot of the things that journalists today still don't get. You can disagree with a lot of what he says, and his "ethic" list is a little goofy, but as a "third" generation hacker (someone who grew up hacking on an Apple ][e), I found his interpretation of what was going on in the golden age deeply insightful. IMO, "computer journalism" has never really produced someone like him again -- today it's all David Pogue type "gadget reviewers" who really don't get what was, and still is, revolutionary about computing and the people involved in it.
A remarkable new algorithm for raising children! It's open source too -- free as in speech, and free as in sippy-cups of beer.
When I do become a parent (o happy day!) the computer will sit in the living room for many, many years. This is one suggestion in the parenting algorithm.
Here's his stuff on "inflation and its discontents." Sean -- of course, he's not sitting here, so really "Sean according to Simon" -- doesn't want to dump inflation, but rather considers the standard story about how it works to be flawed. He wraps this up in a much larger thesis on the origin of the arrow of time. But you're right that Sean is not claiming that all inflation stories are wrong, and I was wrong to suggest that.
This is data coming from an observatory -- i.e., off of a CCD or other kind of detector. Even after it's reduced to, say, a list of galaxies and information about them, however, there is still an enormous amount of it.
No, neither of us claim that. In the past, if you wanted to get your news about subject X, you did so through a GII and were thus also exposed to news about subject Y and opinions Z and not-Z about X. You could certainly prevent exposure to the GII, but you would do so at the cost of most, if not all, of your news. That's Cass's argument, and I think it carries a lot of weight.
What do you think of RedState? I'm a liberal, but I found their discussions quite interesting to join in. They are pretty strict about trolling, but on the other hand I was able to join the discussion as long as I was careful and uberpolite about disagreements. (I stopped visiting because my account was deactivated, and while part of my paranoia assumed it was because of my POV, I think actually it was just technical incompetence.)
This was a few years ago, however, and stopping back in it seems they've declined a little -- in particular, they've gone over more to aggressive talking points-defense in the manner of a lot of other sites, left and right.
The anthropic principle -- I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. That way lies madness. To me it is a fundamental abdication of the scientific method. To put it another way, we could have invoked the anthropic principle at any point in the history of physics. Why is gravity an inverse square law? Because if not the solar system would have different properties and it would be unable to support life. (That's not a perfect example, but it's OK I think.) Literally. It's a universal tool. If we did, we'd have stopped science in its tracks. As bizarre as it seems, looking for deeper explanations than the anthropic principle can ever provide has paid off for centuries.
If you're still interested in the anthropic principle and want to go deeper despite my rather condescending tone above, consider Boltzmann brains. The problem is that if you believe Boltzmann brains are logically possible (and I do), then you would use the anthropic principle to predict a very different kind of universe. In other words, you disprove empirically the anthropic principle!
As for uniqueness question. I think inflation is more of a "paradigm" (ugh) or "mechanism" than a theory. Nobody really believes the details of anybody's particular inflation model. That's one of the reasons why I was looking for alternatives: because maybe alternatives would have less wiggle room. But it's so damn hard, and the mechanism works so well -- it's just that one of its effects is to "wipe out" most of the information that could tell us how it worked!
Sean's also a good friend, and I like people to think I have smart friends! And, while he is very smart, he is also a terrific explainer. Check his blog!
Well, I see some of the secrets have leaked out!
Yes, this is definitely a question -- the problem of how to configure the background, see my previous comment to this one (in time) about the "landscape." But you have exhausted my knowledge of the string theory side of things to a certain extent. Sorry I can't be more helpful on this!
three questions to answer! I will go in order.
1. I have many many positive things to say about Lee. He is a terrific guy, and one thing he deserves special praise for is that he loves talking to, and taking seriously, younger researchers like me. I buttonholed him on his last vist and we talked for a while about my inflation alternative and he was critical but also encouraging -- a hard note to strike.
Lee is also a great "cherrypicker", he finds neat things in different parts of physics and brings them in. We actually had (twenty or thirty years apart) stumbled on a couple unusual facts in the literature for condensed matter and had a good chat about applying them to cosmology. That said (you could see this coming huh?) Lee's criticisms of string theory have angered a lot of string theorists -- and in such a way that I think Lee maybe should take some of the blame for being overly confrontational.
String theory these days is looking for ideas and data, and so lots of people do so-called "string cosmology". It is very much in its infancy, and many (including myself) consider it something to dabble in but not to build a career on (yet.)
2. cosmology has some "big" questions. Essentially, many all boil down to some uber fine tuning. The universe needs to be expanding at just the right rate to have survived this long, and it's very strange that it is. To put it another way, OK: we believe that when the universe was very young, all the physics had to do with the very tiny Planck scale -- the scale at which quantum fluctuations form black holes. You can just combine the constants G, c, and h together in different ways to get the length, time and mass associated with this phenomenon. For example, if you accelerated an electron until it's (relativistic) mass became about 10^-5 grams and crashed it in to something, you would expect that in order to describe the event correctly you would need to describe how the crash produced miniblackholes.
So instead of making the Planck mass, change the constants around to get the Planck time. It's unbelievably short -- 10^-44 seconds. We expect all the physics back then to have roughly this timescale. Basically, you assume that whatever the equations are, the terms are going to have dimensionless coefficients of order unity, and then the rest pops out. (In the same way, say you had a funny oscillating system -- not a simple harmonic oscillator, but something wayyy more complicated. There will still be a constant in there with dimensions (force)/(distance), call it "k", and there will be a mass for the system. From that you can make a rough guess at the period -- sqrt(m/k) is the only combination that gives you time.) Sorry to belabor this if it's obvious to you!
Anyway, there's something glaringly obvious. The Planck time (10^-44) is much smaller than the age of the Universe today (10 billion years.) How did the physics back then "conspire" to give an answer so wildly different? That's how we know it's going to be a tough problem.
As for the 10^500 thing -- that's the question of the string theory "landscape". The basic thing is that string theory is a perturbative theory right now (one of Lee's big criticisms, and potentially very valid, although it's how every other non-gravitational quantum theory works) -- you can basically do calculations against a "background". Perturb the background a little, and gravitons are produced -- string theory can tell you their scattering amplitude, a massive victory. We used to think that the choice of the background would end up being "obvious". Now there's the suggestion that there are maybe 10^500 different choices and it makes a difference. Still a controversial thesis however!
3. Ah, yes, I see you already know about this whole background thing. I think Lee is going down a bit of a rabbit hole with the whole background indepedence thing. We've been doing thing perturbatively for years, and it's enabled us to calculate all sorts of things that go on in colliders (although
I'm not a string theorist, but I am a cosmologist. Here are some thoughts:
Inflation has not been "confirmed" in away way. It's the best explanation for a very very limited number of datapoints we have on the "early" Universe. Very smart people (e.g., Sean Carroll, now at CalTech) have made convincing cases that inflation is actually incoherent in important ways. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with alternatives to inflation, and it's damn hard -- it "works" very well, in the sense that it solves a bunch of problems all at once that are hard to solve individually. But it does invoke plenty of nonstandard physics we've never seen in the Universe, let alone the lab.
Inflation and dark energy are deeply connected. They both require something called "negative pressure". Negative pressure is bizarre, and actually is from a Newtonian perspective a violation of the conservation of energy (in General Relativity, energy is not conserved -- rather a complicated combination of numbers some of which refer to what we'd measure as energy is conserved.) Negative pressure means that if you take a box of the stuff, and let it expand, at the end of the day there's actually more stuff in there than you started with.
String theory should better be known as "a collection of approaches." It does not have the coherence of, say General Relativity, which is a mathematically closed system. Talking about "giving up string theory" is kind of dumb -- essentially what you are saying is "do not try to do the following large class of calculation." There are definitely competitors to string theory, but none have captured the attention of a highly fractious community the way string theory has.
Not sure if anyone's still reading this thread, but I'm happy to talk more about it. Reply with questions if you like!
I live in Chicago, but coming from New York it sometimes feels that way.
Do read my review, instead of cherrypicking quotes out of context. This is "new" (Cass claims) because of technology that allows one to bypass the usual routes to encountering views and opinions different from your own: the public forum (e.g., speaker's corner) and the "general interest intermediaries" -- places like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or CBS, &c..
A sentence was inadvertently taken out from the above review; it contains a reference and link to a detailed study of blog linkage patterns done by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller. Here's the paragraph in full (I've e-mailed the eds to fix, but they may be too busy.)
His evidence that blogs — and not just controlled psychological experiments — actually do elicit group polarization is disappointingly thin, and relies on overinterpreted linkage studies and anecdotal evidence that show major "hubs" in the political blogging world, like instapundit, Atrios, and talkingpointsmemo, acting as strong filters that reinforce the party line. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller (also a close friend) have done a more detailed study of linkage patterns and come to very different conclusions.
Thanks folks for reading.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I try not to stress too much about getting consumable goods. If I don't like a hoop I have to jump through -- whether it's watching some horrible flash ad or popup -- I won't jump. I believe that business -- and "the economy" in general -- exists to serve me and the rest of the public; they are not charities even in part. I love Apple Computer's products, for example, but I'm not going to throw out various opinions I have on how I want to live my life just to continue buying their products.
You are suggesting (I think) that the only way to support online content is to watch ads I find irritating. You are incorrect! The various places I do go include many that are subscriber-supported (e.g., the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books), that make sufficient money off of amazon affiliation (many full-time bloggers), that sell merchendise (many webcomics), that are run as a "loss leader" for a larger corporation (The New Republic, many literary sites) or that are supported by a non-profit (The Nation, all of my scientific journals.)
To put it another way: I have the legal right to use my computer as I please, and to prevent display of things I do not want to see. When has a company ever done something for me they don't want to do without being legally obligated? Calling me "immoral" for not doing them a favor is offensive.
A good rule of dealing with businesses is as follows. If they ask you for something as a favor, flip the situation around and see what would happen. If I walked into an average store and asked to borrow busfare because my wallet was stolen, what do you think they'd say? Keeping this in mind keeps things clear -- I very rarely get upset when some random store goes broke and complains that people weren't subsidizing it and going on the internet instead. (On occasion, however, the "busfare" experiment comes out nicely -- there are a number of independent bookstores around the country that I "favor" by paying a premium to because they do, in fact, do plenty of favors for me.)
"Your awesome t-shirt is now my laundry."
(Although I agree that the background should be solid red.)
I remember when I (and everyone I knew) had a pirated copy of Microsoft Word 5.1 (best damn wordprocessor ever written.) The legend was that Microsoft didn't care that we and every other student in the galaxy had pirated it, because it helped their market penetration. If they gave it away free, they'd get in trouble for unfair competition or something.
I haven't followed Microsoft's silliness for many years (pretty much ever since they rewrote MS Word so that there was a noticable delay between the keypress and the letter appearing on the screen on a contemporary top-of-the-line mac.) But I have two questions. Is my legend true? And what dark shifts in Mordor politics led to MS changing its ways?
"Your business model is not my problem".
Fair enough on the foe thing. I think it's kind of weird. As for the suggestion that my analysis is wrong -- hey, there's one datapoint in this discussion, and I provided it. Your turn! But seriously, looking at a random article can be quite enlightening. I'm quite familiar with wikipedia myself, have created and edited a lot of non-trivial articles, and think about wikis in a meta way quite a bit.
Regarding the AfD discussion, how is that a particularly bureaucratic process? Everyone gets a chance to voice their concerns, and they are evaluated. Can you think of a method that is better?
That, well, seems to be the epitome of bureaucracy? Lots of (virtual) paper generated, with the actual decision left in the hands of an official. I don't think a majoratarian rule is the way to go of course, but the direction of wikipedia in the last few years has trended towards greater and greater bureaucratic and centralized control. If I had to suggest one major change to improve wikipedia right now, it would be to have administrators serve only for a limited time (order of months), and require a wait period (order of months) before an exadmin can return to RFA.
This problem -- with user-generated content not being properly vetted by marketing departments before being juxaposed with ads -- is common to the "Web 2.0". Nobody has a "solution" to it, and the true solution is that advertisers need to buck up and learn that they can't micromanage every single waking moments of our day. Not to be some kind of bizarre technoutopian, but actually people think and act in ways that may be unpleasant to their fellows. The world doesn't actually look like one of those 1980s "Buy the World a Coke" ads.
Entropy is fascinating. It's proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates, but until the advent of quantum mechanics, there was not good way to number the microstates of a given physical system. Once you have the uncertainty principle, you can divide the phase space up into little chunks of volume (Planck's constant)^(dimensions) and count it that way.
Another way to put it is that before the advent of quantum mechanics, every measurement of entropy was only meaningful in a relative, differential sense. S is arbitrary up to a constant. You can see that from the definition you use, which when you integrate is ambiguous up to a constant.
[Thanks for adding me as a "foe". Warning contrary opinion to yours follows, avert your eyes!]
I find it telling (in as much as a stratified sample can tell you anything) that the two millionth article:
1. was a rather trivial piece on a TV show.
2. triggered a bureaucratic response.
Contrary to what you may believe, bureaucracy is not a good thing in most circumstances. It is certaintly not the only source of fairness in the world, and indeed in many cases it actually generates large amounts of unfairness as a by-product.
Nominated for deletion, amusingly enough.
It was "speedy kept", but amusing that a stratified sample shows not only that wikipedia is filling these days with trivia, but also bureaucracy.
(Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet about wikipedia even though I love it -- see my sig.)
There was a fantastic, grotesque story on kuro5hin a few years ago -- I can't remember the title or author -- a very well worked out novella on the notion of post-singularity AI that endeavours to protect mankind, against its wishes in many cases, from death. The novella focuses on a cult of people who "push" the system as far as possible. Really one of the best SF pieces I've read in years.
Funnily enough, I have just been advocating forserif fonts for body text on the web (check my blog.) The font size thing may be a browser dependent thing -- on the latest version of Safari, the lowercase (!) in the stories is taller than the standard mouse pointer. That's way too large for me. I am way way sympathetic to browser-dependent bugs, we just finished laying out absent, a poetry journal, and it took far longer than expected because Safari's treatment of word breaks in <pre> tags is broken w/r/t to the spec. (Not to slam Safari in particular -- IE also was a horror to deal with.)