The Doctor Who revival, wonderful as it has been, has been suffering from small problem of threat inflation in its season finales:
(1) Dalaks threaten a future point of Earth
(2) Daleks/Cybermen threaten the present Earth
(3) The Master treatens present Earth with it's future.
(4) Davros threaten to blow up all of space
(4b) Time Lords threaten to blow up all of time
(5) The Tardis blows up, taking all of space and time with it
The big content-owning ISPs are looking at the profit margin on cell phone text messages and trying to figure out how to carve up the entire online experience that way.
Science is essentially a giant coding project that's being going for centuries. You have the accumulated code (the sum of all knowledge), you have the
individual coders (scientists) and you have the entire community structure of peer review. Even though the source code is all there, it's too big
for any one person to reverify every line of code (to run every past experiment). So you have to pick your battles carefully and focus on what's important: areas where performance needs to improve or where there seem to be bugs. An individual end-user may feel completely lost trying to understand how it all works, but it's all there if you want to learn it.
(I have a whole other metaphore about lobbiests and malware but I'll leave that for another day)
Biology is one of the few disciplines in which you can apply an existing procedure and earn an advanced degree. Pick a species, pick a fashionable question, apply that question to that species, gather your data, publish and graduate. I think that tends to insulate some of them from "the real world" a little longer than most fields.
Also, the study of a discipline tends to be a walk through it's history. The core of biology is still observational and descriptive - statistical analysis and mathematical modeling only came along later, so it's a field where some students feel blindsided by a bit of a bait-and-switch. A student in biology is absorbing enormous quantities of factual data and context and then, fairly late in their education, there is a switch to a more mathematical framework.
At least this was my qualitative analysis of biologists in the wild - I admit I didn't do any catch-and-release banding or a proper t-test on my hypothesis in the preparation of this post.
Now if you want to talk about students not prepared to deal with the real world, biologists have nothing on mathematicians. Biologists are at least are encouraged to talk to each other. In mathematics you quickly learn that it is likely only five people in the world will understand your idea. Three of them will be borderline autistic and a fourth carries live grenades in his jacket.
To me, it's all a question of liability. Who is liable when something goes wrong? How hard is going to be to hold them to it?
I look at the utter chaos of trying to debug and repair rare errors in existing car software or faulty sensors, and all I can see is a chain of denial, evasion and presure to cover up. Of course an accident may sink an automated driver project - it will be the test of the manufacturer's willingness to accept full liability for the damages. The moment they attempt to say "can't be my fault", it's over.
Just to sure... we are certain that today's version of the truth is more reliable than yesterdays? We aren't just setting ourselves up for more egg on our faces?
My read of the evidence is that the primordial ooze was likely churning with a great many different self-sustaining/self-replicating chemical cycles that could have started in isolation in a soup sufficiently rich in a variety of compounds. RNA would have simply been one fairly isolated self-replicating molecule in this constantly churning chemical soup. To me, that initial flip from "not alive" to "life" happens when bubbles of promordial ooze inside lipid membranes start absorbing their free-floating surroundings and successfully fissioning, creating the concept of individuals. Only after you have cells does the presence of *NA inside them (able to ramp up the diversity and complexity of protiens in that confined area) start to matter.
The firework at the finale of Bilbo's party in Fellowship of the Ring was supposed to be a mock Smaug so that may give a hint of what they have in mind.
(Perhaps it was just the young age at which I first encountered it, but I still rank Bilbo's conversation with Smaug as one of the scariest scenes I've ever read)
Why restrict the calculations to integer dimensions. The universe is obviously highly self-similiar from repeated elementary particles to repeated large scale structures, so why not model its geometry as an attractor of non-integeter dimension?
This would seem to be a rather important point to clarify, wouldn't it? I mean, if a rank-and-file anonymous loyal Lybian soldier of good conscience but no strong political opinions is looking at situation right now, what does the world legally and ethically expect him to be doing right now?
Does (in theory) an edict from the UN security council ordering a conflict to end override the chain of command within a sovereign nation? I realize its a messy and imperfect world (and we were possibly within hours of a catastrophic massacre) but I've never been a fan of the medieval idea that in the great game of diplomacy, you kill pawns to influence the mind of a king.
Bashir: They broke seven of your transverse ribs and fractured your clavical.
Garak: Ah, but I got off several cutting remarks which no doubt did serious damage to their egos.
Bashir: Garak, this isn't funny.
Garak: I'm serious, doctor! Thanks to your administrations I'm almost completely healed but the damage I did to them will last a lifetime.
I'm always tempted to use these types of games as algorithms to test the randomness of pi. Write out pi in base 3, use these for your choices and see if the computer can somehow eek out any trace of a pattern in trying to win the game.
I just watched the whole 20 minutes and you're right - he's saying the two areas (wikileaks and Arab uprisings) that share a common root cause of technology empowering people rather than saying one caused the other. The story is fundementally wrong.
He then launches into a string of character assassination comments dismissing wikileaks as not having a consistent philosophy (at which point the video pauses to provide counterevidence) and dismisses any notion of bias in the legal system as conspiracy theory (which ironicly demonstrates exactly what Assange's thesis is: a culture of secrecy breeds conspiracy theories since you can no longer trust the offical record to be complete or accurate). He comes off rather badly here, but it's not really inflamatory.
The video ends with a very pointed question about the Downing Street Memos, which although interesting, he can't really respond to given that there are inquiries in progress (although when government figures use that defence, I'm never clear if it's a real legal requirement or simply self-defence advice from the lawyers).
Isn't it just a bet on the variance of the underlying stock? Skimming over those models, they look like they're really all just different ways of mutating your choice of initial assumption about the distribution of possible futures.
Slashdot Mirror
The Doctor Who revival, wonderful as it has been, has been suffering from small problem of threat inflation in its season finales:
...
(1) Dalaks threaten a future point of Earth
(2) Daleks/Cybermen threaten the present Earth
(3) The Master treatens present Earth with it's future.
(4) Davros threaten to blow up all of space
(4b) Time Lords threaten to blow up all of time
(5) The Tardis blows up, taking all of space and time with it
I'm a little concerned about what happens next
The big content-owning ISPs are looking at the profit margin on cell phone text messages and trying to figure out how to carve up the entire online experience that way.
Technology wipes out whole industries?! Oh no! Whatever will horseshoe makers do!
Science is essentially a giant coding project that's being going for centuries. You have the accumulated code (the sum of all knowledge), you have the individual coders (scientists) and you have the entire community structure of peer review. Even though the source code is all there, it's too big for any one person to reverify every line of code (to run every past experiment). So you have to pick your battles carefully and focus on what's important: areas where performance needs to improve or where there seem to be bugs. An individual end-user may feel completely lost trying to understand how it all works, but it's all there if you want to learn it.
(I have a whole other metaphore about lobbiests and malware but I'll leave that for another day)
Biology is one of the few disciplines in which you can apply an existing procedure and earn an advanced degree. Pick a species, pick a fashionable question, apply that question to that species, gather your data, publish and graduate. I think that tends to insulate some of them from "the real world" a little longer than most fields.
Also, the study of a discipline tends to be a walk through it's history. The core of biology is still observational and descriptive - statistical analysis and mathematical modeling only came along later, so it's a field where some students feel blindsided by a bit of a bait-and-switch. A student in biology is absorbing enormous quantities of factual data and context and then, fairly late in their education, there is a switch to a more mathematical framework.
At least this was my qualitative analysis of biologists in the wild - I admit I didn't do any catch-and-release banding or a proper t-test on my hypothesis in the preparation of this post.
Now if you want to talk about students not prepared to deal with the real world, biologists have nothing on mathematicians. Biologists are at least are encouraged to talk to each other. In mathematics you quickly learn that it is likely only five people in the world will understand your idea. Three of them will be borderline autistic and a fourth carries live grenades in his jacket.
To me, it's all a question of liability. Who is liable when something goes wrong? How hard is going to be to hold them to it?
I look at the utter chaos of trying to debug and repair rare errors in existing car software or faulty sensors, and all I can see is a chain of denial, evasion and presure to cover up. Of course an accident may sink an automated driver project - it will be the test of the manufacturer's willingness to accept full liability for the damages. The moment they attempt to say "can't be my fault", it's over.
I was here when the microedits meme was born.
Just to sure ... we are certain that today's version of the truth is more reliable than yesterdays? We aren't just setting ourselves up for more egg on our faces?
Friends don't let friends have principles. Once you turn down an opportunity for any reason other than greed, the spiral towards the gutter has begun.
I used to ask managers how much our unused IP addresses were worth and they used to give me a blank stare.
In hindsight, I probably should have taken that as a bad sign.
My read of the evidence is that the primordial ooze was likely churning with a great many different self-sustaining/self-replicating chemical cycles that could have started in isolation in a soup sufficiently rich in a variety of compounds. RNA would have simply been one fairly isolated self-replicating molecule in this constantly churning chemical soup. To me, that initial flip from "not alive" to "life" happens when bubbles of promordial ooze inside lipid membranes start absorbing their free-floating surroundings and successfully fissioning, creating the concept of individuals. Only after you have cells does the presence of *NA inside them (able to ramp up the diversity and complexity of protiens in that confined area) start to matter.
The firework at the finale of Bilbo's party in Fellowship of the Ring was supposed to be a mock Smaug so that may give a hint of what they have in mind.
(Perhaps it was just the young age at which I first encountered it, but I still rank Bilbo's conversation with Smaug as one of the scariest scenes I've ever read)
Why restrict the calculations to integer dimensions. The universe is obviously highly self-similiar from repeated elementary particles to repeated large scale structures, so why not model its geometry as an attractor of non-integeter dimension?
This would seem to be a rather important point to clarify, wouldn't it? I mean, if a rank-and-file anonymous loyal Lybian soldier of good conscience but no strong political opinions is looking at situation right now, what does the world legally and ethically expect him to be doing right now?
Does (in theory) an edict from the UN security council ordering a conflict to end override the chain of command within a sovereign nation? I realize its a messy and imperfect world (and we were possibly within hours of a catastrophic massacre) but I've never been a fan of the medieval idea that in the great game of diplomacy, you kill pawns to influence the mind of a king.
Bashir: They broke seven of your transverse ribs and fractured your clavical.
Garak: Ah, but I got off several cutting remarks which no doubt did serious damage to their egos.
Bashir: Garak, this isn't funny.
Garak: I'm serious, doctor! Thanks to your administrations I'm almost completely healed but the damage I did to them will last a lifetime.
The Hindenburg feels your pain. The world can adapt and continue to progress, even if we choose to kill random technologies.
And your argument is that preserving that symmetry is the most important objective in deciding whether or not to accept help?
The US did refuse an offer of 1600 medics+supplies from Cuba. Nobody is immune to stubborn pride.
I have altered the language. Pray I do not alter it further.
I'm always tempted to use these types of games as algorithms to test the randomness of pi. Write out pi in base 3, use these for your choices and see if the computer can somehow eek out any trace of a pattern in trying to win the game.
At bleeding edge of knowledge/measurement the margin of error is often larger than the margin of excitement.
I just watched the whole 20 minutes and you're right - he's saying the two areas (wikileaks and Arab uprisings) that share a common root cause of technology empowering people rather than saying one caused the other. The story is fundementally wrong.
He then launches into a string of character assassination comments dismissing wikileaks as not having a consistent philosophy (at which point the video pauses to provide counterevidence) and dismisses any notion of bias in the legal system as conspiracy theory (which ironicly demonstrates exactly what Assange's thesis is: a culture of secrecy breeds conspiracy theories since you can no longer trust the offical record to be complete or accurate). He comes off rather badly here, but it's not really inflamatory.
The video ends with a very pointed question about the Downing Street Memos, which although interesting, he can't really respond to given that there are inquiries in progress (although when government figures use that defence, I'm never clear if it's a real legal requirement or simply self-defence advice from the lawyers).
In my opinion, just because a rocket has wheels doesn't make it a car.
Isn't it just a bet on the variance of the underlying stock? Skimming over those models, they look like they're really all just different ways of mutating your choice of initial assumption about the distribution of possible futures.