My brother-in-law works in the building trades in Michigan. Yeah, the unions in that state have run rampant and are killing the entire state's economy.
Can something that does not exist be "in effect"? One would think that the "Set of all things no longer in effect" contains the "Set of all things that do not exist."
Your mistake here is trying to apply this thing called "logic" to law.
What's really exciting here is that such a simple method works in a game that people thought was beyond brute force. Tactics, strategy, "expert" knowledge can be discovered without hand-coding them.
Yes! This is like that article last month talking about how Google was "the end of theory." This is that author's point, in practice.
Its frustrating because what makes go an interesting problem, to me anyway, is that its hard. And whats hard about it is not the lack of a computer big enough to do a mini-max on the game tree, but in written an algorithm that captures the tactics and strategies of the game in a way that a human could read and employ themselves.
Pff. No algorithm for computers is going to be employable by humans. Even division. Humans can do division like how a computer would, but it sucks.
Makefiles are text files, and completely tool agnostic. By standardizing on Make, you don't paint yourself into a corner with a single toolchain.
What are you talking about? Makefiles require the make tool. That is not really tool agnostic.
Makefiles aren't agnostic with respect to make implementations: GNU make has features that aren't in other POSIX makes, like target-specific variables.
And before you standardize on make, you best make sure the rest of your toolchain needs to have command-line ways of doing everything you need to do, like select a platform and set a build configuration.
Further, make basically assumes that you have a tool that turns source into executable. How well does it work with a language like maybe Smalltalk, which already has a standard IDE that is part of the spec, does its own dependency checking, and uses project files instead of source code files? Or a system involving database stored procedures?
Personally it's been ages since I used a mutable structure. Once you understand how to use immutable structures, they are just so much more convenient. Of course there's a big leap that has to happen in your head before you understand how to use them naturally. Functional programming has several big leaps like that though.
But immutable data seem really inefficient. Rather than altering one value in the data structure or collection, you have to copy the entire thing to a new location with one value changed! Now, granted, since the other values in the structure or collection are immutable, you can just alias the data from the old location to the new, but that is still a lot of pointer-copying and allocation.
Of course, this technique probably isn't precise enough for the purposes of the kg standard mass. No way linear motors or specular reflection detectors could be precise or sensitive enough to measure or notice reflections below nanometer scale, and maybe not nanometer scale either.
Doesn't seem all that hard to me. You need a pair of lasers and a way of detecting when the lasers touch the sphere. Make the lasers parallel to each other at a distance controlled by a high-precision linear motor. The lasers fire continuously, and the laser assembly can move along an X axis and rotate around or move along a Z axis relative to the sphere.
Move the lasers approximately half-way down the sphere and center the sphere between them by bringing the lasers together until they both touch, then pulling the lasers apart until only one touches, then adjusting the sphere relative to the lasers so that both touch, wash rinse and repeat. The sphere is now centered on the X axis. Rotate the laser assembly 90 deg around the Z axis and center the sphere on the Y axis.
Since the sphere is now centered, you can find its diameter by moving the lasers down and increasing their separation until they pass the equator and no longer touch the sphere.
Now, you know mathematically what the sphere should look like. You can test the curvature to the limits of your linear motors' precision by running the lasers in a spiral pattern around and down the Z axis, adjusting the laser's separation by the mathematical curvature. If the diameter of the slice being measured doesn't lie within tolerances of what it ought to be, the sphere is imperfectly curved. Check the tolerances by running the lasers from an arbitrary position, first just barely touching, then just barely not touching, the surface of the sphere. As you run the lasers around the sphere, if they touch when they initially didn't, or stop touching when they initially did, you've exceeded tolerances.
Now, reorient the sphere and do the same thing to measure the curvature of any coverage gaps (like at the very bottom of the sphere where it is resting on something).
This is all with one device. You can take a multimodal approach by maybe using calipers or displacement volume or whatever to get additional measurements.
This isn't going to be a reference mass; the idea is to make this the same weight as the old platinum reference mass (or the weight the platinum mass was, or whatever), compute the number of silicon atoms it contains, then define the kilogram as "the mass of a sphere containing[x] atoms of silicon-28."
I'm not sure how well this is going to work. Let's say they've got the sphere milled down to almost-but-not quite the mass of the kg reference. Say it is a little on the high side. So they need to mill it down just slightly. What if the difference between the sphere's mass and the reference mass is less than the mass of the atoms forming the surface of the sphere? When they mill them away, the sphere will be less than the kg reference, and they've got the same problem in reverse.
I guess it depends on how accurately they can compare masses.
Parent is correct. Corporations cannot contribute to a politician's political campaign, but can solicit money from certain employees and pay for certain ads. Read the Wikipedia article.
The problem, I think, is lobbyists. Corporations are able to hire good lobbyists to deliver a focused and professional message to our representatives. But, really, lobbyists aren't the problem, either. In theory, any group of citizens can get their message out equally well by banding together and hiring their own lobbyists. The problem is, we do not do this.
News at 11 (by the way, I've always wondered, does that expression mean 11 AM or PM? I only hear it in shows so I get too little a context to be able to tell).
PM. At 11 AM, everyone was traditionally at work so they wouldn't be able to watch any 11 AM news.
why shouldn't children engage in sexual activity as soon as they express an interest in each other?
Your post:
An 8 year old isn't physically ready for sex.
If the 8-year-old isn't physically ready for sex, his hormones haven't kicked in and it doesn't seem to me he'd express any sexual interest in any girls...and the same for 8-year-old girls.
But other than not speaking to the point, I agree with your post.
You are probably more correct about what the article is actually talking about. The article says that, in the brave new world of tomorrow, "correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models." What comes out of the process are correlations, not theories with explanations.
We are sort of moving to a pure correlation system as it is, with chaos theory. Last I heard, chaos theory had strange attractors -- like Jupiter's Great Red Spot(s). We don't know how they form, because the system is too complex to ascribe understandable causes to their formation. We just know that they are there, and mostly stable, until they aren't, when they vanish. But, we can sort of look at a system as a whole, like a weather system, and make predictions about what happens. In actuality, we build particle- or cell-based computer models, let them run, and see what happens. We don't have any simpler models that we can apply. The article says we are heading there, and this is how the Uplift computers worked.
A lot of fields are like this. Medical practice is all about correlated symptoms. When we finish delving into subatomic particles and the fundamental nature of the Universe, I doubt we'll find a reason for anything, we'll just find patterns or "laws" that hold true.
I'm not positive I understand - are you saying that we've got a data source, in Google, for example, that isn't modeling reality - it IS reality, and that we no longer need to check in with anything else to get information FROM reality? Something like that?
No, more like... in the same way as the article suggests using statistical relationships derived from mass quantities of data to form theories about reality, instead of using simplified models, the computers in the Uplift series used more concrete abstractions of integers and elemental particles and manipulated vast numbers of them in their computations, instead of using mathematical simplifications like floating point numbers or calculus.
Of course, in the Uplift series, humans developed the sciences without the aid of those computers, so we had all these effective mathematical models that the rest of galactic civilization never needed to invent, which gave us an advantage in explaining strange occurrences that came to light over the course of the series.
I saw a different parallel, to Brin's Uplift series.
The galactic civilizations in that series relied on computers and algorithms handed down from the dawn of time. Their computers and algorithms were so powerful, in fact, that they worked with the fundamentals. They didn't have floating point numbers or calculus or abstractions about area or specular highlights. Their algorithms worked with integers, counted virtual atoms, and traced virtual photons.
The blind correlation techniques described in the article seem very similar to me. Don't bother with models and abstractions, with power-law and bell-curve approximations of reality, just deal with reality directly.
It's like the dude said, "God invented the integers; all else is the work of man."
It also reminds me of the Chinese Room. You don't need understanding, you just need patterns. This concept was fruitfully explored in the hard SF book Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
If that is true, then it must be quite uncomfortable to ride a bike.
Nah, it's fine. I just pedal with two legs and steer with my third. It works out, because that leaves one arm free for flipping off drivers, and the other one for holding a) my morning danish or b) your cute sister -- whichever.
What scares me is that you're willing to allow terroists (you may not be aware that they are our ENEMIES - they want you and me DEAD) US Constitutional rights.
Accused terrorists. They may or may not actually be terrorists. They could have just been turned in by a neighbor who didn't like them and wanted some reward money. They need to have a chance to defend themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother-in-law works in the building trades in Michigan. Yeah, the unions in that state have run rampant and are killing the entire state's economy.
Can something that does not exist be "in effect"? One would think that the "Set of all things no longer in effect" contains the "Set of all things that do not exist."
Your mistake here is trying to apply this thing called "logic" to law.
Yes! This is like that article last month talking about how Google was "the end of theory." This is that author's point, in practice.
Pff. No algorithm for computers is going to be employable by humans. Even division. Humans can do division like how a computer would, but it sucks.
Deep Crow
RMS never told you what happened to your father. Vista is your father.
Deny/Allow?
[Click Deny]
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Makefiles are text files, and completely tool agnostic. By standardizing on Make, you don't paint yourself into a corner with a single toolchain.
What are you talking about? Makefiles require the make tool. That is not really tool agnostic.
Makefiles aren't agnostic with respect to make implementations: GNU make has features that aren't in other POSIX makes, like target-specific variables.
And before you standardize on make, you best make sure the rest of your toolchain needs to have command-line ways of doing everything you need to do, like select a platform and set a build configuration.
Further, make basically assumes that you have a tool that turns source into executable. How well does it work with a language like maybe Smalltalk, which already has a standard IDE that is part of the spec, does its own dependency checking, and uses project files instead of source code files? Or a system involving database stored procedures?
But immutable data seem really inefficient. Rather than altering one value in the data structure or collection, you have to copy the entire thing to a new location with one value changed! Now, granted, since the other values in the structure or collection are immutable, you can just alias the data from the old location to the new, but that is still a lot of pointer-copying and allocation.
Of course, this technique probably isn't precise enough for the purposes of the kg standard mass. No way linear motors or specular reflection detectors could be precise or sensitive enough to measure or notice reflections below nanometer scale, and maybe not nanometer scale either.
Doesn't seem all that hard to me. You need a pair of lasers and a way of detecting when the lasers touch the sphere. Make the lasers parallel to each other at a distance controlled by a high-precision linear motor. The lasers fire continuously, and the laser assembly can move along an X axis and rotate around or move along a Z axis relative to the sphere.
Move the lasers approximately half-way down the sphere and center the sphere between them by bringing the lasers together until they both touch, then pulling the lasers apart until only one touches, then adjusting the sphere relative to the lasers so that both touch, wash rinse and repeat. The sphere is now centered on the X axis. Rotate the laser assembly 90 deg around the Z axis and center the sphere on the Y axis.
Since the sphere is now centered, you can find its diameter by moving the lasers down and increasing their separation until they pass the equator and no longer touch the sphere.
Now, you know mathematically what the sphere should look like. You can test the curvature to the limits of your linear motors' precision by running the lasers in a spiral pattern around and down the Z axis, adjusting the laser's separation by the mathematical curvature. If the diameter of the slice being measured doesn't lie within tolerances of what it ought to be, the sphere is imperfectly curved. Check the tolerances by running the lasers from an arbitrary position, first just barely touching, then just barely not touching, the surface of the sphere. As you run the lasers around the sphere, if they touch when they initially didn't, or stop touching when they initially did, you've exceeded tolerances.
Now, reorient the sphere and do the same thing to measure the curvature of any coverage gaps (like at the very bottom of the sphere where it is resting on something).
This is all with one device. You can take a multimodal approach by maybe using calipers or displacement volume or whatever to get additional measurements.
This isn't going to be a reference mass; the idea is to make this the same weight as the old platinum reference mass (or the weight the platinum mass was, or whatever), compute the number of silicon atoms it contains, then define the kilogram as "the mass of a sphere containing[x] atoms of silicon-28."
I'm not sure how well this is going to work. Let's say they've got the sphere milled down to almost-but-not quite the mass of the kg reference. Say it is a little on the high side. So they need to mill it down just slightly. What if the difference between the sphere's mass and the reference mass is less than the mass of the atoms forming the surface of the sphere? When they mill them away, the sphere will be less than the kg reference, and they've got the same problem in reverse.
I guess it depends on how accurately they can compare masses.
From the little I know of academic teachings, it's not considered trendy to focus on such areas - particularly as he didn't program in Java
Yeah, he probably programmed in T.
corporations don't donate money.
Parent is correct. Corporations cannot contribute to a politician's political campaign, but can solicit money from certain employees and pay for certain ads. Read the Wikipedia article.
The problem, I think, is lobbyists. Corporations are able to hire good lobbyists to deliver a focused and professional message to our representatives. But, really, lobbyists aren't the problem, either. In theory, any group of citizens can get their message out equally well by banding together and hiring their own lobbyists. The problem is, we do not do this.
Mod parent up, good point.
News at 11 (by the way, I've always wondered, does that expression mean 11 AM or PM? I only hear it in shows so I get too little a context to be able to tell).
PM. At 11 AM, everyone was traditionally at work so they wouldn't be able to watch any 11 AM news.
Grandparent post:
why shouldn't children engage in sexual activity as soon as they express an interest in each other?
Your post:
An 8 year old isn't physically ready for sex.
If the 8-year-old isn't physically ready for sex, his hormones haven't kicked in and it doesn't seem to me he'd express any sexual interest in any girls...and the same for 8-year-old girls.
But other than not speaking to the point, I agree with your post.
You are probably more correct about what the article is actually talking about. The article says that, in the brave new world of tomorrow, "correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models." What comes out of the process are correlations, not theories with explanations.
We are sort of moving to a pure correlation system as it is, with chaos theory. Last I heard, chaos theory had strange attractors -- like Jupiter's Great Red Spot(s). We don't know how they form, because the system is too complex to ascribe understandable causes to their formation. We just know that they are there, and mostly stable, until they aren't, when they vanish. But, we can sort of look at a system as a whole, like a weather system, and make predictions about what happens. In actuality, we build particle- or cell-based computer models, let them run, and see what happens. We don't have any simpler models that we can apply. The article says we are heading there, and this is how the Uplift computers worked.
A lot of fields are like this. Medical practice is all about correlated symptoms. When we finish delving into subatomic particles and the fundamental nature of the Universe, I doubt we'll find a reason for anything, we'll just find patterns or "laws" that hold true.
I'm not positive I understand - are you saying that we've got a data source, in Google, for example, that isn't modeling reality - it IS reality, and that we no longer need to check in with anything else to get information FROM reality? Something like that?
No, more like... in the same way as the article suggests using statistical relationships derived from mass quantities of data to form theories about reality, instead of using simplified models, the computers in the Uplift series used more concrete abstractions of integers and elemental particles and manipulated vast numbers of them in their computations, instead of using mathematical simplifications like floating point numbers or calculus.
Of course, in the Uplift series, humans developed the sciences without the aid of those computers, so we had all these effective mathematical models that the rest of galactic civilization never needed to invent, which gave us an advantage in explaining strange occurrences that came to light over the course of the series.
I saw a different parallel, to Brin's Uplift series.
The galactic civilizations in that series relied on computers and algorithms handed down from the dawn of time. Their computers and algorithms were so powerful, in fact, that they worked with the fundamentals. They didn't have floating point numbers or calculus or abstractions about area or specular highlights. Their algorithms worked with integers, counted virtual atoms, and traced virtual photons.
The blind correlation techniques described in the article seem very similar to me. Don't bother with models and abstractions, with power-law and bell-curve approximations of reality, just deal with reality directly.
It's like the dude said, "God invented the integers; all else is the work of man."
It also reminds me of the Chinese Room. You don't need understanding, you just need patterns. This concept was fruitfully explored in the hard SF book Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
No guarantee, that's true... but past performance is a probable indicator of future results.
If that is true, then it must be quite uncomfortable to ride a bike.
Nah, it's fine. I just pedal with two legs and steer with my third. It works out, because that leaves one arm free for flipping off drivers, and the other one for holding a) my morning danish or b) your cute sister -- whichever.
There is some truth to that. There aren't that many Mac programming jobs.
Not global warming, but several of Africa's presidents have not believed that AIDS is caused by HIV or believed it can be cured by folk magic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/27/aids.badscience
What scares me is that you're willing to allow terroists (you may not be aware that they are our ENEMIES - they want you and me DEAD) US Constitutional rights.
Accused terrorists. They may or may not actually be terrorists. They could have just been turned in by a neighbor who didn't like them and wanted some reward money. They need to have a chance to defend themselves.
Will it blend?