Actually, the essays in this section, as well as much of his other writing, make very interesting reading. I think this one can only be found via the site-map.
There must be interogation R&D. Can't you just imagine companies realizing that this market exists, and trying to develop new inventions to sell to good old Uncle Sam?
More like Avg Proportion of Criminals in Prisons
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 1
its like judging the crime rate of the entire nation by taking the average of the largest several cities.
No, it's more like taking the average proportion of criminals in the largest several prisons.
I didn't say "the climate is inherently unpredictable", I said that the models don't predict climate.
A good model of a chaotic system is pathalogically sensitive to its starting state and some of its parameters. Each iteration is based on the results of the previous one. The iterations must be fine enough and the model complex enough to address all the important movements of heat in air and water in the world. After a dozen or a hundred iterations, you start seeing the extreme sensitivity to the initial conditions.
If you model weather, you can only get useful results for a couple of days out. Everything after that is basically an extrapolation of what is know to be occuring at the time.
Another reason climate change is hard to predict is that there are a number of buffering effects that interact with each other... you know... the warmer it is, the more water evaporate, making more clouds that reflect more sunlight and cause cooling. Or, the more CO2 in the air, the more plants, including ocean algae, and the faster plants grow, which uses up more CO2.
I believe the climate is changing. I believe that it has always been changing. Getting a bit warmer is a lot better than getting a bit cooler.
The beauty of modeling chaotic systems is that you can get any answer you want. If you are being paid to study global warming, you set it up with variables and parameters about how global warming is supposed to work and let er rip. If you don't get the results you expect, you adjust the model until it works properly.
The whole nature of chaotic systems is that iterative models cannot be used to predict future events. You can create models that demonstrates a theory, but the model is of little use in predicting what will actually happen.
Some things never change - death, taxes, and the fact that the climate is always changing.
Consider - if 911 had stranded people for a longer period and lots of people want trustworthy water. People that have some on hand start selling it, but realize that they are soon going to be out. The price goes up and you have people selling water for 20 bucks.
With cell phones, word gets out fast - if you can get water into that end of The City, you can make big bucks. Many people start working hard at getting water to the folks who need it.
Anyone can sell water for $15 bucks and have a huge market... no wait, the guy across the street is selling for $10, so $7... but now there are people wandering through the crowd selling for $5.
Pretty soon the price is not much higher and maybe even lower than it was before the disaster.
If there is a way of making a buck selling something, it always attracts others trying to cut in on the action with a lower price.
It is like sweatshops. As more people try to make a buck at it, wage rates are forced up.
... or perhaps just the possibility of getting to beat people. Or chain them in painful positions for hours on end.
The problem with decent people joining the Army is the possibiltiy that they will be given jobs that a decent person would find extremely disturbing to perform.
Although this certainly isn't the first time that has been true.
I started in a High School Computer club, learning Basic (for terminals) and Fortan (by punching cards and submitting batch jobs), using computer time donated by the local technical college in the late '70s. They had a medium-sized main-frame made by Xerox.
Times have changed. But I think text based is still the way to get into programming.
Even young kids can learn how to code HTML and make their own web pages. (Not that this is really programming, but it is a step in the right direction.)
Then, Linux and C/C++. Give them a good tutorial (book or online), and show them how to do "Hello, World!" using gcc.
The ones who are going to love it will pick up the basic idea in an hour or a day or few days. Then you give them K&R and... they either love it or they won't bother. Some people love it. They get to do what they love (or waste time, writing about it on SlashDot).
Possible Interesting Projects:
- funny programs where the computer complains that it feels funny, and starts going insane and asking the user funny questions and using the input to ask even more insane questions. Another variation of this is the program that looks like the computer is logged out, so you have to enter your password again... actually, if you tell your kid about this one, they will think it is so cool that within a few weeks, they will have been expelled from school.
- text-based role-playing games ("you come to a door on your left. Do you open it? y/n")
- game-of-life - checker board where each square might be empty or contain a fox and/or a mouse. Or modeling a forest fire or an election or the emotions in the stock market or the spread of a disease and the effect of using the vaccine, or...
- micro game of life - try to make a tiny system that behaves chaotically with 1 or 2 or 3 primary variables - "I say yes, you say no, you say stop, I say go" (actually that isn't chaotic; it is pretty predictable) or 3 girls deciding which movie to go to - try to do a three-body-problem where each of 3 objects tries to act in accordance to what the others are doing. Try to make chaotic behavior.
...the 'Lady of Justice' holding, instead of the scales, an M-16, for stories relating to the fact that the United States is one scary country, and getting scarier.
Maybe plants and animals require more genes if every single thing they do is hard-coded.
Or, at least, the more hard-coding there is, the more genes it takes.
As animals, humans aren't known for having the most advanced bodies; it is our brains that we are so proud of. Big brains must require a swack of genes (although big as in "more of the same" (maybe?) doesn't). But maybe brains that can train themselves to do things is easier to code for than hard-coding every aspect of life.
My brother and I both had one, and they would not stop barking if a cop or park ranger tried to talk to us.
They can sense the "copness" - the implied threat.
Re:The problem I have with essays....
on
The Age of the Essay
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I blame schools.
I hear you. I blame schools for a great deal.
Up here in Canada, there is a great amount of fussing about how to make the school system better.
The problem with schools is that at least 95% of what the students learn is crap. Rule-based, length-controlled essay writing is only a minor example.
Kids come out of school knowing next to nothing about how the things in the world actually work.
Instead the learn classification systems and definitions.
As another example, take chemistry. Kids learn various definitions. They learn how to balance ionic equations. They learn how to lie about their lab results. But they learn next to nothing about the interesting stuff... hydrocarbons - methane, ethane, propane, butane..., get those carbon chains long enough (mostly around 7 or 8 in a chain) and you have gasoline. Look at the benzene ring (six atoms in an extremely rigid flat hexagonal ring. Replace a hydrogen with an OH and you get phenol - what makes the soar throat spray stuff work. Instead of the OH, replace a hydrogen with a methyl group (CH3) and you get toluene, the main ingredient (I think) in nail-polish remover - great solvent. Replace a few more hydrogens with nitrate groups (NO3) and you get trinitrotoluene - TNT. Now kids, those NO3s are kind of unstable; give 'em a hit and they will loose one of those oxygens, which given half a chance will try to combine with the carbons and hydrogens in there.
Carbon and hydrogen love to combine with oxygen - we call it "burning". When TNT does it with oxygen that it supplies itself, we call it "blowing up".
My point is that there is a lot of interesting things to learn about in this world. Instead, kids go to school.
"We laugh because it hurts to much to cry." - R.A.H
I was going to make a snide remark about how this could possibly be, when people seek out humor because it is so much fun.
But then I thought, wait a minute, we all have (to one degree or another) a mechanism to feel bad if we see someone in pain. Perhaps, the reaction of finding something funny and laughing about it is an alternate mode for the brain to follow, to avoid going to deep into the feeling-bad mode inappropriately.
Or maybe laughing is the brain's way of rebooting (or resetting or recalibrating) the empathy circuit - so you don't keep feeling worse and worse as you find more and more pain around you.
These days, I would imagine that if a student wrote an essay about Hitler being a hero, the school would go nuts, realize that they have to call the parents, inform the principle, call the police?
We live in very oppresive times - believe the right thing, or else!
Maybe they don't want anyone to be able to do autonomous vehicles - they just want really smart people to come up with some good ideas that they can use.
Slashdot Mirror
How can they separate causality from correlation?
It certainly would not be surprising if violent people play more violent video games.
The number of rapes in public parks goes up with ice cream consumption; obviously we should ban ice cream.
They could patent a spoon with a bump in the middle of the bowl for eating calamari, and another one with ridges for eating baby carrots.
Packing data in this fashion is hardly new. They are just specifying a particular way of doing the packing for a particular purpose.
Maybe I shoud patent "Using a font-color of Red for the purpose of sending nasty mail to Bill"
Check out Sex Tips for Geeks
Actually, the essays in this section, as well as much of his other writing, make very interesting reading. I think this one can only be found via the site-map.
There must be interogation R&D. Can't you just imagine companies realizing that this market exists, and trying to develop new inventions to sell to good old Uncle Sam?
No, it's more like taking the average proportion of criminals in the largest several prisons.
A good model of a chaotic system is pathalogically sensitive to its starting state and some of its parameters. Each iteration is based on the results of the previous one. The iterations must be fine enough and the model complex enough to address all the important movements of heat in air and water in the world. After a dozen or a hundred iterations, you start seeing the extreme sensitivity to the initial conditions.
If you model weather, you can only get useful results for a couple of days out. Everything after that is basically an extrapolation of what is know to be occuring at the time.
Another reason climate change is hard to predict is that there are a number of buffering effects that interact with each other... you know... the warmer it is, the more water evaporate, making more clouds that reflect more sunlight and cause cooling. Or, the more CO2 in the air, the more plants, including ocean algae, and the faster plants grow, which uses up more CO2.
I believe the climate is changing. I believe that it has always been changing. Getting a bit warmer is a lot better than getting a bit cooler.
The whole nature of chaotic systems is that iterative models cannot be used to predict future events. You can create models that demonstrates a theory, but the model is of little use in predicting what will actually happen.
Some things never change - death, taxes, and the fact that the climate is always changing.
With cell phones, word gets out fast - if you can get water into that end of The City, you can make big bucks. Many people start working hard at getting water to the folks who need it.
Anyone can sell water for $15 bucks and have a huge market... no wait, the guy across the street is selling for $10, so $7... but now there are people wandering through the crowd selling for $5.
Pretty soon the price is not much higher and maybe even lower than it was before the disaster.
If there is a way of making a buck selling something, it always attracts others trying to cut in on the action with a lower price.
It is like sweatshops. As more people try to make a buck at it, wage rates are forced up.
The problem with decent people joining the Army is the possibiltiy that they will be given jobs that a decent person would find extremely disturbing to perform.
Although this certainly isn't the first time that has been true.
Times have changed. But I think text based is still the way to get into programming.
Even young kids can learn how to code HTML and make their own web pages. (Not that this is really programming, but it is a step in the right direction.)
Then, Linux and C/C++. Give them a good tutorial (book or online), and show them how to do "Hello, World!" using gcc.
The ones who are going to love it will pick up the basic idea in an hour or a day or few days. Then you give them K&R and... they either love it or they won't bother. Some people love it. They get to do what they love (or waste time, writing about it on SlashDot).
Possible Interesting Projects:
- funny programs where the computer complains that it feels funny, and starts going insane and asking the user funny questions and using the input to ask even more insane questions. Another variation of this is the program that looks like the computer is logged out, so you have to enter your password again... actually, if you tell your kid about this one, they will think it is so cool that within a few weeks, they will have been expelled from school.
- text-based role-playing games ("you come to a door on your left. Do you open it? y/n")
- game-of-life - checker board where each square might be empty or contain a fox and/or a mouse. Or modeling a forest fire or an election or the emotions in the stock market or the spread of a disease and the effect of using the vaccine, or...
- micro game of life - try to make a tiny system that behaves chaotically with 1 or 2 or 3 primary variables - "I say yes, you say no, you say stop, I say go" (actually that isn't chaotic; it is pretty predictable) or 3 girls deciding which movie to go to - try to do a three-body-problem where each of 3 objects tries to act in accordance to what the others are doing. Try to make chaotic behavior.
The 1959 MIT hackers were, a few years earlier, model-train-hackers.
If you are cracking by hacking, you are a hacker.
...the 'Lady of Justice' holding, instead of the scales, an M-16, for stories relating to the fact that the United States is one scary country, and getting scarier.
There is more than one way to deliver bombs - boats, for instance.
Or, at least, the more hard-coding there is, the more genes it takes.
As animals, humans aren't known for having the most advanced bodies; it is our brains that we are so proud of. Big brains must require a swack of genes (although big as in "more of the same" (maybe?) doesn't). But maybe brains that can train themselves to do things is easier to code for than hard-coding every aspect of life.
My brother and I both had one, and they would not stop barking if a cop or park ranger tried to talk to us.
They can sense the "copness" - the implied threat.
I hear you. I blame schools for a great deal.
Up here in Canada, there is a great amount of fussing about how to make the school system better. The problem with schools is that at least 95% of what the students learn is crap. Rule-based, length-controlled essay writing is only a minor example.
Kids come out of school knowing next to nothing about how the things in the world actually work. Instead the learn classification systems and definitions.
As another example, take chemistry. Kids learn various definitions. They learn how to balance ionic equations. They learn how to lie about their lab results. But they learn next to nothing about the interesting stuff... hydrocarbons - methane, ethane, propane, butane..., get those carbon chains long enough (mostly around 7 or 8 in a chain) and you have gasoline. Look at the benzene ring (six atoms in an extremely rigid flat hexagonal ring. Replace a hydrogen with an OH and you get phenol - what makes the soar throat spray stuff work. Instead of the OH, replace a hydrogen with a methyl group (CH3) and you get toluene, the main ingredient (I think) in nail-polish remover - great solvent. Replace a few more hydrogens with nitrate groups (NO3) and you get trinitrotoluene - TNT. Now kids, those NO3s are kind of unstable; give 'em a hit and they will loose one of those oxygens, which given half a chance will try to combine with the carbons and hydrogens in there. Carbon and hydrogen love to combine with oxygen - we call it "burning". When TNT does it with oxygen that it supplies itself, we call it "blowing up".
My point is that there is a lot of interesting things to learn about in this world. Instead, kids go to school.
I was going to make a snide remark about how this could possibly be, when people seek out humor because it is so much fun.
But then I thought, wait a minute, we all have (to one degree or another) a mechanism to feel bad if we see someone in pain. Perhaps, the reaction of finding something funny and laughing about it is an alternate mode for the brain to follow, to avoid going to deep into the feeling-bad mode inappropriately.
Or maybe laughing is the brain's way of rebooting (or resetting or recalibrating) the empathy circuit - so you don't keep feeling worse and worse as you find more and more pain around you.
We live in very oppresive times - believe the right thing, or else!
It would be so bad that people would be forced to think about what they want known about them.
It would make people take (some) responsibility for their own privacy.