I find this quite interesting - certain religious groups appears to be determined to attack evolution, while they're busy tilting at that windmill, they completely failed to see that Neuroscience is creeping up behind them and is going to have a much larger effect on what we consider humans to be.
Let's see - apart from direct research into religious or magical beliefs (in some circumstances linking them to say, temporal lobe epilepsy), there's been work on morality, which, to a large degree appears to be built-in. If people *are* moral without a crusty old religious book, then there goes one major crutch that religion depends on.
I was addicted to them for a few months, and eventually wrote a solver in PHP. Haven't done one since.
However, the best solver I've seen solves them with regexes. Regex ninjas scare the hell out of me.
Whilst he's a very good security researcher, Stefan Esser has a reputation for being very hard to work with.
He claims that month of PHP bugs was created because he couldn't get the fixes into PHP. Whilst this may be true for PHP, he recently announced a vulnerability in mod_security complete with P.O.C code as part of MOPB. This had nothing to do with PHP, and Esser didn't bother to notify the mod_security team before releasing it.
There were also other Change Blindness experiments which were more convincing, mainly conducted by Daniel Simons. For example, in one study, participants went into a room and asked to sign up for something. The person behind the desk, ducked down to get them a form, and a *different* person stood up and continued the conversation.
The vast majority of subjects didn't notice anything wrong, even when there were large differences in the two people.
Reconciliation analysis determines that there are two alternative explanations that account for the current distribution of anthropoid primate lice. The more parsimonious of the two solutions suggests that a Pthirus species switched from gorillas to humans. This analysis assumes that the divergence between Pediculus and Pthirus was contemporaneous with the split (i.e., a node of cospeciation) between gorillas and the lineage leading to chimpanzees and humans. Divergence date estimates, however, show that the nodes in the host and parasite trees are not contemporaneous. Rather, the shared coevolutionary history of the anthropoid primates and their lice contains a mixture of evolutionary events including cospeciation, parasite duplication, parasite extinction, and host switching. Based on these data, the coevolutionary history of primates and their lice has been anything but parsimonious.
Since this is sounding like a support group of recovering addicts: Hi, I'm Simon, I'm 27, and I owned an Amiga. It affected me so much that I spent an afternoon recreating the good times in XHTML.
Yeah, things like "mama" and "papa" tend to be independantly developed from infants babbling - there's an interesting discussion on it here, but I think we're well off topic now:)
Hmm.. how hard would it be to find chance similarities in any two codebases?
I work on the evolution of languages (shameless plug), and I know that it's quite possible to get the same words meaning the same thing, just due to change. For example "mata" means "eye" in both Greek and Maori, but there's just no chance that these languages are related anytime within the last, say, 20 thousand years, and this is just an outcome of plain old chance.
My question - how likely and to what degree is this sort of convergent evolution of code between two separate programs? Keeping in mind that there's a whole lot of functional constraints, i.e. both operating systems have to manage RAM somehow, or both have to manipulate graphics in some way, there are common good coding practices, there are common language idioms, etc.
So - how easy would it be, for Ballmer to find a chance similarity between linux and vista, and how would you distinguish between this and real similarity? (homoplasy vs. homology for you evolutionary biologists out there).
The paper's really interesting, it's currently in press in Current Biology. Abstract:
Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats to owls, chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during vertebrate hunting by nonhumans. At the Fongoli site in Senegal, we observed ten different chimpanzees use tools to hunt prosimian prey in 22 bouts.
This includes immature chimpanzees and females, members of age-sex classes not normally characterized by extensive hunting behavior. Chimpanzees made 26 different tools, and we were able to recover and analyze 12 of these. Tool construction entailed up to five steps, including trimming the tool tip to a point. Tools were used in the manner of a spear, rather than a probe or rousing tool. This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.
Should have the DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.042 when it's published (it's NOT active yet - give it some time).
However, from a quick reading of the paper, this seems to be a simple extension of the ant-nest probing behavior (i.e. jam a stick into a nest and feed off the ants/termites that rush out). What *is* interesting is that the chimps appear to have crafted these tools through a number of steps (which is uncommon, AFAIK, the only other animal to do this is the New Caledonian Crow.
Yeah, the shine's definitely gone off Google, eh? at the rate google (and yahoo) are swallowing up other sites there's going to be some major monopolising going on.
I think searching the web is one of the few bastions where closed source still rules, and it surprises me that no-one's really made an open source search engine. I'm aware that there are things like Nutch and ht:dig out there but their scope is completely different (site-wide searching primarily).
So - why don't we have an open source search engine? Pagerank is fairly easy to implement, and would serve as a good starting point for improvement. Writing apps to rank and sort web pages strikes me as the type of problem that a lot of smart people would find a lot of fun.
I know that it requires a crap load of infrastructure, but if Wikipedia can handle it. Besides, you can index one hell of a lot of pages with the standard few GB of bandwidth a month on cheap-ish hosting plans.
It's worse than that - this is bait-n-switch. Cleaning up the internet does not mean "stopping innocent Chinese watching perverted porn", it means "we'll pretend to protect your from goatse, but we're really interested in stopping you from seeing all that evil anti-communist propaganda out there".
Yeah, that same engine ruined Deus Ex 2 in the same way. Rather than having the feeling that you could just go anywhere and do anything, you were quickly shown that you only had a very small playing field and there was very little incentive to explore and try different approaches.
Re:Examples of horrible MySpace design?
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I don't know any offhand, but I always loved the Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards: First, and Second editions.
Slashdot Mirror
I find this quite interesting - certain religious groups appears to be determined to attack evolution, while they're busy tilting at that windmill, they completely failed to see that Neuroscience is creeping up behind them and is going to have a much larger effect on what we consider humans to be.
Let's see - apart from direct research into religious or magical beliefs (in some circumstances linking them to say, temporal lobe epilepsy), there's been work on morality, which, to a large degree appears to be built-in. If people *are* moral without a crusty old religious book, then there goes one major crutch that religion depends on.
Then there's the whole freewill issue.
I'm looking forward to fanboy posts about what Kevin Rose had for breakfast, and the turning off of threaded comments mode. Yay!
I, for one, welcome our brain-breaking evolving-hardware-Slashdot-blurb overlords.
I was addicted to them for a few months, and eventually wrote a solver in PHP. Haven't done one since. However, the best solver I've seen solves them with regexes. Regex ninjas scare the hell out of me.
Whilst he's a very good security researcher, Stefan Esser has a reputation for being very hard to work with.
He claims that month of PHP bugs was created because he couldn't get the fixes into PHP. Whilst this may be true for PHP, he recently announced a vulnerability in mod_security complete with P.O.C code as part of MOPB. This had nothing to do with PHP, and Esser didn't bother to notify the mod_security team before releasing it.
Dubya, is that you?
(trolling, I know)
What was that movie about subliminal advertising and the guns that caused people to black out for hours?
"Legally Blonde 2"
There were also other Change Blindness experiments which were more convincing, mainly conducted by Daniel Simons. For example, in one study, participants went into a room and asked to sign up for something. The person behind the desk, ducked down to get them a form, and a *different* person stood up and continued the conversation.
The vast majority of subjects didn't notice anything wrong, even when there were large differences in the two people.
In all of these competitions, why is it that the unreleased games are the ones that win?
Conclusion:
Since this is sounding like a support group of recovering addicts: Hi, I'm Simon, I'm 27, and I owned an Amiga. It affected me so much that I spent an afternoon recreating the good times in XHTML.
Yes, my bad. I was moving stuff around & trying to make it coherent. I must have missed that. You may mock me mercilessly.
Yeah, things like "mama" and "papa" tend to be independantly developed from infants babbling - there's an interesting discussion on it here, but I think we're well off topic now :)
--Simon
I know :)
n/t
Hmm.. how hard would it be to find chance similarities in any two codebases?
I work on the evolution of languages (shameless plug), and I know that it's quite possible to get the same words meaning the same thing, just due to change. For example "mata" means "eye" in both Greek and Maori, but there's just no chance that these languages are related anytime within the last, say, 20 thousand years, and this is just an outcome of plain old chance.
My question - how likely and to what degree is this sort of convergent evolution of code between two separate programs? Keeping in mind that there's a whole lot of functional constraints, i.e. both operating systems have to manage RAM somehow, or both have to manipulate graphics in some way, there are common good coding practices, there are common language idioms, etc.
So - how easy would it be, for Ballmer to find a chance similarity between linux and vista, and how would you distinguish between this and real similarity? (homoplasy vs. homology for you evolutionary biologists out there).
Should have the DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2006.12.042 when it's published (it's NOT active yet - give it some time).
However, from a quick reading of the paper, this seems to be a simple extension of the ant-nest probing behavior (i.e. jam a stick into a nest and feed off the ants/termites that rush out). What *is* interesting is that the chimps appear to have crafted these tools through a number of steps (which is uncommon, AFAIK, the only other animal to do this is the New Caledonian Crow.
Flowers replaced the designs with vacuum tubes
Ahhh.. so he's the guy who invented the internet, then?
Yeah, the shine's definitely gone off Google, eh? at the rate google (and yahoo) are swallowing up other sites there's going to be some major monopolising going on.
I think searching the web is one of the few bastions where closed source still rules, and it surprises me that no-one's really made an open source search engine. I'm aware that there are things like Nutch and ht:dig out there but their scope is completely different (site-wide searching primarily).
So - why don't we have an open source search engine? Pagerank is fairly easy to implement, and would serve as a good starting point for improvement. Writing apps to rank and sort web pages strikes me as the type of problem that a lot of smart people would find a lot of fun.
I know that it requires a crap load of infrastructure, but if Wikipedia can handle it. Besides, you can index one hell of a lot of pages with the standard few GB of bandwidth a month on cheap-ish hosting plans.
So - why not?
No, they've just been disappeared into Gitmo with no chance of a fair trial this side of 2017.
It's worse than that - this is bait-n-switch. Cleaning up the internet does not mean "stopping innocent Chinese watching perverted porn", it means "we'll pretend to protect your from goatse, but we're really interested in stopping you from seeing all that evil anti-communist propaganda out there".
Well sure, but the best comment you're ever going to see on Digg is either 'Blogspam!' or 'Lame! No Digg'
and don't forget Sam 'n' Max either - they're cheap, and fun and (IMO) hold true to the original Sam'n'Max game.
Yeah, that same engine ruined Deus Ex 2 in the same way. Rather than having the feeling that you could just go anywhere and do anything, you were quickly shown that you only had a very small playing field and there was very little incentive to explore and try different approaches.
I don't know any offhand, but I always loved the Annual MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards: First, and Second editions.