The professor of philosophy is actually wrong. We don't understand what time is any better then clocks do. We are complicated, ad infinitum refined "clocks" for mindless, insentient set of genes who aren't even aware of us. Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
No, this is wrong. The professor is right; we do understand time and computers do not. In fact, we are capable of an understanding of time in a way which is impossible to communicate to computers or even any other forms consciousnesses. We understand time because we have an inherent sense of causality built into us, and time is the name we have given to the way we relate causal events. In fact, we are so good with time that we can construct dynamic experiments in our mind, using our own mind as a model and track the state of the modelled mind in time.
Consider the following experiment. A little child watches his mother put a bar of chocolate in the fridge. Little later daddy sneaks in and eats the chocolate. The little boy giggles; why? Because he knows that as far as mommy is concerned the chocolate is still there in the fridge and she will be surprised when she looks for it. How does he know? Because he constructed a simulation in his head of his mommy's mind, fed it a sequence of stimuli and observed its evolution over time. This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
"Amazon" may not care, but "Amazon" doesn't make hiring decisions either. Individuals in Amazon do and they are as subject to societal prejudices as anybody. Not that I know anything about how women are treated in the Seattle tech industry, but this anthropomorphizing of large organizations is pretty silly.
There was an idea like this floated in the 1990s, called Strato station or something. Balloons at 80km altitude (in the stratosphere) providing coverage. I seem to remember that Loral and Alenia Spaziale were both involved to some extent. It was abandoned because it is too difficult to keep balloons static (even at that altitude) and this would need expensive tracking antennae on the ground (in the 1990s digital beamforming was simply not available for commercial use). Anybody else remember this? It was around the time when the whole world (including Microsoft, remember Teledesic?) was planning to do 'internet in the sky' kind of things.
This has something to do with India's recent increased interest in cruise missiles. The Indian Armed forces just recently tested a sub-sonic, nuclear capable cruise missile.
No wireless link operates at an SINR of -40dB. You are mixing up SINR and RSSI. An SINR of 19dB is actually very reasonable; LTE will achieve its top rates only at SINR of 30dB or so.
Till the point where the 'automated' is considered more important than the 'testing' part and people stop tinkering with the software anymore ; oh, the automated tester will test __everything__.
That may be, but there are other issues as well. As a tech lead, I frequently hear from a developer, "for feature X, we can either create a brand new state machine, or add to that for existing feature Y; its not too big a deal." Which we finally do also depends on my judgement of this person's capability to make changes to the code-base (it can break a new guy's confidence to be given something too big for him/her to chew, even if they volunteered for it), how much additional testing (regression testing) will be required, whether I need to tell the customer or not (I work in communications software and we can barely test 50% of our feature set in the lab; there are always things happening in the field we don't anticipate).
If we write a new state machine, there may be subtle things that the old state machine handled, which we haven't thought of. On the other hand, if we modify the existing state machine, we may break existing stuff. In either case there is a chance of getting it wrong, but fear causes you to suspend judgement and replace it by paranoia or wishful thinking. Worse, your developers get infected by the same fear and start suspending their judgement.
[2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.
One of the reasons why classrooms work is that the students, knowingly or unknowingly are being constantly evaluated. A good teacher makes a statement (or writes a theorem on the board) and then looks around the class; one look is enough to let her know how many of the students understood, how many didn't and how many (as my father, a professor of EE for 42 years says) haven't even understood that they haven't understood - usually the vast majority. She then restates it, or provides a counter-example, or asks one student to tell her what he understood. This allows the teacher to 'pace' the class. A good teacher also provides breaks within the delivery, to allow the students to sit back and digest what they have heard. This cannot be done fully aposteriori. Each class is different and requires a different pace at different parts of the course. I don't see how this gap is handled through online lectures.
Nevertheless, successful MOOCs have been around for 500 years; they are called textbooks. I am teaching myself Riemannian Geometry using Prof. doCarmo's book as numerous amateurs and auto didacts have done before me. Books, with supporting online forums for specific questions (such as stackexchange) allow one to try and follow at one's own pace, find alternate proofs and alternate explanations of material (for me, it usually takes two good text books).
I was indeed thinking of Giordano Bruno, but he was one of many. The astronomer Cecco d'Ascoli was also burned alive for suggesting that men may live on both sides of a round earth.
You realize of course that there was a time about 500 years back, when scientists were actually burned at the stake for having the wrong theory?
Bernhard Riemann came up with his 'The hypotheses that lie at the fundamentals of geometry' in a lecture which was part of his interview process. He was trying to get a position as a teacher in Heidelberg University where they wouldn't' pay him a salary; just give him a room to hold lectures in and a percentage of the fees that students would volunteer to pay. And this was fairly typical of scientists in the past. Other than a select few, scientists lived in rags, home-taught their kids (since they couldn't afford good schools) and died in penury. Things have been much, much worse for scientists in the past.
I don't want to trivialize the issues that scientists are facing today (my own sister is a scientist and I hear her fights for funding all the time), but please understand that things are way better today than they were in the past.
Its unlikely that it is able to "hack into" the base band processor. What it probably does is to pose as a genuine tower and offer to carry the cell phone signals. This then causes the baseband processor to start negotiating with it and bingo, all kinds of stuff is revealed about the phone! That kind of thing would be nearly impossible to keep hidden from the operator; operators routinely do drive by tests using handheld testers and they would know for sure. Given that the operator hasn't done anything about it is fishy.
Muslim rulers in India have always had soldiers and generals of all religions. Aurangzeb was hardly anybody's idea of a "liberal" ruler; he re-imposed jaziya and banned music from the court, among other things and yet his principal general was Rana Jai Singh of Amber, a Rajput Hindu.
zakat is not entirely a tax, it is supposed to be a voluntary donation of about 10% of one's income to charity. It goes directly to the wakf, the charitable board, which maintains mosques, feeds the poor, etc. The purpose of jaziya is also to balance the fact that non Muslim conquered people were not required to serve in the army (in fact, there was an actual prohibition) but Muslims were./Indian Hindu, but I see the logic, really.
Wierdest is when folks IM you asking for your extension number, so that they can call. When there is a fully working directory service. One of the reasons I had to permanently log out of sametime.
As it happens, Americans are too nice about their own time. If a meeting is more than 5 minutes overdue Scandinavians (and Germans) will brusquely get up and leave. Americans sit around and chew the fat waiting for somebody else to make the move.
In many countries, these problems are partially solved by having third party administrators, who actually take care of verifying medical bills and making payments - insurance companies are not directly allowed to process bills, they only administer the policy and calculate premia, etc.
If nothing else, you may be able to help some of these twenty somethings as they transition into becoming mature adults with families and children in their lives. I have one such guy in my team now - he still doesn't understand that with a pregnant wife, he had better damned well push back on unnecessary stuff so as to go home in time every evening. None of the other guys, including the completely asocial punk of a team lead understands; I am the only one who can stick up for him, having been in the same situation 10 years back.
Its more complex than that. People who tend to eat much more processed food also numb their tastebuds, so freshly cooked, mildly flavoured food actually is tasteless to them. The problem is that their tastebuds no longer work. It takes some time for a person to start enjoying home cooked food - their tastebuds have to catch up
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But all of it doesn't even matter.
The professor of philosophy is actually wrong. We don't understand what time is any better then clocks do. We are complicated, ad infinitum refined "clocks" for mindless, insentient set of genes who aren't even aware of us. Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
No, this is wrong. The professor is right; we do understand time and computers do not. In fact, we are capable of an understanding of time in a way which is impossible to communicate to computers or even any other forms consciousnesses. We understand time because we have an inherent sense of causality built into us, and time is the name we have given to the way we relate causal events. In fact, we are so good with time that we can construct dynamic experiments in our mind, using our own mind as a model and track the state of the modelled mind in time.
Consider the following experiment. A little child watches his mother put a bar of chocolate in the fridge. Little later daddy sneaks in and eats the chocolate. The little boy giggles; why? Because he knows that as far as mommy is concerned the chocolate is still there in the fridge and she will be surprised when she looks for it. How does he know? Because he constructed a simulation in his head of his mommy's mind, fed it a sequence of stimuli and observed its evolution over time. This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
"Amazon" may not care, but "Amazon" doesn't make hiring decisions either. Individuals in Amazon do and they are as subject to societal prejudices as anybody. Not that I know anything about how women are treated in the Seattle tech industry, but this anthropomorphizing of large organizations is pretty silly.
Europe is already planning an HVDC super-grid to cover the entire continent by 2020.
Sorry, ARM is doing excellent work as a CPU (design) company. The whole smartphone/tablet business is riding on their coat-tails. So is nVidia.
They do. Otherwise the receivers will have to continuously correct the link timing and Doppler. The link capacity will be degraded.
There was an idea like this floated in the 1990s, called Strato station or something. Balloons at 80km altitude (in the stratosphere) providing coverage. I seem to remember that Loral and Alenia Spaziale were both involved to some extent. It was abandoned because it is too difficult to keep balloons static (even at that altitude) and this would need expensive tracking antennae on the ground (in the 1990s digital beamforming was simply not available for commercial use). Anybody else remember this? It was around the time when the whole world (including Microsoft, remember Teledesic?) was planning to do 'internet in the sky' kind of things.
This has something to do with India's recent increased interest in cruise missiles. The Indian Armed forces just recently tested a sub-sonic, nuclear capable cruise missile.
Machiavelli: If you have to do bad things, don't do them by dribs and drabs. Do them upfront in one fell swoop.
Thanks. This is a little more understandable, once I read the wikipedia entry and saw the phase diagram.
No wireless link operates at an SINR of -40dB. You are mixing up SINR and RSSI. An SINR of 19dB is actually very reasonable; LTE will achieve its top rates only at SINR of 30dB or so.
Till the point where the 'automated' is considered more important than the 'testing' part and people stop tinkering with the software anymore ; oh, the automated tester will test __everything__.
That may be, but there are other issues as well. As a tech lead, I frequently hear from a developer, "for feature X, we can either create a brand new state machine, or add to that for existing feature Y; its not too big a deal." Which we finally do also depends on my judgement of this person's capability to make changes to the code-base (it can break a new guy's confidence to be given something too big for him/her to chew, even if they volunteered for it), how much additional testing (regression testing) will be required, whether I need to tell the customer or not (I work in communications software and we can barely test 50% of our feature set in the lab; there are always things happening in the field we don't anticipate).
If we write a new state machine, there may be subtle things that the old state machine handled, which we haven't thought of. On the other hand, if we modify the existing state machine, we may break existing stuff. In either case there is a chance of getting it wrong, but fear causes you to suspend judgement and replace it by paranoia or wishful thinking. Worse, your developers get infected by the same fear and start suspending their judgement.
[2] is a very common problem, not just because of a badly written code-base, but mostly (IMHO) because of people not having the time to understand a complex piece of code. Ends up in 'nearly' the same code being written in a dozen different places. In my knowledge, it doesn't immediately screw things up, but, over time as the garbage accumulates leads to extremely interesting failure scenarios.
One of the reasons why classrooms work is that the students, knowingly or unknowingly are being constantly evaluated. A good teacher makes a statement (or writes a theorem on the board) and then looks around the class; one look is enough to let her know how many of the students understood, how many didn't and how many (as my father, a professor of EE for 42 years says) haven't even understood that they haven't understood - usually the vast majority. She then restates it, or provides a counter-example, or asks one student to tell her what he understood. This allows the teacher to 'pace' the class. A good teacher also provides breaks within the delivery, to allow the students to sit back and digest what they have heard. This cannot be done fully aposteriori. Each class is different and requires a different pace at different parts of the course. I don't see how this gap is handled through online lectures.
Nevertheless, successful MOOCs have been around for 500 years; they are called textbooks. I am teaching myself Riemannian Geometry using Prof. doCarmo's book as numerous amateurs and auto didacts have done before me. Books, with supporting online forums for specific questions (such as stackexchange) allow one to try and follow at one's own pace, find alternate proofs and alternate explanations of material (for me, it usually takes two good text books).
I was indeed thinking of Giordano Bruno, but he was one of many. The astronomer Cecco d'Ascoli was also burned alive for suggesting that men may live on both sides of a round earth.
You realize of course that there was a time about 500 years back, when scientists were actually burned at the stake for having the wrong theory?
Bernhard Riemann came up with his 'The hypotheses that lie at the fundamentals of geometry' in a lecture which was part of his interview process. He was trying to get a position as a teacher in Heidelberg University where they wouldn't' pay him a salary; just give him a room to hold lectures in and a percentage of the fees that students would volunteer to pay. And this was fairly typical of scientists in the past. Other than a select few, scientists lived in rags, home-taught their kids (since they couldn't afford good schools) and died in penury. Things have been much, much worse for scientists in the past.
I don't want to trivialize the issues that scientists are facing today (my own sister is a scientist and I hear her fights for funding all the time), but please understand that things are way better today than they were in the past.
Its unlikely that it is able to "hack into" the base band processor. What it probably does is to pose as a genuine tower and offer to carry the cell phone signals. This then causes the baseband processor to start negotiating with it and bingo, all kinds of stuff is revealed about the phone! That kind of thing would be nearly impossible to keep hidden from the operator; operators routinely do drive by tests using handheld testers and they would know for sure. Given that the operator hasn't done anything about it is fishy.
Paraphrasing something I just read somewhere on the Internet:
When somebody says 'the cloud', mentally replace it by 'somebody else's computer'.
Muslim rulers in India have always had soldiers and generals of all religions. Aurangzeb was hardly anybody's idea of a "liberal" ruler; he re-imposed jaziya and banned music from the court, among other things and yet his principal general was Rana Jai Singh of Amber, a Rajput Hindu.
zakat is not entirely a tax, it is supposed to be a voluntary donation of about 10% of one's income to charity. It goes directly to the wakf, the charitable board, which maintains mosques, feeds the poor, etc. The purpose of jaziya is also to balance the fact that non Muslim conquered people were not required to serve in the army (in fact, there was an actual prohibition) but Muslims were. /Indian Hindu, but I see the logic, really.
Wierdest is when folks IM you asking for your extension number, so that they can call. When there is a fully working directory service. One of the reasons I had to permanently log out of sametime.
As it happens, Americans are too nice about their own time. If a meeting is more than 5 minutes overdue Scandinavians (and Germans) will brusquely get up and leave. Americans sit around and chew the fat waiting for somebody else to make the move.
In many countries, these problems are partially solved by having third party administrators, who actually take care of verifying medical bills and making payments - insurance companies are not directly allowed to process bills, they only administer the policy and calculate premia, etc.
If nothing else, you may be able to help some of these twenty somethings as they transition into becoming mature adults with families and children in their lives. I have one such guy in my team now - he still doesn't understand that with a pregnant wife, he had better damned well push back on unnecessary stuff so as to go home in time every evening. None of the other guys, including the completely asocial punk of a team lead understands; I am the only one who can stick up for him, having been in the same situation 10 years back.
Its more complex than that. People who tend to eat much more processed food also numb their tastebuds, so freshly cooked, mildly flavoured food actually is tasteless to them. The problem is that their tastebuds no longer work. It takes some time for a person to start enjoying home cooked food - their tastebuds have to catch up