Actually, "the uncanny valley" kicks in when an animator does NOT push the motion hard enough. Look up "caricature" in any textbook on animation. There was a lot of very subtle animation (and very exaggerated animation) in THE INCREDIBLES, yet the figures themselves were highly stylized. The animators for FINAL FANTASY, on the other hand, shot themselves in the foot by muting all motion with "between-like" gradients (real animals don't move that way) and muting the lighting (no "modeling"). Hyperbole is what you want.
"without this incentive good TV and movies won't get shown on broadcast television."
Come again? The greatest irony of all is that the high-tech home cinema with surround sound and high definition arrives when there is less and less to justify it. I'll worry when they start "flagging" books.
The Japanese "invisibility cloak" is nothing more than the front projection technique used in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and many other films. That's like claiming that we have a super weapon that can hit an enemy anywhere -- provided he stands right here on this spot marked X. The alleged surgical and pilotting applications sound equally silly. It is an infinite regression of "if we can fit a camera in front of the surgeon's hands, we can project an image behind them to make a really cool effect that they are invisible!"
What about Tesla's radio controlled torpedo boat (patent 613,809) from the 1890s -- or does this "oldest" award apply to humanoid robots only? Tesla is also responsible for the first logical AND gate (patents 723,188 and 725,605 from 1903) to insure against enemy jamming.
Use the iPod like a hard-drive and make an encrypted disk image (.dmg) file. Put your sensitive stuff in there -- this method requires a Mac, of course. An iPod-accessible secure file sounds like you're crossing the boundary into PDA country.
Perhaps it was a test bed for Tiger's "Spotlight" feature? The iTunes library search looks a lot like Spotlight (from a purely interface point of view) -- but what the heck do I know? I'm not a coder.
Ion propulsion would be the last drive I'd consider for human transport. It is extremely low thrust, but can maintain drive for a very long time. Take a look at nuclear thermal rockets at nuclearspace.com. The book TO THE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM is an excellent primer on the technology and history.
I think it was the TOS Trek episode "Spock's Brain" where Scotty commented on an ion-driven ship, "they could teach us a thing or two!" Right.
I've run into some very slick voice recognition software -- some of it is in use on telephone navigation systems (rather than having to punch a number). Considering the world-wide nature of one company I found using this, it must be very reliable. (The person I finally ended up talking to said that the system rarely stumbles.)
the moon was formed when the planet was hit by a rock, and the planet is still here.
Perhaps, but that is only one of four primary theories on how Luna was formed. An event catastrophic to human civilization need not be catastrophic to Earth and all life on it.
In Colin Kapp's short story "Gottlos" the VR operator of a robot tank identifies too closely with his warmech when it is dismembered by an enemy machine. He recovers from his shock to learn that his opponent, Gottlos, has suffered an even worse fate, for Gottlos is not a remotely controlled VR tank...
And because it is "expanding," it is getting bigger. When the universe reaches the standing wave frequency of the Great Superstring, it will all vibrate apart.
Re:Occam's Razor and the "simpler theory"
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 1
In the absence of interaction with other people, do you believe that your "awareness", "personality" and "self" continue to exist?
I ask for compelling arguments and you give me philosophy 101 puzzles. "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?" You can prove anything with such games. Pythagoras believed that "truth" could be deduced by logic, but scientists rely on physical evidence. It is all we have. "But the senses are fallible to illusion." Again, that's all we have. The best we can do is check for consistency. Shall we take a stab at Zeno's paradox next?
before I say more, you should probably tell me what you think a soul is.
I didn't say, and neither have you. Soul is a type of music. Other than that, animism is a fiction from a time before the scientific method, or an "explanation" by those who've given up looking for an explanation. It doesn't hurt to say "I don't know." But many people can't stand not knowing, so they resort to comforting fictions and wishful thinking. Big Bang cosmology posits a beginning and an end to the universe, and an edge, yet there is no proof of these things. As the cop told the fender-bender victim, "there is a vast difference between not seeing anything and seeing that there is nothing."
But it turns out that if you look directly at the problem in a particular way
Cross-eyed and slightly drunk? Always a good conditional escape clause. "Well you're just not looking at it right." I gave several examples. You have yet to produce a single argument.
prove the existance of... alien intelligences
Since we're going for semantic rigor, I assume you mean "extraterrestrial" intelligences (plural)? Let me guess -- Stonehenge, or Easter Island, or some other "impossible" structure that weak and stupid humans could not have built without the aid of powered machinery?
it requires a highly logical mind with education / familiarity with topics ranging from modern physics, artificial intelligence and advanced mathematics, to biology and psychology.
Another common escape clause. "You're not trained enough in the esoteric arts to understand." The specialist who cannot make himself understood to the layman is probably not very sure of the subject himself.
As I stated previously, math is not truth and cannot prove anything. Math is a language for describing the physical world. When the math fails to dovetail with the world, then the model is wrong, not the other way around. Keep in mind that math was invented by humans, not extracted from the fabric of the universe. Numerology and other mathematical coincidences are just coincidences -- many coincidences vanish when converted to a different number base. I am not Diderot, and you won't fluster me with non sequitur equations.
Biology? You're not going to use the "watchmaker" argument on me? That's the idea that if a plant or animal is too complex for you to grasp, or if a step in evolution is too major a leap for you to accept, there must be A Great Designer behind it all. No other explanation will fit, such as we might be missing a piece of the puzzle, or perhaps a model is wrong? Again we see the failure of imagination -- or an excess of it. Mysteries take time to puzzle out. Don't give up because we don't currently know. You'll give the kids a bad example.
As for modern physics, I already commented on that, but I doubt you bothered to read the article. Little by little mankind weeds out the bad theories -- and we still have plenty of them around. The most absurd notion in modern physics is that of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. That idea already bit Lord Kelvin in the butt, yet many persist in repeating the mistake. Even if the universe is finite, it is still large enough that I doubt mankind will ever run out of questions to ask and theories to repair. Don't be so quick to "30" it all with a simple and unfounded answer.
Re:Occam's Razor and the "simpler theory"
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 1
You made good points about my loose language. No, our crude understanding of the brain does not "explain" awareness. However there is abundant evidence that awareness, personality and the "self" are physical. As previously noted, drugs, drunkeness and even accidents can alter the personality. I don't remember the details, but there is a case in psychology of a railroad worker from the late 1800s -- Gage, I think. He was tamping a charge with an iron rod when the charge ignited. The rod was blown through his skull -- entering under the left cheek and exiting top right cranium. Gage survived the accident and seemed lucid on the ride back to town. In later years he seemed normal enough, but was prone to sudden rages of bad temper without apparent provocation.
In a bid to "prove" the existence of the soul, someone once tried the "damaged car" argument on me; the idea that the body is just a vehicle the soul controls. That a damaged, drugged or drunken body was like a defective car. That argument was nothing more than a rationalization for what the proponent wished to believe. No, science has not yet explained awareness, but the soul is still an unnecessary hypothesis.
I am interested in your "proof" of the soul, either here on this public forum, or by e-mail (metryq at earthlink dot net). I'll warn you now that I'm an empiricist and won't be swayed by ethereal or philosophical notions. I'm not one of those "agnostic" sorts who grants that "god may or may not exist" just to be "fair." I expect compelling evidence.
But back to the original topic of Einsteinian Relativity and the spookiness of quantum mechanics, there are other cosmologies. The evidence presented by Flandern et al have convinced me that the speed of light is not a universal limit (gravity is much faster), that space does not warp, and red shift is not a reliable distance indicator in the cosmos.
Occam's Razor and the "simpler theory"
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, Occam's Razor is not "the simpler theory is usually the right one," it is "create no unnecessary hypotheses." That may sound the same, but it's not. For example, many religions posit a soul or other non-corporeal entity that persists after the death of the body. Modern science doesn't claim to have a firm grip on sentience and awareness, but it appears to be a highly complex system of nervous reactions. (I imagine most of the Slashdot crowd knows that a complex system of conditionals, like a computer, can seem very life-like.) The point is, the mechanistic understanding of awareness explains it without recourse to a soul. Consider the natural chemicals in our bodies that contribute to mood, or artificial chemicals (like drugs or alcohol) that can alter one's personality, or even cases of trauma to the head, and "soul" is left as nothing but a non-explanation -- an unnecessary hypothesis.
Another non-explanation is the idea that "warped space" explains gravity. All it does is push the explanation back one step from "what is gravity?" to "why do masses warp space?" So which is the correct theory? I don't think there is one, and our ideas or "understanding" of the universe will continue to evolve with everything else around us. The Pythagoreans believed that math was truth, and that reality was merely an imperfect shadow of the real world hidden beyond the veil of our senses. Well, this isn't the Matrix, an no amount of passion for "perfect" answers (like "elegant" equations or crystal spheres in the sky) will make it so.
You want an alternative theory? Give Tom Van Flandern's Meta Model a try. It may be no better than the orthodoxy of Einsteinian Relativity and quantum mechanics, but at least it won't resort to mathematical trickery and the comforting reassurance of what we'd LIKE to believe. A good introductory article may be found at:
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/physicshasitsp ri nciples.asp
This sounds like the "carbon powder rocket to the moon" perversity mentioned in Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I can imagine some companies running more discreet ads that they paid to keep the skies clear.
Copy protection is nothing. Digital TV will have nastier surprises in store. All of us are abundantly aware by now that duplicating copyrighted films is illegal, but that doesn't stop some publishers from putting up THREE warnings that the FBI, CIA, Interpol and the KGB will come and get us. With videotape and laserdisc you could always zip through those notices, but not with DVD. Set-top DVD players are semi-literate computers, which means that you can give them instructions like "over-ride all user controls" so that you must sit through it.
Digital TV may do the same thing with ads. All of a sudden your volume, mute, change channel and power-off buttons will not work -- until the ad is over, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
"The aqueduct."
Actually, "the uncanny valley" kicks in when an animator does NOT push the motion hard enough. Look up "caricature" in any textbook on animation. There was a lot of very subtle animation (and very exaggerated animation) in THE INCREDIBLES, yet the figures themselves were highly stylized. The animators for FINAL FANTASY, on the other hand, shot themselves in the foot by muting all motion with "between-like" gradients (real animals don't move that way) and muting the lighting (no "modeling"). Hyperbole is what you want.
No, the beta does not support trapping yet.
"without this incentive good TV and movies won't get shown on broadcast television."
Come again? The greatest irony of all is that the high-tech home cinema with surround sound and high definition arrives when there is less and less to justify it. I'll worry when they start "flagging" books.
There is also a scene where Bond must sneak past some guards and get back in his car...he "hides" behind the car for coverage.
The Japanese "invisibility cloak" is nothing more than the front projection technique used in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and many other films. That's like claiming that we have a super weapon that can hit an enemy anywhere -- provided he stands right here on this spot marked X. The alleged surgical and pilotting applications sound equally silly. It is an infinite regression of "if we can fit a camera in front of the surgeon's hands, we can project an image behind them to make a really cool effect that they are invisible!"
What about Tesla's radio controlled torpedo boat (patent 613,809) from the 1890s -- or does this "oldest" award apply to humanoid robots only? Tesla is also responsible for the first logical AND gate (patents 723,188 and 725,605 from 1903) to insure against enemy jamming.
"Your grandma already uses Linux on the desktop, ever hear of Google?"
Right, only there seems to be some confusion over "Red Hat."
Use the iPod like a hard-drive and make an encrypted disk image (.dmg) file. Put your sensitive stuff in there -- this method requires a Mac, of course. An iPod-accessible secure file sounds like you're crossing the boundary into PDA country.
"Apple has far too much tied up in MP3 hardware to switch quickly"
What the heck are you talking about?
iPod formats (direct from the Apple site): AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF, Audible
Perhaps it was a test bed for Tiger's "Spotlight" feature? The iTunes library search looks a lot like Spotlight (from a purely interface point of view) -- but what the heck do I know? I'm not a coder.
Ion propulsion would be the last drive I'd consider for human transport. It is extremely low thrust, but can maintain drive for a very long time. Take a look at nuclear thermal rockets at nuclearspace.com. The book TO THE END OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM is an excellent primer on the technology and history.
I think it was the TOS Trek episode "Spock's Brain" where Scotty commented on an ion-driven ship, "they could teach us a thing or two!" Right.
I've run into some very slick voice recognition software -- some of it is in use on telephone navigation systems (rather than having to punch a number). Considering the world-wide nature of one company I found using this, it must be very reliable. (The person I finally ended up talking to said that the system rarely stumbles.)
I want one that looks like V.I.N.CENT from "The Black Hole."
Perhaps, but that is only one of four primary theories on how Luna was formed. An event catastrophic to human civilization need not be catastrophic to Earth and all life on it.
In Colin Kapp's short story "Gottlos" the VR operator of a robot tank identifies too closely with his warmech when it is dismembered by an enemy machine. He recovers from his shock to learn that his opponent, Gottlos, has suffered an even worse fate, for Gottlos is not a remotely controlled VR tank...
Yeah, brown nosing God to keep the universe around a little longer doesn't sound too good.
Be sure to pull that spit valve once in a while.
And because it is "expanding," it is getting bigger. When the universe reaches the standing wave frequency of the Great Superstring, it will all vibrate apart.
I ask for compelling arguments and you give me philosophy 101 puzzles. "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?" You can prove anything with such games. Pythagoras believed that "truth" could be deduced by logic, but scientists rely on physical evidence. It is all we have. "But the senses are fallible to illusion." Again, that's all we have. The best we can do is check for consistency. Shall we take a stab at Zeno's paradox next?
before I say more, you should probably tell me what you think a soul is.
I didn't say, and neither have you. Soul is a type of music. Other than that, animism is a fiction from a time before the scientific method, or an "explanation" by those who've given up looking for an explanation. It doesn't hurt to say "I don't know." But many people can't stand not knowing, so they resort to comforting fictions and wishful thinking. Big Bang cosmology posits a beginning and an end to the universe, and an edge, yet there is no proof of these things. As the cop told the fender-bender victim, "there is a vast difference between not seeing anything and seeing that there is nothing."
But it turns out that if you look directly at the problem in a particular way
Cross-eyed and slightly drunk? Always a good conditional escape clause. "Well you're just not looking at it right." I gave several examples. You have yet to produce a single argument.
prove the existance of ... alien intelligences
Since we're going for semantic rigor, I assume you mean "extraterrestrial" intelligences (plural)? Let me guess -- Stonehenge, or Easter Island, or some other "impossible" structure that weak and stupid humans could not have built without the aid of powered machinery?
it requires a highly logical mind with education / familiarity with topics ranging from modern physics, artificial intelligence and advanced mathematics, to biology and psychology.
Another common escape clause. "You're not trained enough in the esoteric arts to understand." The specialist who cannot make himself understood to the layman is probably not very sure of the subject himself.
As I stated previously, math is not truth and cannot prove anything. Math is a language for describing the physical world. When the math fails to dovetail with the world, then the model is wrong, not the other way around. Keep in mind that math was invented by humans, not extracted from the fabric of the universe. Numerology and other mathematical coincidences are just coincidences -- many coincidences vanish when converted to a different number base. I am not Diderot, and you won't fluster me with non sequitur equations.
Biology? You're not going to use the "watchmaker" argument on me? That's the idea that if a plant or animal is too complex for you to grasp, or if a step in evolution is too major a leap for you to accept, there must be A Great Designer behind it all. No other explanation will fit, such as we might be missing a piece of the puzzle, or perhaps a model is wrong? Again we see the failure of imagination -- or an excess of it. Mysteries take time to puzzle out. Don't give up because we don't currently know. You'll give the kids a bad example.
As for modern physics, I already commented on that, but I doubt you bothered to read the article. Little by little mankind weeds out the bad theories -- and we still have plenty of them around. The most absurd notion in modern physics is that of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. That idea already bit Lord Kelvin in the butt, yet many persist in repeating the mistake. Even if the universe is finite, it is still large enough that I doubt mankind will ever run out of questions to ask and theories to repair. Don't be so quick to "30" it all with a simple and unfounded answer.
You made good points about my loose language. No, our crude understanding of the brain does not "explain" awareness. However there is abundant evidence that awareness, personality and the "self" are physical. As previously noted, drugs, drunkeness and even accidents can alter the personality. I don't remember the details, but there is a case in psychology of a railroad worker from the late 1800s -- Gage, I think. He was tamping a charge with an iron rod when the charge ignited. The rod was blown through his skull -- entering under the left cheek and exiting top right cranium. Gage survived the accident and seemed lucid on the ride back to town. In later years he seemed normal enough, but was prone to sudden rages of bad temper without apparent provocation.
In a bid to "prove" the existence of the soul, someone once tried the "damaged car" argument on me; the idea that the body is just a vehicle the soul controls. That a damaged, drugged or drunken body was like a defective car. That argument was nothing more than a rationalization for what the proponent wished to believe. No, science has not yet explained awareness, but the soul is still an unnecessary hypothesis.
I am interested in your "proof" of the soul, either here on this public forum, or by e-mail (metryq at earthlink dot net). I'll warn you now that I'm an empiricist and won't be swayed by ethereal or philosophical notions. I'm not one of those "agnostic" sorts who grants that "god may or may not exist" just to be "fair." I expect compelling evidence.
But back to the original topic of Einsteinian Relativity and the spookiness of quantum mechanics, there are other cosmologies. The evidence presented by Flandern et al have convinced me that the speed of light is not a universal limit (gravity is much faster), that space does not warp, and red shift is not a reliable distance indicator in the cosmos.
Actually, Occam's Razor is not "the simpler theory is usually the right one," it is "create no unnecessary hypotheses." That may sound the same, but it's not. For example, many religions posit a soul or other non-corporeal entity that persists after the death of the body. Modern science doesn't claim to have a firm grip on sentience and awareness, but it appears to be a highly complex system of nervous reactions. (I imagine most of the Slashdot crowd knows that a complex system of conditionals, like a computer, can seem very life-like.) The point is, the mechanistic understanding of awareness explains it without recourse to a soul. Consider the natural chemicals in our bodies that contribute to mood, or artificial chemicals (like drugs or alcohol) that can alter one's personality, or even cases of trauma to the head, and "soul" is left as nothing but a non-explanation -- an unnecessary hypothesis.
p ri nciples.asp
Another non-explanation is the idea that "warped space" explains gravity. All it does is push the explanation back one step from "what is gravity?" to "why do masses warp space?" So which is the correct theory? I don't think there is one, and our ideas or "understanding" of the universe will continue to evolve with everything else around us. The Pythagoreans believed that math was truth, and that reality was merely an imperfect shadow of the real world hidden beyond the veil of our senses. Well, this isn't the Matrix, an no amount of passion for "perfect" answers (like "elegant" equations or crystal spheres in the sky) will make it so.
You want an alternative theory? Give Tom Van Flandern's Meta Model a try. It may be no better than the orthodoxy of Einsteinian Relativity and quantum mechanics, but at least it won't resort to mathematical trickery and the comforting reassurance of what we'd LIKE to believe. A good introductory article may be found at:
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/physicshasits
http://www.sfwa.org/news/vheinlein.htm
This sounds like the "carbon powder rocket to the moon" perversity mentioned in Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I can imagine some companies running more discreet ads that they paid to keep the skies clear.
Copy protection is nothing. Digital TV will have nastier surprises in store. All of us are abundantly aware by now that duplicating copyrighted films is illegal, but that doesn't stop some publishers from putting up THREE warnings that the FBI, CIA, Interpol and the KGB will come and get us. With videotape and laserdisc you could always zip through those notices, but not with DVD. Set-top DVD players are semi-literate computers, which means that you can give them instructions like "over-ride all user controls" so that you must sit through it.
Digital TV may do the same thing with ads. All of a sudden your volume, mute, change channel and power-off buttons will not work -- until the ad is over, of course.