I'm guessing that neither you nor Rush saw the movie. As usual, Rush passes on some innuendo as "fact". Add this to the list already going:
the 1991 Pinatubo eruption put 1000 times as much chlorine into the atmosphere as industry has ever produced through CFCs false
Banks take the risks in issuing student loans and they are entitled to the profits false
The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe false
There's no such thing as an implied contract false
It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive, the same with cigarettes causing emphysema false
The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent false
Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the United States today than we did at the time the constitution was written false
Middle eastern terrorists were behind the Oklahoma City bombing (I heard this one myself back when I used to listen to Rush in the car) false
There are, I'm sure, hundreds more examples of Rush stating fiction as fact, and yet you continue to believe him. Do you also believe that Saddam was behind 9/11?
Reread what I said. I never claimed, nor implied, that Osama was friends with the Iranians. All I said is exactly what you said - they're both "enemies" of the US. So if Osama benefits from having Bush in power, so might Iran. In no way does that imply those two enemies of ours are friends to each other. It does not even imply deliberate cooperation.
First of all, in the "real world", everything has a correlation (either positive or negative). The only question is whether or not that correlation is statistically significant. I started off with a "real world" example that was trivial enough to understand, but you started trying to get technical on whether I was really talking about correlation or not, so I went to the mathematics to give you an example.
But, alright, I'll try to give you an example that is (a) "real world", (b) simple enough to easily understand, and (c) mathematically precise. Assume I throw a ball in an arc. Would you argue that its height is correlated with its forward position?
Also, we're talking about statistics, which is a branch of mathematics, and not philosophy.
More likely, if Gore had won, Saddam would still be in control of Iraq, but we'd have captured Osama. There wouldn't have been a "War on Terror", but rather a "War on the Taliban/al Qaeda". Perhaps I'm giving Gore too much credit, but this much I'm sure of: it wouldn't be any worse than it is now.
Well, if you RTFA carefully (I know), you'll see that it starts with the phrase "If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks," when referring to "Jon Kyl", and "would bring up a link to" for Peter King. The article states what Direct Democracy hopes to happen and not what has already happened. To be fair, I misread it the first time, as well.
I think that if you're using quotes, your argument is valid. However, sometimes when I search for a word, I get a web-site that doesn't contain that word, but does contain the concept I was searching for.
Your post reminds me of the Jon Stewart sketch regarding news programs (esp. Fox) and the question mark. You can claim anything you want as long as you frame it in the form of a question.
Of course, then you go beyond that and make a baseless claim without any evidence, with the claim being obvious hyperbole. (Well, obvious to anyone with a brain. I'm assuming that includes you, but maybe you'll prove me wrong.)
I agree completely. An error was just reported in our voting machines in Charlottesville. However, they can't fix the problem before the elections because changes are not allowed this close to the elections. In this case, the (reported) error is relatively small: last names are truncated on the summary page (but not on the voting page). Hopefully, if it was a more serious error there would be other avenues. On the other hand, perhaps the only other avenue (and the one the author desires) is non-electronic voting.
Well, there's an argument to be made that whether it was the Republicans or Iranian intelligence, the result would still be the Republicans in power. After all, the current administration has been a boon to recruitment. According to our own intelligence estimates, more terrorists are being recruited than are being killed. It does seem that Osama shows up on TV at just the right time to help the Republicans get elected. So, either he's totally clueless about how we react (admittedly, a possibility), or he *wants* Republicans in power (also a real possibility for the reasons just mentioned).
Such stories have already been circulated. Many people are dismissive. Of course, most of those who were dismissive then will still be dismissive now. I'm not advocating actually hacking the election, but I believe hacking in a very obvious way might be the only way to get the attention of *most* Americans.
I'm not sure how you know my age, but I will say that I haven't been in academia my whole life. After graduating from GT, I managed a theater for a couple years, substitute taught for a couple years, taught full-time high school physics/chemistry for a couple years, and then worked for a software company for 6 years. I do agree that academia is NOT the same thing as actually trying to write software that you need to sell to real customers who don't always know what they want. For the first few years of working in the software industry, our software ONLY worked under DOS (or DOS shell). Also, I think you're confusing me with someone else, because I wasn't disagreeing with you. I just want you to GET OFF MY @#&$ LAWN!
X and (X-1)^2 are not correlated when X is chosen uniformly over the range [0,2]. There are literally an uncountably infinite (specifically, Aleph_2) amount of curves Y=f(X) where X and Y are not correlated, even when f is deterministic. Many of these apply in the "real world". I like that you're extremely confident in your beliefs, but I think it's time for you to re-examine those beliefs. Of course, as you point out, it's also important to realize that in the "real world" nothing is the sole cause of any other thing.
X and X^2 are not correlated if X is a random number chosen uniformly over the interval [-1,1] (or [-2,2], etc.). I think you're confusing the rather technical term "correlation" with its less technical brethren. Of course, I contributed to that by giving a rather wordy non-exact example, but one that a layman can understand.
We have a whole slew of Debian PCs in our lab, and for the most part they run fine. One of our newer clusters just experienced some weirdness, but we tracked that down to my jobs (I'm creating hordes of minions in an attempt to develop artificial consciousness so that they'll write my dissertation for me) overheating the CPU. The solution, of course, was to edit the BIOS to raise the maximum allowable operating temperature...:)
P.S.: It wasn't my detective work that figured out the problem. Thanks Andrew!
If I was training to match V1-4, I'd have the input come from two "eyes" with inputs similar to what our eyes actually provide to our brain. We know quite a bit about visual cortex, but there's a lot we don't know. Initially, I'd train it using a batch of photographs for a single person (we'll call her "Momma") and then I'd train with a few others (where a match is a match only if it's the same person). From there, I'd create histograms of parameter settings that seem to do an adequate job on this small set, and then use this reduced parameter space to create populations that are evaluated after training on millions of photographs. (The photographs can be placed in front of the eyes - once for each photograph, mind you, and not for each "individual" being tested - just like we can recognize photos and not just people.)
I could imagine narrowing the parameter space down to 100 or so unknown parameters, and each training session might take several hours. Given enough resources (e.g., the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center), I'd run population sizes of 500 or so (in parallel), so that you could possibly go through 4-5 generations per day. In a month, you might have some pretty good individuals. Of course, my research area is the hippocampus and not the visual cortex, so it might take significantly more than 100 parameters to even begin to set this up.
Now, someone else pointed out that such computers would not have the biases that we humans have, but that's not necessarily true. If you train the computer using an input set of 950,000 "white" people and 50,000 "black" people, it would tend to make the mistake of thinking that "black" people look a lot like each other. (Studies done with speech recognition have shown that neural networks trained on Japanese have a much harder time telling "l" from "r" than those trained on English.)
Sounds good. You could use GA guided neural networks. Worked once (i.e., us), so it stands to reason it could work again. I'd set up an input system similar to how we understand V1 to work, and then let the GA explore over a range of options for V2, V3, and V4. Each of these would be constrained by some of our best guesses of how they work in humans. I've been trying similar things recently with a model of the hippocampus.
Evidently, I look a lot like Tom Cruise. Well, actually, the first hit was Matt Stone, but with a much less flattering picture. Tom Cruise was 4th or 5th on the list, after Luke Wilson. Here was the picture I submitted. Naturally, I'm being sarcastic when I say it's flawless.
But it was just a joke. Like communism, philospher kings (or even tech-kings) can only work in theory. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a sense, however, our democratic republic has similarites to the philopher kings of Socrates/Plato. In theory the populace elects those best suited to govern. Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Yes, when the only ones with rights to vote are those who understand the system, aka electronic engineers and computer programmers with access to the source code months prior to the election.
So, this is an argument in favor of e-voting, right?
Non-correlation does not necessarily disprove causality, but it is a strong argument. (Stronger than correlation implying causality.) For numerous examples, consider the book "Why Things Bite Back". Here's a hypothetical: assume that helmets save lives. Specifically, if you're in an accident the helmet will "cause" you to live 90% of the time. Also assume that otherwise you live 0% of the time. (These numbers are completely made up, so just accept them for the sake of this example.) Now, also assume that people only wear a helmet when they're driving on certain roads, and that these roads have a 50% chance of resulting in an accident. Other roads have a 5% chance of resulting in an accident. So, in this purely made up example, every time you drive you have a 5% chance of death when you wear a helmet, and a 5% chance of death when you don't wear a helmet. No correlation, even on the assumption of causation.
Now, I want to repeat that non-correlation is a strong argument against causation. It just doesn't disprove it.
and I hope it's not me. Whenever I've been abroad, I've always been treated well by the natives (even when I don't speak the language), whether I'm in urban areas or in rural areas (although in rural areas, it's definitely a good idea to speak the language). Rarely do I see behavior from my fellow Americans that make me cringe (it happens, but is more the exception than the rule), and similarly rare is behavior from tourists from other countries that is cringe-worthy. We get a fair number of tourists here in Charlottesville (home of Monticello and Jefferson's University), and I can't think of a single instance when those tourists have acted obnoxious.
Maybe it just takes more to make me cringe. (German tourists are a species unto themselves?!? I've known a few German tourists and honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Of course, I've been known to have a German bias.)
Slashdot Mirror
- the 1991 Pinatubo eruption put 1000 times as much chlorine into the atmosphere as industry has ever produced through CFCs false
- Banks take the risks in issuing student loans and they are entitled to the profits false
- The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe false
- There's no such thing as an implied contract false
- It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive, the same with cigarettes causing emphysema false
- The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent false
- Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the United States today than we did at the time the constitution was written false
- Middle eastern terrorists were behind the Oklahoma City bombing (I heard this one myself back when I used to listen to Rush in the car) false
There are, I'm sure, hundreds more examples of Rush stating fiction as fact, and yet you continue to believe him. Do you also believe that Saddam was behind 9/11?Reread what I said. I never claimed, nor implied, that Osama was friends with the Iranians. All I said is exactly what you said - they're both "enemies" of the US. So if Osama benefits from having Bush in power, so might Iran. In no way does that imply those two enemies of ours are friends to each other. It does not even imply deliberate cooperation.
First of all, in the "real world", everything has a correlation (either positive or negative). The only question is whether or not that correlation is statistically significant. I started off with a "real world" example that was trivial enough to understand, but you started trying to get technical on whether I was really talking about correlation or not, so I went to the mathematics to give you an example.
But, alright, I'll try to give you an example that is (a) "real world", (b) simple enough to easily understand, and (c) mathematically precise. Assume I throw a ball in an arc. Would you argue that its height is correlated with its forward position?
Also, we're talking about statistics, which is a branch of mathematics, and not philosophy.
More likely, if Gore had won, Saddam would still be in control of Iraq, but we'd have captured Osama. There wouldn't have been a "War on Terror", but rather a "War on the Taliban/al Qaeda". Perhaps I'm giving Gore too much credit, but this much I'm sure of: it wouldn't be any worse than it is now.
Now you're talking. Am I to assume you're a fellow alumnus? (Phys '90, here.)
I doubt he missed that post, since he wrote it. More likely, he has a very short attention span, which helps explain his unusual beliefs.
Well, if you RTFA carefully (I know), you'll see that it starts with the phrase "If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks," when referring to "Jon Kyl", and "would bring up a link to" for Peter King. The article states what Direct Democracy hopes to happen and not what has already happened. To be fair, I misread it the first time, as well.
I think that if you're using quotes, your argument is valid. However, sometimes when I search for a word, I get a web-site that doesn't contain that word, but does contain the concept I was searching for.
Your post reminds me of the Jon Stewart sketch regarding news programs (esp. Fox) and the question mark. You can claim anything you want as long as you frame it in the form of a question.
Of course, then you go beyond that and make a baseless claim without any evidence, with the claim being obvious hyperbole. (Well, obvious to anyone with a brain. I'm assuming that includes you, but maybe you'll prove me wrong.)
I agree completely. An error was just reported in our voting machines in Charlottesville. However, they can't fix the problem before the elections because changes are not allowed this close to the elections. In this case, the (reported) error is relatively small: last names are truncated on the summary page (but not on the voting page). Hopefully, if it was a more serious error there would be other avenues. On the other hand, perhaps the only other avenue (and the one the author desires) is non-electronic voting.
So, by that reasoning, now is the best time.
Well, there's an argument to be made that whether it was the Republicans or Iranian intelligence, the result would still be the Republicans in power. After all, the current administration has been a boon to recruitment. According to our own intelligence estimates, more terrorists are being recruited than are being killed. It does seem that Osama shows up on TV at just the right time to help the Republicans get elected. So, either he's totally clueless about how we react (admittedly, a possibility), or he *wants* Republicans in power (also a real possibility for the reasons just mentioned).
Such stories have already been circulated. Many people are dismissive. Of course, most of those who were dismissive then will still be dismissive now. I'm not advocating actually hacking the election, but I believe hacking in a very obvious way might be the only way to get the attention of *most* Americans.
I'm not sure how you know my age, but I will say that I haven't been in academia my whole life. After graduating from GT, I managed a theater for a couple years, substitute taught for a couple years, taught full-time high school physics/chemistry for a couple years, and then worked for a software company for 6 years. I do agree that academia is NOT the same thing as actually trying to write software that you need to sell to real customers who don't always know what they want. For the first few years of working in the software industry, our software ONLY worked under DOS (or DOS shell). Also, I think you're confusing me with someone else, because I wasn't disagreeing with you. I just want you to GET OFF MY @#&$ LAWN!
X and (X-1)^2 are not correlated when X is chosen uniformly over the range [0,2]. There are literally an uncountably infinite (specifically, Aleph_2) amount of curves Y=f(X) where X and Y are not correlated, even when f is deterministic. Many of these apply in the "real world". I like that you're extremely confident in your beliefs, but I think it's time for you to re-examine those beliefs. Of course, as you point out, it's also important to realize that in the "real world" nothing is the sole cause of any other thing.
X and X^2 are not correlated if X is a random number chosen uniformly over the interval [-1,1] (or [-2,2], etc.). I think you're confusing the rather technical term "correlation" with its less technical brethren. Of course, I contributed to that by giving a rather wordy non-exact example, but one that a layman can understand.
We have a whole slew of Debian PCs in our lab, and for the most part they run fine. One of our newer clusters just experienced some weirdness, but we tracked that down to my jobs (I'm creating hordes of minions in an attempt to develop artificial consciousness so that they'll write my dissertation for me) overheating the CPU. The solution, of course, was to edit the BIOS to raise the maximum allowable operating temperature... :)
P.S.: It wasn't my detective work that figured out the problem. Thanks Andrew!
You kids get off my lawn!
If I was training to match V1-4, I'd have the input come from two "eyes" with inputs similar to what our eyes actually provide to our brain. We know quite a bit about visual cortex, but there's a lot we don't know. Initially, I'd train it using a batch of photographs for a single person (we'll call her "Momma") and then I'd train with a few others (where a match is a match only if it's the same person). From there, I'd create histograms of parameter settings that seem to do an adequate job on this small set, and then use this reduced parameter space to create populations that are evaluated after training on millions of photographs. (The photographs can be placed in front of the eyes - once for each photograph, mind you, and not for each "individual" being tested - just like we can recognize photos and not just people.)
I could imagine narrowing the parameter space down to 100 or so unknown parameters, and each training session might take several hours. Given enough resources (e.g., the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center), I'd run population sizes of 500 or so (in parallel), so that you could possibly go through 4-5 generations per day. In a month, you might have some pretty good individuals. Of course, my research area is the hippocampus and not the visual cortex, so it might take significantly more than 100 parameters to even begin to set this up.
Now, someone else pointed out that such computers would not have the biases that we humans have, but that's not necessarily true. If you train the computer using an input set of 950,000 "white" people and 50,000 "black" people, it would tend to make the mistake of thinking that "black" people look a lot like each other. (Studies done with speech recognition have shown that neural networks trained on Japanese have a much harder time telling "l" from "r" than those trained on English.)
Here are two pictures of Matt Stone, one of the pictures of South Park, just to prove your point.
Sounds good. You could use GA guided neural networks. Worked once (i.e., us), so it stands to reason it could work again. I'd set up an input system similar to how we understand V1 to work, and then let the GA explore over a range of options for V2, V3, and V4. Each of these would be constrained by some of our best guesses of how they work in humans. I've been trying similar things recently with a model of the hippocampus.
Evidently, I look a lot like Tom Cruise. Well, actually, the first hit was Matt Stone, but with a much less flattering picture. Tom Cruise was 4th or 5th on the list, after Luke Wilson. Here was the picture I submitted. Naturally, I'm being sarcastic when I say it's flawless.
But it was just a joke. Like communism, philospher kings (or even tech-kings) can only work in theory. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a sense, however, our democratic republic has similarites to the philopher kings of Socrates/Plato. In theory the populace elects those best suited to govern. Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Non-correlation does not necessarily disprove causality, but it is a strong argument. (Stronger than correlation implying causality.) For numerous examples, consider the book "Why Things Bite Back". Here's a hypothetical: assume that helmets save lives. Specifically, if you're in an accident the helmet will "cause" you to live 90% of the time. Also assume that otherwise you live 0% of the time. (These numbers are completely made up, so just accept them for the sake of this example.) Now, also assume that people only wear a helmet when they're driving on certain roads, and that these roads have a 50% chance of resulting in an accident. Other roads have a 5% chance of resulting in an accident. So, in this purely made up example, every time you drive you have a 5% chance of death when you wear a helmet, and a 5% chance of death when you don't wear a helmet. No correlation, even on the assumption of causation.
Now, I want to repeat that non-correlation is a strong argument against causation. It just doesn't disprove it.
and I hope it's not me. Whenever I've been abroad, I've always been treated well by the natives (even when I don't speak the language), whether I'm in urban areas or in rural areas (although in rural areas, it's definitely a good idea to speak the language). Rarely do I see behavior from my fellow Americans that make me cringe (it happens, but is more the exception than the rule), and similarly rare is behavior from tourists from other countries that is cringe-worthy. We get a fair number of tourists here in Charlottesville (home of Monticello and Jefferson's University), and I can't think of a single instance when those tourists have acted obnoxious.
Maybe it just takes more to make me cringe. (German tourists are a species unto themselves?!? I've known a few German tourists and honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Of course, I've been known to have a German bias.)