Setting up computational infrastructure is an important but extremely unexciting step in neural simulation. The very fundamentals of *what* we should be simulating are still largely unknown. If anyone has read more on the research please correct me, but my guess is they are running simulating 8 million undifferentiated neurons disconnected from real-world input. This isn't a "mouse brain", they just call it such because the number of "neurons" is similar.
Your rambling style of narrative provides terrifying insight into a twisted twitching mind. Did Iraq make you like this? Or is this why you chose to waste your life being shot at?
I don't know about the take down of websites, but I just read recently about a man in New York being arrested for installing satellite receivers which get Al-Manar (the Hezbollah TV station). Since Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, broadcasting its media in the US is illegal. It doesn't seem like shutting down a website would be much different.
"string comparisons"? Sheesh...good thing you're not writing my programming languages. Every dynamic language (beyond simple undergrand homework assignments) uses either hashing, lexical addresses or something even more clever to avoid ever having to do internal string comparisons.
Yep in the future, everyone will be using the web on their cell phone. Any day now. *twiddles thumbs*
But according to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp, not today. So keep up the over-designing for non-existent users. I'll make websites in 1/4 the time, and my clients will stay happily where they are.
Web development is easy, once you do it right
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 1
Aside from the obnoxious incompatibilities between CSS and JavaScript implementations, I think the major problem with web development is the shoe-horning of layout. When you're coding HTML and CSS, where does your layout information reside? Well, your stylesheet is full of "position", "margin", and "padding" properties, so most people assume that CSS separates layout from content. However, even if you're coding in strict XHTML, the order and nesting of your tags *also* affects where on the screen the content ends up. I spent a lot of time being frustrated with web programming, but recently I've discovered that it can be easy, as long as you maintain explicit barriers between the three elements of your website: the style, the layout and the content. Obviously the HTML contains content and CSS the style. But where is the layout? In a page template! Using ASP.Net Master Pages or Ruby on Rails partials, the content of your page doesn't know where on the screen it'll end up. And even better, since CSS is stressful for layout (but great for style), you can use tables in your template (for situations where CSS positioning is too much work). Voila, web programming is a breeze.
So what you're saying is that CSS is so darn flexible that it's useless. As someone who gets paid to make a webpage, I have (rightfully) never considered what my design will look like on a 4" screen with a 66pt font. I know I'm right because my clients aren't interested in the elegance or theoretical power of my super-l33t stylesheet. They want an easy to navigate website that works for 99% of the site's viewers. So stop whining about us mere web-design mortals abusing your beautiful standard, and start paying attention to what is TRULY important in web development: the website.
Here's a problem I encountered, for which I've never encountered an adequate solution. After I took a college biblical archaeology class, I started cleaning up a variety of articles related to the topics I studied. I came across an article titled "History of ancient Israel and Judah". I immediately recognized the article as very strange, it's a historical narrative of Israel woven from several religious texts (whose authorship spans thousands of years). Mostly the article ignores archaeological evidence except in cases where archaeology supports the religious history. The editors of the article were smart people, but unfortunately for me, *very* dedicated to an academically marginal point of view. When I attempted to bring the article in line with...well, reality, the editors got extremely aggressive. Rather than debate with opposing opinions, the editors of this article have retreated to an unnoticed corner of wikipedia and constructed an impenetrable barrier around their alternate reality. Is this acceptable? Is this sort of fragmentation of viewpoints to be expected? If not, what can be done?
I spent my childhood in the Soviet Union. My family were refuseniks (denied permission to leave the USSR in 1979, pariahs of the state until we finally got out in 1989). Several members of my family in my grandparents' generation were "vanished" (one for teaching Hebrew, another for "subverting the communist economic system" by selling black-market pants). Though I didn't personally experience the worst of the USSR (Stalin's reign), I am familiar enough with the crimes of the USSR to discern when another country is repeating them. I think the United States (of which I am now a citizen and dearly love) has been steadily inching towards a Stalinist nightmare for many years. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the news. Our country now engages in limited amounts of secret arrests, torture and spying on its citizenry. The last item may not even be limited. We build "detention centers" around the world and fill them with kidnapped foreign nationals. The scariest thing to me is that these crimes are never made public until revealed by the media. The media has very scant access to government secrets, so we can't know what deeper more malicious crimes are being committed at the moment. Once you've read about MK-ULTRA it's hard to imagine something our government won't do when not overseen by the public. So the grandparent poster is correct. We are not yet a police state, but we're well on our way.
The phenomenon your smoker-acquaintenances are describing has been documented many times with a variety of psychoactive drugs. It's called "state-dependent memory". Memories are (most likely) linked to your mental state at the time of encoding. For example, it's common for alcoholics to hide their cache of liquor while drunk and not remember its location until they are again intoxicated.
Is anyone else sick of smarmy-pants C++ coders thinking that knowledge of arcane language trivia is somehow equivalent to intelligence? The genuinely smart are happily producing useful code in Ruby, Erlang, C, Scheme, OCaml, Matlab or any other language appropriate for their domain. In the time it takes you to read Meyers, Alexandrescu and all of Sutter's GotW's you could have written a half dozen useful programs in any other language (even Visual Basic). But nay, you took the high road and memorized every dark corner of C++'s ugly spec. Congratulations, you are truly the elite.
I think a lot of the misinformation in this thread (such as that of the parent post) could be done away with if more people watched mixed martial arts competitions. Seriously, go on youtube.com and look up some clips from Pride or UFC tournaments. Especially watch the early UFCs where practitioners of traditional martial arts are demolished. There is no magic for defeating a larger better skilled opponent. On the street you might be able to surprise an attacker with an aikido trick, certainly not if they're trained in some form of free-fighting. Then you're screwed.
Hi, I've never seen Hatsumi, and maybe despite my skepticism he really is the "real deal"...BUT, your description of him mimics dozens of similar descriptions of some awe-inspiring sensei/sifu/magic-killing-wizard. Look up Dillman or Botzepe...two obvious frauds, whose students praise to the heavens.
Do you have any videos or other evidence of him fighting/sparring with an uncooperative partner? The marine story sounds fishy to me (sorry, it's just so easy to exaggerate a 180lb teenager wearing fatigue pants into a 250lb trained marine)...did the marine have any grappling experience? What did Hatsumi do to incapacitate him?
The company claims that their exercises improves...(ugh) your speed of thinking. Gods, that's horrible bunk. They don't actually show that repeatedly taking their tests improves anything but your performance on those specific tests. There's no research behind this, just a scam to take advantage of the elderly with baseless promises of preserving your aging brain's cognitive abilities.
Ummm...which estimates of the brain's processing power?
I've seen some really horrible figures thrown around in lay articles saying something like, well you've got about 10 billion neurons, each with a maximum firing rate of 1khz, so that's a 10^12 hz computer. Rubbish...we might be decades from even making a reasonable estimate of the brain's "processing" power. Seriously, pick up a neuroscience book. You'll find a majority of the current knowledge about the brain is limited to the input and output systems. The internals, where all the interesting stuff happens, are labeled "association cortex" and left as a mystery for the future. We don't know how the brain processes information and thus can't make any good estimates on the computational limits of the brain.
-Alex
Old English was a germanic language, derived from the theoretical Proto-Germanic (not German, which is a modern language). Proto-Germanic itself descended from Proto-IndoEuropean. Old English was no more related to Greek than any other Indo-European language (such as Farsi or Sanskrit).
So no, English did not come from German through Greek or any thing like that.
Categorizing this blatant antisemitism as "anti-Israel" is dishonest beyond words.
Some quotes: "Orthodox Christianity has lived with the great threat of the Homosexual Jew for centuries now and have a better grasp on reality! It is time for Muslim and Christian to stop fighting each other and see the REAL enemy here!...Thank You and Allah Support You in your Struggle!" http://radioislam.net/letters/chrtmus.htm
"The future belongs to the forces of Islam. The Hezbullah, Hamas and the Jihad are the Islamic response to the Zionist challenge. " http://radioislam.net/luther/index.htm --- Nope, no fanatical extremist islamic hatred there.
Now, as an American, and staunch supporter of our first amendment, I think it's important that this website (though delusional, insulting, and supportive of terrorism) *not* be censored.
But Germany and France have laws against hate speech, which radioislam.net quite clearly is.
We know that partisan debate is based on negative emotions and the addictive desire to defeat the other party. We know that emotions arise from biological activity in the brain, and roughly where that activity occurs. This study, while impressive-sounding, teaches us nothing new.
No "serious theorists" have even put a foot on the path to strong AI.
Neural nets are the latest fad in smart computing, gobbled up as an alternative to Good Old Fashioned AI (symbolic logic, expert systems, etc..), but not really making much progress towards "human-level" intelligence.
The term "neural net" doesn't even refer to anything specific. A neural net might be a statistical-pattern recognizer, a clustering algorithm, time-dependent spiking computer, or a model of a biological neuron (which we don't know how to do anything interesting with).
Forget the hype. We're still waiting for the revolution.
" Well, just wait until the AI gets more advanced."
The number of times those words have been written since the 40s in uncountably infinite. I don't think humans have much to worry about. The state of AI remains (and will remain for the forseeable future) with ELIZA and Dr. Spaitso. Not exactly earth-threatening super-brains.
There are so many problems with the study you linked to.
First of all, it *does* rely on Soviet propaganda-statistics.
The Chernobyl accident resulted in a total number of 237 individuals
who were suspected of suffering from acute radiation sickness (ARS). Of
these, 28 died due to radiation exposure.
How else could these numbers be obtained if not from the Soviet government? What external agency would have had access to medical records?
Second, the current state of health reporting in post-Soviet countries is abysmal. What can a statement like: This is now reported as 600-800 total cases [of thyroid cancer]. There are 3 associated deaths in this population. possibly mean, when millions of people in the affected area are too poor to see a doctor (and public healthcare requires bribes to get treated). My other grandfather in Kiev would be living on a $33/month pension (if not for money my family sends him). His situation is not abnormal. On that money most people can't afford to bribe a public doctor or hire a private. The problems of the poor and elderly generally go unreported.
Even worse, how can any study tally the medical problems of the millions of ex-Soviet citizens who have left the affected area since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Also from your link: Most (est 95%) of these cancers are treatable with no long term
adverse prognosis except the need for routine thyroid medication.. Maybe a highly invasive surgery to remove your thyroid glands, followed by a lifetime dependency on thyroidal hormone supplements sounds like fun to you. But maybe you'd change your opinion if the government dumped radioactive iodine in *your* drinking water.
As for the Yuvchenko quote: I think you misunderstand me. I have no problem with nuclear power. It's done safely in the US, France and other countries. But I *do* have a problem with people trying to pass off Chernobyl as "no biggie". The damage done by that disaster is literally incalculable. Just because you check some records and find "Oh ho! Not much cancer here!" only means you had a reason to not look very hard.
Keep in mind that the dozen or so people who died in Chernobyl were people at the plant. All other deaths (which have been greatly exaggerated by the media, mind you) were from radioisotope contamination.
Apparently you've bought into the Soviet propaganda. I grew up in Kiev (~80 miles south of Chernobyl) and was there at the time Chernobyl blew up. The government denied anything was wrong for days and refused to evacuate the area. People knew something horrible had happened since the families of everyone with Party connections disappeared the next day.
Aside from the ~30 workers who died at the plant, thousands of soldiers who were recruited to drop sand and lead onto the burning reactor died several months to years later (they were breathing in radioactive dust). Their deaths were never acknowledged by the government.
Nobody knows how many people died from cancer as a result of Chernobyl, the government never tried to assess the damage. Anecdotally I would guess the number is very high. My grandmother died of cancer, my grandfather has several forms of cancer right now, all of their friends have died of cancer, my mother had cancer.
Try telling something as stupid and cruel as "Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated" to my grandfather, whose tumorous thyroids were removed earlier this year.
Jesus! I know you want to bolster support for your pet cause, but why would you ever believe *anything* the Soviet government said?
Slashdot Mirror
Setting up computational infrastructure is an important but extremely unexciting step in neural simulation. The very fundamentals of *what* we should be simulating are still largely unknown. If anyone has read more on the research please correct me, but my guess is they are running simulating 8 million undifferentiated neurons disconnected from real-world input. This isn't a "mouse brain", they just call it such because the number of "neurons" is similar.
Your rambling style of narrative provides terrifying insight into a twisted twitching mind. Did Iraq make you like this? Or is this why you chose to waste your life being shot at?
Come on: "Here's a mommy and a daddy truck. They live on a truck farm, and raise little trucks." You don't think this is adorably funny.
Anyways, I'm sure Perl is also quite happy that you left.
I don't know about the take down of websites, but I just read recently about a man in New York being arrested for installing satellite receivers which get Al-Manar (the Hezbollah TV station). Since Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, broadcasting its media in the US is illegal. It doesn't seem like shutting down a website would be much different.
"string comparisons"? Sheesh...good thing you're not writing my programming languages. Every dynamic language (beyond simple undergrand homework assignments) uses either hashing, lexical addresses or something even more clever to avoid ever having to do internal string comparisons.
Why make a hard boundary between "me" and "I"? Sometimes having to reshuffle a sentence to change a "me" to an "I" just isn't worth the clumsiness.
Yep in the future, everyone will be using the web on their cell phone. Any day now. *twiddles thumbs* But according to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp, not today. So keep up the over-designing for non-existent users. I'll make websites in 1/4 the time, and my clients will stay happily where they are.
Aside from the obnoxious incompatibilities between CSS and JavaScript implementations, I think the major problem with web development is the shoe-horning of layout. When you're coding HTML and CSS, where does your layout information reside? Well, your stylesheet is full of "position", "margin", and "padding" properties, so most people assume that CSS separates layout from content. However, even if you're coding in strict XHTML, the order and nesting of your tags *also* affects where on the screen the content ends up. I spent a lot of time being frustrated with web programming, but recently I've discovered that it can be easy, as long as you maintain explicit barriers between the three elements of your website: the style, the layout and the content. Obviously the HTML contains content and CSS the style. But where is the layout? In a page template! Using ASP.Net Master Pages or Ruby on Rails partials, the content of your page doesn't know where on the screen it'll end up. And even better, since CSS is stressful for layout (but great for style), you can use tables in your template (for situations where CSS positioning is too much work). Voila, web programming is a breeze.
So what you're saying is that CSS is so darn flexible that it's useless. As someone who gets paid to make a webpage, I have (rightfully) never considered what my design will look like on a 4" screen with a 66pt font. I know I'm right because my clients aren't interested in the elegance or theoretical power of my super-l33t stylesheet. They want an easy to navigate website that works for 99% of the site's viewers. So stop whining about us mere web-design mortals abusing your beautiful standard, and start paying attention to what is TRULY important in web development: the website.
Here's a problem I encountered, for which I've never encountered an adequate solution. After I took a college biblical archaeology class, I started cleaning up a variety of articles related to the topics I studied. I came across an article titled "History of ancient Israel and Judah". I immediately recognized the article as very strange, it's a historical narrative of Israel woven from several religious texts (whose authorship spans thousands of years). Mostly the article ignores archaeological evidence except in cases where archaeology supports the religious history. The editors of the article were smart people, but unfortunately for me, *very* dedicated to an academically marginal point of view. When I attempted to bring the article in line with...well, reality, the editors got extremely aggressive. Rather than debate with opposing opinions, the editors of this article have retreated to an unnoticed corner of wikipedia and constructed an impenetrable barrier around their alternate reality. Is this acceptable? Is this sort of fragmentation of viewpoints to be expected? If not, what can be done?
Global Frequency?
I spent my childhood in the Soviet Union. My family were refuseniks (denied permission to leave the USSR in 1979, pariahs of the state until we finally got out in 1989). Several members of my family in my grandparents' generation were "vanished" (one for teaching Hebrew, another for "subverting the communist economic system" by selling black-market pants). Though I didn't personally experience the worst of the USSR (Stalin's reign), I am familiar enough with the crimes of the USSR to discern when another country is repeating them. I think the United States (of which I am now a citizen and dearly love) has been steadily inching towards a Stalinist nightmare for many years. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the news. Our country now engages in limited amounts of secret arrests, torture and spying on its citizenry. The last item may not even be limited. We build "detention centers" around the world and fill them with kidnapped foreign nationals. The scariest thing to me is that these crimes are never made public until revealed by the media. The media has very scant access to government secrets, so we can't know what deeper more malicious crimes are being committed at the moment. Once you've read about MK-ULTRA it's hard to imagine something our government won't do when not overseen by the public. So the grandparent poster is correct. We are not yet a police state, but we're well on our way.
The phenomenon your smoker-acquaintenances are describing has been documented many times with a variety of psychoactive drugs. It's called "state-dependent memory". Memories are (most likely) linked to your mental state at the time of encoding. For example, it's common for alcoholics to hide their cache of liquor while drunk and not remember its location until they are again intoxicated.
Is anyone else sick of smarmy-pants C++ coders thinking that knowledge of arcane language trivia is somehow equivalent to intelligence? The genuinely smart are happily producing useful code in Ruby, Erlang, C, Scheme, OCaml, Matlab or any other language appropriate for their domain. In the time it takes you to read Meyers, Alexandrescu and all of Sutter's GotW's you could have written a half dozen useful programs in any other language (even Visual Basic). But nay, you took the high road and memorized every dark corner of C++'s ugly spec. Congratulations, you are truly the elite.
I think a lot of the misinformation in this thread (such as that of the parent post) could be done away with if more people watched mixed martial arts competitions. Seriously, go on youtube.com and look up some clips from Pride or UFC tournaments. Especially watch the early UFCs where practitioners of traditional martial arts are demolished. There is no magic for defeating a larger better skilled opponent. On the street you might be able to surprise an attacker with an aikido trick, certainly not if they're trained in some form of free-fighting. Then you're screwed.
Hi,
I've never seen Hatsumi, and maybe despite my skepticism he really is the "real deal"...BUT, your description of him mimics dozens of similar descriptions of some awe-inspiring sensei/sifu/magic-killing-wizard. Look up Dillman or Botzepe...two obvious frauds, whose students praise to the heavens.
Do you have any videos or other evidence of him fighting/sparring with an uncooperative partner? The marine story sounds fishy to me (sorry, it's just so easy to exaggerate a 180lb teenager wearing fatigue pants into a 250lb trained marine)...did the marine have any grappling experience? What did Hatsumi do to incapacitate him?
-Alex
The company claims that their exercises improves...(ugh) your speed of thinking. Gods, that's horrible bunk. They don't actually show that repeatedly taking their tests improves anything but your performance on those specific tests. There's no research behind this, just a scam to take advantage of the elderly with baseless promises of preserving your aging brain's cognitive abilities.
Ummm...which estimates of the brain's processing power? I've seen some really horrible figures thrown around in lay articles saying something like, well you've got about 10 billion neurons, each with a maximum firing rate of 1khz, so that's a 10^12 hz computer. Rubbish...we might be decades from even making a reasonable estimate of the brain's "processing" power. Seriously, pick up a neuroscience book. You'll find a majority of the current knowledge about the brain is limited to the input and output systems. The internals, where all the interesting stuff happens, are labeled "association cortex" and left as a mystery for the future. We don't know how the brain processes information and thus can't make any good estimates on the computational limits of the brain. -Alex
Gods, this thread is painful to read.
Old English was a germanic language, derived from the theoretical Proto-Germanic (not German, which is a modern language). Proto-Germanic itself descended from Proto-IndoEuropean. Old English was no more related to Greek than any other Indo-European language (such as Farsi or Sanskrit).
So no, English did not come from German through Greek or any thing like that.
Umm...did you look at radioislam.net?
They post gobs of jewish conspiracies, holocaust denial and many other types of nazi propaganda:
http://radioislam.net/germany/index.htm
http://radioislam.net/historia/really/intro.htm
http://radioislam.net/judaism/index.htm
http://radioislam.net/russie/index.htm
Categorizing this blatant antisemitism as "anti-Israel" is dishonest beyond words.
Some quotes:
"Orthodox Christianity has lived with the great threat of the Homosexual Jew for centuries now and have a better grasp on reality! It is time for Muslim and Christian to stop fighting each other and see the REAL enemy here!...Thank You and Allah Support You in your Struggle!"
http://radioislam.net/letters/chrtmus.htm
"The future belongs to the forces of Islam. The Hezbullah, Hamas and the Jihad are the Islamic response to the Zionist challenge. "
http://radioislam.net/luther/index.htm
---
Nope, no fanatical extremist islamic hatred there.
Now, as an American, and staunch supporter of our first amendment, I think it's important that this website (though delusional, insulting, and supportive of terrorism) *not* be censored.
But Germany and France have laws against hate speech, which radioislam.net quite clearly is.
We know that partisan debate is based on negative emotions and the addictive desire to defeat the other party. We know that emotions arise from biological activity in the brain, and roughly where that activity occurs. This study, while impressive-sounding, teaches us nothing new.
No "serious theorists" have even put a foot on the path to strong AI.
Neural nets are the latest fad in smart computing, gobbled up as an alternative to Good Old Fashioned AI (symbolic logic, expert systems, etc..), but not really making much progress towards "human-level" intelligence.
The term "neural net" doesn't even refer to anything specific. A neural net might be a statistical-pattern recognizer, a clustering algorithm, time-dependent spiking computer, or a model of a biological neuron (which we don't know how to do anything interesting with).
Forget the hype. We're still waiting for the revolution.
" Well, just wait until the AI gets more advanced."
The number of times those words have been written since the 40s in uncountably infinite. I don't think humans have much to worry about. The state of AI remains (and will remain for the forseeable future) with ELIZA and Dr. Spaitso. Not exactly earth-threatening super-brains.
There are so many problems with the study you linked to.
5 /pr38/en/%5D, a number I think is too low (for the above reasons).
First of all, it *does* rely on Soviet propaganda-statistics.
The Chernobyl accident resulted in a total number of 237 individuals who were suspected of suffering from acute radiation sickness (ARS). Of these, 28 died due to radiation exposure.
How else could these numbers be obtained if not from the Soviet government? What external agency would have had access to medical records?
Second, the current state of health reporting in post-Soviet countries is abysmal. What can a statement like: This is now reported as 600-800 total cases [of thyroid cancer]. There are 3 associated deaths in this population. possibly mean, when millions of people in the affected area are too poor to see a doctor (and public healthcare requires bribes to get treated). My other grandfather in Kiev would be living on a $33/month pension (if not for money my family sends him). His situation is not abnormal. On that money most people can't afford to bribe a public doctor or hire a private. The problems of the poor and elderly generally go unreported.
Even worse, how can any study tally the medical problems of the millions of ex-Soviet citizens who have left the affected area since the collapse of the Soviet Union?
The WHO puts the estimate of thyroid cancers resulting from Chernobyl at 4000 [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/200
Also from your link: Most (est 95%) of these cancers are treatable with no long term adverse prognosis except the need for routine thyroid medication.. Maybe a highly invasive surgery to remove your thyroid glands, followed by a lifetime dependency on thyroidal hormone supplements sounds like fun to you. But maybe you'd change your opinion if the government dumped radioactive iodine in *your* drinking water.
As for the Yuvchenko quote: I think you misunderstand me. I have no problem with nuclear power. It's done safely in the US, France and other countries. But I *do* have a problem with people trying to pass off Chernobyl as "no biggie". The damage done by that disaster is literally incalculable. Just because you check some records and find "Oh ho! Not much cancer here!" only means you had a reason to not look very hard.
Keep in mind that the dozen or so people who died in Chernobyl were people at the plant. All other deaths (which have been greatly exaggerated by the media, mind you) were from radioisotope contamination.
Apparently you've bought into the Soviet propaganda. I grew up in Kiev (~80 miles south of Chernobyl) and was there at the time Chernobyl blew up. The government denied anything was wrong for days and refused to evacuate the area. People knew something horrible had happened since the families of everyone with Party connections disappeared the next day.
Aside from the ~30 workers who died at the plant, thousands of soldiers who were recruited to drop sand and lead onto the burning reactor died several months to years later (they were breathing in radioactive dust). Their deaths were never acknowledged by the government.
Nobody knows how many people died from cancer as a result of Chernobyl, the government never tried to assess the damage. Anecdotally I would guess the number is very high. My grandmother died of cancer, my grandfather has several forms of cancer right now, all of their friends have died of cancer, my mother had cancer.
Try telling something as stupid and cruel as "Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated" to my grandfather, whose tumorous thyroids were removed earlier this year.
Jesus! I know you want to bolster support for your pet cause, but why would you ever believe *anything* the Soviet government said?