"people will treat you better, and you will get promoted and or paid more.."
Sure, this applies...if your interactions with other people are brief and superficial, and you approach your job as some sort of race to a mythical "top".
Some people actually enjoy their work (so you can keep your promotion), and spend the day talking to people who won't think less of them for a ketchup stain.
"Researchers believe the pentateuch was more likely written by at least 4 scholars/rabbis during the exile in Babylon."
That idea has been out of fashion for a few decades. There are parts of the pentateuch that were almost certainly written in Babylon. But many parts carry the grammar and style of a pre-Hebrew semitic language, indicating that they probably pre-date the formation of Israel.
Some people have gotten it into their heads that some committee in Babylon sat down and wrote a Torah de novo. That's silly. Why would Israelites accept a religion/history unfamiliar to them?
We can never know the definite origin of the pentateuch, but it was almost certainly a unification of earlier religious texts and histories.
> efforts to teach great apes more advanced languages have been remarkably successful.
Ummm...no.
In a small number of cases some primates have been trained to recognize (up to) a few hundred symbols. Grammatical structure? Never. It's a really far stretch to call that language.
http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.htm l " A chimp might learn to connect a hand sign with an item of food, skeptics like Dr. Terrace argued, but this could be a matter of simple conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs learning to salivate at the sound of a bell. Most importantly, there was no evidence that the chimps had acquired a generative grammar -- the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity."
If there were a quake-console style web shell, which worked as a layer over bash or zsh it would greatly simplify a lot of my daily tasks.
Some of the comments here have stated that the web is too easy to require a shell. I totally disagree. Every task I want to do requires some typing, a click or two and page loads. While individually these take up just a few seconds, they add up to eat lots of my time.
I'd much rather type "weather 61923" into a shell than "www.weather.com" (wait for load) "61923" (ENTER). It's just faster.
Also imagine YubNub combined with an object oriented shell such as MS's monad...
Here's another weird one.
Go over the middleast totally zoomed out, and start zooming in towards Israel.
zoom...zoom...the labels "Gaza Strip" and "West Bank" appear for two zoom levels but no "Israel".
Weird, since they're not yet countries and cover less territory.
"Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don't suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births - that much is obvious."
That's not clear at all. If I went back in time and killed the baby George W Bush, it's like he would disappear in the middle of a speech. Rather the entire course of history branching from that moment would be changed, so that in the "present" no one would ever know GW had existed.
"An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday."
To anyone who knows about the current state of neuroscience (a few disconnected scraps of experimental data) this reads:
"A team of three dozen gerbils have endeavored to construct a space shuttle from twigs and cheese nuggets."
The article continues:
"It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time"
So wrong. We've been doing live single-neuron recordings in rats, cats, monkeys and even humans for quite some time...and that *is* observing the electrical code of the brain. There's been progress in a few directions (analysis of retinal ganglion spikes has helped the development of the artificial retina), but only the input and ouput signals (with which we can correlate real world events) make any sense to us. All the internal processing of the brain is still mysterious magic.
A 10,000 neuron simulation of the cortex won't really tell us anything we haven't already learned, and isolated from other neural circuits it probably won't do much.
To claim this project will "shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness" is either ignorant or purposefully dishonest.
-Alex
Those numbers are so small...my parents run a small computer schoool that pulls in ~ $3 million a year. After taxes and expenses there's really not much left. SCO really *is* dying...they're spending millions on the IBM case, and that's really all the money they have. I wonder if some the delay in the lawsuit is due to IBM...the longer this case drags out, the less chance SCO has to survive to the end.
Ugh, another pop-neuroscience book?
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Books like Rita Carter's are the junk-tabloids of brain studies. Our understanding of the brain is so small and limited...why these books keep coming out? Why do they push fragile disputed theories as "Consciousness Explained!" ?
If you want to learn about neuroscience in an easy-to-swallow format, read Oliver Sacks
* He's a practicing neurologist, with a deep knowledge of the subjects he covers (unlike Rita Carter, who's a clueless popularizer)
* He covers many of the same cases at Rita Carter with greater insight
* He doesn't throw around wild exaggerations, (it seems that Rita Carter is hoping her reader won't know any better).
Forget Rita Carter, go pick up Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat".
2) Why do you assume that a neuron can be simulated with a multiply-add operation? Even if the perceptron model of the neuron, where a scalar output is the linear combination of scalar inputs, had anything to do with the brain (which it almost certainly doesn't), you'd need a variable-length addition (between 1 and 100,000 inputs). Furthermore, to make the perceptron useful, you need some form of non-linear transformation on the output.
3) Many of the 1e11 cells you're including in your calculation are used for specific, non-conscious tasks.
4) What about the 1e13 neuroglia, whose function is still poorly understood, but have been shown to have an active role in the brain's activity? (reacting to and initiating neural activity)
5) 1e2 "operations per seconds" (firing rate?). Action potentials are not operations performed on data, they are the data.
Ugh, I could go on for a while...
But please, please....the brain != serial computer. The brain is not comparable to a serial computer. And they can be compared, no one today knows enough to do it. So stop.
(reposted with formatting, sorry)
From the latest International Jerusalem Post:
Year--Suicide Bombings 2002 46
2003 17 2004 4
All four this year were before the assasination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Personally I think Israeli tactics foment hatred, and cause more Palestinians to want to commit acts of terror. But without leaders (thanks to assassinations), weapons (thanks to raids), or physical access (thanks to seperation wall), no matter how much a Palestinian might want to kill Israelis, they can't do it.
From the latest International Jerusalem Post:
Year------------Suicide Bombings
2002 46
2003 17
2004 4
All four this year were before the assasination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Personally I think Israeli tactics foment hatred, and cause more Palestinians to want to commit acts of terror.
But without leaders (thanks to assassinations), weapons (thanks to raids), or physical access (thanks to seperation wall), no matter how much a Palestinian might want to kill Israelis, they can't do it.
The problem of radical islam (and the terrorism it encourages) is so vexing precisely because the common-sense solutions (increased education/wealth) don't work.
It's (dangerously) popular to claim that terrorism is somehow linked to the quality of life terrorists experience.
But take Israel for example: The majority of suicide bombers are middle-class and educated. Ditto for the September 11th hijackers: middle class professionals. They aren't motivated to kill out of poverty and despair, but through cultural and religious indoctrination.
About 10 years ago my parents opened a computer school together. My mom has some education in Human Resources, my dad was a programmer/DBA. They split the tasks so that everything involving people went to my mom, while all things computer related went to my dad. Whenever there was overlap (hiring teachers, which subjects to teach this semester, which computer hardware shop to trust etc..), horrible arguments ensued.
After a few years of fighting, my dad gave up on having his say, and just started doing whatever my mom told him to. The business functions smoothly now, they've expanded to a few new locations, and are becoming moderately successful. My mom runs the show, my dad fixes broken stations in his hidden-away office.
I guess the lesson of the story is that if both of you are strong-willed (as my parents started off), be prepared for some changes in the relationship. Either one of you will "break", or you'll live out your relationship in a constant state of bickering.
Horrific policy...makes me a bit ashmed of the iMac I'm typing this on.
I'm a fan of Apple designs, but I really hope they stay a niche in the market. If Apple ever overruns Redmond, we'll all look back on Microsoft as comparatively benevolent.
"Coding isn't as hard as most coders would like to claim"...
Mostly anyone (grandmas, monkeys, LAS majors), can memorize the basic tricks of C++ and start churning out functional code in little time.
My parents own a crash-course computer school. Immigrants, career-changers and miscellaneous riff-raff come in, sit through 14 weeks of labs and lectures, and off to the job market they go. They've learned C++ and their code works. BUT, the quality of the code is horrible...and improvements won't come with another quick-fix training session.
Though coders may be common, good ones are rare. (Check sourceforge projects for further proof)
The brain is not a serial computer
I repeat, the brain is not a serial computer. The maximum firing rate of each neuron is 1000 hertz. This speed is glacial compared to even the oldest computers. The brains power comes from its massive parallelism. Your head houses billions of interconnected neurons, all firing simultaneously.
A machine equivalent would not be a computer (in the usual sense) but a parallel neural network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network
I think parent (along with some other posts) are confusing the biological neuron and the perceptron, which is a simplified mathematical model.
While the perceptron can't cope with linearly inseperable problems (like XOR), there is no consensus on the computational limits of the neuron. In fact, very little is known for certain about the learning algorithm used by the nervous system.
The neuron may learn not only through the weights of its inputs, but also through chemical interactions with glial cells. Really, the neuron is still too much of a mystery for us to know its limitations.
A few more modern taboos:
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I imagine none of the following discussions would find acceptance in the US today, but may in the future:
Inherent differences between races. I think these differences aren't being studied today because they are politically too sensitive. But there are legitimate scientific questions we've left unanswered. In what way are the races different (what bits of DNA affect which traits?), how did these differences arise?
How do Jews become powerful in every country they have moved to?
Why has Hitler been made this age's personification of evil while Stalin's crimes are known only to students of history?
What sort of things would get you beat up if said in public...?
- Blacks and Mexicans are more likely than Whites or Asians to be murderers, rapists and criminals of every variety.
Any others?
Ummm...I'll bite...
Any modeling or visualization...anything application in which you need to calculate the complex interplay of many little components.
I'm writing an application that simulates the evolution of language in a population of ~1000 neural networks. Try running that on your 386SX with math coprocessor.
I only wish the price of these things would slide down a little more. Something like a PS2 cluster would be excellent for me if the linux kit wasn't so costly.
Slashdot Mirror
"people will treat you better, and you will get promoted and or paid more.." Sure, this applies...if your interactions with other people are brief and superficial, and you approach your job as some sort of race to a mythical "top". Some people actually enjoy their work (so you can keep your promotion), and spend the day talking to people who won't think less of them for a ketchup stain.
"Researchers believe the pentateuch was more likely written by at least 4 scholars/rabbis during the exile in Babylon."
That idea has been out of fashion for a few decades. There are parts of the pentateuch that were almost certainly written in Babylon. But many parts carry the grammar and style of a pre-Hebrew semitic language, indicating that they probably pre-date the formation of Israel.
Some people have gotten it into their heads that some committee in Babylon sat down and wrote a Torah de novo. That's silly. Why would Israelites accept a religion/history unfamiliar to them?
We can never know the definite origin of the pentateuch, but it was almost certainly a unification of earlier religious texts and histories.
> efforts to teach great apes more advanced languages have been remarkably successful.
m
m l
Ummm...no.
In a small number of cases some primates have been trained to recognize (up to) a few hundred symbols. Grammatical structure? Never. It's a really far stretch to call that language.
Read about it:
http://www.garysturt.free-online.co.uk/gardner.ht
http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.chimp.ht
" A chimp might learn to connect a hand sign with an item of food, skeptics like Dr. Terrace argued, but this could be a matter of simple conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs learning to salivate at the sound of a bell. Most importantly, there was no evidence that the chimps had acquired a generative grammar -- the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity."
I heartily second this idea.
If there were a quake-console style web shell, which worked as a layer over bash or zsh it would greatly simplify a lot of my daily tasks.
Some of the comments here have stated that the web is too easy to require a shell. I totally disagree. Every task I want to do requires some typing, a click or two and page loads. While individually these take up just a few seconds, they add up to eat lots of my time.
I'd much rather type "weather 61923" into a shell than "www.weather.com" (wait for load) "61923" (ENTER). It's just faster.
Also imagine YubNub combined with an object oriented shell such as MS's monad...
"g 'rocket' | list_objects('url') | mailto(someaddr@server.com)"
Do a google search, extract all the urls from the search results, email the list of the urls to some address.
It would be fantastic.
-Alex
Here's another weird one. Go over the middleast totally zoomed out, and start zooming in towards Israel. zoom...zoom...the labels "Gaza Strip" and "West Bank" appear for two zoom levels but no "Israel". Weird, since they're not yet countries and cover less territory.
Ugh, modded insightful. I'm pretty sure parent is joking (or an idiot...might have to do with his skull shape).
Seriously, phrenolog != science. It's a hundred years disproven and people are still being bought in.
"Clearly, the present never is changed by mischievous time-travellers: people don't suddenly fade into the ether because a rerun of events has prevented their births - that much is obvious."
That's not clear at all. If I went back in time and killed the baby George W Bush, it's like he would disappear in the middle of a speech. Rather the entire course of history branching from that moment would be changed, so that in the "present" no one would ever know GW had existed.
-Alex
"An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday." To anyone who knows about the current state of neuroscience (a few disconnected scraps of experimental data) this reads: "A team of three dozen gerbils have endeavored to construct a space shuttle from twigs and cheese nuggets." The article continues: "It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time" So wrong. We've been doing live single-neuron recordings in rats, cats, monkeys and even humans for quite some time...and that *is* observing the electrical code of the brain. There's been progress in a few directions (analysis of retinal ganglion spikes has helped the development of the artificial retina), but only the input and ouput signals (with which we can correlate real world events) make any sense to us. All the internal processing of the brain is still mysterious magic. A 10,000 neuron simulation of the cortex won't really tell us anything we haven't already learned, and isolated from other neural circuits it probably won't do much. To claim this project will "shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness" is either ignorant or purposefully dishonest. -Alex
Those numbers are so small...my parents run a small computer schoool that pulls in ~ $3 million a year. After taxes and expenses there's really not much left. SCO really *is* dying...they're spending millions on the IBM case, and that's really all the money they have.
I wonder if some the delay in the lawsuit is due to IBM...the longer this case drags out, the less chance SCO has to survive to the end.
Books like Rita Carter's are the junk-tabloids of brain studies. Our understanding of the brain is so small and limited...why these books keep coming out? Why do they push fragile disputed theories as "Consciousness Explained!" ?
If you want to learn about neuroscience in an easy-to-swallow format, read Oliver Sacks
* He's a practicing neurologist, with a deep knowledge of the subjects he covers (unlike Rita Carter, who's a clueless popularizer)
* He covers many of the same cases at Rita Carter with greater insight
* He doesn't throw around wild exaggerations, (it seems that Rita Carter is hoping her reader won't know any better).
Forget Rita Carter, go pick up Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat".
I see these brain-computer processing power comparisons on slashdot often, and they make me cringe.
)
The brain is *not* a serial computer, and cannot be compared to one in any meaningful way.
1) Parallel computations cannot necessarily be simulated on a serial computer. (http://www.andrewboucher.com/papers/parallel.htm
2) Why do you assume that a neuron can be simulated with a multiply-add operation? Even if the perceptron model of the neuron, where a scalar output is the linear combination of scalar inputs, had anything to do with the brain (which it almost certainly doesn't), you'd need a variable-length addition (between 1 and 100,000 inputs). Furthermore, to make the perceptron useful, you need some form of non-linear transformation on the output.
3) Many of the 1e11 cells you're including in your calculation are used for specific, non-conscious tasks.
4) What about the 1e13 neuroglia, whose function is still poorly understood, but have been shown to have an active role in the brain's activity? (reacting to and initiating neural activity)
5) 1e2 "operations per seconds" (firing rate?). Action potentials are not operations performed on data, they are the data.
Ugh, I could go on for a while...
But please, please....the brain != serial computer. The brain is not comparable to a serial computer. And they can be compared, no one today knows enough to do it. So stop.
(reposted with formatting, sorry) From the latest International Jerusalem Post:
Year--Suicide Bombings
2002 46
2003 17
2004 4
All four this year were before the assasination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Personally I think Israeli tactics foment hatred, and cause more Palestinians to want to commit acts of terror. But without leaders (thanks to assassinations), weapons (thanks to raids), or physical access (thanks to seperation wall), no matter how much a Palestinian might want to kill Israelis, they can't do it.
From the latest International Jerusalem Post: Year------------Suicide Bombings 2002 46 2003 17 2004 4 All four this year were before the assasination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Personally I think Israeli tactics foment hatred, and cause more Palestinians to want to commit acts of terror. But without leaders (thanks to assassinations), weapons (thanks to raids), or physical access (thanks to seperation wall), no matter how much a Palestinian might want to kill Israelis, they can't do it.
The problem of radical islam (and the terrorism it encourages) is so vexing precisely because the common-sense solutions (increased education/wealth) don't work.
It's (dangerously) popular to claim that terrorism is somehow linked to the quality of life terrorists experience.
But take Israel for example: The majority of suicide bombers are middle-class and educated. Ditto for the September 11th hijackers: middle class professionals. They aren't motivated to kill out of poverty and despair, but through cultural and religious indoctrination.
About 10 years ago my parents opened a computer school together. My mom has some education in Human Resources, my dad was a programmer/DBA. They split the tasks so that everything involving people went to my mom, while all things computer related went to my dad. Whenever there was overlap (hiring teachers, which subjects to teach this semester, which computer hardware shop to trust etc..), horrible arguments ensued.
After a few years of fighting, my dad gave up on having his say, and just started doing whatever my mom told him to. The business functions smoothly now, they've expanded to a few new locations, and are becoming moderately successful. My mom runs the show, my dad fixes broken stations in his hidden-away office.
I guess the lesson of the story is that if both of you are strong-willed (as my parents started off), be prepared for some changes in the relationship. Either one of you will "break", or you'll live out your relationship in a constant state of bickering.
Horrific policy...makes me a bit ashmed of the iMac I'm typing this on.
I'm a fan of Apple designs, but I really hope they stay a niche in the market. If Apple ever overruns Redmond, we'll all look back on Microsoft as comparatively benevolent.
-Jerald Hams
"Coding isn't as hard as most coders would like to claim"... Mostly anyone (grandmas, monkeys, LAS majors), can memorize the basic tricks of C++ and start churning out functional code in little time.
My parents own a crash-course computer school. Immigrants, career-changers and miscellaneous riff-raff come in, sit through 14 weeks of labs and lectures, and off to the job market they go. They've learned C++ and their code works. BUT, the quality of the code is horrible...and improvements won't come with another quick-fix training session.
Though coders may be common, good ones are rare. (Check sourceforge projects for further proof)
-Jerald Hams
The brain is not a serial computer
I repeat, the brain is not a serial computer. The maximum firing rate of each neuron is 1000 hertz. This speed is glacial compared to even the oldest computers. The brains power comes from its massive parallelism. Your head houses billions of interconnected neurons, all firing simultaneously.
A machine equivalent would not be a computer (in the usual sense) but a parallel neural network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network
I think parent (along with some other posts) are confusing the biological neuron and the perceptron, which is a simplified mathematical model. While the perceptron can't cope with linearly inseperable problems (like XOR), there is no consensus on the computational limits of the neuron. In fact, very little is known for certain about the learning algorithm used by the nervous system. The neuron may learn not only through the weights of its inputs, but also through chemical interactions with glial cells. Really, the neuron is still too much of a mystery for us to know its limitations.
Mmmm....Anyone have more?
-Jerald_Hams
What sort of things would get you beat up if said in public...? - Blacks and Mexicans are more likely than Whites or Asians to be murderers, rapists and criminals of every variety. Any others?
Ummm...I'll bite... Any modeling or visualization...anything application in which you need to calculate the complex interplay of many little components.
I'm writing an application that simulates the evolution of language in a population of ~1000 neural networks. Try running that on your 386SX with math coprocessor.
I only wish the price of these things would slide down a little more. Something like a PS2 cluster would be excellent for me if the linux kit wasn't so costly.