I'm taking Psych. 1 now; one of the things we talked about first was the evolution of the brain -- this was intro, background material.
Homo sapiens has a brain about 2x the size of Homo erectus', and 4x the size of Australopithecus. But here's the interesting bit: Really advanced human behavior took a long time to develop after the brain for it evolved.
Our species waited around for tens of thousands of years with the right wetware, apparently doing nothing, until, all of a sudden, a whole host of behaviors emerged: Art (cave paintings), Spirituality (ritual burials), etc. And in the evolutionary timescale, this is even pretty close to things like The Emergence of Civilization.
My psych. prof used this as evidence for his own personal belief that most of the limitations placed on the human brain are socio-cultural, not biological.
Now, I switch from what I was told in class, to my own ideas: If this is true, then, what is it that happened in the intervening time -- while we were sitting around with big brains and before 'intelligence' emerged? An answer: Our memes evolved!
The question, then: What set of thoughts and beliefs creates more intelligent people? How do we find that set?
Yeah, I do understand. I once had two close friends, both ethnically Chinese: One intensely distrusted the other in large part because the second was a Japanophile; the first felt that it wasn't right to like Japanese culture if you're Chinese. Interestingly, the more nationalistic and anti-Japanese of the two was Chinese-American, and the one who was actually from China - Shanghai - was the Japanophile. Maybe it's like how language evolves more quickly in the mother country (example: Parisian French) than in the colony (example: Quebecois French): When culture branches, it's the culture in the motherland that moves on from the past more quickly.
Of course, it could also just be because now-booming Shanghai isn't representative of the rest of China. Or maybe it's as simple as that the sample size of my experience is too small.
At any rate, you're definitely right about the 'why.' I just think that picking scabs on the wounds of history only makes the healing slower. (But as a Caucasian with no stake whatsoever, maybe that's just easy for me to say.)
That sounds vaguely reminicent of all the complaints about Chinese actresses being cast in Memoirs of a Geisha. I've seen movies made from books, in which black actors played white characters -- well. So who cares if somebody Chinese plays a character who is incidentally Japanese? It's acting. The whole point is to behave like somebody you're not.
So if this really is about ethnicity, I sympathize with Mr. Lim. But if he's just playing that card because he's annoyed he didn't get the role, then he's playing the sorts of politics I can't stand.
Not being intimately familiar with what's going on, I don't really know enough to say which this is. So I'll just leave it at that and be on my way.
Re:Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologiz
on
Pluto Probe Launches
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· Score: 1
Paper cranes? Seems pretty disrespectful to the people who died at Hiroshima to implicitly compare a spacecraft launch to that atrocity.
(Re: Politics. I'm not condemning the US in particular for dropping Little Boy. It was war, which, as Sherman said, was hell. Every side committed genocide. War is mass-murder. Not the fault of the poor schmucks in the Wehrmacht, or the ones flying Zeroes, or the G.I.s. Not your fault or my fault: Just terrible, terrible history. Only thing to do now is not repeat it.)
> WTF are you smoking? how the hell can you conclude that leaving a network open creates an implied "use me" policy?
If things like public municipal WiFi are to take off, we can't have that point of view.
Let's say I'm the city of Philadelphia and I want to put free WiFi in the parks. If there's a legal precedent that says you're not allowed to use WAPs you stumble across, then this idea will never take off.
Or what if we want WiFi to become a truly open broadcasting medium? What if I want to stream my own MP3s to whoever is nearby who might care? This vision of the future can't happen with implied non-permission.
The problem is the "breaking-and-entry" metaphor we've been using. What we're talking about is radio communication. CB operators have never had an expectation of privacy, nor have HAMs. Unless there's an explicit lock -- it doesn't even need to be cryptographically secure; it just needs to send the message "you do not belong here" -- then I think we need to use the same assumptions we use for other radio communications.
>My comment was just meant to point out that I've seen many women interpret plain ol' interest by a guy as harrasment and not even have the guts to tell the guy to go away.
I've actually had this happen. Just once. Actually, it was worse than what you describe: What I thought was simple general-purpose friendliness was interpreted as sexual advances.
I went to a party with a girl, who ran into a friend of hers who I didn't know. I was introduced to the friend, I assumed, simply because that's what people do to be polite. I tried to be friendly to this new person but didn't think I showed any particular interest. I found out much later that apparently she did, and that she'd told another friend of hers that I'd been hitting on her and otherwise paying her unwanted attention. That shocked the hell out of me. I thought I'd hardly said more than hello.
That made me angry for a couple of reasons. First, that someone would think of me in those terms at all -- I aspire to be a good person, and have always thought that that was the impression I gave. Second (this is the tiniest bit contradictory), that, if she did think that I was making advances, that she was offended by them (why, what's wrong with me?). And third, because I felt that I had to change my patterns of behavior with other people as a result: I began to get the paranoid thought, "I cannot say 'hello' to other people. They will translate it to mean, 'I would like to sleep with you.'"
I've told this story to a few other people in a self-questioning way, and have only received comments to the effect of, "Don't worry; you don't come across that way." But what would I expect people to say? You can't trust people not to tell little white lies to you.
So anyway, I figured I'd post this story, at the very least, as a demonstration that the issues that everyone seems concerned with run in all sorts of directions.
I'd never really thought about it in those terms. Cool. But here's a thought: If it were possible to view a 2d image at a specific depth - like a cross-section -- then time could provide the necessary additional dimension(s) if your seeing-machine could use a fast enough scan cycle. In fact, you only need to be able to "see" a single point in space at any instant, so long as you can raster through the volume of interest fast enough. One might even spend more time performing "progressive refinement" of the center of focus, for example (recursively subdividing the view grid using something like oct-trees -- or random sampling.)
An example of what doing things sequentially but very quickly can do: DLP televisions only show one color at a time, and the apparent intensity of any color is itself determined by pulse-width modulation -- turning the color on and off very quickly.
We can do 3d imaging using techniques like MRI. I wonder what it would take to apply some of these things to vision. What would be the best way to perceive it? Is it possible to give the mind additional inputs, and to develop additional, entirely independent senses? Or do we need to piggyback on the already highly-evolved visual processing centers that we have?
(Approaching the subject like an engineer who reads too much sci-fi.)
Labview is horrible, horrible, horrible!!. Egads do I detest that program. Language is more intuitive than are circuit diagrams!! Don't use analog circuits as a metaphor for code. Please.
That said, "graph-based langages" do seem to "encourage" programmers to write code that, it would seem to me, might have better parallelism for multi-processing / cluster stuff. But that's the only advantage I can imagine.
I share your pain.
For everyone who has been fortunate enough to avoid Labview: It's what physisists who don't know computer languages do to get computers to automate their experiments. And it does bad things to my head. But maybe I'm just too stuck in my imperative language paradigms (though the little Lisp I've played with is pretty intuitive too.)
It's also slow. I was trying to get some realtime video analysis stuff working in Labview -- pointing a laser at a camera and figuring out where the centroid of the beam is with subpixel accuracy; you do that by fitting a 2d gaussian to the spot. Using the Labview Levenberg-Marquadt routines, you'd be lucky to get a frame a minute. When I implemented the whole thing in a C DLL running in a seperate thread, (which Labview queried when it needed to for centroid coordinates), that rate went up to 15 fps!
I happen to like the way they look in the morning when they first wake up. Or after a workout, or just after a shower. There's something genuinely human about it. When they're dressed up and covered in makeup, I feel myself becoming an objectifying asshole -- and that's something I'd rather not be.
But hey, this is Slashdot. What am I doing being serious?
It used to be, back in the 90s, that you could do all kinds of cool stuff: Dynamic logic, they called it -- precharge-evaluate, domino logic, zipper logic... google 'em; they're cool. Nowadays, we can't even do that. I was talking to a guy from AMD the other day; he explained that the leakage currents and noise levels are so high that everying ends up needing to be boring old AOI CMOS. "It's not as fun for the circuit designers as it used to be," he said. Ah well.
EM fields do propagate at the speed of light. Light is EM fields. But the signals inside a chip do move much more slowly. Why? Picture a wire as a whole lot of little capacitors with resistors in between (in what's called a "ladder network.") Say the entire wire starts out at 0v. Now touch one end to +5V. What happens? The capacitor closest to +5V begins to charge. As the first capacitor charges, current starts to flow through the series resistor to the next capacitor -- and so on. If you're curious about this sort of thing, google "transmission line."
Innovation?! C'mon! This is a culture in which people really do use words like "synergy" and "value-added" with straight faces! I know; I've worked with them!
Each time I've worked in a corporate environment, I've been thoroughly appauled. People don't pursue good ideas! Rather, they make sure that they have all the right "check marks" on their "report cards." At the last place I worked, there were so many half-assed useless projects lying around -- wastes of time and money -- which could have been made useful if the resources had been put into them to do them right. But they weren't, because that's not how the incentive structure works.
When the end of the quarter comes around, you're faced with a choice: Have I "met my goals" (your immediate supervisor will be inclined to say that you did, because it'll make him look good), and pick up a fat bonus -- or do you finish the job right?. Of course you choose option 1; you play the "incentive structure" for all it's worth.
You make the right moves. You cozy up to the right people. You do everything you can to look good. You do not investigate great new ideas.
Political scientists speak of "collective action problems." The corporation is a legal construct, and the laws that govern it seem tailor-made to create collective action problems. The individual incentives that corporatism puts in place spur individual actions which do not sum to positive collective action. That is, each worker puts the right checkmarks on his report card, but the company does not pursue goals - like investing in new technology - on which its future ultimately depends.
It's because of the "incentive horizon." People pursue goals "within their horizons." Investment culture, and legal obligations to shareholders, dictate that the incentive horizon is approximately three months long. Why don't we have decent broadband in the US? Because infrastructure takes time and has delayed returns. Successful cultures emphasize the importance of 'delayed returns,' but corporatism as it is currently practiced does not. There's a famous explanation in political science for why hereditary monarchy is rationally preferable for a people than is a series of dictatorships by unrelated people: The monarch has a larger "incentive horizon," and so will seek to build a country that will serve him and his decendants. He will tax at the maximum level which does not significantly harm economic growth, because, integrated over time, this represents his largest possible profit. The despot, in contrast, has a shorter incentive horizon, and so it is not rational for him to pursue delayed returns: He taxes everything immediately, seizing farms and industrial equipment. His actions mean that soon the public will not be able to generate new tax income to tax, but, in the short time-span in which he is operating, that is entirely rational. The problem is that modern corporatism creates this second incentive structure. Other countries, like South Korea and Japan, have succeeded in developing good broadband because they have succeeded in using government regulation to effectively change the incentive structure for corporations. The incentive horizon is longer for them. Probably still not optimally large, but longer.
So what is an innovator to do? Certainly don't get caught up in the mess that is corporate culture. Me, I'm seriously thinking about a PhD and research. I've been nothing but impressed with academic scientists.
Don't transparent materials tend not to be very good conductors? Conductors tend to be shiny, since if they can conduct current, then when EM waves like light hit them, the fields induce opposite currents. These alternating currents emit their own waves, which propagate in the opposite direction to be reflections -- right?
...in which case, the transparent aluminum foil wouldn't protect as well!
>TAHT'S WHY I'M PORTING MYSELF TO A SILICON BASED LIFE FORM! WHO'S WITH ME?
That's the spirit! But I'm gonna go with galium nitride for better RF response. You gotta be careful about the dopants though; you'll get the munchies and'll end up eating too many chips.
Come on, EVERYBODY has Photoshop! (And none of them paid for it.;-) )
[Side observation: Adobe's business model depends on warez. Were it not for free copies of Photoshop on the black market, people wouldn't learn to use it, and it would not be the industry standard. Adobe makes its money from corporations who buy copies to put on their workers' computers -- workers who first learned to use Photoshop with pirated copies.]
Computer science is cool, but Google Labs will never do anything as fundamentally world-changing as invent the transistor. It takes more than computer science and IT to be the next Bell Labs. It takes real physics!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm taking Psych. 1 now; one of the things we talked about first was the evolution of the brain -- this was intro, background material.
Homo sapiens has a brain about 2x the size of Homo erectus', and 4x the size of Australopithecus. But here's the interesting bit: Really advanced human behavior took a long time to develop after the brain for it evolved.
Our species waited around for tens of thousands of years with the right wetware, apparently doing nothing, until, all of a sudden, a whole host of behaviors emerged: Art (cave paintings), Spirituality (ritual burials), etc. And in the evolutionary timescale, this is even pretty close to things like The Emergence of Civilization.
My psych. prof used this as evidence for his own personal belief that most of the limitations placed on the human brain are socio-cultural, not biological.
Now, I switch from what I was told in class, to my own ideas: If this is true, then, what is it that happened in the intervening time -- while we were sitting around with big brains and before 'intelligence' emerged? An answer: Our memes evolved!
The question, then: What set of thoughts and beliefs creates more intelligent people? How do we find that set?
Yeah, I do understand. I once had two close friends, both ethnically Chinese: One intensely distrusted the other in large part because the second was a Japanophile; the first felt that it wasn't right to like Japanese culture if you're Chinese. Interestingly, the more nationalistic and anti-Japanese of the two was Chinese-American, and the one who was actually from China - Shanghai - was the Japanophile. Maybe it's like how language evolves more quickly in the mother country (example: Parisian French) than in the colony (example: Quebecois French): When culture branches, it's the culture in the motherland that moves on from the past more quickly.
Of course, it could also just be because now-booming Shanghai isn't representative of the rest of China. Or maybe it's as simple as that the sample size of my experience is too small.
At any rate, you're definitely right about the 'why.' I just think that picking scabs on the wounds of history only makes the healing slower. (But as a Caucasian with no stake whatsoever, maybe that's just easy for me to say.)
That sounds vaguely reminicent of all the complaints about Chinese actresses being cast in Memoirs of a Geisha. I've seen movies made from books, in which black actors played white characters -- well. So who cares if somebody Chinese plays a character who is incidentally Japanese? It's acting. The whole point is to behave like somebody you're not.
So if this really is about ethnicity, I sympathize with Mr. Lim. But if he's just playing that card because he's annoyed he didn't get the role, then he's playing the sorts of politics I can't stand.
Not being intimately familiar with what's going on, I don't really know enough to say which this is. So I'll just leave it at that and be on my way.
Paper cranes? Seems pretty disrespectful to the people who died at Hiroshima to implicitly compare a spacecraft launch to that atrocity.
(Re: Politics. I'm not condemning the US in particular for dropping Little Boy. It was war, which, as Sherman said, was hell. Every side committed genocide. War is mass-murder. Not the fault of the poor schmucks in the Wehrmacht, or the ones flying Zeroes, or the G.I.s. Not your fault or my fault: Just terrible, terrible history. Only thing to do now is not repeat it.)
>Are we talking cheddar or gorgonzola?
Bleu. That was the color she turned.
A whole bunch of stuff that went straight over my head about a year ago is suddenly boomeranging back into my consciousness. And it hurts. Bad.
> ...as loosely, um, a really loose thing.
If the joke isn't obvious to you already, it should be.
> WTF are you smoking? how the hell can you conclude that leaving a network open creates an implied "use me" policy?
If things like public municipal WiFi are to take off, we can't have that point of view.
Let's say I'm the city of Philadelphia and I want to put free WiFi in the parks. If there's a legal precedent that says you're not allowed to use WAPs you stumble across, then this idea will never take off.
Or what if we want WiFi to become a truly open broadcasting medium? What if I want to stream my own MP3s to whoever is nearby who might care? This vision of the future can't happen with implied non-permission.
The problem is the "breaking-and-entry" metaphor we've been using. What we're talking about is radio communication. CB operators have never had an expectation of privacy, nor have HAMs. Unless there's an explicit lock -- it doesn't even need to be cryptographically secure; it just needs to send the message "you do not belong here" -- then I think we need to use the same assumptions we use for other radio communications.
>The free piece of cheese I get at the supermarket from the nice little lady expires in about 12-14 hours... doesn't make it any less free.
...and the nice piece of expired lady that I get at the supermarket doesn't smell any less like cheese...>My comment was just meant to point out that I've seen many women interpret plain ol' interest by a guy as harrasment and not even have the guts to tell the guy to go away.
I've actually had this happen. Just once. Actually, it was worse than what you describe: What I thought was simple general-purpose friendliness was interpreted as sexual advances.
I went to a party with a girl, who ran into a friend of hers who I didn't know. I was introduced to the friend, I assumed, simply because that's what people do to be polite. I tried to be friendly to this new person but didn't think I showed any particular interest. I found out much later that apparently she did, and that she'd told another friend of hers that I'd been hitting on her and otherwise paying her unwanted attention. That shocked the hell out of me. I thought I'd hardly said more than hello.
That made me angry for a couple of reasons. First, that someone would think of me in those terms at all -- I aspire to be a good person, and have always thought that that was the impression I gave. Second (this is the tiniest bit contradictory), that, if she did think that I was making advances, that she was offended by them (why, what's wrong with me?). And third, because I felt that I had to change my patterns of behavior with other people as a result: I began to get the paranoid thought, "I cannot say 'hello' to other people. They will translate it to mean, 'I would like to sleep with you.'"
I've told this story to a few other people in a self-questioning way, and have only received comments to the effect of, "Don't worry; you don't come across that way." But what would I expect people to say? You can't trust people not to tell little white lies to you.
So anyway, I figured I'd post this story, at the very least, as a demonstration that the issues that everyone seems concerned with run in all sorts of directions.
I'd never really thought about it in those terms. Cool. But here's a thought: If it were possible to view a 2d image at a specific depth - like a cross-section -- then time could provide the necessary additional dimension(s) if your seeing-machine could use a fast enough scan cycle. In fact, you only need to be able to "see" a single point in space at any instant, so long as you can raster through the volume of interest fast enough. One might even spend more time performing "progressive refinement" of the center of focus, for example (recursively subdividing the view grid using something like oct-trees -- or random sampling.)
An example of what doing things sequentially but very quickly can do: DLP televisions only show one color at a time, and the apparent intensity of any color is itself determined by pulse-width modulation -- turning the color on and off very quickly.
We can do 3d imaging using techniques like MRI. I wonder what it would take to apply some of these things to vision. What would be the best way to perceive it? Is it possible to give the mind additional inputs, and to develop additional, entirely independent senses? Or do we need to piggyback on the already highly-evolved visual processing centers that we have?
(Approaching the subject like an engineer who reads too much sci-fi.)
Labview is horrible, horrible, horrible!! . Egads do I detest that program. Language is more intuitive than are circuit diagrams!! Don't use analog circuits as a metaphor for code. Please.
That said, "graph-based langages" do seem to "encourage" programmers to write code that, it would seem to me, might have better parallelism for multi-processing / cluster stuff. But that's the only advantage I can imagine.
I share your pain.
For everyone who has been fortunate enough to avoid Labview: It's what physisists who don't know computer languages do to get computers to automate their experiments. And it does bad things to my head. But maybe I'm just too stuck in my imperative language paradigms (though the little Lisp I've played with is pretty intuitive too.)
It's also slow. I was trying to get some realtime video analysis stuff working in Labview -- pointing a laser at a camera and figuring out where the centroid of the beam is with subpixel accuracy; you do that by fitting a 2d gaussian to the spot. Using the Labview Levenberg-Marquadt routines, you'd be lucky to get a frame a minute. When I implemented the whole thing in a C DLL running in a seperate thread, (which Labview queried when it needed to for centroid coordinates), that rate went up to 15 fps!
I happen to like the way they look in the morning when they first wake up. Or after a workout, or just after a shower. There's something genuinely human about it. When they're dressed up and covered in makeup, I feel myself becoming an objectifying asshole -- and that's something I'd rather not be.
But hey, this is Slashdot. What am I doing being serious?
It used to be, back in the 90s, that you could do all kinds of cool stuff: Dynamic logic, they called it -- precharge-evaluate, domino logic, zipper logic... google 'em; they're cool. Nowadays, we can't even do that. I was talking to a guy from AMD the other day; he explained that the leakage currents and noise levels are so high that everying ends up needing to be boring old AOI CMOS. "It's not as fun for the circuit designers as it used to be," he said. Ah well.
Quantum dots!
You're probably thinking 0.35 and 0.65 micron... and there are a thousand of those to a nanometer, so that'd be 350 and 650 nm, respectively.
One in four Americans. One in four.
You know, the individual pixels in jumbotrons are blocks of LEDs -- they're that big! We're just far enough away that they look fine anyway.
So if honking LEDs suffice, I suspect super-duper-teeny-pixels won't quite be necessary!
EM fields do propagate at the speed of light. Light is EM fields. But the signals inside a chip do move much more slowly. Why? Picture a wire as a whole lot of little capacitors with resistors in between (in what's called a "ladder network.") Say the entire wire starts out at 0v. Now touch one end to +5V. What happens? The capacitor closest to +5V begins to charge. As the first capacitor charges, current starts to flow through the series resistor to the next capacitor -- and so on. If you're curious about this sort of thing, google "transmission line."
More likely than monkeys, it's robotic space dogs. Who've lost their tails. And are pretending that they're manga. With some chick named Cindi.
Climbing the corporate ladder != Innovation
Innovation?! C'mon! This is a culture in which people really do use words like "synergy" and "value-added" with straight faces! I know; I've worked with them!
Each time I've worked in a corporate environment, I've been thoroughly appauled. People don't pursue good ideas! Rather, they make sure that they have all the right "check marks" on their "report cards." At the last place I worked, there were so many half-assed useless projects lying around -- wastes of time and money -- which could have been made useful if the resources had been put into them to do them right. But they weren't, because that's not how the incentive structure works.
When the end of the quarter comes around, you're faced with a choice: Have I "met my goals" (your immediate supervisor will be inclined to say that you did, because it'll make him look good), and pick up a fat bonus -- or do you finish the job right?. Of course you choose option 1; you play the "incentive structure" for all it's worth.
You make the right moves. You cozy up to the right people. You do everything you can to look good. You do not investigate great new ideas.
Political scientists speak of "collective action problems." The corporation is a legal construct, and the laws that govern it seem tailor-made to create collective action problems. The individual incentives that corporatism puts in place spur individual actions which do not sum to positive collective action. That is, each worker puts the right checkmarks on his report card, but the company does not pursue goals - like investing in new technology - on which its future ultimately depends.
It's because of the "incentive horizon." People pursue goals "within their horizons." Investment culture, and legal obligations to shareholders, dictate that the incentive horizon is approximately three months long. Why don't we have decent broadband in the US? Because infrastructure takes time and has delayed returns. Successful cultures emphasize the importance of 'delayed returns,' but corporatism as it is currently practiced does not. There's a famous explanation in political science for why hereditary monarchy is rationally preferable for a people than is a series of dictatorships by unrelated people: The monarch has a larger "incentive horizon," and so will seek to build a country that will serve him and his decendants. He will tax at the maximum level which does not significantly harm economic growth, because, integrated over time, this represents his largest possible profit. The despot, in contrast, has a shorter incentive horizon, and so it is not rational for him to pursue delayed returns: He taxes everything immediately, seizing farms and industrial equipment. His actions mean that soon the public will not be able to generate new tax income to tax, but, in the short time-span in which he is operating, that is entirely rational. The problem is that modern corporatism creates this second incentive structure. Other countries, like South Korea and Japan, have succeeded in developing good broadband because they have succeeded in using government regulation to effectively change the incentive structure for corporations. The incentive horizon is longer for them. Probably still not optimally large, but longer.
So what is an innovator to do? Certainly don't get caught up in the mess that is corporate culture. Me, I'm seriously thinking about a PhD and research. I've been nothing but impressed with academic scientists.
Don't transparent materials tend not to be very good conductors? Conductors tend to be shiny, since if they can conduct current, then when EM waves like light hit them, the fields induce opposite currents. These alternating currents emit their own waves, which propagate in the opposite direction to be reflections -- right?
...in which case, the transparent aluminum foil wouldn't protect as well!
>TAHT'S WHY I'M PORTING MYSELF TO A SILICON BASED LIFE FORM! WHO'S WITH ME?
That's the spirit! But I'm gonna go with galium nitride for better RF response. You gotta be careful about the dopants though; you'll get the munchies and'll end up eating too many chips.
Ah, nicely done then.
I wonder where you can do corporate research these days besides IBM and defense contractors like B.A.E.
Come on, EVERYBODY has Photoshop! (And none of them paid for it. ;-) )
[Side observation: Adobe's business model depends on warez. Were it not for free copies of Photoshop on the black market, people wouldn't learn to use it, and it would not be the industry standard. Adobe makes its money from corporations who buy copies to put on their workers' computers -- workers who first learned to use Photoshop with pirated copies.]
Computer science is cool, but Google Labs will never do anything as fundamentally world-changing as invent the transistor. It takes more than computer science and IT to be the next Bell Labs. It takes real physics!