Yes, I understand what you are saying. But why then are there so many linear relationships in the physical world. Why does F=ma and not F=ma^1.3 or some weird relation between velocity and acceleration. Or a universe where the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity instead of linear... oh wait. Never mind.
Why are these laws so simple? That is the central question to me. Perhaps they need to be for a life sustaining universe. And the Anthropic Principle raises its head... is there a "Godwin Rule" for this?
No pretty accurate I think. We have created a fragile civilisation. How long would our civilisation survive if there was a power outage for one week? One month? Then compare what would have happened 100 years ago. What if supplies of fuel failed for a month, no food would get into supermarkets. But 100 years ago market gardens actually existed within cities, they were not purely urban. People could be fed, not well, but the population was nowhere near as great and existing means of transport were not so dependent on high energy sources. We have made no effort to make our civilisation resilient. Everyone is way too gung-ho thinking we can do anything. Well I tell you it is a fantasy. Nature and life can be very cruel and nasty and we seem to have forgotten that.
Wrong. The temperatures have not been dropping. This has been well and truly debunked. If you start your graph with the record warm year of 2008 then of course it looks like a drop, you don't need to be an Einstein to figure that one out. But if you plot on a longer timescale then the line of best fit for temperature just continues its relentless climb.
Exactly. Our civilisation is complex and fragile. It is easier to destroy our civilisation now than it was even 100 years ago. Any disruption could be long term, food and water are fundamental and shortages of them could destabilise advanced nations. But we could handle that. But if temperatures went over 4C say, then I think we would be struggling to keep civilisation together.
What? Are you now saying that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas? More CO2 means more infra red energy trapped in the atmosphere. Known for more than a hundred years. There is abundant evidence for any reasonable person to conclude that global warming is probably due to human produced CO2. The rest of the world had this debate more than 10 years ago... sadly the USA seemed to have just been watching Fox News rather than any science.
Ideal circles do not exist. Before human beings they didn't exist, and they still do not exist. We define them. Can you think of a perfect circle? If you can you must have perfect visual processing in your brain. This is a hard problem I admit, and I'm not going to pretend my answer is absolutely correct. However, mathematics proceeds from axioms, which are fundamental assumptions... sometimes based on physical intuitions, but sometimes not.
I think mathematics is so effective because in the realm of physics our discoveries have few degrees of freedom and can therefore be represented by simple rules. Since the rules must be consistent we have the basis for physics and a tie in to mathematics.
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? — Albert Einstein
There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology. — Alexandre Borovik
YES! This has long been acknowledged by people who we usually assume know a little bit about the physical world. It seems reasonable to me, but demonstrating why it is reasonable is another thing.
Mathematics is a collection of logically consistent statements about abstractions such as structure and number. "Hypothetical" implies it needs to be tested, a mathematical proof does not need a 'test'.
If prices rise too high the economy will collapse anyway. The oil doesn't have to completely disappear just become too expensive. You could have bazillions of tonnes of shale oil but if it is too expensive the economy won't function anyway. Endgame.
The problem is that the model of the market is part of the market. Therefore the correct model could only be true for a brief period, if at all. Any model will become a subset of a new model... ad infinitum. However, it is an interesting result nonetheless.
Re:That Quote Really Hit Home
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have never understood this whole debate. Randomness does not mean free-will. Just because there is a random factor does not mean you have a "real" choice, any more than if you lived your life by a roll of the dice. And I have never heard anyone give me a satisfactory definition of free-will. It always seems like a sloppy notion that human beings use but have never worked out. No wonder we get confused.
The article headline is completely wrong. Read the article. It is about how although we may have the capacity to analyse things properly, we may fail to do so because of bias, unwillingness etc. Being smart does not make you wise. It isn't even controversial. But the researchers talk about expanding the definition of intelligence or adding extra tests to measure this capacity.
It was obvious there was something else going on from episode one titled "33". Where Baltar repents and suddenly the ship is destroyed... you start to wonder if it was all just coincidence. Then "The Hand of God" episode and Baltar realising he is an instrument of God. There is so much bizarre manipulation of the characters going on through the series that it becomes pretty clear there is another 'player' beyond the humans and the cylons. So when Head Six says to Baltar, "I am an Angel of God sent here to protect you." --- I took it as the truth. From then on the story got more interesting not less so.
Back in 1964 Sir Fred Hoyle wrote a slim volume of essays entitled "Of Men And Galaxies". In it he discussed the Fermi Paradox and his take on it.
"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only."
Not what we want to hear, but that doesn't make it false either. And yes it made me depressed when I first read it all those years ago. I however, believe intelligence can overcome even such a scenario, but it wont be the kind of advanced civilisation we are used to thinking about.
I don't think you could even call this "aluminium" in any normal sense of the word. It was a hot plasma with the electrons displaced somewhat, from memory. It is extremely interesting, I think plasma physics is fascinating, but calling it 'Transparent Aluminium'... that is just wrong.
Oh and yes for the anal crowd: I do not live in the USA so I use a different spelling and pronunciation of the element, but we all know I am speaking of 'Al', atomic number 13.
I think the greatest danger is that we will degrade our foodbase and the biodiversity at the same time we run out of cheap energy. And we will have a big population at the same time. A triple whammy. If we don't think way ahead and start acting now I don't think our civilisation will survive. It will go under. Humans will survive. The world will get hot, after a millennium cool, perhaps over shoot into a new glacial period. Eventually, we will come out of it, hopefully smarter but in a resource poor world. We will get to a renaissance level but not much more. Fail again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe eventually we will have evolved to be much smarter, smart enough to create a technical civilisation without the abundant energy and minerals we have. Or else we will just quietly go extinct.
That is what I fear is our fate if we don't plan as we should. It would be an appropriate irony if Homo Sapiens, the wise man, were to fail because of its foolishness.
But CO2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas than methane. So the small amount of methane is a problem as methane, but those same carbon atoms in CO2 are far less effective.
Ha ha... Yeah my thoughts exactly. But to be fair to MS they aren't the first company to lockout parts of an OS until money has been coughed up. I think the difference is that this time it is designed to do this... sorry just couldn't help myself.
Just as a postscript. I just tried "planet positions"... and it gave me a skychart showing the positions of planets at this time. So I thought, "wait a second, this is latitude, longitude dependent, does it know where I am?" And looking at the chart it shows my town... or did it extract that from my previous query on the weather. Looks like we may have a learning machine here for each user... hmmm.
First query I tried was: brisbane weather. Because it is raining here. Very interesting results. Extremely cool.
However more mundane googly kind of searches resulted in nothing.
Conclusion: potentially very interesting indeed, but it will take my mind a little while to think of this as not a search engine but a data 'probing' or analysis engine... I can't think of an appropriate term for it at the moment. Perhaps it could be regarded as a processing frontend to lots of statistical and numeric data... like Google Trends but more so. We shall see.
We have to also remember that this all occurred over many thousands of years. You don't have to be that much better and aggressive to win out. As for the extinction of the megafauna... well yeah that was indeed pretty fast... what can I say it was a smorgasboard. But Neanderthals hung on for quite a while.
We are very xenophobic, I know it is unpopular to say this but really the last hundred years should have demonstrated that genocide is practically instinctive in us. Anybody who attacks us is in big trouble. We have to try really hard not slaughter each other. And we are doing reasonably well... maybe a C-minus on that. So if homo neanderthalensis got into a guerilla war with tribes of h.sap then the end result would be inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I understand what you are saying. But why then are there so many linear relationships in the physical world. Why does F=ma and not F=ma^1.3 or some weird relation between velocity and acceleration. Or a universe where the kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity instead of linear ... oh wait. Never mind.
Why are these laws so simple? That is the central question to me. Perhaps they need to be for a life sustaining universe. And the Anthropic Principle raises its head ... is there a "Godwin Rule" for this?
No pretty accurate I think. We have created a fragile civilisation. How long would our civilisation survive if there was a power outage for one week? One month? Then compare what would have happened 100 years ago. What if supplies of fuel failed for a month, no food would get into supermarkets. But 100 years ago market gardens actually existed within cities, they were not purely urban. People could be fed, not well, but the population was nowhere near as great and existing means of transport were not so dependent on high energy sources. We have made no effort to make our civilisation resilient. Everyone is way too gung-ho thinking we can do anything. Well I tell you it is a fantasy. Nature and life can be very cruel and nasty and we seem to have forgotten that.
Or just point them to a dictionary and ask them to look up 'climate' as opposed to 'weather'.
"... once the temps started to drop"
Wrong. The temperatures have not been dropping. This has been well and truly debunked. If you start your graph with the record warm year of 2008 then of course it looks like a drop, you don't need to be an Einstein to figure that one out. But if you plot on a longer timescale then the line of best fit for temperature just continues its relentless climb.
Exactly. Our civilisation is complex and fragile. It is easier to destroy our civilisation now than it was even 100 years ago. Any disruption could be long term, food and water are fundamental and shortages of them could destabilise advanced nations. But we could handle that. But if temperatures went over 4C say, then I think we would be struggling to keep civilisation together.
But the Earth has seen much worse. We haven't.
What? Are you now saying that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas? More CO2 means more infra red energy trapped in the atmosphere. Known for more than a hundred years. There is abundant evidence for any reasonable person to conclude that global warming is probably due to human produced CO2. The rest of the world had this debate more than 10 years ago ... sadly the USA seemed to have just been watching Fox News rather than any science.
Ideal circles do not exist. Before human beings they didn't exist, and they still do not exist. We define them. Can you think of a perfect circle? If you can you must have perfect visual processing in your brain. This is a hard problem I admit, and I'm not going to pretend my answer is absolutely correct. However, mathematics proceeds from axioms, which are fundamental assumptions ... sometimes based on physical intuitions, but sometimes not.
I think mathematics is so effective because in the realm of physics our discoveries have few degrees of freedom and can therefore be represented by simple rules. Since the rules must be consistent we have the basis for physics and a tie in to mathematics.
Quotes shamelessly stolen from here.
But the attention span doesn't change.
YES! This has long been acknowledged by people who we usually assume know a little bit about the physical world. It seems reasonable to me, but demonstrating why it is reasonable is another thing.
Hypothetical?
Mathematics is a collection of logically consistent statements about abstractions such as structure and number. "Hypothetical" implies it needs to be tested, a mathematical proof does not need a 'test'.
If prices rise too high the economy will collapse anyway. The oil doesn't have to completely disappear just become too expensive. You could have bazillions of tonnes of shale oil but if it is too expensive the economy won't function anyway. Endgame.
Sorry don't have moderation points. Peak Oil is a situation made worse by human nature. And the reasons for those decisions are completely logical.
The problem is that the model of the market is part of the market. Therefore the correct model could only be true for a brief period, if at all. Any model will become a subset of a new model ... ad infinitum. However, it is an interesting result nonetheless.
I have never understood this whole debate. Randomness does not mean free-will. Just because there is a random factor does not mean you have a "real" choice, any more than if you lived your life by a roll of the dice. And I have never heard anyone give me a satisfactory definition of free-will. It always seems like a sloppy notion that human beings use but have never worked out. No wonder we get confused.
The article headline is completely wrong. Read the article. It is about how although we may have the capacity to analyse things properly, we may fail to do so because of bias, unwillingness etc. Being smart does not make you wise. It isn't even controversial. But the researchers talk about expanding the definition of intelligence or adding extra tests to measure this capacity.
It was obvious there was something else going on from episode one titled "33". Where Baltar repents and suddenly the ship is destroyed ... you start to wonder if it was all just coincidence. Then "The Hand of God" episode and Baltar realising he is an instrument of God. There is so much bizarre manipulation of the characters going on through the series that it becomes pretty clear there is another 'player' beyond the humans and the cylons. So when Head Six says to Baltar, "I am an Angel of God sent here to protect you." --- I took it as the truth. From then on the story got more interesting not less so.
Watch it! The two of you are sounding like dangerous subversives.
Back in 1964 Sir Fred Hoyle wrote a slim volume of essays entitled "Of Men And Galaxies". In it he discussed the Fermi Paradox and his take on it.
Not what we want to hear, but that doesn't make it false either. And yes it made me depressed when I first read it all those years ago. I however, believe intelligence can overcome even such a scenario, but it wont be the kind of advanced civilisation we are used to thinking about.
I don't think you could even call this "aluminium" in any normal sense of the word. It was a hot plasma with the electrons displaced somewhat, from memory. It is extremely interesting, I think plasma physics is fascinating, but calling it 'Transparent Aluminium' ... that is just wrong.
Oh and yes for the anal crowd: I do not live in the USA so I use a different spelling and pronunciation of the element, but we all know I am speaking of 'Al', atomic number 13.
I think the greatest danger is that we will degrade our foodbase and the biodiversity at the same time we run out of cheap energy. And we will have a big population at the same time. A triple whammy. If we don't think way ahead and start acting now I don't think our civilisation will survive. It will go under. Humans will survive. The world will get hot, after a millennium cool, perhaps over shoot into a new glacial period. Eventually, we will come out of it, hopefully smarter but in a resource poor world. We will get to a renaissance level but not much more. Fail again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe eventually we will have evolved to be much smarter, smart enough to create a technical civilisation without the abundant energy and minerals we have. Or else we will just quietly go extinct.
That is what I fear is our fate if we don't plan as we should. It would be an appropriate irony if Homo Sapiens, the wise man, were to fail because of its foolishness.
But CO2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas than methane. So the small amount of methane is a problem as methane, but those same carbon atoms in CO2 are far less effective.
Ha ha ... Yeah my thoughts exactly. But to be fair to MS they aren't the first company to lockout parts of an OS until money has been coughed up. I think the difference is that this time it is designed to do this ... sorry just couldn't help myself.
Just as a postscript. I just tried "planet positions" ... and it gave me a skychart showing the positions of planets at this time. So I thought, "wait a second, this is latitude, longitude dependent, does it know where I am?" And looking at the chart it shows my town ... or did it extract that from my previous query on the weather. Looks like we may have a learning machine here for each user ... hmmm.
First query I tried was: brisbane weather. Because it is raining here. Very interesting results. Extremely cool.
However more mundane googly kind of searches resulted in nothing.
Conclusion: potentially very interesting indeed, but it will take my mind a little while to think of this as not a search engine but a data 'probing' or analysis engine ... I can't think of an appropriate term for it at the moment. Perhaps it could be regarded as a processing frontend to lots of statistical and numeric data ... like Google Trends but more so. We shall see.
We have to also remember that this all occurred over many thousands of years. You don't have to be that much better and aggressive to win out. As for the extinction of the megafauna ... well yeah that was indeed pretty fast ... what can I say it was a smorgasboard. But Neanderthals hung on for quite a while.
We are very xenophobic, I know it is unpopular to say this but really the last hundred years should have demonstrated that genocide is practically instinctive in us. Anybody who attacks us is in big trouble. We have to try really hard not slaughter each other. And we are doing reasonably well ... maybe a C-minus on that. So if homo neanderthalensis got into a guerilla war with tribes of h.sap then the end result would be inevitable.