Agreed. There's a definite parallel with the automotive industry here. My parents got me a '66 Mustang when I turned 16 and I was always amazed at how accessible/intelligible things were under the hood compared to the latest models, with their fuel injection and microprocessor-controlled componentry. Tinkering or repairing new cars now requires taking it into a shop with fancy diagnostic gear. End result: fewer and fewer ordinary folks attempting to DIY their car maintenance, and becoming more dependent on specialists.
Is this a good thing or bad thing? Depends on your point of view. On the one side, some people would say that such industrial and technological evolution undermines the core of society. Others would say, "Bring it on, baby!" (though perhaps not quite in those words).
This advancement of complexity in our technology, leading to less tinkerer-accessible devices over time, is a natural phenomenon and a consequence of a society that encourages a division of labor, as ours does. I'll bet that 10,000 years ago, tinkering types were probably complaining about the difficulty in hacking their new-fangled farming and hunting tools. For the nostalgic, here's a cool web vizualization of the various objects we humans have crafted over the years.
+1 for Redmine. I've been using it for about a month and so far so good.
It has a nice set of functionality: wiki, forum, time tracking, source code version control integration, etc. Interestingly, Redmine.org uses it both as a CMS for their website and for task/bug tracking for the development of Redmine itself. So it's good dogfood.
It's actually a Rails-based app, so it's easy to install and set up from any webhost that supports Rails (as many do), or you can run it internally. Rails should also help on the extensibility front, in theory.
Configurability is good and it's easy to search and create links between different issues. One limitation of Redmine is that projects can only be nested one level deep (project -> subproject) -- also a limitation of JIRA, btw. This could blessing though, as a deeply nested project tree could become hard to manage. Keeping things relatively flat and using tags/categories might be a better approach. Redmine does support tagging and categories, though I've not explored it.
Sounds like a good thing to ping every so often. If the latency goes up or it stops responding altogether then the chances are that a whole load of people somewhere know something that you don't.
and in that event, I'm sure they will tweet about it (as long as Twitter stays up...)
Yes, we need to do a better job at not letting our scientific braniacs slip through the cracks. But we'd be doing a disservice to society by focusing on them to the exclusion of the masses who go on to pursue other careers. Great ideas and technological innovations could fail if people don't understand them, can't intelligently discuss them, or can be easily swayed into fearing them.
We need everyone to be more scientifically literate, regardless of what career path they choose: turn them on to science without necessarily turning them into scientists (or into the same type of scientists). I brought this up a couple of years ago.
I can totally vouch for Doug's stance on taking his meds, as a witness to his certification back in the day. He's way beyond needing meds at this point. Just don't mess with his quaternions, man.
Sure, he might need a little help with math here and there, but at least he doesn't have a problem with rambling run-on sentences.
I'm sorry but I just can't stand developing in Javascript.
Why write in Javascript when you can use a library like jQuery or toolkit like GWT that spare you the messy details of working in straight JS and take care of cross-browser compatibility?
I guess one answer would be, "because they don't support HTML5." Anyone know the status of HTML5 support/compatibility in these JS libraries and tools?
The Mac version of Chrome requires Intel CPU and Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later. So the (vast number?) of Mac users that are either still using a PowerPC-based or Tiger will have to sit this one out. With luck and perhaps some prodding, Google will produce a universal binary version that runs on 10.4.x as well. The Leopard dependency might indicate a requirement for Java 1.6, which is not supported in Tiger, unless you have an Intel mac.
Basically, you're right that consumption reduction isn't a necessary part of this story. Loyd simply wanted to take advantage of the freely available thermonuclear energy stream we get from the sun every day. But cutting his consumption of energy from the utility company is a key motivation here. By reducing his overall energy consumption, he will increase the percentage of his energy usage that is funded by his solar installation, reducing his dependency on the grid.
As someone who has also experimented with a solar installation over the past 6 months, I can attest that a funny thing happens regarding your attitude towards energy consumption when you start getting some of your energy from the sun: It makes you hyper-aware of your overall energy consumption and much more aggressive in saving energy wherever you can.
My solar installation is micro-scale compared to the Loyd's: I started out with one PV panel hooked up to one deep-cycle battery off of which I ran an inverter to power handful of small devices in my office running on AC adapters (modem, router, phone chargers, etc.). The whole thing was under $500.
While my initial motivation was like Loyd's (supplement my energy sources), my little experiment has made me extremely protective of the energy I get from the sun; I don't want to run any devices more than necessary lest I drain my battery, to maximize the solar-based energy.
As a consequence, I'm much more aware of which devices really need to be on or off and which are energy hogs. I'm also more conscious of energy drains that aren't hooked up to my panel (lights) as well as non-electricity based energy (central heating).
End result: My Dec 2008 monthly energy bill was $200 lower than Dec 2007. I can attribute only a fraction of these savings to the energy I get from my micro-solar set up. The bulk of it came from the energy consumption awareness imparted by having a solar installation.
Btw, I intend to write up the details of my do-it-yourself micro-solar home installation. Keep an eye on GoOffGrid.com if you're interested. (I just updated DNS for this domain, so it may take a few hours/days to resolve.)
Awesome C book: "Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden.
I heartily second (or third) this. I don't even program in C anymore and yet I still keep it on my shelf and peruse it from time to time, just to enjoy the wit and humor of van der Linden's writing. His instructive yet amusing approach brings a sense of joy to the art of programming.
A great example is his analysis in chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll's Knight's paradigm in terms of the C type model. A true classic.
The RNA world hypothesis is indeed an important thing to note in this discussion. According to this theory, early life forms evolved not from pools of amino acids assembling into proteins, but from pools of nucleotides (or nucleotide-like things) assembling into RNAs. Given this, I'd be more excited if the newly discovered vials were chock full of nucleotides rather than just more amino acids.
While Miller's experiments did not show the production of RNA precursors, nucleotides were found by other simulations (mentioned on the wikipedia link I gave, but it doesn't cite studies that show production of nucleotides under prebiotic conditions -- gotta fix that).
Even if someone were able to generate self-splicing RNAs or proteins under supposedly prebiotic conditions in a lab experiment, it wouldn't prove how life evolved on Earth (but it would be damn exciting no doubt). Probably the best way to get really good evidence for life evolving from pools of chemicals is via space exploration: find a planet that is in a prebiotic state and sample it. The lightening strikes and volcanoes could make such studies tricky, though.
Good news for the Senate finally passing GINA:
Congress Near Deal on Genetic Test Bias Bill (23 Apr 2008)
Quoting from the article:
"More than a decade after we began the effort to protect Americans from genetic discrimination, the Senate is finally poised to see the fruition of those efforts," [Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine] said in a press release that quoted another senator describing GINA as "the first civil rights act of the 21st century." Big stuff.
Don't trust everything your professors (or lawyers) tell you.
A genetic predisposition for a disease in a currently healthy individual is not the same as having the disease. According to HIPAA,
genetic information in the absence of a current diagnosis of illness does not constitute a pre-existing condition.
But HIPAA is just the beginning of genetic information protection. The real deal is something called GINA: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which recently passed in the U.S. Congress and is pending in the Senate. President Bush has openly supported this bill. So it has some decent momentum.
Further reading: Navigenics provides some good resources about legal rights regarding the use of your genetic information, and there was a good article in the Boston Globe on this in Sep 2007.
The notion of chaos is essential to this debate, and I think is at the heart of what we think of as free will. Chaotic systems are not easily predictable due to the huge number of interaction terms between all elements in the system under study (such as the weather). The system becomes very sensitive to small variations in the initial state that you are basing your prediction on. I'd argue that human behavior is also chaotic, and therefore difficult to predict. Witness the unpredictability of the stock market, which is guided by large numbers of interacting humans, each making decisions presumably based on their own free will.
But even when you look at a single human brain, there is plenty of opportunity for chaos to come into play. With 100 billion neurons, each of which having on average 1000 connections (synpases) to other neurons (reference), the brain contains a tremendous degree of connectivity. One might say that this amount of connectivity is both beyond comprehension and required for comprehension, eh?
I'm not saying that the brain or other products of human behavior like the stock market are impossible to predict, which might be a tenet of a free will purist. Like the weather, it's easier to make short-range predictions or ones involving few numbers of variables.
So maybe it's best to think of free will as continuous rather than discrete property (i.e., not that it's something we either have or we don't). I could probably predict with decent accuracy what you will have for lunch next week given a list of your meals for the past three months. But predicting who you will marry (or even if you will ever get married), is something in which I'd have very little confidence, even if I knew all your personal contacts for the last 10 years.
As an aside, humans should become more predictable in the near future, as researchers in academic, clinical, and pharmaceutical setting continue to scan whole human genomes for SNPs and associate them with various diseases and other human traits. This will help us build risk profiles for many different ailments based on the content of our genome. But it may also impact other areas more associated with human predilections considered to have a free will component, such as sexual orientation and substance abuse.
Natural selection will always produce something "better". After all, we're "better" than bacteria, aren't we?
The correct analogy here is whether we are "better" than our distant ancestors, which, if you go back far enough, were bacteria-like organisms from which we evolved according to Darwinian natural selection (though some folks would dispute this explanation of our origins).
If by "better" you mean more well-adapted to our environment, then we should be better than our ancestors assuming an unchanging environment -- which is not the case: the geological environment is always changing (e.g., global warming) as is the ecological environment (e.g., emergence of other competing species, overcrowding due to population growth, etc.). So it's impossible to say whether we are more well adapted to our environment than our ancestors were to theirs.
You touch on an interesting area, though: comparing language evolution to species evolution. There is certainly constant pressure on languages to mutate and adapt to new pressures, and scientists that study human evolution have used linguistic analysis to gain insights into the spread of early human populations. Read up more on language evolution.
Now as to whether we are "better" than present-day bacteria (i.e., more highly evolved or well-adapted), this is a different question entirely. Given the increased complexity of human biology and our great technological innovations that allow us to survive anywhere on Earth, one might put the ball in our court as being the "better" species.
However, consider that the generation time of bacterium such as E. coli is about 20 minutes, compared to ~20 years for a typical human. So the bacterium is experiencing an orders of magnitude faster iteration cycle of than are humans. Natural selection operates on a species only as fast as its replication cycle, with different genetic variants of each generation being selected for or against based on their differential fitness (ability to replicate).
By this measure, bacteria have had much more opportunity to be optimized by evolution than have humans, and thus are more highly evolved than we are. BTW, this is the same sort of reasoning that underlies some tenets of agile software development.
Bacteria are selected for rapid generation time, so they have evolved very simple genomes and cellular designs to allow for such rapid replication. So if your definition of "better" is speedy replication, bacteria win hands down.
Perhaps a reasonable way to rank various species and languages is to look at how long they've been in existence, since that would be a measure of adaptability and robustness to environmental change. By this measure, humans wouldn't be a top-rated species, but we are still alive, which is more than you can say for 99% of species that have existed on Earth. Time will tell.
When you think about it, the survival of a language is tied to the survival of the speakers in interesting ways. For example, a language may survive longer if it allows its speakers to communicate better and adapt to environmental and sociological changes better than other languages. In this way, language evolution likely plays a role in species evolution, and vice versa.
Human language is a fairly recent invention, but it is clearly a major force underlying the success of human populations. I'd argue that language and its speakers are co-evolving entities, each shaping the other in complex ways, striving to ensure their mutual survival.
True story: I was bike commuting in San Francisco one evening in March of 2003 when a car took a U-turn right in front of me. Unable to stop in time, I plowed into the car, was thrown off my bike, somersaulted through the air over his car, and landed squarely on my back in the street.
I was carrying my 15" Powerbook in a Brenthaven, along with some other stuff, so the backpack was fairly full. When I hit the street, the Brenthaven cushioned my fall perfectly. It felt like I landed on a big pillow! As I felt my body hurtling through the air and crushing down on the pack I thought, "There goes my Mac..." (not: "I wonder if I'll ever walk again...").
Luckily, I was on my feet instantly without a scratch. After exchanging information with the driver, I immediately opened my pack and pulled out the laptop and was happy to see the calmly pulsating light of my sleeping machine. When I got home, it woke up fine and the screen had no new defects that I could see.
Apple deserves some credit for making a fairly durable machine, but I think most of the kudos go to Brenthaven.
Brenthaven: Recommended gear for the urban bike commuter!
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. There's a definite parallel with the automotive industry here. My parents got me a '66 Mustang when I turned 16 and I was always amazed at how accessible/intelligible things were under the hood compared to the latest models, with their fuel injection and microprocessor-controlled componentry. Tinkering or repairing new cars now requires taking it into a shop with fancy diagnostic gear. End result: fewer and fewer ordinary folks attempting to DIY their car maintenance, and becoming more dependent on specialists.
Is this a good thing or bad thing? Depends on your point of view. On the one side, some people would say that such industrial and technological evolution undermines the core of society. Others would say, "Bring it on, baby!" (though perhaps not quite in those words).
This advancement of complexity in our technology, leading to less tinkerer-accessible devices over time, is a natural phenomenon and a consequence of a society that encourages a division of labor, as ours does. I'll bet that 10,000 years ago, tinkering types were probably complaining about the difficulty in hacking their new-fangled farming and hunting tools. For the nostalgic, here's a cool web vizualization of the various objects we humans have crafted over the years.
+1 for redmine. See my reply in this thread
+1 for Redmine. I've been using it for about a month and so far so good.
It has a nice set of functionality: wiki, forum, time tracking, source code version control integration, etc. Interestingly, Redmine.org uses it both as a CMS for their website and for task/bug tracking for the development of Redmine itself. So it's good dogfood.
It's actually a Rails-based app, so it's easy to install and set up from any webhost that supports Rails (as many do), or you can run it internally. Rails should also help on the extensibility front, in theory.
Configurability is good and it's easy to search and create links between different issues. One limitation of Redmine is that projects can only be nested one level deep (project -> subproject) -- also a limitation of JIRA, btw. This could blessing though, as a deeply nested project tree could become hard to manage. Keeping things relatively flat and using tags/categories might be a better approach. Redmine does support tagging and categories, though I've not explored it.
Sounds like a good thing to ping every so often. If the latency goes up or it stops responding altogether then the chances are that a whole load of people somewhere know something that you don't.
and in that event, I'm sure they will tweet about it (as long as Twitter stays up...)
Yes, we need to do a better job at not letting our scientific braniacs slip through the cracks. But we'd be doing a disservice to society by focusing on them to the exclusion of the masses who go on to pursue other careers. Great ideas and technological innovations could fail if people don't understand them, can't intelligently discuss them, or can be easily swayed into fearing them.
We need everyone to be more scientifically literate, regardless of what career path they choose: turn them on to science without necessarily turning them into scientists (or into the same type of scientists). I brought this up a couple of years ago.
--
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.
The country I live in is a former British colony, and the official entry on Wikipedia regarding that country is ...
Which country? I do a fair amount of wikipedia editing and can look into this for you.
I can totally vouch for Doug's stance on taking his meds, as a witness to his certification back in the day. He's way beyond needing meds at this point. Just don't mess with his quaternions, man.
Sure, he might need a little help with math here and there, but at least he doesn't have a problem with rambling run-on sentences.
--
One-time LHC blogger
I'm sorry but I just can't stand developing in Javascript.
Why write in Javascript when you can use a library like jQuery or toolkit like GWT that spare you the messy details of working in straight JS and take care of cross-browser compatibility?
I guess one answer would be, "because they don't support HTML5." Anyone know the status of HTML5 support/compatibility in these JS libraries and tools?
The Mac version of Chrome requires Intel CPU and Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later. So the (vast number?) of Mac users that are either still using a PowerPC-based or Tiger will have to sit this one out. With luck and perhaps some prodding, Google will produce a universal binary version that runs on 10.4.x as well. The Leopard dependency might indicate a requirement for Java 1.6, which is not supported in Tiger, unless you have an Intel mac.
Basically, you're right that consumption reduction isn't a necessary part of this story. Loyd simply wanted to take advantage of the freely available thermonuclear energy stream we get from the sun every day. But cutting his consumption of energy from the utility company is a key motivation here. By reducing his overall energy consumption, he will increase the percentage of his energy usage that is funded by his solar installation, reducing his dependency on the grid.
As someone who has also experimented with a solar installation over the past 6 months, I can attest that a funny thing happens regarding your attitude towards energy consumption when you start getting some of your energy from the sun: It makes you hyper-aware of your overall energy consumption and much more aggressive in saving energy wherever you can.
My solar installation is micro-scale compared to the Loyd's: I started out with one PV panel hooked up to one deep-cycle battery off of which I ran an inverter to power handful of small devices in my office running on AC adapters (modem, router, phone chargers, etc.). The whole thing was under $500.
While my initial motivation was like Loyd's (supplement my energy sources), my little experiment has made me extremely protective of the energy I get from the sun; I don't want to run any devices more than necessary lest I drain my battery, to maximize the solar-based energy. As a consequence, I'm much more aware of which devices really need to be on or off and which are energy hogs. I'm also more conscious of energy drains that aren't hooked up to my panel (lights) as well as non-electricity based energy (central heating).
End result: My Dec 2008 monthly energy bill was $200 lower than Dec 2007. I can attribute only a fraction of these savings to the energy I get from my micro-solar set up. The bulk of it came from the energy consumption awareness imparted by having a solar installation.
Btw, I intend to write up the details of my do-it-yourself micro-solar home installation. Keep an eye on GoOffGrid.com if you're interested. (I just updated DNS for this domain, so it may take a few hours/days to resolve.)
Awesome C book: "Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets" by Peter van der Linden.
I heartily second (or third) this. I don't even program in C anymore and yet I still keep it on my shelf and peruse it from time to time, just to enjoy the wit and humor of van der Linden's writing. His instructive yet amusing approach brings a sense of joy to the art of programming.
A great example is his analysis in chapter 3 of Lewis Carroll's Knight's paradigm in terms of the C type model. A true classic.
--
No sig here. Move along now...
Such a recursive infinite loop, however, is a common error of newbie programmers, not God.
--
God is real, unless declared integer.
The RNA world hypothesis is indeed an important thing to note in this discussion. According to this theory, early life forms evolved not from pools of amino acids assembling into proteins, but from pools of nucleotides (or nucleotide-like things) assembling into RNAs. Given this, I'd be more excited if the newly discovered vials were chock full of nucleotides rather than just more amino acids.
While Miller's experiments did not show the production of RNA precursors, nucleotides were found by other simulations (mentioned on the wikipedia link I gave, but it doesn't cite studies that show production of nucleotides under prebiotic conditions -- gotta fix that).
Even if someone were able to generate self-splicing RNAs or proteins under supposedly prebiotic conditions in a lab experiment, it wouldn't prove how life evolved on Earth (but it would be damn exciting no doubt). Probably the best way to get really good evidence for life evolving from pools of chemicals is via space exploration: find a planet that is in a prebiotic state and sample it. The lightening strikes and volcanoes could make such studies tricky, though.
Don't trust everything your professors (or lawyers) tell you.
A genetic predisposition for a disease in a currently healthy individual is not the same as having the disease. According to HIPAA, genetic information in the absence of a current diagnosis of illness does not constitute a pre-existing condition.
But HIPAA is just the beginning of genetic information protection. The real deal is something called GINA: Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which recently passed in the U.S. Congress and is pending in the Senate. President Bush has openly supported this bill. So it has some decent momentum.
Further reading: Navigenics provides some good resources about legal rights regarding the use of your genetic information, and there was a good article in the Boston Globe on this in Sep 2007.
But even when you look at a single human brain, there is plenty of opportunity for chaos to come into play. With 100 billion neurons, each of which having on average 1000 connections (synpases) to other neurons (reference), the brain contains a tremendous degree of connectivity. One might say that this amount of connectivity is both beyond comprehension and required for comprehension, eh?
I'm not saying that the brain or other products of human behavior like the stock market are impossible to predict, which might be a tenet of a free will purist. Like the weather, it's easier to make short-range predictions or ones involving few numbers of variables.
So maybe it's best to think of free will as continuous rather than discrete property (i.e., not that it's something we either have or we don't). I could probably predict with decent accuracy what you will have for lunch next week given a list of your meals for the past three months. But predicting who you will marry (or even if you will ever get married), is something in which I'd have very little confidence, even if I knew all your personal contacts for the last 10 years.
As an aside, humans should become more predictable in the near future, as researchers in academic, clinical, and pharmaceutical setting continue to scan whole human genomes for SNPs and associate them with various diseases and other human traits. This will help us build risk profiles for many different ailments based on the content of our genome. But it may also impact other areas more associated with human predilections considered to have a free will component, such as sexual orientation and substance abuse.
MacBook Pro Offers Promising Start to Era Of Intel-Powered Apple
The correct analogy here is whether we are "better" than our distant ancestors, which, if you go back far enough, were bacteria-like organisms from which we evolved according to Darwinian natural selection (though some folks would dispute this explanation of our origins).
If by "better" you mean more well-adapted to our environment, then we should be better than our ancestors assuming an unchanging environment -- which is not the case: the geological environment is always changing (e.g., global warming) as is the ecological environment (e.g., emergence of other competing species, overcrowding due to population growth, etc.). So it's impossible to say whether we are more well adapted to our environment than our ancestors were to theirs.
You touch on an interesting area, though: comparing language evolution to species evolution. There is certainly constant pressure on languages to mutate and adapt to new pressures, and scientists that study human evolution have used linguistic analysis to gain insights into the spread of early human populations. Read up more on language evolution.
Now as to whether we are "better" than present-day bacteria (i.e., more highly evolved or well-adapted), this is a different question entirely. Given the increased complexity of human biology and our great technological innovations that allow us to survive anywhere on Earth, one might put the ball in our court as being the "better" species.
However, consider that the generation time of bacterium such as E. coli is about 20 minutes, compared to ~20 years for a typical human. So the bacterium is experiencing an orders of magnitude faster iteration cycle of than are humans. Natural selection operates on a species only as fast as its replication cycle, with different genetic variants of each generation being selected for or against based on their differential fitness (ability to replicate).
By this measure, bacteria have had much more opportunity to be optimized by evolution than have humans, and thus are more highly evolved than we are. BTW, this is the same sort of reasoning that underlies some tenets of agile software development.
Bacteria are selected for rapid generation time, so they have evolved very simple genomes and cellular designs to allow for such rapid replication. So if your definition of "better" is speedy replication, bacteria win hands down.
Perhaps a reasonable way to rank various species and languages is to look at how long they've been in existence, since that would be a measure of adaptability and robustness to environmental change. By this measure, humans wouldn't be a top-rated species, but we are still alive, which is more than you can say for 99% of species that have existed on Earth. Time will tell.
When you think about it, the survival of a language is tied to the survival of the speakers in interesting ways. For example, a language may survive longer if it allows its speakers to communicate better and adapt to environmental and sociological changes better than other languages. In this way, language evolution likely plays a role in species evolution, and vice versa.
Human language is a fairly recent invention, but it is clearly a major force underlying the success of human populations. I'd argue that language and its speakers are co-evolving entities, each shaping the other in complex ways, striving to ensure their mutual survival.
--
God is real, unless declared integer.
and my TiBook, too!
True story: I was bike commuting in San Francisco one evening in March of 2003 when a car took a U-turn right in front of me. Unable to stop in time, I plowed into the car, was thrown off my bike, somersaulted through the air over his car, and landed squarely on my back in the street.
I was carrying my 15" Powerbook in a Brenthaven, along with some other stuff, so the backpack was fairly full. When I hit the street, the Brenthaven cushioned my fall perfectly. It felt like I landed on a big pillow! As I felt my body hurtling through the air and crushing down on the pack I thought, "There goes my Mac..." (not: "I wonder if I'll ever walk again...").
Luckily, I was on my feet instantly without a scratch. After exchanging information with the driver, I immediately opened my pack and pulled out the laptop and was happy to see the calmly pulsating light of my sleeping machine. When I got home, it woke up fine and the screen had no new defects that I could see.
Apple deserves some credit for making a fairly durable machine, but I think most of the kudos go to Brenthaven.
Brenthaven: Recommended gear for the urban bike commuter!