Perhaps I was not clear on my point. I agreed with you that if we are in a VR Universe, then we are unable to prove or disprove if this is so. However, if we are in an OR Universe, we can disprove we are in a VR Universe by finding a phenomenon that is incalculable. An incalculable phenomenon, by definition, can not be in a Universe which depends on calculations.
As he said in the paper, we could falsify the theory by finding a physical phenomenon that is not calculable.
If we were in a VR, I can't conceive of a way to prove it, either. But I think his suggestion is a good one: see if we can derive known physical phenomenon by starting with information theory. That's not proof, either, but it's support. At the very least, it gives us a new direction to look in for understanding the Universe.
It's work in the sense that when I go to sleep, I want to just shut down. It's the only time during the day in which I have no expectations for myself except for rest. If I turn sleep into entertainment, then I no longer have this break.
When Revonsuo began studying dreams, he asked his students to start keeping logs of their own nocturnal escapades. He noticed something striking. The dreams were filled with dangerous events, negative emotions, monsters, chases, escapes, fights, and near-death experiences. The dream world was a hellscape of danger, teeming with threatening events far more sinister than in waking life.
These weren't the misfirings of diseased brains. Threat dreams were the norm, accounting for a staggering two-thirds of all dreams. Revonsuo discovered that we grossly underestimate the number of nightmares we have. As it turns out, we have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year--one to four per night. Just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. The rest are about car crashes, falling and drowning, missing a meeting or a test, being lost or trapped, and being naked in public. The whole dream world seemed to have a negative bias: more negative emotions than positive ones, more misfortune than good fortune, more nightmares than fantasy.
Self-reporting is not as reliable as an objective metric, but sometimes it's the only way. The only alternative is to never study anything which requires self-reporting. What the researchers are doing is fine, since in this case, the dream content only gave the idea for the theory, it wasn't a test of it. The rat experiment supports the theory, but it is not overwhelming support. But that's how progress is made.
Aside about lucid dreaming: I had a roommate obsessed with it, and my brother had experiences with it. It sounds interesting, but it also sounds like a decent amount of effort. I don't have the cycles to spare for sleep to be work, too!
Self-reporting is the only way to do any study that takes into account the content of dreams. So you're basically saying that science has no business trying to figure out what goes on with dream content, which is silly. You make do with what capabilities you have, however limited. As my freshmen physics professor said, "There's no such thing as an exact science."
I'm a very social person, and like interaction with people.
So do I! Interaction is great. And fun! Much more fun than working. Which is the problem. I'd rather talk to the people around me than actually work, so I have to make an effort to not do that and get work done. If I had a private office, I wouldn't have to make that effort, and I'd get more done. I can use headphones, but sometimes I just want silence to get work done. In fact, I generally prefer it over music. Then there's the fact that people literally walk right behind me all the time. I find this both unsettling and distracting.
I'm in a similar setup to what I saw in the article. Specifically, picture 3 is eerily close to our setup. But I'm not in a company, I'm a PhD student in a relatively large department in a new building. So, it's not going to change.
steal/stil/, verb, stole,stolen, stealing, noun -verb (used with object) 1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch. 2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
The grandparent's usage of the word "stole" is correct. You're actually trying to narrow the definition.
Yes, the GPU is off limits. Which makes sense from Sony's perspective - if Linux gave you full access to the machine, then people could makes PS3 games that didn't require a Sony license. But the hypervisor also prevents access to the Cell's performance counters, including the thermal sensors. I understand why they did it, but the limitations make the PS3 harder to use for research.
The transfer time between the SPEs and main memory is many orders of magnitude smaller than between main memory and disk. Further, communication between SPEs and main memory can be overlapped with computation, completely covering the latency.
Keep in mind that the SPE's local storage is basically a software managed cache. So your argument of "churning on itself within 256kb" would also apply to an L1 or L2 cache.
No, each SPE has 256kb of local storage. In general, a Cell processor has 8 of them, but in the PS3 only 6 are usable. But that has nothing to do with my main point; the 256k of local storage for each SPE is a problem, but you can code around it. (It's not trivial, but it can be done.) You can't code around having a small amount of RAM and still maintain high performance.
I'd like to know more details about his code, because a PS3 only has 256MB of RAM. That's a serious performance obstacle, since most high performance applications that do anything interesting need much more than that. I know it's a problem our group has had, and we've heard the same from others.
It's only six cores available to Linux per Cell processor on a PS3. One is reserved for the Game OS, and one is disabled to achieve a higher yield on fabrication. (The Game OS is always running, since Linux actually runs on top of a hypervisor.)
At many universities, when it comes to handing out financial aid, the grants, research and teaching assistantships are only given to foreign students and the US citizens can only get loans.
Have you actually been to graduate school? I have never heard of a program that favored giving assistanceships to foreign students.
If you want your obscure research paper to receive mainstream media coverage and net you loads of grant money, be sure to link your work to one or more of the following "hot topics":
From the physorg write up,
The article, "An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the probable source of the K/T impactor," was published in the Sept. 6 issue of Nature.
If you don't understand why this juxtaposition is funny, then you're not qualified to make fun of anyone's scientific research.
Eating right and regular exercise does in fact work to lose fat (not "weight"), but it's not a "silver bullet" because the process is long, slow, and requires lifestyle changes. I'm unaware of any medication that is able to aid this process.
I'm not sure what your point is. I am a person who says you need to eat right and exercise regularly, but I don't say that's "all you need to do," as if it's easy to do so. The reason so many people are overweight is that doing that for the rest of your life is hard, and as you pointed out, it requires drastic lifestyle changes for most people.
But the inherent difficulty does not change the fact that it is necessary. You can't bargain with your body. If you value being fit, then you have to sacrifice things you may enjoy, such as overeating. (Which, by the way, is not necessary when you go out with friends.)
I don't think leg presses come close to squats or deadlifts in terms of the stress they place on your body. I can grind out a 15-rep set, full range-of-motion of leg presses and be breathing pretty hard. After doing the same with squats or deadlifts, I'm happy if I can remain standing, not throw up, and stay conscious. Simply, leg presses aren't a whole-body movement like squats or deadlifts. I'm sitting down and only pressing my legs. In squats, my entire body is bearing the load, and in deadlifts, my entire body is working to raise the bar.
I consider leg presses a leg isolation exercise, and I use it for assistance only.
The standardization of C++ is a group process, and he is very much a part of that. As another poster pointed out, it's a slow process. It's not him taking a leisurely approach, they're just hard problems, and they're trying to do the Right Thing.
Well, you can, it's just not useful. If I state a problem is O(something), I get to determine what operation I counted. But if we're talking about sorting, and I choose any operation other than comparing two elements, then it's not a useful analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good response, I actually agree. But I do think there's some value in being able to say we are not in a subset of VR Universes.
Perhaps I was not clear on my point. I agreed with you that if we are in a VR Universe, then we are unable to prove or disprove if this is so. However, if we are in an OR Universe, we can disprove we are in a VR Universe by finding a phenomenon that is incalculable. An incalculable phenomenon, by definition, can not be in a Universe which depends on calculations.
As he said in the paper, we could falsify the theory by finding a physical phenomenon that is not calculable.
If we were in a VR, I can't conceive of a way to prove it, either. But I think his suggestion is a good one: see if we can derive known physical phenomenon by starting with information theory. That's not proof, either, but it's support. At the very least, it gives us a new direction to look in for understanding the Universe.
Actually, he does point out a way to falsify the theory: find a physical phenomenon which is not calculable.
I eat well and am in excellent shape.
It's work in the sense that when I go to sleep, I want to just shut down. It's the only time during the day in which I have no expectations for myself except for rest. If I turn sleep into entertainment, then I no longer have this break.
Aside about lucid dreaming: I had a roommate obsessed with it, and my brother had experiences with it. It sounds interesting, but it also sounds like a decent amount of effort. I don't have the cycles to spare for sleep to be work, too!
Not now, anyway.
Self-reporting is the only way to do any study that takes into account the content of dreams. So you're basically saying that science has no business trying to figure out what goes on with dream content, which is silly. You make do with what capabilities you have, however limited. As my freshmen physics professor said, "There's no such thing as an exact science."
I'm in a similar setup to what I saw in the article. Specifically, picture 3 is eerily close to our setup. But I'm not in a company, I'm a PhD student in a relatively large department in a new building. So, it's not going to change.
Thanks. Those pictures are much more informative than the one in the article.
Yes, the GPU is off limits. Which makes sense from Sony's perspective - if Linux gave you full access to the machine, then people could makes PS3 games that didn't require a Sony license. But the hypervisor also prevents access to the Cell's performance counters, including the thermal sensors. I understand why they did it, but the limitations make the PS3 harder to use for research.
The transfer time between the SPEs and main memory is many orders of magnitude smaller than between main memory and disk. Further, communication between SPEs and main memory can be overlapped with computation, completely covering the latency.
Keep in mind that the SPE's local storage is basically a software managed cache. So your argument of "churning on itself within 256kb" would also apply to an L1 or L2 cache.
No, each SPE has 256kb of local storage. In general, a Cell processor has 8 of them, but in the PS3 only 6 are usable. But that has nothing to do with my main point; the 256k of local storage for each SPE is a problem, but you can code around it. (It's not trivial, but it can be done.) You can't code around having a small amount of RAM and still maintain high performance.
I'd like to know more details about his code, because a PS3 only has 256MB of RAM. That's a serious performance obstacle, since most high performance applications that do anything interesting need much more than that. I know it's a problem our group has had, and we've heard the same from others.
It's only six cores available to Linux per Cell processor on a PS3. One is reserved for the Game OS, and one is disabled to achieve a higher yield on fabrication. (The Game OS is always running, since Linux actually runs on top of a hypervisor.)
What if Google tried to game their own system?
At many universities, when it comes to handing out financial aid, the grants, research and teaching assistantships are only given to foreign students and the US citizens can only get loans.
Have you actually been to graduate school? I have never heard of a program that favored giving assistanceships to foreign students.
From the physorg write up,
If you don't understand why this juxtaposition is funny, then you're not qualified to make fun of anyone's scientific research.
I imagine if he used create instead of creat, early C compilers would have recognized the first 7 characters. C and UNIX grew up together.
Eating right and regular exercise does in fact work to lose fat (not "weight"), but it's not a "silver bullet" because the process is long, slow, and requires lifestyle changes. I'm unaware of any medication that is able to aid this process.
I'm not sure what your point is. I am a person who says you need to eat right and exercise regularly, but I don't say that's "all you need to do," as if it's easy to do so. The reason so many people are overweight is that doing that for the rest of your life is hard, and as you pointed out, it requires drastic lifestyle changes for most people.
But the inherent difficulty does not change the fact that it is necessary. You can't bargain with your body. If you value being fit, then you have to sacrifice things you may enjoy, such as overeating. (Which, by the way, is not necessary when you go out with friends.)
I don't think leg presses come close to squats or deadlifts in terms of the stress they place on your body. I can grind out a 15-rep set, full range-of-motion of leg presses and be breathing pretty hard. After doing the same with squats or deadlifts, I'm happy if I can remain standing, not throw up, and stay conscious. Simply, leg presses aren't a whole-body movement like squats or deadlifts. I'm sitting down and only pressing my legs. In squats, my entire body is bearing the load, and in deadlifts, my entire body is working to raise the bar.
I consider leg presses a leg isolation exercise, and I use it for assistance only.
The standardization of C++ is a group process, and he is very much a part of that. As another poster pointed out, it's a slow process. It's not him taking a leisurely approach, they're just hard problems, and they're trying to do the Right Thing.
Well, you can, it's just not useful. If I state a problem is O(something), I get to determine what operation I counted. But if we're talking about sorting, and I choose any operation other than comparing two elements, then it's not a useful analysis.