You characterize their claims in the most anodyne way possible. These quotes, also from their paper, is magical realism more appropriate in a J. G. Ballard novel:
In this Letter, we explicitly propose a first step toward such a relationship in the form of a causal generalization of entropic forces that we show can spontaneously induce remarkably sophisticated behaviors associated with the human ‘‘cognitive niche,’’ including tool use and social cooperation, in simple physical systems.
We modeled an animal as a disk (disk I) undergoing causal entropic forcing, a potential tool as a smaller disk (disk II) outside of a tube too narrow for disk I to enter, and an object of interest as a second smaller disk (disk III) resting inside the tube [...]. We found that disk I spontaneously collided with disk II, so as to cause disk II to then collide with disk III inside the tube, successfully releasing disk III from its initially fixed position and making its degrees of freedom accessible for direct manipulation and even a sort of ‘‘play’’ by disk I.
Their disks were playing with each other. Because that's what they wanted to see.
They put "cognitive niche" in scare quotes for good reason, because they know there's no empirical measure for what that is, aside from abusing non-applicable concepts from psychology and biology. Choose any diagnosis from the DSM-IV, and I can write you a computer program that meets each criteria of illness. This does not mean that I have a model of mental illness, or even that I have something that "suggests a general model." The only difference between my exercise and the investigators here is our disparate intentions, the outcomes are the same; I'm approaching the problem as Neat AI, and they are approaching it as Scruffy.
The authors propose a toy mathematical model that reproduces key features of several interesting observed behaviors.
Yeah, like string theory.
The problem is that the approach is essentially definitional: They created a software model that does X. X "looks like" the sort of things an animal or an "intelligence" might do, thus the investigator postulates the "physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible" as "intelligence."
The problem comes from the analogy of the behavior of the software to "intelligence," and the false analogy linking it to something other beings do. It remains to be proven that this is what biological systems actually do, except that the experiment establishes no falsifiable procedure for doing that; thus, the extrapolation of the model's behavior to anything living is nothing more than science fiction or pure conjecture, based utterly on the subjective appraisal of the investigator.
Respectfully asking, what's wrong with saying, "What if?"
Nothing, in your philosophy or humanities class. However, such speculations are not science, not empirical, and should be set on the same stack as Intelligent Design and The Technological Singularity.
But as soon as I ask the police to force a shoplifter to pay, I'll wind up having to deal with dollars
The government can force a party to fulfill their part of a contract with a commodity (such as Bitcoins) through an injunction and specific performance, but it's true that these are harder remedies to obtain from a court than a judgement in dollars.
The stereo image was intentional, it's a trick for removing perceived echo/reverb by spreading it out across a stereo image instead of it all piling up right behind the voice in mono.
o_0
FWIW, several other video producers wrote me to ask how I got such great sound without a lav, and (like you) others wrote to mention that they found the very wide stereo distracting. I'll tinker with it more in the next vid.
Nobody records dialogue in X-Y stereo professionally, and recording dialogue in any kind of stereo field is exceedingly rare -- we pan it if we want to position it, but generally speaking it's distracting and breaks convention unless you're trying to emphasize two sources in L-R space. Tom Holman was fond of telling us in class that the only major American feature film to ever shoot stereo dialogue was Bette Midler's The Rose, and the experiment died a quick death in dailies. (That crew did win an Oscar though.)
If you insist on recording in stereo though, you might do as they did, and record with a Mid-Side array and use a matrix to decode back to L-R, so you can control the stereo spread in post-production.
As a nitpick, you get dithering losses _or_ quantization distortion, or a linear tradeoff between the two.
As you point out though, this depends a lot on the selection of dither spectrum and the dither's probability density function, and these are much more pokey issues and depend on subjective analysis of the signal target -- noise shaped dither is great if you're mastering for delivery but can screw you if your recipient isn't an ISO 226 listener, and expects to be able do pitch shifting or folding with a ring modulator.
Counter nitpick: Monty, as a professional motion picture sound designer, I cannot tell you how distracting it is to hear your voice constantly changing its pan across the stereo field:)
To beat a 16-bit digital system, it has to have better than 96 dB SNR and dynamic range
Not absolutely. You get dithering losses and quantization distortion, so a 16 bit system usually has about 14 ENB thus 84 db dynamic range. SNR is the range from the floor to the reference fluxivity, which per the AES spec would be -18 dbFS or -66 db. I have worked with 24 track machines (a Studer A827 in this case), at 15 ips and with Dolby SR, with a fresh, degaussed roll of Quantegy, that could do 70 decibels of SNR on the first generation.
Yes, sampling *theory* means there are no stair steps, but codecs are real devices.
You're absolutely right, and real devices are more or less prone to some distortion when converting digital signals.
However, this must be determined empirically, and is beyond the scope of a discussion of digital signals. As a rule, the DSP developer gets his algorithm right, and getting those Signed Ints to sound good is strictly the client's responsibility.
The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
The DHS was created by an Act of Congress, it enforces many laws Congress passes, particularly customs laws.
The Supreme Court and lower courts have long held that a customs agent is allowed to search and seize private property at international borders or ports without a warrant or probable cause, pursuant to Title 19 USC.
The DHS merely is the parent of the US Customs Service, to which Arrington's alleged "jack-booted thug" belonged. The US Customs Service has existed since 1789, was enacted by the very first US congress and signed into law by George Washington.
This is how many countries used to do it, before the people realized that all of their poor people were in thrall to the church, labor union or political movement that was feeding them instead. In Germany, the national health insurance system was developed specifically with the goal of breaking the Social Democratic party, Spain and Italy adopted social insurance systems as anticlerical reforms, among other reasons.
Dumb joke: you know who else fed the poor and gave them work with private donations? Hitler.
Rothbard's concept of private law was in perfect resonance with his nativism and crypto-racism*. It creates a perfect system where an individual must consent to the prevailing contractual terms for protection of his property and himself, or face the prospect of having no protection at all. In short, you can take or leave the private terms of police protection, but leaving them is tantamount to renouncing your citizenship and becoming stateless. Individuals acting en sole who want protection have no say in negotiating these terms, except for the resources they can use to bargain with. And in these sorts of negotiations, the only useful bargaining resource would be weapons, the capacity to take other people's property.
See, your problem is you don't understand libertarianism. Libertarianism requires a minimal government, a government that is forbidden from working on behalf of any social, democratic, or moral good, while demanding the same government manifest near-godlike powers in the defense of property from incursion. And the more peculiar and abstract the property is, like the intellectual property of trademarks, the more godlike and coercive the state becomes.
When was the last time you saw someone EAT a circuit board?
Cellphone goes into trash, trash goes into landfill, rain goes into landfill, reactive compounds go into groundwater.
Proper eWaste disposal methods can minimize this, but in a lot of cases this just means shipping the cellphone to Dalian or Inner Mongolia where an 11-year-old makes a dime an hour dipping circuit boards into a hot bath. In the open air. Without a mask.
Lucas should have sold BEFORE the prequels. Hard to believe he made those classics. Some mentor must have helped Lucas in the past and died a few decades ago...
Let us not discount the Damon Lindelof phenomenon -- he wrote Prometheus and Cowboys vs. Aliens, and bears most of the responsibility for the Lost storyline. (He's also writing Into Darkness).
Then again, if yo've ever seen J. J. Abrams tell his "Mystery Box" Story it's pretty hard to not come to the conclusion that he's motivated by at least a little contempt for the audience's intelligence.
Kidding aside, we can note that *nixes do have a reasonable excuse, since they grew from a Ritchie/Kernighan hobby project originally intended as therapeutic relief from working on MULTICS. Unix wasn't designed for long-term success, and it was designed to be hacked as necessary, so this wasn't a case of egregiously stupid design decisions.
At the time K&R wrote it, people didn't use "operating systems" as "platforms" for "applications" as much as they were just the first tape you loaded onto the core in order to boot your one-off payroll application, developed by a hundred contractors at stupendous expense. New computer systems would come out every couple years and ship with completely new OSs -- computer infrastructures that could actually run the same client software on different machines (or even different model numbers of the same machine) were specialist and generally exceptions to the rule until the 70s.
People would keep the OS that shipped with their machine for years and when the time came to buy a new computer, they took for granted that they'd have to significantly rewrite everything and the old computer would have to be kept for several years in order to read the old tapes for audit purposes. The idea that two computer systems, even from the same vendor, would naturally be able to read the same set of tapes or disks was a fantasy, unless you were paying top-dollar for IBM gear.
When people worried about how to store a date in 1970, they were primarily concerned with how many columns of the card they were taking up.
It went without saying that they'd never "warehouse" data for longer than the legal requirement, and in any case the paper printouts of every transaction, boxed and shipped to archives every week, were the actual record that anyone would care about. Nobody searched historical computer records, and nobody expected records from more than 12 months back to be online. The online record held a two-digit year because that's all that needed to be printed on the check, the computer's tapes weren't designed to actually serve as a legal record of anything, most people used their machines as fancy check and bill printers that did some totals for them. The paper these machines emitted was the document. In the 80s this mentality changed completely and the computer record became the document, the paper output merely copies, and that's when people started paying attention -- but the attitude people had toward online record-keeping only changed because vendors made it possible to store records on a medium, go through three buying cycles of computers, and have that medium still be readable.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope they aren't still renting that thing. I remember how hard it was to convince my grandma that she didn't have to keep renting her phone.
You characterize their claims in the most anodyne way possible. These quotes, also from their paper, is magical realism more appropriate in a J. G. Ballard novel:
Their disks were playing with each other. Because that's what they wanted to see.
They put "cognitive niche" in scare quotes for good reason, because they know there's no empirical measure for what that is, aside from abusing non-applicable concepts from psychology and biology. Choose any diagnosis from the DSM-IV, and I can write you a computer program that meets each criteria of illness. This does not mean that I have a model of mental illness, or even that I have something that "suggests a general model." The only difference between my exercise and the investigators here is our disparate intentions, the outcomes are the same; I'm approaching the problem as Neat AI, and they are approaching it as Scruffy.
Yeah, like string theory.
The problem is that the approach is essentially definitional: They created a software model that does X. X "looks like" the sort of things an animal or an "intelligence" might do, thus the investigator postulates the "physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible" as "intelligence."
The problem comes from the analogy of the behavior of the software to "intelligence," and the false analogy linking it to something other beings do. It remains to be proven that this is what biological systems actually do, except that the experiment establishes no falsifiable procedure for doing that; thus, the extrapolation of the model's behavior to anything living is nothing more than science fiction or pure conjecture, based utterly on the subjective appraisal of the investigator.
Nothing, in your philosophy or humanities class. However, such speculations are not science, not empirical, and should be set on the same stack as Intelligent Design and The Technological Singularity.
THX certs haven't meant anything since the late 1990s, all THX really certifies these days is that the check from the theater owner cleared.
IAAMPSD. I am a motion picture sound designer. The inventor of THX was my instructor in college.
The government can force a party to fulfill their part of a contract with a commodity (such as Bitcoins) through an injunction and specific performance, but it's true that these are harder remedies to obtain from a court than a judgement in dollars.
o_0
Nobody records dialogue in X-Y stereo professionally, and recording dialogue in any kind of stereo field is exceedingly rare -- we pan it if we want to position it, but generally speaking it's distracting and breaks convention unless you're trying to emphasize two sources in L-R space. Tom Holman was fond of telling us in class that the only major American feature film to ever shoot stereo dialogue was Bette Midler's The Rose, and the experiment died a quick death in dailies. (That crew did win an Oscar though.)
If you insist on recording in stereo though, you might do as they did, and record with a Mid-Side array and use a matrix to decode back to L-R, so you can control the stereo spread in post-production.
As you point out though, this depends a lot on the selection of dither spectrum and the dither's probability density function, and these are much more pokey issues and depend on subjective analysis of the signal target -- noise shaped dither is great if you're mastering for delivery but can screw you if your recipient isn't an ISO 226 listener, and expects to be able do pitch shifting or folding with a ring modulator.
Counter nitpick: Monty, as a professional motion picture sound designer, I cannot tell you how distracting it is to hear your voice constantly changing its pan across the stereo field :)
Not absolutely. You get dithering losses and quantization distortion, so a 16 bit system usually has about 14 ENB thus 84 db dynamic range. SNR is the range from the floor to the reference fluxivity, which per the AES spec would be -18 dbFS or -66 db. I have worked with 24 track machines (a Studer A827 in this case), at 15 ips and with Dolby SR, with a fresh, degaussed roll of Quantegy, that could do 70 decibels of SNR on the first generation.
We listen to nothing more than sums of pure sine waves.
You're absolutely right, and real devices are more or less prone to some distortion when converting digital signals.
However, this must be determined empirically, and is beyond the scope of a discussion of digital signals. As a rule, the DSP developer gets his algorithm right, and getting those Signed Ints to sound good is strictly the client's responsibility.
The DHS was created by an Act of Congress, it enforces many laws Congress passes, particularly customs laws.
The Supreme Court and lower courts have long held that a customs agent is allowed to search and seize private property at international borders or ports without a warrant or probable cause, pursuant to Title 19 USC.
The DHS merely is the parent of the US Customs Service, to which Arrington's alleged "jack-booted thug" belonged. The US Customs Service has existed since 1789, was enacted by the very first US congress and signed into law by George Washington.
This is how many countries used to do it, before the people realized that all of their poor people were in thrall to the church, labor union or political movement that was feeding them instead. In Germany, the national health insurance system was developed specifically with the goal of breaking the Social Democratic party, Spain and Italy adopted social insurance systems as anticlerical reforms, among other reasons.
Dumb joke: you know who else fed the poor and gave them work with private donations? Hitler.
Rothbard's concept of private law was in perfect resonance with his nativism and crypto-racism*. It creates a perfect system where an individual must consent to the prevailing contractual terms for protection of his property and himself, or face the prospect of having no protection at all. In short, you can take or leave the private terms of police protection, but leaving them is tantamount to renouncing your citizenship and becoming stateless. Individuals acting en sole who want protection have no say in negotiating these terms, except for the resources they can use to bargain with. And in these sorts of negotiations, the only useful bargaining resource would be weapons, the capacity to take other people's property.
* I'm sure you're aware that Murray and Lew wrote all of Ron Paul's racist newsletters in a bizarre bid to create "Outreach to the Rednecks," as Rothbard himself called it.
See, your problem is you don't understand libertarianism. Libertarianism requires a minimal government, a government that is forbidden from working on behalf of any social, democratic, or moral good, while demanding the same government manifest near-godlike powers in the defense of property from incursion. And the more peculiar and abstract the property is, like the intellectual property of trademarks, the more godlike and coercive the state becomes.
There was a True Scotsman on TV this morning making just this point...
You don't work for the NRA, do you? :)
Cellphone goes into trash, trash goes into landfill, rain goes into landfill, reactive compounds go into groundwater.
Proper eWaste disposal methods can minimize this, but in a lot of cases this just means shipping the cellphone to Dalian or Inner Mongolia where an 11-year-old makes a dime an hour dipping circuit boards into a hot bath. In the open air. Without a mask.
You people ruin Kari Byron pr0n for the rest of us.
I can't find any seeders for my chemistry homework!
The "Huh?" per minute rate in Prometheus is rather high. "Why does David poison Holloway?" is probably my first question...
Gary Kurtz and Larry Kasdan are still very much alive, he just never worked with them again because they occasionally disagreed with him.
Let us not discount the Damon Lindelof phenomenon -- he wrote Prometheus and Cowboys vs. Aliens, and bears most of the responsibility for the Lost storyline. (He's also writing Into Darkness).
Then again, if yo've ever seen J. J. Abrams tell his "Mystery Box" Story it's pretty hard to not come to the conclusion that he's motivated by at least a little contempt for the audience's intelligence.
My fear is that you have about the median level of Star Wars knowledge, and that you're the audience he'll make it for.
At the time K&R wrote it, people didn't use "operating systems" as "platforms" for "applications" as much as they were just the first tape you loaded onto the core in order to boot your one-off payroll application, developed by a hundred contractors at stupendous expense. New computer systems would come out every couple years and ship with completely new OSs -- computer infrastructures that could actually run the same client software on different machines (or even different model numbers of the same machine) were specialist and generally exceptions to the rule until the 70s.
People would keep the OS that shipped with their machine for years and when the time came to buy a new computer, they took for granted that they'd have to significantly rewrite everything and the old computer would have to be kept for several years in order to read the old tapes for audit purposes. The idea that two computer systems, even from the same vendor, would naturally be able to read the same set of tapes or disks was a fantasy, unless you were paying top-dollar for IBM gear.
When people worried about how to store a date in 1970, they were primarily concerned with how many columns of the card they were taking up.
It went without saying that they'd never "warehouse" data for longer than the legal requirement, and in any case the paper printouts of every transaction, boxed and shipped to archives every week, were the actual record that anyone would care about. Nobody searched historical computer records, and nobody expected records from more than 12 months back to be online. The online record held a two-digit year because that's all that needed to be printed on the check, the computer's tapes weren't designed to actually serve as a legal record of anything, most people used their machines as fancy check and bill printers that did some totals for them. The paper these machines emitted was the document. In the 80s this mentality changed completely and the computer record became the document, the paper output merely copies, and that's when people started paying attention -- but the attitude people had toward online record-keeping only changed because vendors made it possible to store records on a medium, go through three buying cycles of computers, and have that medium still be readable.