Not necessarily. All we can say for sure is that photons and other small entities have attributes that we can measure as if they were particles and waves. However, they might be something else entirely. Perhaps, if we could perceive in 5 dimensions rather than 4, all would be clear.
When all you have is a hammer - everything looks like a nail.
When all you have is a couple of slits and photomultiplier everything looks like a particle/wave duality...
I agree that the line is man-made, but man-made definitions are useful tools for sorting things - in this case, sorting the living from the non-living.
Metaphorically, poetically, and/or romantically you may call the dust of the Sahara, molecules, atoms, electrons, etc. alive, but none of these things pass the test of scientific, biological definition of the term. In other words, there's no utility in referring to these things as being alive. There is utility in referring to entities that pass the formal definition as being alive.
Technically, there's no plural of the word 'virus'. It's a 'mass noun' which has no logical plural meaning. English convention tends to accept 'viruses', so one might argue that this is slightly less incorrect than virii...
Service as in, I reward my waitress with a tip for good service or the soldier feels a sense of reward for service to his country.
Of course, an AI will be rewarded by a higher karma score, which is just an arbitrary parameter with no real meaning, but it will be the goal that it is programmed to work towards.
Oh wait... perhaps I'm confusing AI and slashdot...
I guarantee you that the new series will generate interest in the old series.
My kids would have never watched the old Star Trek series had they never been exposed to the "Enterprise" series.
Similarly, they gained an appreciation for The Who because they watched the Limp Bizkit version of "Behind Blue Eyes" on YouTube and then followed some Who links.
Remakes can have a positive impact on culture, even when the remakes are poor imitations of the originals... although I DO like Limp Bizkit's "Behind Blue Eyes"...
The Prisoner was a lot like Star Trek (the original series) in the sense that is tried to make socio-political statements that were relevant to the time and audience. Some of those episode that strike you as pointless crap might have seemed more relevant if you were living in the UK during the 60s and keeping up with the politics and pop culture of the time.
I don't work with DNA, so I have to trust what I read on the internet. According to numerous sources, the base substitution error rate of the DNA replication process is estimated to be about one error per billion.
Hard disk manufacturers don't advertise their natural error rates, but they are much, much higher than the DNA error rate. This is why modern hard disks use on the order of 200 bits of error correction per sector. Hard disk error rates are well over 1,000 per billion.
Semiconductor memories (something that I know intimately), are better than hard disks, but only by about an order of magnitude (i.e. more than 100 errors per billion).
As for the "redundancy" of DNA due to the twin helical strands, they cannot be considered redundant since they are required for stability of the DNA molecule. Their appearance of redundancy is merely an artifact of evolution.
My point is that the error rate is much, much higher in the modern computer equipment. In fact, it gets worse the higher the density of whatever memory technology you choose. The fact that you don't notice it does not change the fact that the errors occurred.
So the original assertion that we cannot replicate that error rate in computer technology is still correct. It will likely be more correct tomorrow.
Also, when thinking about competing approaches we have to consider that technology achieves it's error correction through redundancy and overhead. DNA achieves it through repair.
However, you are correct. In the long haul, a few errors are a good thing when it comes to DNA.
I'd be very surprised if your copy operation didn't encounter errors. You won't notice them because of the error correction techniques employed. Of course, genes have error correction too - it's just they can do it on-the-fly without having to recopy the source data to a new area on the genome...
The whole point I'm trying to make is that "rude" does not constitute a sufficient standard for making something illegal.
I disagree. Rude behavior, by definition, is behavior that negatively affects others in a society. Society relies on laws to discourage unacceptable behaviors. This is why there are laws against driving too slow on highways, unnecessarily holding up traffic, or making obscene hand gestures, for instance.
Previously in the field, the "guesses" (assumption) was that there would ROUGHLY be a sphere of activated neurons surrounding the electrode tip.
I know the article stated this, but this is clearly not the case. As early as 1874 Roberts Barlow demonstrated that electrical stimulation of neurons triggered muscular contractions. These kinds of experiments have been going on with rats, cats, dogs, monkeys, and a veritable menagerie of other critters (including humans) for more than 100 years. It has been well understood through experimentation that electrical stimulation of one area of the brain triggers the firing of other neurons elsewhere in the brain. That whole business about "balls" of affected neurons is so patently wrong, I can only assume that they were trying to make some other point...
The only interesting, newsworthy part of this is the ability to observe this behavior at a cellular level using new imaging tools.
I would have been a lot less dismissive if the headline would have been something along the lines of:
New optical imaging technology used to show unprecedented detail of neuron behavior
If traffic is at a standstill, then unless there's a cop right next to you, you're not likely to get caught. Technically, you're not driving in that situation.
On the other hand, the other day I was in backed up traffic. Nothing was moving. Then traffic started to move... all except for the car in front of me. I can only guess that she was texting and had not noticed. People were starting to honk... finally she looked up and remembered where she was. She made me miss the next light... maybe not dangerous, but exceptionally rude!
This is so patently obvious that to call it a new discovery is just silly. Who conducted this study at Harvard; the accounting department?
Anyone involved in brain science knows how interconnected the brain is and how remotely connected neurons are. Why would anyone assume that forcing one neuron to fire from an electrical stimulus would only affect neurons locally?
Previously, the Mythbusters (and other scientific studies) has shown that talking on a cell phone while driving is worse than driving while legally drunk. Texting is far more distracting than talking on a cell phone, so this legislation seems more than appropriate.
What could possibly be so vitally important that it has to be texted right now, yet not so important that you can't pull over to do it?
I'm not going to try and make the argument that these searches are not legal.
Any terrorist worth his salt isn't going to have his terrorist manifesto or whatever on his hard disk. All the really sensitive data going to be on a flash drive safely hidden in a body orifice. Searching laptops is a complete waste of time and money.
I doubt very seriously that Cohen's attorney would havve focused on the "skank" charge anyway. Probably the "liar", "psychotic", and "whore" were the terms that they would have cited as libelous...
I'm sorry for your experience. I, too, have had to deal with false allegations that very nearly cost me my career. Fortunately my accuser was not anonymous and eventually someone checked his non-facts.
The question is not what you or I would do in this situation or even if society generally endorses this sort of behavior. The question was is it legally sound and apparently a judge felt it was.
Let's take your music ensemble example. I have a pretty good ear for music. I can focus on a single instrument and distinguish every note and chord for that instrument. I can focus on a different instrument and do likewise. Or I can, as you say, focus on the whole performance, but as soon as my focus centers on the whole, I can no longer know what each instrument is doing in isolation. Now you might argue that this is just my personal weakness, but I don't think so. I think, necessarily when one allows the instruments to blend into a single composition, differentiation is no longer possible - by definition.
Let's take your poetry example. Walking, as we said is autonomous and does not take attention unless you're walking over treacherous terrain. I challenge that the composing a poem and committing it to memory are really just two sides of the same coin. One might be able to compose a poem and not commit it to memory, but I think that's not the norm. So what about composing and looking at scenery. That seems like multitasking - depending on what we mean by "looking". If looking is merely looking, then I think it's autonomous like walking. If looking is also free associating to inspire the content of the poem, then it's multitasking, but it is arguable whether that is more efficient than say remembering the scenery from an earlier walk and focusing on the composition. Not being in the same class of poet as Wordsworth, et. al. I'm probably not qualified to judge which is more efficient... but then again, to my earlier point, perhaps they are not qualified to judge either.
I know... when it comes to poetry, efficiency is not as important as beauty, but my earlier point was about efficiency not aesthetics...
As for driving while listening to music, while holding a conversation, while composing a poem... remind me to give you a wide berth on the road...
Yes, I can multitask by reading a book and riding a stationary bike with no appreciable impact in performance of either. I can run and catch a football. I can walk down the hall and carry on a conversation. I can answer emails and listen to music.
All of these examples involve one activity that requires attention and one that does not require attention.
Where humans can't multitask is when two or more activities require attention. A classic example is driving and talking on a cell phone. Most people think that they can do this effectively. They are ALL wrong. They believe this because of two phenomena (1) for the most part, driving is fairly autonomous, only occasionally does it require attention (2) if your attention is on your phone conversation, you tend to miss those times when driving does require your attention unless something interrupts your attention like you have an accident or someone honks a horn at you for driving like a jackass. For the most part, these drivers are blissfully ignorant of their ineptitude behind the wheel.
Most people who think they can multitask with other activities are wrong for the same reasons. I've yet to see someone with an open laptop in a meeting freely contribute to the process and often they force everyone else in the meeting to backtrack when their input is actually required.
Or she might be accused of having some compassion. Remember, before she knew who it was, it could have been the guy who had been continuously harassing her. Once she found out it was some jealous nobody, maybe she decided that exposing her was punishment enough.
You might think differently if your very livelihood depended on the opinions of others. As someone who's job it is to be the opposite of a 'skank', Cohen possibly felt this derogatory claim threatened her reputation or even her earning power.
If someone questions your skankiness in a newspaper, you generally have the power to rebut in the same forum. Not so in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. All we can say for sure is that photons and other small entities have attributes that we can measure as if they were particles and waves. However, they might be something else entirely. Perhaps, if we could perceive in 5 dimensions rather than 4, all would be clear.
When all you have is a hammer - everything looks like a nail.
When all you have is a couple of slits and photomultiplier everything looks like a particle/wave duality...
Well stated. If I could, I would give you the rest of my mod points!
They have no metabolism and cannot reproduce without the aid of the cellular machinery of another living cell.
I agree that the line is man-made, but man-made definitions are useful tools for sorting things - in this case, sorting the living from the non-living.
Metaphorically, poetically, and/or romantically you may call the dust of the Sahara, molecules, atoms, electrons, etc. alive, but none of these things pass the test of scientific, biological definition of the term. In other words, there's no utility in referring to these things as being alive. There is utility in referring to entities that pass the formal definition as being alive.
Technically, there's no plural of the word 'virus'. It's a 'mass noun' which has no logical plural meaning. English convention tends to accept 'viruses', so one might argue that this is slightly less incorrect than virii...
See: latin words ending in us and virii
If you're going to pick nits, you should pick well.
Service as in, I reward my waitress with a tip for good service or the soldier feels a sense of reward for service to his country.
Of course, an AI will be rewarded by a higher karma score, which is just an arbitrary parameter with no real meaning, but it will be the goal that it is programmed to work towards.
Oh wait... perhaps I'm confusing AI and slashdot...
Moreover, we design the reward system. We would just design it such that the AI felt rewarded by it's service.
I guarantee you that the new series will generate interest in the old series.
My kids would have never watched the old Star Trek series had they never been exposed to the "Enterprise" series.
Similarly, they gained an appreciation for The Who because they watched the Limp Bizkit version of "Behind Blue Eyes" on YouTube and then followed some Who links.
Remakes can have a positive impact on culture, even when the remakes are poor imitations of the originals... although I DO like Limp Bizkit's "Behind Blue Eyes"...
The Prisoner was a lot like Star Trek (the original series) in the sense that is tried to make socio-political statements that were relevant to the time and audience. Some of those episode that strike you as pointless crap might have seemed more relevant if you were living in the UK during the 60s and keeping up with the politics and pop culture of the time.
I don't work with DNA, so I have to trust what I read on the internet. According to numerous sources, the base substitution error rate of the DNA replication process is estimated to be about one error per billion.
Hard disk manufacturers don't advertise their natural error rates, but they are much, much higher than the DNA error rate. This is why modern hard disks use on the order of 200 bits of error correction per sector. Hard disk error rates are well over 1,000 per billion.
Semiconductor memories (something that I know intimately), are better than hard disks, but only by about an order of magnitude (i.e. more than 100 errors per billion).
As for the "redundancy" of DNA due to the twin helical strands, they cannot be considered redundant since they are required for stability of the DNA molecule. Their appearance of redundancy is merely an artifact of evolution.
My point is that the error rate is much, much higher in the modern computer equipment. In fact, it gets worse the higher the density of whatever memory technology you choose. The fact that you don't notice it does not change the fact that the errors occurred.
So the original assertion that we cannot replicate that error rate in computer technology is still correct. It will likely be more correct tomorrow.
Also, when thinking about competing approaches we have to consider that technology achieves it's error correction through redundancy and overhead. DNA achieves it through repair.
However, you are correct. In the long haul, a few errors are a good thing when it comes to DNA.
Since most mutations are detrimental, it's probably a good idea to usurp the default evolutionary process... unless, of course, it pisses God off.
I'd be very surprised if your copy operation didn't encounter errors. You won't notice them because of the error correction techniques employed. Of course, genes have error correction too - it's just they can do it on-the-fly without having to recopy the source data to a new area on the genome...
I disagree. Rude behavior, by definition, is behavior that negatively affects others in a society. Society relies on laws to discourage unacceptable behaviors. This is why there are laws against driving too slow on highways, unnecessarily holding up traffic, or making obscene hand gestures, for instance.
You're right. My bad.
You say
I know the article stated this, but this is clearly not the case. As early as 1874 Roberts Barlow demonstrated that electrical stimulation of neurons triggered muscular contractions. These kinds of experiments have been going on with rats, cats, dogs, monkeys, and a veritable menagerie of other critters (including humans) for more than 100 years. It has been well understood through experimentation that electrical stimulation of one area of the brain triggers the firing of other neurons elsewhere in the brain. That whole business about "balls" of affected neurons is so patently wrong, I can only assume that they were trying to make some other point...
The only interesting, newsworthy part of this is the ability to observe this behavior at a cellular level using new imaging tools.
I would have been a lot less dismissive if the headline would have been something along the lines of:
If traffic is at a standstill, then unless there's a cop right next to you, you're not likely to get caught. Technically, you're not driving in that situation.
On the other hand, the other day I was in backed up traffic. Nothing was moving. Then traffic started to move... all except for the car in front of me. I can only guess that she was texting and had not noticed. People were starting to honk... finally she looked up and remembered where she was. She made me miss the next light... maybe not dangerous, but exceptionally rude!
This is so patently obvious that to call it a new discovery is just silly. Who conducted this study at Harvard; the accounting department?
Anyone involved in brain science knows how interconnected the brain is and how remotely connected neurons are. Why would anyone assume that forcing one neuron to fire from an electrical stimulus would only affect neurons locally?
Previously, the Mythbusters (and other scientific studies) has shown that talking on a cell phone while driving is worse than driving while legally drunk. Texting is far more distracting than talking on a cell phone, so this legislation seems more than appropriate.
What could possibly be so vitally important that it has to be texted right now, yet not so important that you can't pull over to do it?
I'm not going to try and make the argument that these searches are not legal.
Any terrorist worth his salt isn't going to have his terrorist manifesto or whatever on his hard disk. All the really sensitive data going to be on a flash drive safely hidden in a body orifice. Searching laptops is a complete waste of time and money.
I doubt very seriously that Cohen's attorney would havve focused on the "skank" charge anyway. Probably the "liar", "psychotic", and "whore" were the terms that they would have cited as libelous...
I'm sorry for your experience. I, too, have had to deal with false allegations that very nearly cost me my career. Fortunately my accuser was not anonymous and eventually someone checked his non-facts.
The question is not what you or I would do in this situation or even if society generally endorses this sort of behavior. The question was is it legally sound and apparently a judge felt it was.
I'm not sure I agree with you.
Let's take your music ensemble example. I have a pretty good ear for music. I can focus on a single instrument and distinguish every note and chord for that instrument. I can focus on a different instrument and do likewise. Or I can, as you say, focus on the whole performance, but as soon as my focus centers on the whole, I can no longer know what each instrument is doing in isolation. Now you might argue that this is just my personal weakness, but I don't think so. I think, necessarily when one allows the instruments to blend into a single composition, differentiation is no longer possible - by definition.
Let's take your poetry example. Walking, as we said is autonomous and does not take attention unless you're walking over treacherous terrain. I challenge that the composing a poem and committing it to memory are really just two sides of the same coin. One might be able to compose a poem and not commit it to memory, but I think that's not the norm. So what about composing and looking at scenery. That seems like multitasking - depending on what we mean by "looking". If looking is merely looking, then I think it's autonomous like walking. If looking is also free associating to inspire the content of the poem, then it's multitasking, but it is arguable whether that is more efficient than say remembering the scenery from an earlier walk and focusing on the composition. Not being in the same class of poet as Wordsworth, et. al. I'm probably not qualified to judge which is more efficient... but then again, to my earlier point, perhaps they are not qualified to judge either.
I know... when it comes to poetry, efficiency is not as important as beauty, but my earlier point was about efficiency not aesthetics...
As for driving while listening to music, while holding a conversation, while composing a poem... remind me to give you a wide berth on the road...
Yes, I can multitask by reading a book and riding a stationary bike with no appreciable impact in performance of either. I can run and catch a football. I can walk down the hall and carry on a conversation. I can answer emails and listen to music.
All of these examples involve one activity that requires attention and one that does not require attention.
Where humans can't multitask is when two or more activities require attention. A classic example is driving and talking on a cell phone. Most people think that they can do this effectively. They are ALL wrong. They believe this because of two phenomena (1) for the most part, driving is fairly autonomous, only occasionally does it require attention (2) if your attention is on your phone conversation, you tend to miss those times when driving does require your attention unless something interrupts your attention like you have an accident or someone honks a horn at you for driving like a jackass. For the most part, these drivers are blissfully ignorant of their ineptitude behind the wheel.
Most people who think they can multitask with other activities are wrong for the same reasons. I've yet to see someone with an open laptop in a meeting freely contribute to the process and often they force everyone else in the meeting to backtrack when their input is actually required.
Or she might be accused of having some compassion. Remember, before she knew who it was, it could have been the guy who had been continuously harassing her. Once she found out it was some jealous nobody, maybe she decided that exposing her was punishment enough.
You might think differently if your very livelihood depended on the opinions of others. As someone who's job it is to be the opposite of a 'skank', Cohen possibly felt this derogatory claim threatened her reputation or even her earning power.
If someone questions your skankiness in a newspaper, you generally have the power to rebut in the same forum. Not so in this case.