Look over Robert Hecht-Nielsen's "Confabulation Theory" -- in particular the confabulation equation which he posits is a major discovery that debunks the "Bayesian religion" by providing a scalable model of cognition in which the parallel processing elements are performing functions similar to the brain's thalamocortical modules. Among other things, he claims that this is the holy grail of artificial modeling of natural intelligence -- that confabulation theory captures, in a scalable algorithm the essence of learning, thought and behavior. He is, in essence, claiming to have achieved strong AI.
It is, of course, tempting to dismiss his extreme claims as some sort of mental aberration -- perhaps resulting from his having hit the jackpot with the sale of his company for, by some accounts, between $3B and $4B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.
On the other hand, he did sell his company for between $3B and $B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.
Moreover, if we give the initial statement in Clark's Laws any credence: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.", RHN's age and the fact that he is commenting on his specialization should be given some weight.
With this in mind, I would ask you to review the linked presentation -- which I located at Sandia's website (and of which I recommend you commit to memory lest it disappear down the memory hole) -- made by RHN at Sandia in 2006. Note he proposes an "Extraction System Organization" with a budget rising to $300B/year by 2015.
In particular, I found this item interesting:
Collectors and Analysts have no need to know how extraction system works (this knowledge should be highly restricted) – users need only know extraction system’s capabilities and how to use it.
CAUTION: Some obviously psychotic individuals claim there to be a deep relationship between credit card companies and the surveillance state. They should be locked up for their own safety.
Cosmopolitan society selects for psychopathy due to a phenomenon called, by evolutionary medicine, horizontal transmission. Horizontal transmission evolves virulence. Horizontal transmission occurs when a pathogen is transmitted between hosts without regard to lineal descent of the hosts (peer-to-peer rather than parent-to-child). Horizontal transmission evolves the greatest virulence when the host can infect peers without the host being healthy.
When viewed as group organisms, societies, corporations, etc. can become "infected" by "pathogens" that can go from peer-to-peer -- and indeed tend to do so -- when the just-infected host has become nonviable.
The zeitgeist of cosmopolitan society is that borders ate the epitome of evil. "The Politics of Exclusion" is up there with child molestation in the hierarchy of sins. This zeitgeist produces virulence in the human genome -- virulence such as the ability to turn off empathy when it pays off for the selfish genes of the individual.
If Microsoft needs foreign talent so badly a portion of the US defense budget should be allocated to relocating Microsoft to India where it can get the talent it needs without violating US territory by opening it to one of the biggest populations in the world. Territorial integrity is an appropriate role for the Federal government and the Defense Department and MIcrosoft (and other companies like Facebook, etc.) that are clamoring for more immigration should be sent to India and barred from doing software development in the US at all.
"Team Nukie" was a surf team from the 1980s that surfed the San Onofre Nuclear Plant beaches. They wore t-shirts sporting "Nukiedog" as their idol: The surfer, his board and his dog that surfed with him on his board that, bathed in the effluent from the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, fused together into the meanest tube riding machine of Southern California.
Come on -- TFA even says, "ET3's Hyperloop-like project".... Musk still hasn't announced what his "hyperloop" actually is and, no, Rand Corp and not even Gerard O'Neil in his book "2081" called the evacuated tube EM levitation system "hyperloop".
Horizontal transmission evolves virulence. Immobile victims increase the potential virulence achieved by horizontal transmission. The "moral zeitgeist" that Dawkins loves so much is a perfect fit to evolve virulence -- that moral zeitgeist being enforced borders are the ultimate evil -- worse than child molestation by an HIV vector without a condom. Therefore, as this moral zeitgeist is increasingly enforced everywhere in the world, you are either going to be (virtually) eaten by virulent critters that make like they're human as they go from nation to nation exploiting their weaknesses and then moving on before they collapse, or you're going to become one of those virulent critters yourself!
Hmm... so if I don't want to live in someone else's culture -- indeed if I want to preserve the culture in which I was raised, I must hate the other's culture. Do I have that right?
Nebraska: Local teenage girls are being used as black tar heroin dealers vs Iowa where the person you contact to apply for energy grants from the state of Iowa is Paritosh Kasotia who assures me that the grant they gave to the ethanol plant a half mile from here to grow algae just HAD to hire folks from India and that it is wonderful because these tax dollars are going to be spent right here in Iowa by these highly skilled gifts from abroad.
You see, these geniuses are are making up for the fact that Iowa's scholastic aptitude is ranked near the top of the world, if counted as a separate country, and lord knows Iowans like Norman Borlaug just couldn't have figured out how to grow things without help from these geniuses from India. In fact, its Normal Borlaug's fault that there are so many of them so we have to find SOMEWHERE to give them jobs and, hey, Iowa fits the bill don'it?
It is necessary to distinguish between theories and theorems in this kind of situation. Non-trival theories (such as the axioms of various physical theories) have an infinite set of provable theorems that are not obvious -- including those that exclude possibilities. Mathematicians spend their lifetimes exploring even a small number of these theorems in the form of proof. Conjectures -- proposed theorems -- are what the "skeptics" are trafficking in when they make arguments like yours that the absence of a conjecture implies the absence of something that would be predicted by theory. Your strongest point is that there seems to be some statistical success in relying on this implication, but all you can really argue is that some discount factor should be applied to obtain the expected value of the investigation. However, "skeptics" never do this. They don't look at the value of the potential source of energy and then apply a rationally derived discount factor to discover whether, for instance, it is legitimate to destroy a grad student's career for attempting to do his thesis on a replication of Nathan Lewis's negative cold fusion experiment that was the basis for the APS deep-sixing cold fusion a mere 5 weeks after the March 1989 press conference. Or, worse, the editor of Nature rejecting the recommendation of his own peer-reviewers to accept Oriani's experimental replication of the P&F effect less than a year after the March 1989 press conference -- rejecting on the grounds that "it violated theory".
The camera's physics directly measure power impinging on the sensors. On the way through the thermal calibration emissivity introduces bias in one direction and on the way through the power calibration it is inverted so it cancels out. There is a residual error that must be quantified in that, although (contrary to your statement about "visible light") the Optris IR camera is, well, IR, in order to obtain a full-spectrum integration of power the software must fit to Plank's curve and this apparently makes the grey body assumption (which is that emissivity doesn't vary with wavelength), which, as you point out, doesn't hold in reality. I've never seen any "skeptic" attempt to quantify this error, which rationality dictates be done. Moreover, they haven't even attempted to argue the sign of the error, let alone whether it is conceivably significant given that at the wavelengths below IR where the errors are most likely to occur (as Wein's approximation is accurate at higher wavelengths), the energies are lower not only in magnitude but in frequency.
I'd really like to see some genuine skepticism. I have my own reasons for skepticism but to put myself in the same class as those who refuse to do arithmetic is an insult to my intelligence.
The fourth root of 10 is 1.77 -- now try to keep in mind that I've just removed from consideration the high sensitivity to error introduced by the Stefan Boltzmann equation and we're dealing solely with the direct proportionality of Wien's displacement law:
So you're positing that the IR camera's calibration for figure 3 was plausibly 77% off.
Ethan Sh*t-For-Brains Siegel declares that if there is no known theory for producing heat in excess of that which can be accounted for by chemical means, that we're dealing either with a hoax or with a particular class of nuclear reactions.
For such SFBs Theory rules over Experiment.
Clue: If the Enlightenment has anything at all to offer, it is that Experiment rules over Theory.
The question isn't whether nuclear products are present.
The question is whether heat beyond that explicable by chemical means is present. If so, we can go ahead and posit a hoax or we can posit that we Just Don't Know what the physical mechanism is for producing the heat but Whatever It Is It Sure Is Interesting. In the latter position, we call this the beginning of scientific research.
For a clue exactly how clueless Mr. SFB is, one can look at Figure 3 of the paper and, using physics 101 application of the Stefan Boltzmann law, calculate the power output during the thermal excursion to be 10kW for 1kW input.
With that kind of power gain, the niceties Mr. SFB posits as essential measurements just don't matter to the importance. Its either a hoax or its a revolution that should receive more resources and attention than middle east politics and American Idol combined.
Slashdot Mirror
It is, of course, tempting to dismiss his extreme claims as some sort of mental aberration -- perhaps resulting from his having hit the jackpot with the sale of his company for, by some accounts, between $3B and $4B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.
On the other hand, he did sell his company for between $3B and $B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.
Moreover, if we give the initial statement in Clark's Laws any credence: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.", RHN's age and the fact that he is commenting on his specialization should be given some weight.
With this in mind, I would ask you to review the linked presentation -- which I located at Sandia's website (and of which I recommend you commit to memory lest it disappear down the memory hole) -- made by RHN at Sandia in 2006. Note he proposes an "Extraction System Organization" with a budget rising to $300B/year by 2015.
In particular, I found this item interesting:
CAUTION: Some obviously psychotic individuals claim there to be a deep relationship between credit card companies and the surveillance state. They should be locked up for their own safety.
When viewed as group organisms, societies, corporations, etc. can become "infected" by "pathogens" that can go from peer-to-peer -- and indeed tend to do so -- when the just-infected host has become nonviable.
The zeitgeist of cosmopolitan society is that borders ate the epitome of evil. "The Politics of Exclusion" is up there with child molestation in the hierarchy of sins. This zeitgeist produces virulence in the human genome -- virulence such as the ability to turn off empathy when it pays off for the selfish genes of the individual.
It seems like its become a subsidiary of the WSJ's oped page.
It truly is An Empire of Their Own.
If Microsoft needs foreign talent so badly a portion of the US defense budget should be allocated to relocating Microsoft to India where it can get the talent it needs without violating US territory by opening it to one of the biggest populations in the world. Territorial integrity is an appropriate role for the Federal government and the Defense Department and MIcrosoft (and other companies like Facebook, etc.) that are clamoring for more immigration should be sent to India and barred from doing software development in the US at all.
Earlier today I was looking for an image of Nukiedog to do some ascii art of him as a response to Aspidog in earlier today, but alas, found nothing.
What a synchronicity!
PS: As usual, Google's Usenet archive search fails big time.
Come on -- TFA even says, "ET3's Hyperloop-like project".... Musk still hasn't announced what his "hyperloop" actually is and, no, Rand Corp and not even Gerard O'Neil in his book "2081" called the evacuated tube EM levitation system "hyperloop".
Burn, Baby, Burn!
Praise Dawkins' Moral Zeitgeist. Hail Kali! Destroy Creation With Morbidity! Invasive Species Über Alles!
Clearly, the next app should be tagging the location of all Jews with a yellow Star of David badge, starting with one Brett Stallbaum.
Hmm... so if I don't want to live in someone else's culture -- indeed if I want to preserve the culture in which I was raised, I must hate the other's culture. Do I have that right?
Does that the culture that produced guys like Noyce can have its own reservation? Can it have as much land as the Sioux?
Nebraska: Local teenage girls are being used as black tar heroin dealers vs Iowa where the person you contact to apply for energy grants from the state of Iowa is Paritosh Kasotia who assures me that the grant they gave to the ethanol plant a half mile from here to grow algae just HAD to hire folks from India and that it is wonderful because these tax dollars are going to be spent right here in Iowa by these highly skilled gifts from abroad. You see, these geniuses are are making up for the fact that Iowa's scholastic aptitude is ranked near the top of the world, if counted as a separate country, and lord knows Iowans like Norman Borlaug just couldn't have figured out how to grow things without help from these geniuses from India. In fact, its Normal Borlaug's fault that there are so many of them so we have to find SOMEWHERE to give them jobs and, hey, Iowa fits the bill don'it?
Perhaps I should have said "Silicon Valley" instead of "California".
I moved from California back to Iowa, where I grew up, to get away from becoming a colony of India. Now where do I move?
Obviously the Jews that turned in the pro-Israelis are self-hating Nazi scum!
Yes there is. It's defined by a field called "Universal Artificial Intelligence" and the roadmap says what to study.
When will the science of sociobiology get around to studying the epigenetics of the Baby Daddy and determine his species?
It is necessary to distinguish between theories and theorems in this kind of situation. Non-trival theories (such as the axioms of various physical theories) have an infinite set of provable theorems that are not obvious -- including those that exclude possibilities. Mathematicians spend their lifetimes exploring even a small number of these theorems in the form of proof. Conjectures -- proposed theorems -- are what the "skeptics" are trafficking in when they make arguments like yours that the absence of a conjecture implies the absence of something that would be predicted by theory. Your strongest point is that there seems to be some statistical success in relying on this implication, but all you can really argue is that some discount factor should be applied to obtain the expected value of the investigation. However, "skeptics" never do this. They don't look at the value of the potential source of energy and then apply a rationally derived discount factor to discover whether, for instance, it is legitimate to destroy a grad student's career for attempting to do his thesis on a replication of Nathan Lewis's negative cold fusion experiment that was the basis for the APS deep-sixing cold fusion a mere 5 weeks after the March 1989 press conference. Or, worse, the editor of Nature rejecting the recommendation of his own peer-reviewers to accept Oriani's experimental replication of the P&F effect less than a year after the March 1989 press conference -- rejecting on the grounds that "it violated theory".
Erratum: "Wein's approximation is accurate at higher wavelengths" should be "Wein's approximation is accurate at higher frequencies"
The camera's physics directly measure power impinging on the sensors. On the way through the thermal calibration emissivity introduces bias in one direction and on the way through the power calibration it is inverted so it cancels out. There is a residual error that must be quantified in that, although (contrary to your statement about "visible light") the Optris IR camera is, well, IR, in order to obtain a full-spectrum integration of power the software must fit to Plank's curve and this apparently makes the grey body assumption (which is that emissivity doesn't vary with wavelength), which, as you point out, doesn't hold in reality. I've never seen any "skeptic" attempt to quantify this error, which rationality dictates be done. Moreover, they haven't even attempted to argue the sign of the error, let alone whether it is conceivably significant given that at the wavelengths below IR where the errors are most likely to occur (as Wein's approximation is accurate at higher wavelengths), the energies are lower not only in magnitude but in frequency.
I'd really like to see some genuine skepticism. I have my own reasons for skepticism but to put myself in the same class as those who refuse to do arithmetic is an insult to my intelligence.
The fourth root of 10 is 1.77 -- now try to keep in mind that I've just removed from consideration the high sensitivity to error introduced by the Stefan Boltzmann equation and we're dealing solely with the direct proportionality of Wien's displacement law: So you're positing that the IR camera's calibration for figure 3 was plausibly 77% off.
For such SFBs Theory rules over Experiment.
Clue: If the Enlightenment has anything at all to offer, it is that Experiment rules over Theory.
The question isn't whether nuclear products are present.
The question is whether heat beyond that explicable by chemical means is present. If so, we can go ahead and posit a hoax or we can posit that we Just Don't Know what the physical mechanism is for producing the heat but Whatever It Is It Sure Is Interesting. In the latter position, we call this the beginning of scientific research.
For a clue exactly how clueless Mr. SFB is, one can look at Figure 3 of the paper and, using physics 101 application of the Stefan Boltzmann law, calculate the power output during the thermal excursion to be 10kW for 1kW input.
With that kind of power gain, the niceties Mr. SFB posits as essential measurements just don't matter to the importance. Its either a hoax or its a revolution that should receive more resources and attention than middle east politics and American Idol combined.
You'll have to see if you can locate a glimpse of the sky in this video of the world in which H-1b fraud is rampant.
The color of sky in my world is the same color it is in the world where H-1b fraud is so routine it is considered legitimate.