It's interesting that just before AT&T was broken up a lot of the best people from the PLATO project were endingup at Bell Labs. I'd keep in contact with them and consulted with them on ideas. They were always doing great things -- none of which saw the light of day.
When AT&T broke up, the head of the Viewtron project, Dennis Hall, was in almost daily contact with the Labs since they were providing the "videotex terminal" (a personal computer ISDN modem combo that used a TV to display the "electronic newspaper" we were working on with Knight Ridder). His comment seemed right on:
Rather than gobble up talent, Bell Labs should have, long ago, become a venture capital company and simply spun off its parts as enterprises in which AT&T would retain shares.
This "20%" con game Google is playing will never pan out.
If the feedstock of "artificial" meat is "a broth of other animal products" then the question is obviously what are the market price for those "other animal products" plus the cost of converting them into a suitable "broth" plus the cost of converting the broth into the "artificial" meat?
Until there is a non-animal feedstock, it is likely to remain too expensive to compete with existing meat products.
Assuming a 2 to 3 Al to H2O molar ratio, it looks like the exhaust velocity is about 900 m/s so the Isp is about 90s.
If that's right, that sucks compared to normal mixtures.
Of course, if you're lifting off the moon or asteroids, it may be ok. Mars? Probably not.
Computing case 1 Fixed enthalpy-pressure equilibrium - adiabatic flame temperature
Propellant composition Code Name mol Mass (g) Composition 34 ALUMINUM (PURE CRYSTALINE) 2.0000 53.9631 1AL 976 WATER 3.0000 54.0458 2H 1O Density: 1.458 g/cm^3 3 different elements AL H O Total mass: 108.008918 g Enthalpy : -7944.26 kJ/kg
24 possible gazeous species 8 possible condensed species
CHAMBER Pressure (atm) : 340.230 Temperature (K) : 3166.569 H (kJ/kg) : -7944.256 U (kJ/kg) : -8685.762 G (kJ/kg) : -33443.801 S (kJ/(kg)(K) : 8.053 M (g/mol) : 35.507 (dLnV/dLnP)t : -1.00584 (dLnV/dLnT)p : 1.13099 Cp (kJ/(kg)(K)) : 3.30500 Cv (kJ/(kg)(K)) : 3.00720 Cp/Cv : 1.09903 Gamma : 1.09264 Vson (m/s) : 900.11114
Molar fractions
AL 6.0290e-004 ALH 9.2486e-004 ALH2 2.8353e-005 ALH3 2.1470e-005 ALO 2.4478e-005 ALOH 5.6133e-003 AL(OH)2 3.4527e-005 AL(OH)3 3.1024e-006 AL2 1.4157e-006 AL2O 1.3669e-003 AL2O2 1.1545e-005 H 1.0276e-002 HALO 2.7342e-006 HALO2 3.5370e-007 H2 7.2954e-001 H2O 7.8723e-003 O 3.5048e-007 OH 4.1466e-005 Condensed species AL2O3(L) 2.4364e-001
Its clear which of these nerdy school boys "started it":
Microsoft
The network externalities locking in Microsoft's control of the OS standard are exceeded only by the Federal Reserve's control of the world's reserve currency.
Google has nothing comparable to Microsoft's network externality.
For crying out loud already! Move NASA to China. Move Microsoft to India.
Thanks for saving me the trouble...
on
The Big Questions
·
· Score: 1
Of reading the review, that is:
I certainly don't mean that it's better than books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, or Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner
Bureaucrat bootlicker writes: Everybody has guaranteed access to free emergency room care.
The funny thing is, some of us are less prone to damage our communities by taking advantage of such freebies -- and those people are usually people who have family histories with those communities and don't have another country to take refuge in once they trash this one to an even lower level.
And as for singing the praises of government because of charity healthcare -- between the time you wrote that message and the time I wrote this response, I just went through a discussion with a doctor about the denial of charity health care to a person in desperate need of it because of the government regulations that require doctors to charge medicare patients no more than they charge other patients. If they're caught giving a "sliding scale" to some people because they are disabled and the social security administration has denied them disability benefits and medicare, the wonderful government can throw them in the slammer for fraud if they charge their medicare patients any more!
This wasn't a hypothetical situation. It is someone we both know and care about in an emergency that arose today.
The government is the preeminent terrorist organization.
There is a vast difference between having tens of millions of property owners to choose from who may, or may not, choose to charge you rent for sitting on their property meditating for 5 years -- and a monopsony like the government that basically arrogates to itself the right not only charge you rent for breathing, and not only to require you to prove things about yourself in the process, but to come and incarcerate you if you don't "comply".
How well prepared are you for the blood of bureaucrats being spilled in the streets?
The boss has been away doing necessary stuff like bringing the land to fruition. The gold bricks then took over the propaganda organs and lied to the boss during the entire 20th century. The internet is here. The boss is finding out just how badly the gold bricks have screwed him.
Despite all the debunkable noise we hear from the right wing that Pelosi is going to come grab you and throw you in prison for being poor enough that you can't afford to pay the premium, there is something sinister about this bill that has slipped by both right and left:
Your mere existence is now taxable.
People who like to claim that "there are no illegal aliens because people aren't illegal" are about to find their words ringing hollow in an especially perverse way.
You can be a monk meditating on a mountain somewhere for 5 years and be gang raped by the government's black and hispanic prison gangs for doing so.
In the mid 70s a programmer was being sued for damages caused by an error in his code but the judge ruled that programming was not a profession the way, say, civil engineering is, so there was no liability implied.
Intel came out with the 8086 and doomed semiconductors to millions of monkeys banging on keyboards as they got degrees in "computer science".
The network externality of software interoperability gave Microsoft a natural monopoly in setting software standards.
The network externality of, ahem, network standards gave the government a natural monopoloy in setting networking standards.
Abandon all hope...
Oh, I suppose I should say something more proximate:
The failure to unify optimizing JIT compilers with memoized (encached, tabled, etc.) demand driven (lazy) computations so that we can express our maths independent of precision without performance penalties. This, of course, is directly related to the failure to maintain dependency graphs so that when under continuous demand (observation) demand driven computation unifies with data driven (data flow) computation -- and when no longer under demand (observation), memoizations (encachments, tabled entries, etc.) can be voided until the next demand requires recomputation.
I'll get around to working on it one of these days. Its just that, like many other things, I thought it was obvious enough 25 years ago that someone who had some serious money would have backed that kind of programming environment. I told Ray in 1985 Microsoft would do lots of damage, but he didn't believe me and even I didn't think it would be this bad...
After talking it over with my underwriters, we've agreed putting it in the public domain at this point would be better than keeping it proprietary even though there is at least one, and possibly two, patentable inventions:
1) Utilizing the heat of formation of the NH3+CO2+H2O pH-buffer, protein-nutrient reactions to moderate temperature extremes throughout the year.
2) The low areal cost, 10-year life photobioreactor design, which creates minimal ground disturbance while allowing continued partial insolation of the underlying ecosystem, constructed of materials that can scale to over tens of thousands of square miles without cutting down all the trees in Siberia or exceeding the world's production capacity for any other resources.
Its in OpenCalc form right now. It would be best if it were in a web-based form but try as I might I couldn't get Google spreadsheets to do all the calculations reasonably. For instance I needed at least one formula using macros and probably should have put more in that form. There were other problems with Google Spreadsheet. I'm pretty sure Bricklin's WikiCalc can't but I'll look into that a little more since its in Perl and I'm a "Perl monk". I may be able to fix its problems.
In the mean time, I'll write up an article describing the systems solution to the CO2/hunger problem and post it as an attachment when I publish it online.
For a number of years, I've been putting together an extensive spreadsheet including everything... and I mean everything... that goes into the bottom line profitability of converting the US's total CO2 effluent of fossil fuel power plants into marketable products from algae. It took me a few months back in 2005 to convince myself that it wasn't worth looking at algal biodiesel.
For starters, here is a direct quote from a researcher in algae metabolism made to me in a private communique:
8-10% that [of total sunlight -- jab] can be converted to biomass... theoretical maxima, with actual efficiencies being substantially lower.
This guy has devoted his life to maximizing the photosynthetic efficiency of algae. In reality your are doing amazingly well to get 5% conversion. And, no, it doesn't matter what you do to the algae or which algae you choose. You aren't going to get better numbers.
Do the net present value calculation on this and try to figure out how you are going to pay for the photobioreactor OR raceway pond's amortization as well as the operating costs. The number just aren't there.
I don't know who is investing all this money but they should fire their advisers.
The only way I've found to convert that much CO2 to algae profitably is to sell the algal protein at the price equivalent of alfalfa protein.
Only problem is, this produces such an abundance of protein, at the price equivalent of alfalfa, that there would be little point in doing agriculture anywhere. The US's fossil fuel CO2 alone would create so much broad-spectrum amino acid protein that if it were directly consumed by humans, everyone in the world could have a diet richer than the US in protein. Oh, sure, you can run it through a couple of trophic layers to get some high grade predator fish farmed out in the ocean desert or something, but then the "environmentalists" who seem to prefer turning the rainforests into soybeans and can't tell the difference between ocean desert mariculture and near-coast mariculture would have a fit, and we can't have _that_ can we?
What will revitalize NASA is for it to follow the law and get the hell out of the launch business like its supposed to.
That will make way for the private sector to invest in launch services without fear of a "public option" driving their investors away at the critical moment.
Why not make the source itself a formal language? That way the idea of source code control for law would fall out naturally along with a better legal system.
Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).
An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.
Subsection (a). IF AND ONLY IF (1)(A) A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
bodily harm on himself, OR
(B) The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
behavior, OR
(C) The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
and serious physical harm to them, OR
(D) The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
specific risks, AND (2) There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur, THEN (3) The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
purposes of subsection (b).
Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF (1) A person is mentally ill, AND (2) The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
the mental illness, AND (3) The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
illness, AND (4) All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person, THEN (5) The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.
The point of the Turing test is to model human intelligence. That is not the point of the Hutter Prize. The point of the Hutter Prize is to model optimal intelligence. Human intelligence is not optimal. The target of this intelligence is chosen as human knowledge as represented in Wikipedia.
Optimal, or universal, intelligence is a field of pure mathematics:
The goal is to mathematically define a unique model superior to any other model
in any environment. From a presentation by Marcus Hutter:
The (optimal) AI model is unique in the sense that it has no parameters which could be
adjusted to the actual environment in which it is used.
In this first step toward a universal theory we are not interested in computational
aspects.
Nevertheless, we are interested in maximizing a utility function, which means to learn in as minimal number of cycles as possible. The interaction cycle is the basic unit, not the computation time per unit.
Some confusion arises due to the fact that optimal compression algorithms rely on optimal prior knowledge of the nature of the input. Optimally compressed prior knowledge is a better "ontology" for predicting, hence compressing, further information coming in from the same environment.
Universal intelligence is not computable, although there is an order 2^N approximation.
I know folks from Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania -- all three -- who escaped the commies and my impression is that the governments of those countries would not only make an exception in the case of Trotskydoom, but may well invest in its production.
daveime: Nothwithstanding that, I guess the think that put me off was the whole "compression == AI" angle that Hutter tried to put on things
Something you need to understand about the Hutter Prize is that it is not about writing a compressor -- it is about achieving the simplest representation of human knowledge. If you want to do it the way Doug Lenat has been trying with Cyc -- hiring a bunch of philosphy PhDs to manually construct an ontology that parsimoniously represents human knowledge -- then by all means, go for it. The amount of ontology required to describe markup syntax is vanishingly small compared to the rest of human knowledge represented in the first 100Mbytes of Wikipedia.
daveime writes: It's like making a compressor that works specifically well on Windows PE exe file structure, and expecting it to do the same thing on a jpeg or plain text file in the English Language.
Again: What English language corpus would you suggest to test your assertion that the Hutter Prize has, due to "specialization" to handle markup syntax, produced a compressor that does not outperform the others on English text?
Slashdot Mirror
When AT&T broke up, the head of the Viewtron project, Dennis Hall, was in almost daily contact with the Labs since they were providing the "videotex terminal" (a personal computer ISDN modem combo that used a TV to display the "electronic newspaper" we were working on with Knight Ridder). His comment seemed right on:
Rather than gobble up talent, Bell Labs should have, long ago, become a venture capital company and simply spun off its parts as enterprises in which AT&T would retain shares.
This "20%" con game Google is playing will never pan out.
Until there is a non-animal feedstock, it is likely to remain too expensive to compete with existing meat products.
Assuming a 2 to 3 Al to H2O molar ratio, it looks like the exhaust velocity is about 900 m/s so the Isp is about 90s.
: 1.458 g/cm^3
: 3166.569 : -7944.256 : -8685.762 : -33443.801 : 8.053 : 35.507 : 3.30500 : 3.00720 : 1.09903 : 1.09264
If that's right, that sucks compared to normal mixtures.
Of course, if you're lifting off the moon or asteroids, it may be ok. Mars? Probably not.
Computing case 1
Fixed enthalpy-pressure equilibrium - adiabatic flame temperature
Propellant composition
Code Name mol Mass (g) Composition
34 ALUMINUM (PURE CRYSTALINE) 2.0000 53.9631 1AL
976 WATER 3.0000 54.0458 2H 1O
Density
3 different elements
AL H O
Total mass: 108.008918 g
Enthalpy : -7944.26 kJ/kg
24 possible gazeous species
8 possible condensed species
CHAMBER
Pressure (atm) : 340.230
Temperature (K)
H (kJ/kg)
U (kJ/kg)
G (kJ/kg)
S (kJ/(kg)(K)
M (g/mol)
(dLnV/dLnP)t : -1.00584
(dLnV/dLnT)p : 1.13099
Cp (kJ/(kg)(K))
Cv (kJ/(kg)(K))
Cp/Cv
Gamma
Vson (m/s) : 900.11114
Molar fractions
AL 6.0290e-004
ALH 9.2486e-004
ALH2 2.8353e-005
ALH3 2.1470e-005
ALO 2.4478e-005
ALOH 5.6133e-003
AL(OH)2 3.4527e-005
AL(OH)3 3.1024e-006
AL2 1.4157e-006
AL2O 1.3669e-003
AL2O2 1.1545e-005
H 1.0276e-002
HALO 2.7342e-006
HALO2 3.5370e-007
H2 7.2954e-001
H2O 7.8723e-003
O 3.5048e-007
OH 4.1466e-005
Condensed species
AL2O3(L) 2.4364e-001
Microsoft
The network externalities locking in Microsoft's control of the OS standard are exceeded only by the Federal Reserve's control of the world's reserve currency.
Google has nothing comparable to Microsoft's network externality.
Soap bubbles are better because I can make them myself, they float around in the air and they look like little gas planets with swirling atmospheres.
YOU decide!
For crying out loud already! Move NASA to China. Move Microsoft to India.
The funny thing is, some of us are less prone to damage our communities by taking advantage of such freebies -- and those people are usually people who have family histories with those communities and don't have another country to take refuge in once they trash this one to an even lower level.
And as for singing the praises of government because of charity healthcare -- between the time you wrote that message and the time I wrote this response, I just went through a discussion with a doctor about the denial of charity health care to a person in desperate need of it because of the government regulations that require doctors to charge medicare patients no more than they charge other patients. If they're caught giving a "sliding scale" to some people because they are disabled and the social security administration has denied them disability benefits and medicare, the wonderful government can throw them in the slammer for fraud if they charge their medicare patients any more!
This wasn't a hypothetical situation. It is someone we both know and care about in an emergency that arose today.
The government is the preeminent terrorist organization.
How well prepared are you for the blood of bureaucrats being spilled in the streets?
There's going to be Hell to pay.
Your mere existence is now taxable.
People who like to claim that "there are no illegal aliens because people aren't illegal" are about to find their words ringing hollow in an especially perverse way.
You can be a monk meditating on a mountain somewhere for 5 years and be gang raped by the government's black and hispanic prison gangs for doing so.
I don't call 2010 "years from flight", but you're right that the Falcon 9 Heavy isn't sitting out on the launch pad right now.
Ares payload: 25,000 kg.
Ares status: Years from flight.
Falcon 9 payload: 29,610 kg.
Falcon 9 status: Countdown on hold pending paperwork.
Oh, I suppose I should say something more proximate:
The failure to unify optimizing JIT compilers with memoized (encached, tabled, etc.) demand driven (lazy) computations so that we can express our maths independent of precision without performance penalties. This, of course, is directly related to the failure to maintain dependency graphs so that when under continuous demand (observation) demand driven computation unifies with data driven (data flow) computation -- and when no longer under demand (observation), memoizations (encachments, tabled entries, etc.) can be voided until the next demand requires recomputation.
I'll get around to working on it one of these days. Its just that, like many other things, I thought it was obvious enough 25 years ago that someone who had some serious money would have backed that kind of programming environment. I told Ray in 1985 Microsoft would do lots of damage, but he didn't believe me and even I didn't think it would be this bad...
The spreadsheet and preliminary narrative are now uploaded to the "oil from algae" group.
After talking it over with my underwriters, we've agreed putting it in the public domain at this point would be better than keeping it proprietary even though there is at least one, and possibly two, patentable inventions:
1) Utilizing the heat of formation of the NH3+CO2+H2O pH-buffer, protein-nutrient reactions to moderate temperature extremes throughout the year.
2) The low areal cost, 10-year life photobioreactor design, which creates minimal ground disturbance while allowing continued partial insolation of the underlying ecosystem, constructed of materials that can scale to over tens of thousands of square miles without cutting down all the trees in Siberia or exceeding the world's production capacity for any other resources.
Its in OpenCalc form right now. It would be best if it were in a web-based form but try as I might I couldn't get Google spreadsheets to do all the calculations reasonably. For instance I needed at least one formula using macros and probably should have put more in that form. There were other problems with Google Spreadsheet. I'm pretty sure Bricklin's WikiCalc can't but I'll look into that a little more since its in Perl and I'm a "Perl monk". I may be able to fix its problems.
In the mean time, I'll write up an article describing the systems solution to the CO2/hunger problem and post it as an attachment when I publish it online.
For a number of years, I've been putting together an extensive spreadsheet including everything ... and I mean everything... that goes into the bottom line profitability of converting the US's total CO2 effluent of fossil fuel power plants into marketable products from algae. It took me a few months back in 2005 to convince myself that it wasn't worth looking at algal biodiesel.
For starters, here is a direct quote from a researcher in algae metabolism made to me in a private communique:
This guy has devoted his life to maximizing the photosynthetic efficiency of algae. In reality your are doing amazingly well to get 5% conversion. And, no, it doesn't matter what you do to the algae or which algae you choose. You aren't going to get better numbers.
Do the net present value calculation on this and try to figure out how you are going to pay for the photobioreactor OR raceway pond's amortization as well as the operating costs. The number just aren't there.
I don't know who is investing all this money but they should fire their advisers.
The only way I've found to convert that much CO2 to algae profitably is to sell the algal protein at the price equivalent of alfalfa protein.
Only problem is, this produces such an abundance of protein, at the price equivalent of alfalfa, that there would be little point in doing agriculture anywhere. The US's fossil fuel CO2 alone would create so much broad-spectrum amino acid protein that if it were directly consumed by humans, everyone in the world could have a diet richer than the US in protein. Oh, sure, you can run it through a couple of trophic layers to get some high grade predator fish farmed out in the ocean desert or something, but then the "environmentalists" who seem to prefer turning the rainforests into soybeans and can't tell the difference between ocean desert mariculture and near-coast mariculture would have a fit, and we can't have _that_ can we?
What will revitalize NASA is for it to follow the law and get the hell out of the launch business like its supposed to.
That will make way for the private sector to invest in launch services without fear of a "public option" driving their investors away at the critical moment.
Clearly, the loss of this Olympic bid means that there is no point in maintaining control over national territory.
OPEN THE BORDERS NOW!!
Signed,
El Cucaracha
Why not make the source itself a formal language? That way the idea of source code control for law would fall out naturally along with a better legal system.
From Example of Normalized English Input to NLESB:
Normalized English has been developed by Layman E. Allen and his colleagues; see for example, Layman E. Allen, ``Language, Law and Logic: Plain Legal Drafting for the Electronic Age,'' Computer Science and Law (Bryan Niblett ed.), 1980, pp. 75-100. Normalized language has been used in the Tennessee statutes (Tenn. Code Ann. sect. 33-6-104(a) (1991)).
An example of the form of Normalized English used as input to the NLESB system follows. Note that the formatting is for the sake of readability, and is not necessary for NLESB.
Subsection (a). IF AND ONLY IF
(1)(A) A person has threatened or attempted suicide or to inflict serious
bodily harm on himself, OR
(B) The person has threatened or attempted homicide or other violent
behavior, OR
(C) The person has placed others in reasonable fear of violent behavior
and serious physical harm to them, OR
(D) The person is unable to avoid severe impairment or injury from
specific risks, AND
(2) There is a substantial likelihood that such harm will occur,
THEN
(3) The person poses a "substantial likelihood of serious harm" for
purposes of subsection (b).
Subsection (b). IF AND ONLY IF
(1) A person is mentally ill, AND
(2) The person poses a substantial likelihood of serious harm because of
the mental illness, AND
(3) The person needs care, training, or treatment because of the mental
illness, AND
(4) All available less drastic alternatives to placement in a hospital or
treatment resource are unsuitable to meet the needs of the person,
THEN
(5) The person may be judicially committed to involuntary care and
treatment in a hospital or treatment resource.
Some confusion arises due to the fact that optimal compression algorithms rely on optimal prior knowledge of the nature of the input. Optimally compressed prior knowledge is a better "ontology" for predicting, hence compressing, further information coming in from the same environment.
Universal intelligence is not computable, although there is an order 2^N approximation.
I know folks from Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania -- all three -- who escaped the commies and my impression is that the governments of those countries would not only make an exception in the case of Trotskydoom, but may well invest in its production.
Something you need to understand about the Hutter Prize is that it is not about writing a compressor -- it is about achieving the simplest representation of human knowledge. If you want to do it the way Doug Lenat has been trying with Cyc -- hiring a bunch of philosphy PhDs to manually construct an ontology that parsimoniously represents human knowledge -- then by all means, go for it. The amount of ontology required to describe markup syntax is vanishingly small compared to the rest of human knowledge represented in the first 100Mbytes of Wikipedia.
Again: What English language corpus would you suggest to test your assertion that the Hutter Prize has, due to "specialization" to handle markup syntax, produced a compressor that does not outperform the others on English text?