For an even simpler solution: couldn't you just *ignite* the methane? Then it would turn into CO2, which, while a greenhouse gas, is a much less powerful greenhouse gas. And there's "very little" methane by mass compared to CO2 [1], so that would reduce its impact to a negligible fraction of the existing CO2's greenhouse effect.
The only problem I see is that it would melt surrounding ice and reduce the earth's albino, absorbing more heat from the sun.
[1]even after accounting for the 2.75x weight ratio of CO2 to CH4 in the combustion reaction.
Create an encoding method for algorithms that outputs a graph. Randomly generate a short algorithm.
It's not random, because it has a low Kolmogorov complexity (shortest program that outputs the data). But it's not predictable either, because you don't know *which* simple program it is.
"For 30 years, the guard at the French Public Library for the evening shift noticed Gugli walking out with a book tucked under his arm. He always make sure to talk to Gugli, as Gugli would look very suspicious, as if he'd done something wrong. The guard always figured there wasn't something quite right about Gugli. So he'd search him, but always find nothing.
"After retiring, the guard wanted this mystery solved, so one day he followed Gugli home. He asked, 'Okay, I know you've been making some kind of mischief all these years, but I've never been able to figure out what. What have you been stealing?'
1) Mozart didn't find algorithms. He didn't find a failproof procedure that can be mechanically followed and which results in pleasing music. If he did, he sure didn't tell the world nor leave any instruction.
Now, with that said:
2) The invention of this program -- if it does what is claimed -- does not take away from Mozart's accomplishments, since Mozart wrote his compositions hundreds of years before the invention of this program, and yes, that matters. For one thing, it's easier to find a pattern in a composer's works than to find the chunk of "musicspace" that the composer discovered in the first place. For another, Mozart's music could be enjoyed in the hundreds of years before this new program, while the program's music couldn't be.
Yes, the program is a tremendous accomplishment, and it stands on the shoulders of another tremendous accomplishment. No contradiction there.
It's the difference between hiring a hit man and hushing up a family suicide using threats from a hit man. Which is to say, no difference at all.
Re:The IRS is not a *kind* organization...
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because the organization that makes sure _every_ _single_ _retail_ _item_ has had its tax paid, necessitating intrusive monitoring... won't have the name "IRS"?
Well, just remember, every story that we let through or pay attention to, is just that much more support for the tightly regimented, controlling parasite that the IOC is.
Withdraw your support from the untameable hype machine.
Like greywolf said, forensics is an applied science. Probably more accurately called engineering. And like the rest of engineering, it relies on scientific theories that can be tested. The results of those tests have inferential value for things that can't be directly tested, like whether Billy-Bob killed Sally-Sue with a serrated knife.
In forensics, as in the rest of science, unobservables are inferred from theories supported by observables.
I already commented in this topic, but the parent really got to the heart of the matter: climatology is not some black box that you can look inside solely by having a PhD in it -- that would make it indistinguishable from a pseudoscience. After all, you can always claim someone can't judge your little cult because they haven't achieved a high enough level...
REAL science opens itself up for review. REAL science is, in principle, understandable by anyone intelligent enough to understand another science. If you expect others to believe your claims just because you're the top dogs of your field, you're not doing science.
(And frankly, we do make people get way too much of the wrong kind of experience to become a surgeon, and we pay for it in health care costs and losing business to foreign countries who can show the same results for less money.)
Yeah, and you know what's also true? Not one person -- not a SINGLE one -- of the people criticizing Scientology has a PhD in Scientology. Nor a doctorate of ANY kind in Scientology.
Let's see them get to OT8 before they start telling us what's wrong with it. Otherwise, they just haven't done the research.
I hate to sound cynical, but what's really going on here is about status. If you're Stephen Ambrose, and you get caught plagiarizing, well, you're at the top of your field, so you get a slap on the wrist. Is "Dr." Ambrose persona non grata in the field of history now? Didn't think so.
OTOH, if you're a young, low status newbie who hasn't "paid her dues", and you embarass your country because they were investing so much credibility in you, well, the kid gloves come off.
I'm not endorsing plagiarism. I'm saying, denounce the act and the wrongdoer *wherever* it occurs, and don't make it a function of how kewl you are.
The American Third Position does not believe that the United States of America has a moral obligation to spread American values the world over. In fact, we believe that we ought to concern ourselves more with the maintenance of democracy within our own borders - especially as it is under attack - and less with the propagation of it on foreign soil.
We refuse to be strong-armed by the international community to serve the interests of others. We are a sovereign nation, and we will act as such. The blood of our people is the most valuable resource of the country, and the lives of our children must not be risked over foreign disputes that have no bearing on the welfare of our people
Yeah, I certainly *wish* the Nazis had that policy...
And what happened to the postal inspector who *obtained* and *distributed* child porn? And to the people he got it from?
This sounds so twisted: I'm imagining someone so hellbent on getting someone arrested that he makes his own children do nude photoshoots and then sends them out intended to get someone in trouble... disgusting.
What could be better than DNA-based lifeforms trying to destroy each other? Eventually one of them will screw something up and fewer and fewer regions will be members of any ecosystem as they get corrupted.
1) Send out an email that you have a program that will solve the problem where you can't read an image because it's upside down, and they should contact you to have it installed.
2) Fire anyone who asks for it. They're too fucking stupid to do their jobs to begin with.
Seriously, if you can't turn a fucking document around on a computer, there's not much you can be trusted with.
I am an engineer, yes, but that's not the problem here, since it's not the lack of final practical results that bothers me. What bothers me is that none of them can actually *spell out* the algorithm that constitutes a Goedel machine so I can go write one, even if it could only be a simple toy model at this point.
Demanding that an algorithm be specific isn't "the engineer mindset gone mad". It's um, the definition of an algorithm... what these guys are supposed to be producing.
I can't infer what the algorithm actually *is* from his paper. And it's not because I'm stupid -- neither can anyone else, not even simple approximations for simple problems as a "proof of concept".
Do you agree that this would be necessary for their work to count as progress?
No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.
Right, it's useful, except for the whole "getting an actual use out of it" thing.
This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hutter and *his* student Shane Legg have taken this ball and run with it in interesting ways.
Yes, I'm familiar with AIT and Hutter's and Legg's work. Still no actual uses. Still no clear pseudocode. Or, rather, your post already listed all of Hutter's and Legg's insights that have proven to be useful for a practical purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
For an even simpler solution: couldn't you just *ignite* the methane? Then it would turn into CO2, which, while a greenhouse gas, is a much less powerful greenhouse gas. And there's "very little" methane by mass compared to CO2 [1], so that would reduce its impact to a negligible fraction of the existing CO2's greenhouse effect.
The only problem I see is that it would melt surrounding ice and reduce the earth's albino, absorbing more heat from the sun.
[1]even after accounting for the 2.75x weight ratio of CO2 to CH4 in the combustion reaction.
Bloederweise kannst Du auch nicht Deutsch sprechen.
Create an encoding method for algorithms that outputs a graph. Randomly generate a short algorithm.
It's not random, because it has a low Kolmogorov complexity (shortest program that outputs the data). But it's not predictable either, because you don't know *which* simple program it is.
I think it's the variant on the old joke.
"For 30 years, the guard at the French Public Library for the evening shift noticed Gugli walking out with a book tucked under his arm. He always make sure to talk to Gugli, as Gugli would look very suspicious, as if he'd done something wrong. The guard always figured there wasn't something quite right about Gugli. So he'd search him, but always find nothing.
"After retiring, the guard wanted this mystery solved, so one day he followed Gugli home. He asked, 'Okay, I know you've been making some kind of mischief all these years, but I've never been able to figure out what. What have you been stealing?'
"Gugli responded, 'Books!'"
And so the downside would be ______?
Fuckers shouldn't eat my crops to begin with.
Got any GMO crops that damage the kidneys of cowtippers? >:-[
1) Mozart didn't find algorithms. He didn't find a failproof procedure that can be mechanically followed and which results in pleasing music. If he did, he sure didn't tell the world nor leave any instruction.
Now, with that said:
2) The invention of this program -- if it does what is claimed -- does not take away from Mozart's accomplishments, since Mozart wrote his compositions hundreds of years before the invention of this program, and yes, that matters. For one thing, it's easier to find a pattern in a composer's works than to find the chunk of "musicspace" that the composer discovered in the first place. For another, Mozart's music could be enjoyed in the hundreds of years before this new program, while the program's music couldn't be.
Yes, the program is a tremendous accomplishment, and it stands on the shoulders of another tremendous accomplishment. No contradiction there.
It's the difference between hiring a hit man and hushing up a family suicide using threats from a hit man. Which is to say, no difference at all.
Because the organization that makes sure _every_ _single_ _retail_ _item_ has had its tax paid, necessitating intrusive monitoring ... won't have the name "IRS"?
Well, just remember, every story that we let through or pay attention to, is just that much more support for the tightly regimented, controlling parasite that the IOC is.
Withdraw your support from the untameable hype machine.
You forgot:
Eating Chipotle burritos makes you crap blood? Clean your underwear with Chipotlaway and keep eating their burriots.
Like greywolf said, forensics is an applied science. Probably more accurately called engineering. And like the rest of engineering, it relies on scientific theories that can be tested. The results of those tests have inferential value for things that can't be directly tested, like whether Billy-Bob killed Sally-Sue with a serrated knife.
In forensics, as in the rest of science, unobservables are inferred from theories supported by observables.
I already commented in this topic, but the parent really got to the heart of the matter: climatology is not some black box that you can look inside solely by having a PhD in it -- that would make it indistinguishable from a pseudoscience. After all, you can always claim someone can't judge your little cult because they haven't achieved a high enough level...
REAL science opens itself up for review. REAL science is, in principle, understandable by anyone intelligent enough to understand another science. If you expect others to believe your claims just because you're the top dogs of your field, you're not doing science.
(And frankly, we do make people get way too much of the wrong kind of experience to become a surgeon, and we pay for it in health care costs and losing business to foreign countries who can show the same results for less money.)
Why, they done healed ma' bruther o' his drinkin' and homosexuality problems!
Yeah, and you know what's also true? Not one person -- not a SINGLE one -- of the people criticizing Scientology has a PhD in Scientology. Nor a doctorate of ANY kind in Scientology.
Let's see them get to OT8 before they start telling us what's wrong with it. Otherwise, they just haven't done the research.
coach-class
Not so fast! The proper term is "Customer of Cheapness".
I hate to sound cynical, but what's really going on here is about status. If you're Stephen Ambrose, and you get caught plagiarizing, well, you're at the top of your field, so you get a slap on the wrist. Is "Dr." Ambrose persona non grata in the field of history now? Didn't think so.
OTOH, if you're a young, low status newbie who hasn't "paid her dues", and you embarass your country because they were investing so much credibility in you, well, the kid gloves come off.
I'm not endorsing plagiarism. I'm saying, denounce the act and the wrongdoer *wherever* it occurs, and don't make it a function of how kewl you are.
From the site:
Foreign Affairs. Humility and restraint.
The American Third Position does not believe that the United States of America has a moral obligation to spread American values the world over. In fact, we believe that we ought to concern ourselves more with the maintenance of democracy within our own borders - especially as it is under attack - and less with the propagation of it on foreign soil.
We refuse to be strong-armed by the international community to serve the interests of others. We are a sovereign nation, and we will act as such. The blood of our people is the most valuable resource of the country, and the lives of our children must not be risked over foreign disputes that have no bearing on the welfare of our people
Yeah, I certainly *wish* the Nazis had that policy...
And what happened to the postal inspector who *obtained* and *distributed* child porn? And to the people he got it from?
This sounds so twisted: I'm imagining someone so hellbent on getting someone arrested that he makes his own children do nude photoshoots and then sends them out intended to get someone in trouble... disgusting.
Let the DNA wars begin!
What could be better than DNA-based lifeforms trying to destroy each other? Eventually one of them will screw something up and fewer and fewer regions will be members of any ecosystem as they get corrupted.
Not true -- I have some old newspapers talking about how Eastasia is our ally.
Vaguely uncomfortable, eh? Like "why can't i own a canadian"?
Um, you *can* own a Canadian, if you're an American. See the Bible
Well, if it helps you to have an additional data point, I asked her how her day was and she said, "Horrible ... until now ;-)"
Then, I finished my cigarette, got out of bed, and left.
Here's what you need to do:
1) Send out an email that you have a program that will solve the problem where you can't read an image because it's upside down, and they should contact you to have it installed.
2) Fire anyone who asks for it. They're too fucking stupid to do their jobs to begin with.
Seriously, if you can't turn a fucking document around on a computer, there's not much you can be trusted with.
I am an engineer, yes, but that's not the problem here, since it's not the lack of final practical results that bothers me. What bothers me is that none of them can actually *spell out* the algorithm that constitutes a Goedel machine so I can go write one, even if it could only be a simple toy model at this point.
Demanding that an algorithm be specific isn't "the engineer mindset gone mad". It's um, the definition of an algorithm ... what these guys are supposed to be producing.
I can't infer what the algorithm actually *is* from his paper. And it's not because I'm stupid -- neither can anyone else, not even simple approximations for simple problems as a "proof of concept".
Do you agree that this would be necessary for their work to count as progress?
No, he knows and has explicitly stated in a few places that it's uncomputable, in much the same way that Kolmogorov Complexity is uncomputable, but an interesting and potentially useful theoretical construct, nonetheless.
Right, it's useful, except for the whole "getting an actual use out of it" thing.
This vein of Schmidhüber's work is more or less descended from Solomonoff's work on induction and Chaitin's Algorithmic Information Theory stuff (the line of descent is less explicit with the latter), and a bunch of Schmidhüber's descendents, most prominently his student Marcus Hutter and *his* student Shane Legg have taken this ball and run with it in interesting ways.
Yes, I'm familiar with AIT and Hutter's and Legg's work. Still no actual uses. Still no clear pseudocode. Or, rather, your post already listed all of Hutter's and Legg's insights that have proven to be useful for a practical purpose.