Over the large span of human evolution, characteristics such as physical strength, size, agression and so forth had much more to do with the ability of an individual to procreate, as opposed to the ability to smooth-talk a member of the opposite sex.
What makes you think that this is true? It takes a lot more than brute strength to be a successful hunter-gatherer. You need a lot of knowledge of seasonal patterns, wildlife, etc. If you look at the fiew hunter-gatherer tribes still around today, you'll see that they tend to be of average build and slightly chubby. In all probability, prehistoric women (and men) were just as succeptible to smooth-talking as we are today, because intelligence is a desireable attribute. I don't see any reason to suppose that placing a value on intelligence and social skills is just a modern convention.
I'm not talking about memory I'm talking about knowledge. It's difficult to process knowledge in parallel because its an interconnected system. You have to combine different parts of your knowledge to do anything useful with it, and there's an infinite number of different ways you can do that (yes, even though the brain itself is finite).
The way I've looked at memory is that the brain is currently "activating" the pathway associated with some subject, and all memories which concern the subject are linked with some strength to that pathway - memories which concern the subject but are not linked with that pathway are considered forgotten.
I suppose you could say the subset that you use to make a decision are those which have the strongest association with the pathway - but who knows?
Well, I'm not really very sympathetic to that sort of associationistic/connectionist model of the mind. In this particular case I don't think that would work as a heuristic. It's unlikely that you have any strong associations between, say, tigers and trees in your mind, but climbing a tree might be a good idea if there's a tiger nearby (ok, ok, assume tigers can't climb trees;)) I think that the ability to have those sorts of ideas (i.e. "i'd better climb a tree because there's a tiger nearby" etc.) is pretty incredible, and we really can't explain it right now.
Before modding this guy interesting, you might like to consider the fact that the article he links to is full of unjustified assertions, pop pseudo-pyschology and other varieties of what might kindly be termed "crap". For example, take this rather incredible statement, presented as an obvious truth:
When your senses detect a set of stimuli, your brain assembles all the
information it has about the source of those stimuli and how to deal with them.
This raises all sorts of difficult issues which the author ignores completely. For example, is it really plausible that the brain assembles all the information relevant to the stimulus and how you might deal with it? That is probably an infinite amount of information. In any given situation, anything whatsoever that you know is potentially useful information. The trick is (we really have no idea how the mind does this) to filter out a tiny fraction of your knowledge using a reasonably fast heurisitic, so that you have a manageable subset of your knowledge to process in any given situation.
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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But Perl has all the features you mention (yes, including blocks).
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Oops, Ruby isn't actually bytecode interpreted is it...
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Variable declarations are silly? Two extra letters per local variable, and you don't have to worry about naming local variables with care, defining methods for ensured isolation, etc. etc. [*] Although in a sense the default in Ruby is for variables to be local, you have know way of knowing -- without looking at variables in all encolising scopes -- of whether you're defining a new local variable or altering an existing one. For sure, this isn't a big problem with Ruby, but then the problems people cite with Perl aren't big problems either. So the syntax is a bit obscure in some cases...big deal. Perl/Python/Ruby are virtually identical in terms of concerete language features. Before someone says "blocks", blocks are just a special syntax for passing anonymous closures to functions, and Perl actually has a special syntax for this just like Ruby! Ruby's OO features are cool, but most of them are also available in Perl because Perl has a very open-ended object system -- if you want mixins, you can easily write your own implementation. And Perl has multiple inheritance anyway, so you don't really need them. Introspection is easier in Python and Ruby than in Perl, but most of the stuff you'd use it for (i.e. serialization) has already been packaged into Perl libraries on CPAN. I guess with your Perl experience you know all of this already. I actually came to Perl after Python and Ruby (the documentation really sucks for mod_ruby and for just about every other Ruby library/module; mod_perl was a welcome change.)
Python and Ruby are nicer than Perl, for sure, but they don't really win in terms of concrete features. They lose in terms of speed and available libraries, so I use Perl. I'd happily use Python or Ruby instead of Perl if I had to, but I just don't see what the hype is with Ruby/Python. They are all bytecode intepreted imperative OO scripting languages with some functional programming features. End of story.
[*] Except insofar as doing these things is a good idea anyway.
Re:Not seeing the forest for the trees
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What is Perl 6?
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Bit of a false dichtomy there -- you could use a language that wasn't Ruby and still avoid looking at fugly code.
LOL, "the museum". Seriously though, there are McDonalds/everywhere/ in London.
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
As I said in reply to another post, it's not only that, it's the fact that there's no way of explicitly declaring local variables in Ruby. So if I declare a variable i within some scope, I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm overwriting a variable 'i' in a higher scope, or creating a new variable. In Perl all local variables are declared with 'my', so this problem doesn't arise.
Re:Actually, I found an example of what you mentio
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
It's not only that, it's the fact that there's no way of explicitly declaring local variables in Ruby. So if I declare a variable i within some scope, I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm overwriting a variable 'i' in a higher scope, or creating a new variable. In Perl all local variables are declared with 'my', so this problem doesn't arise.
Well, if you've never seen a McD's in London you can't have seen much of London.
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
WTF? First, Ruby's scoping is lexical and static, it's just broken. Second, lexical and static aren't the same thing. Third, there's nothing wrong with lexical scoping in a dynamic language. Most dynamic languages don't have dynamic scoping (Common Lisp and Perl are some exceptions -- dynamic scoping is an optional alternative to lexical scoping in both).
Re:Who cares what Perl 6 is..
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1, Troll
Let me know when Ruby gets lexical scoping which isn't broken.
Well, points 1&2 donn't apply in the UK, and usually not point 5. A google for "mcdonalds charges for ketchup" gives plently of results which appear to suggest that it happens in North America too. Which countries did you go to?
Typical for Slashdot to get this wrong. This isn't an EU project. It's a collaboration between the French and German governments (and in fact they are only collaborating to encourage French and German companies to develop a search engine).
References in Perl and PHP disingenuously try to LOOK like C++ references by using the same punctuation characte
I don't know about PHP, but the ampersand character is not used for anything connected to references in Perl. Do you know any Perl?
At least C++ references are well defined in terms of pointers, so there aren't so many horrible edge cases that cause the interpreter to core dum
And there follows a long list of bugs...in PHP! We're talking about Perl here!
References in Perl and PHP are unlike references in any other reasonably designed programming language: they totally suck. They're extremely hard to understand, but sometimes they still crash the interpreter, even if you do understand them perfectly and use them correctly.
No, references in Perl do not crash the interpreter. Though they have a slightly weird syntax for dereferencing, there's nothing fundamentally complicated about them. If you can't grok references in Perl, your programs are going to crash whatever language you write them in.
Let me know when the UK goes out of lock-step with the US.
What's that got to do with anything? UK government policy is certainly in lock step with the US for the most part, but UK public opinion, isn't. As you yourself effectively point out, this is even more the case in the rest of Europe -- strengthening my point.
I see very little evidence to support the idea that European attitudes are openly hostile to Americans.
OK, if we're going to use anecdotal evidence, I live in the EU (the UK), and I can tell you first hand that plenty of people are hostile to American policies in various areas (though not usually to Americans personally). By the way, small self-selecting samples tend to be more biased than polls, so don't try to pull that trick.
There is no meaningful opposition to the US raised by anyone in a position to do so, period.
Woah, talk about changing the question. Originally you said "I'm not going to be convinced that the 'rest of the world' is anything other than adamantly in support of the US, US citizens, and US policies."
Now you're saying that there's no meaningful opposition raised by anyone in a position to do so! Well, I agree with that (and it's mostly because no-one is in a position to do so, not because no-one wants to) but you'll appreciate that it's not the original point that I was arguing against. In fact, there has been a lot of opposition by people who aren't really in a position to oppose the US in terms of power. For example, the US never got UN support for the Iraq war because of overwhelming international opposition (contrast that with the "adamant support" you're dreaming of).
The idea that "'rest of the world' is...adamantly in support of the US, US citizens, and US policies." is quite clearly ludicrous, as I keep pointing out. Your original 4-point list which was supposed to support this argument missed the point on a fairly grand scale, as I also pointed out.
Do you have your eyes and ears sealed shut? Read the news, look at polls. It's not universally unpopular, but there's a lot of resentment towards America out there. Are you seriously denying this?
Indeed, it does.
By your standards then, virtually every country in the world is adamantly in support of every other country, its citizens and it policies. How silly. Your list 1-4 is just the norm for international relations. It doesn't indicate any meaningful degree of "support".
Again, the levels of idiocy here are quite incredible. Across whole swathes of the Earth, America is very unpopular with people (we know this through polls, etc.) Of course governments do not usually show outright hostility to the US, because the US is the world superpower. Take a look at the countries which have shown open hostility recently and look what's happened to them. There are very few countries which don't meet points 1-4 with regard to China. Does that mean that the rest of the world is "adamantly in support of China, Chinese citizens, and Chinese policies?"
Get a grip!
Slashdot Mirror
Over the large span of human evolution, characteristics such as physical strength, size, agression and so forth had much more to do with the ability of an individual to procreate, as opposed to the ability to smooth-talk a member of the opposite sex.
What makes you think that this is true? It takes a lot more than brute strength to be a successful hunter-gatherer. You need a lot of knowledge of seasonal patterns, wildlife, etc. If you look at the fiew hunter-gatherer tribes still around today, you'll see that they tend to be of average build and slightly chubby. In all probability, prehistoric women (and men) were just as succeptible to smooth-talking as we are today, because intelligence is a desireable attribute. I don't see any reason to suppose that placing a value on intelligence and social skills is just a modern convention.
The way I've looked at memory is that the brain is currently "activating" the pathway associated with some subject, and all memories which concern the subject are linked with some strength to that pathway - memories which concern the subject but are not linked with that pathway are considered forgotten. I suppose you could say the subset that you use to make a decision are those which have the strongest association with the pathway - but who knows?
Well, I'm not really very sympathetic to that sort of associationistic/connectionist model of the mind. In this particular case I don't think that would work as a heuristic. It's unlikely that you have any strong associations between, say, tigers and trees in your mind, but climbing a tree might be a good idea if there's a tiger nearby (ok, ok, assume tigers can't climb trees ;)) I think that the ability to have those sorts of ideas (i.e. "i'd better climb a tree because there's a tiger nearby" etc.) is pretty incredible, and we really can't explain it right now.
Before modding this guy interesting, you might like to consider the fact that the article he links to is full of unjustified assertions, pop pseudo-pyschology and other varieties of what might kindly be termed "crap". For example, take this rather incredible statement, presented as an obvious truth:
When your senses detect a set of stimuli, your brain assembles all the information it has about the source of those stimuli and how to deal with them.
This raises all sorts of difficult issues which the author ignores completely. For example, is it really plausible that the brain assembles all the information relevant to the stimulus and how you might deal with it? That is probably an infinite amount of information. In any given situation, anything whatsoever that you know is potentially useful information. The trick is (we really have no idea how the mind does this) to filter out a tiny fraction of your knowledge using a reasonably fast heurisitic, so that you have a manageable subset of your knowledge to process in any given situation.
Einstein and Churchill had editors, you twit.
But Perl has all the features you mention (yes, including blocks).
Oops, Ruby isn't actually bytecode interpreted is it...
Variable declarations are silly? Two extra letters per local variable, and you don't have to worry about naming local variables with care, defining methods for ensured isolation, etc. etc. [*] Although in a sense the default in Ruby is for variables to be local, you have know way of knowing -- without looking at variables in all encolising scopes -- of whether you're defining a new local variable or altering an existing one. For sure, this isn't a big problem with Ruby, but then the problems people cite with Perl aren't big problems either. So the syntax is a bit obscure in some cases...big deal. Perl/Python/Ruby are virtually identical in terms of concerete language features. Before someone says "blocks", blocks are just a special syntax for passing anonymous closures to functions, and Perl actually has a special syntax for this just like Ruby! Ruby's OO features are cool, but most of them are also available in Perl because Perl has a very open-ended object system -- if you want mixins, you can easily write your own implementation. And Perl has multiple inheritance anyway, so you don't really need them. Introspection is easier in Python and Ruby than in Perl, but most of the stuff you'd use it for (i.e. serialization) has already been packaged into Perl libraries on CPAN. I guess with your Perl experience you know all of this already. I actually came to Perl after Python and Ruby (the documentation really sucks for mod_ruby and for just about every other Ruby library/module; mod_perl was a welcome change.)
Python and Ruby are nicer than Perl, for sure, but they don't really win in terms of concrete features. They lose in terms of speed and available libraries, so I use Perl. I'd happily use Python or Ruby instead of Perl if I had to, but I just don't see what the hype is with Ruby/Python. They are all bytecode intepreted imperative OO scripting languages with some functional programming features. End of story.
[*] Except insofar as doing these things is a good idea anyway.
Bit of a false dichtomy there -- you could use a language that wasn't Ruby and still avoid looking at fugly code.
LOL, "the museum". Seriously though, there are McDonalds /everywhere/ in London.
As I said in reply to another post, it's not only that, it's the fact that there's no way of explicitly declaring local variables in Ruby. So if I declare a variable i within some scope, I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm overwriting a variable 'i' in a higher scope, or creating a new variable. In Perl all local variables are declared with 'my', so this problem doesn't arise.
It's not only that, it's the fact that there's no way of explicitly declaring local variables in Ruby. So if I declare a variable i within some scope, I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm overwriting a variable 'i' in a higher scope, or creating a new variable. In Perl all local variables are declared with 'my', so this problem doesn't arise.
Well, if you've never seen a McD's in London you can't have seen much of London.
WTF? First, Ruby's scoping is lexical and static, it's just broken. Second, lexical and static aren't the same thing. Third, there's nothing wrong with lexical scoping in a dynamic language. Most dynamic languages don't have dynamic scoping (Common Lisp and Perl are some exceptions -- dynamic scoping is an optional alternative to lexical scoping in both).
Let me know when Ruby gets lexical scoping which isn't broken.
Well, points 1&2 donn't apply in the UK, and usually not point 5. A google for "mcdonalds charges for ketchup" gives plently of results which appear to suggest that it happens in North America too. Which countries did you go to?
It's ironic that when Americans try to satirise European institutions they are usually more successful in self parody,
Typical for Slashdot to get this wrong. This isn't an EU project. It's a collaboration between the French and German governments (and in fact they are only collaborating to encourage French and German companies to develop a search engine).
References in Perl and PHP disingenuously try to LOOK like C++ references by using the same punctuation characte
I don't know about PHP, but the ampersand character is not used for anything connected to references in Perl. Do you know any Perl?
At least C++ references are well defined in terms of pointers, so there aren't so many horrible edge cases that cause the interpreter to core dum
And there follows a long list of bugs...in PHP! We're talking about Perl here!
References in Perl and PHP are unlike references in any other reasonably designed programming language: they totally suck. They're extremely hard to understand, but sometimes they still crash the interpreter, even if you do understand them perfectly and use them correctly.
No, references in Perl do not crash the interpreter. Though they have a slightly weird syntax for dereferencing, there's nothing fundamentally complicated about them. If you can't grok references in Perl, your programs are going to crash whatever language you write them in.
Kibutz, Spanish revolution, etc.
Let me know when the UK goes out of lock-step with the US.
What's that got to do with anything? UK government policy is certainly in lock step with the US for the most part, but UK public opinion, isn't. As you yourself effectively point out, this is even more the case in the rest of Europe -- strengthening my point.
Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to imply any criticism of Americans or America in general.
I see very little evidence to support the idea that European attitudes are openly hostile to Americans.
OK, if we're going to use anecdotal evidence, I live in the EU (the UK), and I can tell you first hand that plenty of people are hostile to American policies in various areas (though not usually to Americans personally). By the way, small self-selecting samples tend to be more biased than polls, so don't try to pull that trick.
There is no meaningful opposition to the US raised by anyone in a position to do so, period.
Woah, talk about changing the question. Originally you said "I'm not going to be convinced that the 'rest of the world' is anything other than adamantly in support of the US, US citizens, and US policies."
Now you're saying that there's no meaningful opposition raised by anyone in a position to do so! Well, I agree with that (and it's mostly because no-one is in a position to do so, not because no-one wants to) but you'll appreciate that it's not the original point that I was arguing against. In fact, there has been a lot of opposition by people who aren't really in a position to oppose the US in terms of power. For example, the US never got UN support for the Iraq war because of overwhelming international opposition (contrast that with the "adamant support" you're dreaming of).
The idea that "'rest of the world' is...adamantly in support of the US, US citizens, and US policies." is quite clearly ludicrous, as I keep pointing out. Your original 4-point list which was supposed to support this argument missed the point on a fairly grand scale, as I also pointed out.
I'm not in favour of Monarchies in theory (even powerless ceremonial monarchs), but can you name one European royal who's as bad as Bush?
Evidence of this?
Do you have your eyes and ears sealed shut? Read the news, look at polls. It's not universally unpopular, but there's a lot of resentment towards America out there. Are you seriously denying this?
Indeed, it does.
By your standards then, virtually every country in the world is adamantly in support of every other country, its citizens and it policies. How silly. Your list 1-4 is just the norm for international relations. It doesn't indicate any meaningful degree of "support".
Again, the levels of idiocy here are quite incredible. Across whole swathes of the Earth, America is very unpopular with people (we know this through polls, etc.) Of course governments do not usually show outright hostility to the US, because the US is the world superpower. Take a look at the countries which have shown open hostility recently and look what's happened to them. There are very few countries which don't meet points 1-4 with regard to China. Does that mean that the rest of the world is "adamantly in support of China, Chinese citizens, and Chinese policies?" Get a grip!