Re:Against a Dark Background
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Having, coincidentally, finished reading Against A Dark Background for the first time today I am also fairly unimpressed with the lazy gun. It didn't actually feature in the story except for being The Thing We Have To Find, and I think it only killed one person, accidentally, when it was being fired at random at the end of the book.
In short, it weighs three times as much when you turn it upside down and will destroy whatever you aim it at in a slapstick manner. Unless the target is something big, which will probably just explode. That's all. It's a pretty throw-away idea, and I get the feeling Banks wanted to do something with it but didn't get around to actually writing anything by the time the book was finished.
I quite enjoyed the book, but I think it should have been half as long and had a proper ending instead of almost everyone dieing. I've been working my way through the Iain M Banks books in vaguely chronological order, and some of the ideas are great and worth reading the books for on their own but there are also some silly and indulgent ones like the lazy gun (and the solipsists, in the same book) that should have been cut, or spun off into a different series or short stories.
I don't follow your reasoning. Surely any heuristic for checking light values on a pixel will have to generate an approximation to check against. Fixing the image (relative to the checking heuristic at least) would just be a matter of setting the value in the image instead of checking it - so the complexity of checking and fixing images would always be equal if you know the checking algorithm.
Not sure what you mean about heuristics not being guaranteed to finish. A heuristic is just a quick-and-dirty approximation algorithm, many are written so that you can keep throwing processor cycles at them to get a progressively better answer, but if you expect to get the Right Answer it's not a heuristic any more.
I sense a scandal brewing on just how much VB he knows...
"But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not code binary relations with that language, Visual Basic. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false."
You seem to be talking about the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's an interesting topic and worth knowing about, but it's very hard to determine whether any real world situation is an example of the prisoners dilemma, or even precisely what the payoffs are for any action.
I think Gandhi had something to say about the 'Tit for Tat' strategy too...
I am not a physicist (which I think I'm about to make painfully obvious...), but I do follow popular science. Time dilation has always made me think that in the future all the rich people will live close to the speed of light, orbiting a black hole or somesuch. They will leave the rest of the universe to get on with discovering things, generating cultural works and making stuff for them, and they can collect their profit by the century for every one of their subjective days.
Assuming I don't have my physics completely wrong, does anyone know of any science fiction which deals with this kind of thing?
I respect your position and mostly agree with you, but there comes a point where differences in belief result in differences in action and morality. Precisely when this becomes a problem will differ from person to person. I couldn't have a relationship with someone who, for instance, for religious reasons or otherwise, thought that homosexuality was a choice and a sin. I could overlook such a belief in a casual association, and even enjoy their company most of the time but there is no way I could have a relationship with them, or put them in a position to instil the same beliefs in my children.
As for astrology specifically, I would definitely avoid anyone who made financial, career, or relationship decisions based on it. That level of belief in something which is scientifically unsupported and more importantly unpredictive speaks poorly of their reasoning ability, and again I would not like such a person to influence my children's beliefs.
In support of your statement, after reading the headline I thought "well, I wouldn't stop being friends with someone because they believe in astrology, so I guess I would date them". Then I thought about it some more and realised that I couldn't marry someone who believed in astrology, and there's no way in hell I'd let them raise my children. I can put up with a lot of quirks in my associates, but theres a difference between tolerance and making something part of your life.
You have a strange, and rather insulting, definition of 'atheism' which implies that atheism is just another religion. The common thread of religious beliefs is that there is some agency with intent and purpose (whatever it may be) that is responsible for the form and operation of our universe. Mainstream formulations of modern atheism deny this intent or purpose as superfluous and not supported by evidence, regardless of what name it is given - that is a very different position from simply believing in a different god.
If you're using a definition of 'god' which does not include any intent or purpose, I would contest that you're just playing games with labels.
I would normally just let your comment pass, but somebody has modded you 'Insightful' for some reason. And yes, I am replying instead of modding you down.
In high school I was specifically taught that mean, median and mode are the three types of average. Of course casual use generally equates 'average' with 'mean'. Take from that what you will.
We now have an improved Quicksort that is only marginally larger in code size, but runs consistently faster on datasets that are appropriate for Quicksort in the first place.
Can you give me a link to that? I don't keep up with the literature but I'd love to read more, and Google isn't being helpful.
Also, if you look at countries that actually use hand counting, 'time consuming' usually means the results aren't final until about midnight on polling day. That's long enough for a drinking game, but not long enough for the game to land you in hospital.
Nonsense. It's part of a perfectly natural cycle the planet goes through and if you stop driving your SUV you might even make the planet COLDER than it should be. There is no global warming problem;)
I've never actually seen anything evolve. And even if I did, that still wouldn't demonstrate that evolution is the origin of life. That's why it's a theory, because we can only infer, we can't demonstrate, and unfortunately no one actually witnessed it.
I see the discussion is doing quite well without me, but there are a couple of points most people don't raise that I feel are very important.
Firstly, you may not have 'seen evolution', but it goes on all around and you definitely encounter the products of it every day. Selective breeding is evolution in action, but it is evolution by artificial selection instead of evolution by natural selection. If you're being reasonable I'm sure you will accept that new plant and animal varieties are developed by breeders. This might seem like a trivial point, but to deny evolution is to deny that selective breeding works so it is very important.
I would also like to note that if somebody has been telling you that evolution has never been observed, they are either shamefully misinformed or deliberately lying to you. These are people I detest; they are enemies of knowledge. Whether you believe in evolution or not should be your decision based on evidence but such people will deny you the evidence to make your decision. I oppose them in principle, regardless of the discussion at hand.
Secondly, the argument is not about whether evolution occurs (which it unarguably does), the argument is about whether ALL life on earth is descended from a single origin with ALL the variation between life forms attributable to evolution. This is an interesting argument with room for discussion, but few people realise that such a specific claim is the core of the argument - and then they challenge the idea that evolution happens at all, which is a ridiculous position to take.
And as a last point, the theory of the origin of species through evolution by natural selection doesn't say anything about how life started - that's a completely different argument. Evolution can only happen when you start with some life and introduce mutation and selection over generations - it's not about how life starts, it's about how life changes.
I'm happy to go into more detail if you like, but I tend to waffle on and the posts are flying thick and fast already.
Just because an agent isn't forking over money doesn't magically make them not part of the market forces. Also any business in New Orleans that didn't have natural disaster insurance had a bad business model.
I appreciate your point, but the difference with SEO is that rather than merely ripping off a big company you're also peeing in everyone's pool by tainting the search results. This indicates a mindset with little regard for their peers.
This is tangentially related to my current hypothesis that the health of a society can be measured by how strangers are treated.
Boy, you sure got some funny ideas about economics. This is like saying that buying a Macintosh computer will make the Microsoft Windows OS more profitable. Uhhh....wtf???
Your idea only works in a world with more demand than supply.
Normally I would concede the point with good grace, but you seem to be looking for some kind of 'win' here and I'm bored enough to keep arguing over details. As you correctly identified, my analogy would only work where supply was limited, which is a poor fit for farming metaphors and a fairly poor fit for the diamond market, but not totally inappropriate. Also, if only 1000 personal computers were produced per year, buying a Mac would increase demand for the remaining Macs and also Windows PCs. I'm sure you understand my point even though you try to ridicule it.
The diamond market is WELL known for having much more supply than demand - that's why DeBeers is stockpiling massive quantities of diamonds - if they released them all onto the market, it would drastically lower the price.
You make my point for me. DeBeers has a stockpile of diamonds, but they are not available to the market because DeBeers is artificially inducing scarcity. If we use DeBeers as a stand-in for all the unethical diamond producers (I understand that DeBeers doesn't buy conflict diamonds, but they have been criticised for exploiting workers in unhealthy conditions)
I don't know the fine details of the diamond market, but I assume that non-DeBeers diamond suppliers don't maintain stockpiles in the same way that DeBeers does for market manipulation. I could be wrong, but this is an assumption I am arguing from.
Assume that the same price is paid for all diamonds, but that price is based on supply and demand - for simplicity.
Assume that there are 10 diamonds available in the market. 6 are Evil DeBeers diamonds, 4 are Good Canadian or whatever diamonds. EthicalBuyer wants to either buy a Good Diamond or nothing and a group of unethical buyers will buy the rest regardless, although the supply/demand curve will shift accordingly.
If EthicalBuyer does not buy a diamond, DeBeers receives 6/10 of the top 10 bids on diamonds.
If EthicalBuyer buys a Good Diamond, DeBeers chooses to receive:
1. 6/9 of the top 9 bids on diamonds, bidder 10 does not get a diamond because DeBeers has chosen not to release more diamonds to market. Supply is reduced but demand for diamonds remains the same so the price increases.
2. 7/10 of the top 10 bids on diamonds as they release one more diamond to market to replace the Good Diamond EthicalBuyer bought, maintaining the supply/demand curve but getting a bigger slice of available demand relative to the Good Diamond suppliers.
DeBeers can chose whichever option is more profitable for them, but either they sell fewer units for a greater price per unit or more units at the original price per unit - both favourable outcomes for DeBeers.
Now to try and get back somewhere near the original point. The conclusion I come to is that by buying a Good Diamond you are indirectly supporting Evil Diamonds too, and buying Good Diamonds is less ethical than avoiding the market altogether. This is due to unethical buyers who will happily consume Good or Evil diamonds interchangeably. Despite my crappy analogy I belive that is the situation.
1) If they weren't killing eachother over diamonds, they'd be killing eachother over something else. 2) If diamonds were to lose all value tomorrow, something else would replace them. You'd just end up with "blood rubies" or "blood gold". Or "no blood for oil".
That's rather a dim view to take of human nature. And I hope you would admit that diamonds are the commodity of choice because they are convenient and profitable, and forcing a change in the commodity of conflict would reduce the efficiency of the economics of said conflict - a step in the right direction even if not
Well that's a good point actually. I was thinking of a system where supply was constant and production cost was the only variable, but I agree that such a situation doesn't properly describe food or diamonds. So much for analogies.
Way to mess up the analogy. The suffering isn't of the pitiful wretches who can't afford diamonds just because Rich Bastard buys them all, it's the suffering of the diamond miners who are exploited because their nation allows it and it is profitable for the mine owners.
The correct food analogy is a market where food is grown either by freehold farmers or slave labour. Buying slave food obviously makes slavery more profitable so you shouldn't do it. Unfortunately, buying freeman food also makes the slave food more profitable, albeit in a smaller way. Because there are unprincipled buyers who will purchase based on price alone, if you reduce the availability of freeman food by buying some the resulting slight scarcity will raise the price of both freeman and slave food - so you are indirectly contributing to the profits of slave owners and promoting the practice of slavery.
Gee, that doesn't work quite so well as a straw man to knock down. Maybe you should stick with your version.
Slashdot Mirror
Having, coincidentally, finished reading Against A Dark Background for the first time today I am also fairly unimpressed with the lazy gun. It didn't actually feature in the story except for being The Thing We Have To Find, and I think it only killed one person, accidentally, when it was being fired at random at the end of the book.
In short, it weighs three times as much when you turn it upside down and will destroy whatever you aim it at in a slapstick manner. Unless the target is something big, which will probably just explode. That's all. It's a pretty throw-away idea, and I get the feeling Banks wanted to do something with it but didn't get around to actually writing anything by the time the book was finished.
I quite enjoyed the book, but I think it should have been half as long and had a proper ending instead of almost everyone dieing. I've been working my way through the Iain M Banks books in vaguely chronological order, and some of the ideas are great and worth reading the books for on their own but there are also some silly and indulgent ones like the lazy gun (and the solipsists, in the same book) that should have been cut, or spun off into a different series or short stories.
Ah yes, that makes sense. I was thinking of an over-simplified version of the problem. Thanks.
I don't follow your reasoning. Surely any heuristic for checking light values on a pixel will have to generate an approximation to check against. Fixing the image (relative to the checking heuristic at least) would just be a matter of setting the value in the image instead of checking it - so the complexity of checking and fixing images would always be equal if you know the checking algorithm.
Not sure what you mean about heuristics not being guaranteed to finish. A heuristic is just a quick-and-dirty approximation algorithm, many are written so that you can keep throwing processor cycles at them to get a progressively better answer, but if you expect to get the Right Answer it's not a heuristic any more.
You seem to be talking about the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's an interesting topic and worth knowing about, but it's very hard to determine whether any real world situation is an example of the prisoners dilemma, or even precisely what the payoffs are for any action.
I think Gandhi had something to say about the 'Tit for Tat' strategy too...
I am not a physicist (which I think I'm about to make painfully obvious...), but I do follow popular science. Time dilation has always made me think that in the future all the rich people will live close to the speed of light, orbiting a black hole or somesuch. They will leave the rest of the universe to get on with discovering things, generating cultural works and making stuff for them, and they can collect their profit by the century for every one of their subjective days.
Assuming I don't have my physics completely wrong, does anyone know of any science fiction which deals with this kind of thing?
I respect your position and mostly agree with you, but there comes a point where differences in belief result in differences in action and morality. Precisely when this becomes a problem will differ from person to person. I couldn't have a relationship with someone who, for instance, for religious reasons or otherwise, thought that homosexuality was a choice and a sin. I could overlook such a belief in a casual association, and even enjoy their company most of the time but there is no way I could have a relationship with them, or put them in a position to instil the same beliefs in my children.
As for astrology specifically, I would definitely avoid anyone who made financial, career, or relationship decisions based on it. That level of belief in something which is scientifically unsupported and more importantly unpredictive speaks poorly of their reasoning ability, and again I would not like such a person to influence my children's beliefs.
In support of your statement, after reading the headline I thought "well, I wouldn't stop being friends with someone because they believe in astrology, so I guess I would date them". Then I thought about it some more and realised that I couldn't marry someone who believed in astrology, and there's no way in hell I'd let them raise my children. I can put up with a lot of quirks in my associates, but theres a difference between tolerance and making something part of your life.
You have a strange, and rather insulting, definition of 'atheism' which implies that atheism is just another religion. The common thread of religious beliefs is that there is some agency with intent and purpose (whatever it may be) that is responsible for the form and operation of our universe. Mainstream formulations of modern atheism deny this intent or purpose as superfluous and not supported by evidence, regardless of what name it is given - that is a very different position from simply believing in a different god.
If you're using a definition of 'god' which does not include any intent or purpose, I would contest that you're just playing games with labels.
I would normally just let your comment pass, but somebody has modded you 'Insightful' for some reason. And yes, I am replying instead of modding you down.
In high school I was specifically taught that mean, median and mode are the three types of average. Of course casual use generally equates 'average' with 'mean'. Take from that what you will.
We now have an improved Quicksort that is only marginally larger in code size, but runs consistently faster on datasets that are appropriate for Quicksort in the first place.
Can you give me a link to that? I don't keep up with the literature but I'd love to read more, and Google isn't being helpful.
Ah, so you say engineers turn to fundamentalism because they cannot distinguish between literal and metaphorical statements? ;)
they can lack that certain "je ne sais qua"
;)
I don't know what that is
(ps, "quoi", not "qua")
Also, if you look at countries that actually use hand counting, 'time consuming' usually means the results aren't final until about midnight on polling day. That's long enough for a drinking game, but not long enough for the game to land you in hospital.
Ha! So you admit that global warming is not caused by humans!
I like it. I think I shall order my next Ford in this colour.
Nonsense. It's part of a perfectly natural cycle the planet goes through and if you stop driving your SUV you might even make the planet COLDER than it should be. There is no global warming problem ;)
Sorry for being a foreigner (haha, no I'm not), but what is a 'savings card'?
I see the discussion is doing quite well without me, but there are a couple of points most people don't raise that I feel are very important.
Firstly, you may not have 'seen evolution', but it goes on all around and you definitely encounter the products of it every day. Selective breeding is evolution in action, but it is evolution by artificial selection instead of evolution by natural selection. If you're being reasonable I'm sure you will accept that new plant and animal varieties are developed by breeders. This might seem like a trivial point, but to deny evolution is to deny that selective breeding works so it is very important.
I would also like to note that if somebody has been telling you that evolution has never been observed, they are either shamefully misinformed or deliberately lying to you. These are people I detest; they are enemies of knowledge. Whether you believe in evolution or not should be your decision based on evidence but such people will deny you the evidence to make your decision. I oppose them in principle, regardless of the discussion at hand.
Secondly, the argument is not about whether evolution occurs (which it unarguably does), the argument is about whether ALL life on earth is descended from a single origin with ALL the variation between life forms attributable to evolution. This is an interesting argument with room for discussion, but few people realise that such a specific claim is the core of the argument - and then they challenge the idea that evolution happens at all, which is a ridiculous position to take.
And as a last point, the theory of the origin of species through evolution by natural selection doesn't say anything about how life started - that's a completely different argument. Evolution can only happen when you start with some life and introduce mutation and selection over generations - it's not about how life starts, it's about how life changes.
I'm happy to go into more detail if you like, but I tend to waffle on and the posts are flying thick and fast already.
Just because an agent isn't forking over money doesn't magically make them not part of the market forces. Also any business in New Orleans that didn't have natural disaster insurance had a bad business model.
I appreciate your point, but the difference with SEO is that rather than merely ripping off a big company you're also peeing in everyone's pool by tainting the search results. This indicates a mindset with little regard for their peers.
This is tangentially related to my current hypothesis that the health of a society can be measured by how strangers are treated.
Normally I would concede the point with good grace, but you seem to be looking for some kind of 'win' here and I'm bored enough to keep arguing over details. As you correctly identified, my analogy would only work where supply was limited, which is a poor fit for farming metaphors and a fairly poor fit for the diamond market, but not totally inappropriate. Also, if only 1000 personal computers were produced per year, buying a Mac would increase demand for the remaining Macs and also Windows PCs. I'm sure you understand my point even though you try to ridicule it.
You make my point for me. DeBeers has a stockpile of diamonds, but they are not available to the market because DeBeers is artificially inducing scarcity. If we use DeBeers as a stand-in for all the unethical diamond producers (I understand that DeBeers doesn't buy conflict diamonds, but they have been criticised for exploiting workers in unhealthy conditions)
I don't know the fine details of the diamond market, but I assume that non-DeBeers diamond suppliers don't maintain stockpiles in the same way that DeBeers does for market manipulation. I could be wrong, but this is an assumption I am arguing from.
Assume that the same price is paid for all diamonds, but that price is based on supply and demand - for simplicity.
Assume that there are 10 diamonds available in the market. 6 are Evil DeBeers diamonds, 4 are Good Canadian or whatever diamonds. EthicalBuyer wants to either buy a Good Diamond or nothing and a group of unethical buyers will buy the rest regardless, although the supply/demand curve will shift accordingly.
If EthicalBuyer does not buy a diamond, DeBeers receives 6/10 of the top 10 bids on diamonds.
If EthicalBuyer buys a Good Diamond, DeBeers chooses to receive:
1. 6/9 of the top 9 bids on diamonds, bidder 10 does not get a diamond because DeBeers has chosen not to release more diamonds to market. Supply is reduced but demand for diamonds remains the same so the price increases.
2. 7/10 of the top 10 bids on diamonds as they release one more diamond to market to replace the Good Diamond EthicalBuyer bought, maintaining the supply/demand curve but getting a bigger slice of available demand relative to the Good Diamond suppliers.
DeBeers can chose whichever option is more profitable for them, but either they sell fewer units for a greater price per unit or more units at the original price per unit - both favourable outcomes for DeBeers.
Now to try and get back somewhere near the original point. The conclusion I come to is that by buying a Good Diamond you are indirectly supporting Evil Diamonds too, and buying Good Diamonds is less ethical than avoiding the market altogether. This is due to unethical buyers who will happily consume Good or Evil diamonds interchangeably. Despite my crappy analogy I belive that is the situation.
That's rather a dim view to take of human nature. And I hope you would admit that diamonds are the commodity of choice because they are convenient and profitable, and forcing a change in the commodity of conflict would reduce the efficiency of the economics of said conflict - a step in the right direction even if not
Well that's a good point actually. I was thinking of a system where supply was constant and production cost was the only variable, but I agree that such a situation doesn't properly describe food or diamonds. So much for analogies.
"You sever the Bacon Elemental. You get 2 Bacon Elemental Bits"
Way to mess up the analogy. The suffering isn't of the pitiful wretches who can't afford diamonds just because Rich Bastard buys them all, it's the suffering of the diamond miners who are exploited because their nation allows it and it is profitable for the mine owners.
The correct food analogy is a market where food is grown either by freehold farmers or slave labour. Buying slave food obviously makes slavery more profitable so you shouldn't do it. Unfortunately, buying freeman food also makes the slave food more profitable, albeit in a smaller way. Because there are unprincipled buyers who will purchase based on price alone, if you reduce the availability of freeman food by buying some the resulting slight scarcity will raise the price of both freeman and slave food - so you are indirectly contributing to the profits of slave owners and promoting the practice of slavery.
Gee, that doesn't work quite so well as a straw man to knock down. Maybe you should stick with your version.