I thought you were going somewhere interesting with the complaint that JK says "the 'average' child spends.." rather than "on average, a child spends" or "the average amt. of time a child..." or something along those lines. While in fact JK's usage is entirely standard, this would raise some interesting issues about the interface between mathematical and natural languages.
However, it seems that you are in fact just trying to jump on the the Trash-Jon-Katz bandwagon, a pastime on slashdot second only to First-Posting in poularity and lack of real content.
Your example is incorrect. The average amount of time spent reading SF in your office is in fact (10+10+0*8)/(10) = 2 hrs. The average person in your office is an ill-defined quantity, since 'person' is not a numeric random variable, but if you accept the standard usage, the above would be the correct answer for how much SF they read. I think what you mean to say is that the MEDIAN amount of time spent watching TV, or better yet, the MODE, is 0. That would be correct.
Your example is a good illustration of some basic statistical ideas, but not of JKs misuse thereof. In fact, he says in the line right after the one you object to that "some kids play less, some more" so I really don't understand your objection at all. But if you're going to split hairs over his use of statistical quantities, check yourself first.
Technology is a tool. Nobody worshiped looms or mills or iron horses, did they?
Are you kidding me? Erm...where to start. You may have heard of the Harvest Gods and rituals of ancients, clearly based on the basis of their civilization in Agricultual Technology. The Romans had their Cavalry religions, much early metallurgy was a mix of ritual and science; think of all the blood sacrafices on the prows of ships throughout the ages...etc etc. I would argue that humans have *always* worshipped out technology.
It is interesting though, now that you mention it, that we also usually like to take credit for our tools, as such a huge part of what makes us humans. Hmm.
maybe you would be so kind as to define, what is predictable, and what is deterministic
I don't really get your point, but sure:
deterministic: the state of the system at any instant *entirely* determines the state at the next instant, with no variation whatsoever. It's a little trickier for continuous time of course, but if you understand the distinction you probably can see how it generalizes, and if not, not.
predictable: This one is a bit more vague, getting used in different ways. Strictly, it should maybe be synonymous with the above, but that's not really the general usage. I guess the best I could do is that, at any given instant, you can decribe the probability distribution over later states, preferably with fairly low variance, though that will probably increase with time.
Humans are *not* machines! That implies a certain cause-and-effect type of reasoning
Hardly. Machines are unpredictable and non-deterministic, just like organisms. Else why the error-correction in the computer you're using now? Sure, there's differences in degree and type, but unless you're going to make an Essentialist argument, you can hardly deny that on some very low level, you are a machine. A very, very complex one, possibly one that no human artifact could ever simulate or equal, but a machine nonetheless. Learn how your cellular processes work if you don't believe me - beautiful, elegant, baroque machinery. Perhaps we have different definitions of what machines are, but unless you just mean "something amde by humans" I bet I can argue that humans fit any of your definitions.
Explain what is music and what is not?
Well, if you can't explain it -- why do you like it??
Oh come now. That's cheating. I also really can't explain what 'three' or 'red' are, in a truly absolute way. It nether means they don't exist, nor that the concepts aren't useful to me. And if you want to allow looser definitions, then sure I can define music: sound arranged by humans, in a way some of them find pleasing.
Furthermore, I resent your implication that I have to be able to explain something something in order to be able to enjoy it!
Nice to see AI moving away from the old days when folks thought they would someday sit down and write a program that was 'concious'. I'm still nto sure exactly what that word means really, but I'm pretty sure nothing straight outta GCC will ever be it.
Not sure what the OpenMinds guys are going to do with all the natural language input. Just processing that is an OpenProblem, let alone learning 'Common Sense' therefrom, unless it just memorizes the answers, and replies to queries with some textsearch algorithm - hardly what I'd call 'concious' or common sensical.
I like the MindPixel idea of using simple binary info. That seems more usable. I don't know what to think about the validation - I can see arguments either way on that. And I may need to read more, but I found his description of shining lasers through some information space suspiciously vague.
On the whole, I'm not sure I agree that AI should start by trying to build 'Common Sense'. It's true that that plays a big role in human intelligence, but no machine lives the way a human does. It would seem that Intelligence is most likely to develop in a context where it's useful - and I can't see computers getting truly useful information out of facts about the Human Experience. I'd expect to see it (AI) emerge in something like network routing or search engines talking to each other (good self-reference potential there!) or distributed.net type stuff...
Interesting stuff.
Besides the good comments about 'self-' and 'central-' organization lying along orthogonal axes, I would add the following:
There is a strong tendency these days to favor distributed, decentralized control. This is natural and good, as new technology allows new ways of communicating and cooperating. Many projects and communities lend themselves very well to this model, and getting rid of old school central authority is clearly progress. In fact, nature itself seems to favor this approach.
But there are further lessons to be drawn from the natural model: after millenia of trying, one of evolution's highest accomplishments has to be seen as the good ol' Central Nervous System.
So while there are certainly many exciting new possibilites, it seems foolhardy to judge Central Organization and Control entirely obsolete. After all, it has worked fairly well thus far throughout history, and evolution is about one thing only: What Works.
I agree- an interesting ramble by Katz as always.
But I wondered about the survey. Your point about leading questions is good. I also wonder exactly how they got their responses - magazine fill-in-and-send surveys are notorious for getting results mcuh more extereme than reflects the poulation at large.
Why? How many of those have you filled out, ever? Me too...only people who already have strong feelings will take the time...
Regardless of how you feel about DeCSS/etc, it's a very complex and possibly scary thing to say code is "protected in exactly the same way speech is".
For example, that would seem to imply that it is subject to exactly the same copyright restrictions as a book - hence illegal to copy and share with a friend.
We may all agree that "Information Wants to be Free", but what it really means to say that something is "Free" is highly non-trivial, and the subject of millenia-long debates.
One needs to be cautious when equating different forms of Information and/or Freedom. Or maybe one doesn't, but at least consider the quesion...
DNS service has always been a fairly open, cooperative system; one envisions broad swathes of net unwilling to DNS serve strangers, in reaction to a percieved expoit.
Like most good science these days, it's a beautiful idea and praxis - and has implications far beyond the original application...some exciting, glorious...some dark and forboding...
I would post all my special tricks and secret shibboleths on a public server, certain to be parsed at least daily by M$ and Echelon, and try to get everyone else involved in "covert coding" to do the same.
I think a webcam would be good too, though I'd have to wear a mask while I programmed. But this is the proce of being a tough underground developer.
Yes, 'hardware' gene banks exist, where the actual molecules are stored in solution for posterity. This isn't my area, but it looks like some other posts cover this.
Also online are 'software' databases of the actual basepair sequence, mostly searchable via web, Xwindows interfaces, and often downloadable as SQL or other DBs. For instance, GenBank has increasingly complete coverage of organisms ranging from Yeast through Fugu to Yo Mamma. I guess that sounds kinda bad.
Of course, if you're interested in Yo or Any Mamma, or humans in general, you can download the current 'draft freeze' from the public Human Genome Project via UC Santa Cruz.
Remember, when using the new GNU Genome Cross Compiler, to Save Early and Often...
Look, whether you agree with Katz's analysis or not, it's still great to see someone taking RPGs seriously.
I've held onto a hope that they could be a very powerful form of literature for years and years, but it's gets harder and harder. There's so much potential for terrific storytelling and interaction; and it's so rarely achieved. I like hack and slash and level gaining as much as the next life-long geek - but as you get older, and discover more subtle forms of myth and story, it wears thin. It seems to me as though Role Playing could be a lot more than it usually is.
Part of its becoming a fuller, richer form of literature/art has got to be these types of discussions about how it fits into the culture at large. Whether or not you buy the analysis, I think it's terrific to see this type of discussion. This is the kind of thing which might manage to convince those of us struggling to fight the good fight that there's hope, it's not all 12 year olds killing cliche monsters and giggling about NPC barmaids.
The other thing is whether it can ever be a less overwhelmingly male pastime.
Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.
You really think that if the serious shit goes down, some techno-elite is going to be in any better shape than the rest? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to think that too, but Sharper Image fantasyland aside, you really think you have a chance without the rest of society?
Who's going to make your Latte and install your DSL?
I agree that the balance between the individual and the group 'scales' of societal structure is shifting, but I think you can argue it's going the other direction:
The sovereign individual has reached its apogee in western culture, and is (arguably) on the decline in favor of dynamics, structures, and behavior based in the group or cultural entity. Certainly, the old-style nation-state is also fading; the structures I mean are based in cultural and informational substrates, not (traditional) politics or militarism.
This is not a good or bad thing, though I find aspects of it quite frightening and exciting. But I liken these times to a metaphorical moment when single-celled life began to give rise to multi-cellular organisms. One imagines that prokaryotes first discovered the advantages of cooperation and mutual support. Then, after a few (million...) generations, began to notice that they were increasingly less able to function as 'individuals', but had been subsumed into a larger structure, in which each played a needed role, but was unable to exist as a seperate entity. One can abuse the admittedly stretched metaphor further by imagining 'prokaryot rights' groups protesting the invasive behavior of the larger eukaryiotic structures: defending the privacy of individual nuclei, decrying the increasing lack of independance and moral fibre of the younger generations in favor of better assimilation - maybe even attempting to fight the tide with direct (chemical) action (the birth of immune systems - as Cops or Protesters?)...
Consider the increasing acceptance of the loss of individual privacy in deference to 'security' or 'societal cohesion'. Consider the increasing power of cultural phenomenon and movements in political and legal arenas. Time was, we'd look at these and cry 'conspiracy' but that's clearly old-school. I increasingly find that one can explain most conspiracy-like structures more satisfactorily without recourse to some star-chamber of indiviuduals planning the whole thing out.
Rather, I see these phenomenon as emergent behavior not originating in individual preference or schemes at all. Noam Chomsky loves to use NY Times complete avoidance of certain topics as an example of classical consiracy; I love to use the same thing as an example of 'emergent' or 'structural' conspiracy: one can imagine a thousand individual choices, all innocent and minor, based on style/mood/cultural trends/etc, having the same end result without any individual ever deciding to censor news about, say, East Timor. I see many political and societal changes coming about this way, with no individual choice except at a very local, simple level, yet with a higher level impact very reminicent of concious behavior. Increasing technological advance excacerbates this change, and we increasingly resemble the individual components comprising larger organisms, which in turn, depending on your point of view, look like something between: on the positive side, Vernor Vinge's 'Transcendant Powers' or some utopian 'society of mind'; on the negative, Star Treks' 'Borg' or Dr. Who's 'Daleks'...
Not that I neccesarily see things as this extreme, or even buy any of this at all. But I think it's an intersting way to look at things, and I can't resist viewing societal structures as large scale organisms - and this has some odd implications for the concept of 'The Sovereign Individual'....especially when you've had few cups of coffee and don't want to do your PHP coding....
Meanwhile, TeX is the choice of most mathematicians for publishing papers. It's changed very little over recent years, hardly like Word.
Yes. Still the standard, in most research circles. And Tex (LaTeX, etc) has the backwards compatibility most such tools only dream of. While the language and tools have grown over the years, they always grow 'outward', continuing to deal perfectly with existing documents - useful for those of us needing to print out decades-old preprints!
Yay!
I didn't think anyone with a keyboard cared about such things. Angryflower seems to have forgotten one of my favorite peeves:
you SHOULD add an apostrophe (only) when making a possesive out of a word ending in "s":
"The cats' bags were out on the town..."
I see this a lot, in places like the NY Times. I place the blame on spell checkers. We've become a lazy point-click-forget race of lazy proofreaders. And curmudgeons, too!
I really don't care what people like to code in, it's a very personal choice and I enjoy the existence of lots of competing languages. By all means, if you like Python, excelsior. I've always avoided the Language Wars.
But Crucini touches on a point near and dear to my heart: the intimate relationship between Regular Expressions and PERL. Sure, other languages support REGEX matching. Maybe even faster, who cares (oh god, don't start). But no other language I've used includes REGEX matching in the very structure of the language.
Sure, I can write PHP or Python code to find and process all the URLs in a page. Of course. But (I think) only Perl let's me write an actual WHILE loop iterating over them. IE, in most languages, I write a standard control loop which grabs each (say) line in a file. I take that line, call a REGEX function on it; if I find a URL, I do something, then move on to the next. In, I can literally say: "for each thing that looks like http://(whatever), do with it."
...of course, the result is the same. But there's something very elegant (to me, or course) about being able to iterate over PATTERNS, not line numbers or file pointers. It's COOL, damnit!
Purely a subjective preference, I know Python and PHP do a lot of things very nicely too. Enough disclaimers?
All life on, in, and around Earth is based on "combinations of preprogrammed parts" - only 24 of them in fact (I choose the Amino Acid scale for several reasons). In that sense, there is nothing new under the sun, and no truly 'new' life on Earth has developed since a lightening bolt put a little extra zing in that first order of Primoridial Soup (or the comet hit, whatever - choose your ontology).
Nevertheless, this is an academic point, and anyone who considers it meaningful needs to spend a LOT more time outside, looking at all the bizzare variations on a theme Mama Nature has cooked up.
So the difference seems to have something to do with scale, and how 'structure' and 'complexity' can emerge on higher scales out of pieces and processes on lower scales.
If you load a 'simulated evolution process' with a bunch of 'high-scale' adaptations (the equivalent of hands, wings, nervous systems, etc), let it run, and surprise surprise: get something that looks like what we in fact observe at that scale, you're wanking, scientifically speaking.
But if you start your system with a pile of much lower level building blocks, and find high level structure developing, then it DOESN'T MATTER that you started it with something, it's created emergent structure on a higher scale than it was started with, and THAT'S exciting.
My personal metaphor is the difference between rearranging action figures, and building new toys out of legos.
Re:People are bad, mmkay?
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Tasmanian Tiger... will now also be part of human extended phenotype
heh heh...someone, Goethe maybe (?) has this idea that humanity kindof 'absorbs' the 'soul' or 'essence' of each species it makes extinct. I always though this was mushy silliness, but now I'm starting to wonder...
...of course, even if true, is it neccesarily a Good Thing? It surely doesn't justify or excuse the extinction. But it's tempting to see it that way...
Re:Is this the right thing to do?
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you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics
I'm as big a fan of metaphorically extending scientific principles over hill and under dale as the next geek, but I think you've misapplied this one. Actually, I just disagree with your conclusions, thus disapprove of how you got there:)
Firstly, statistical mechanics applies to a much smaller scale than societal decision making, and hence can be applied to questions like this only with great caution; you could argue both sides of most (societal/philosophical) issues using thermo metaphors, since there's so much interpretation involved in 'lifting' statistical mechanics to the level of culture and scientific policy. But many of my favorite thoughts involve entropy and emergent behavior at a societal level, so I can't really hold that against you, only point out the ambiguity.
So how about this:
The laws of thermodynamics aren't 'imposed' on nature, they are a description of what happens; just as evolution isn't a 'force' or even really a 'process' but a description of the effects of countless tiny mutation/selection/differentiation events at a higher scale. So whatever happens obeys the 2nd law, period. You can't use it as a decision criterion.
In summa: if we develop and use the technology to clone the Tasmanian Tiger, then that is a natural part of the time-process of our species. The only 'turning-back of the clock' would be to pretend that we didn't have the technology and desire to do this. Too late now, we've reached a new 'energy' state in our interaction with our environment, and can only hope it's a somewhat stable equilibrium!
um, call me paranoid, but I thought I should clarify that there are many teams within the Genome Project, and I'm only addressing my personal experience with one such.
There is no uniform approach to this throughout the various labs, and even someone in the same group as me might give a completely different report. And it might well be better informed...:) I'm a user, not an admin of our cluster.
Slashdot Mirror
and Ages Come and Go.
The Dragon is Reborn?
I won't really worry until the RIAA starts going after music-sharers with Myrdraal...
..not quite.
I thought you were going somewhere interesting with the complaint that JK says "the 'average' child spends.." rather than "on average, a child spends" or "the average amt. of time a child..." or something along those lines. While in fact JK's usage is entirely standard, this would raise some interesting issues about the interface between mathematical and natural languages.
However, it seems that you are in fact just trying to jump on the the Trash-Jon-Katz bandwagon, a pastime on slashdot second only to First-Posting in poularity and lack of real content.
Your example is incorrect. The average amount of time spent reading SF in your office is in fact (10+10+0*8)/(10) = 2 hrs. The average person in your office is an ill-defined quantity, since 'person' is not a numeric random variable, but if you accept the standard usage, the above would be the correct answer for how much SF they read. I think what you mean to say is that the MEDIAN amount of time spent watching TV, or better yet, the MODE, is 0. That would be correct.
Your example is a good illustration of some basic statistical ideas, but not of JKs misuse thereof. In fact, he says in the line right after the one you object to that "some kids play less, some more" so I really don't understand your objection at all. But if you're going to split hairs over his use of statistical quantities, check yourself first.
It is interesting though, now that you mention it, that we also usually like to take credit for our tools, as such a huge part of what makes us humans. Hmm.
maybe you would be so kind as to define, what is predictable, and what is deterministic
I don't really get your point, but sure:
deterministic: the state of the system at any instant *entirely* determines the state at the next instant, with no variation whatsoever. It's a little trickier for continuous time of course, but if you understand the distinction you probably can see how it generalizes, and if not, not.
predictable: This one is a bit more vague, getting used in different ways. Strictly, it should maybe be synonymous with the above, but that's not really the general usage. I guess the best I could do is that, at any given instant, you can decribe the probability distribution over later states, preferably with fairly low variance, though that will probably increase with time.
Happy?
Humans are *not* machines! That implies a certain cause-and-effect type of reasoning
Hardly. Machines are unpredictable and non-deterministic, just like organisms. Else why the error-correction in the computer you're using now? Sure, there's differences in degree and type, but unless you're going to make an Essentialist argument, you can hardly deny that on some very low level, you are a machine. A very, very complex one, possibly one that no human artifact could ever simulate or equal, but a machine nonetheless. Learn how your cellular processes work if you don't believe me - beautiful, elegant, baroque machinery. Perhaps we have different definitions of what machines are, but unless you just mean "something amde by humans" I bet I can argue that humans fit any of your definitions.
Explain what is music and what is not?
Well, if you can't explain it -- why do you like it??
Oh come now. That's cheating. I also really can't explain what 'three' or 'red' are, in a truly absolute way. It nether means they don't exist, nor that the concepts aren't useful to me. And if you want to allow looser definitions, then sure I can define music: sound arranged by humans, in a way some of them find pleasing.
Furthermore, I resent your implication that I have to be able to explain something something in order to be able to enjoy it!
Cool stuff, I think.
Nice to see AI moving away from the old days when folks thought they would someday sit down and write a program that was 'concious'. I'm still nto sure exactly what that word means really, but I'm pretty sure nothing straight outta GCC will ever be it.
Not sure what the OpenMinds guys are going to do with all the natural language input. Just processing that is an OpenProblem, let alone learning 'Common Sense' therefrom, unless it just memorizes the answers, and replies to queries with some textsearch algorithm - hardly what I'd call 'concious' or common sensical.
I like the MindPixel idea of using simple binary info. That seems more usable. I don't know what to think about the validation - I can see arguments either way on that. And I may need to read more, but I found his description of shining lasers through some information space suspiciously vague.
On the whole, I'm not sure I agree that AI should start by trying to build 'Common Sense'. It's true that that plays a big role in human intelligence, but no machine lives the way a human does. It would seem that Intelligence is most likely to develop in a context where it's useful - and I can't see computers getting truly useful information out of facts about the Human Experience. I'd expect to see it (AI) emerge in something like network routing or search engines talking to each other (good self-reference potential there!) or distributed.net type stuff...
Still, interesting stuff for sure.
Interesting stuff.
Besides the good comments about 'self-' and 'central-' organization lying along orthogonal axes, I would add the following:
There is a strong tendency these days to favor distributed, decentralized control. This is natural and good, as new technology allows new ways of communicating and cooperating. Many projects and communities lend themselves very well to this model, and getting rid of old school central authority is clearly progress. In fact, nature itself seems to favor this approach.
But there are further lessons to be drawn from the natural model: after millenia of trying, one of evolution's highest accomplishments has to be seen as the good ol' Central Nervous System.
So while there are certainly many exciting new possibilites, it seems foolhardy to judge Central Organization and Control entirely obsolete. After all, it has worked fairly well thus far throughout history, and evolution is about one thing only: What Works.
I'd fogotten about than bookmark-javascript stuff, but I'd never thought of this...
I hate to ask, but can it be made to work with IE?
I agree- an interesting ramble by Katz as always.
But I wondered about the survey. Your point about leading questions is good. I also wonder exactly how they got their responses - magazine fill-in-and-send surveys are notorious for getting results mcuh more extereme than reflects the poulation at large.
Why? How many of those have you filled out, ever? Me too...only people who already have strong feelings will take the time...
Check out "How To Lie WIth Statistics".
Regardless of how you feel about DeCSS/etc, it's a very complex and possibly scary thing to say code is "protected in exactly the same way speech is".
For example, that would seem to imply that it is subject to exactly the same copyright restrictions as a book - hence illegal to copy and share with a friend.
We may all agree that "Information Wants to be Free", but what it really means to say that something is "Free" is highly non-trivial, and the subject of millenia-long debates.
One needs to be cautious when equating different forms of Information and/or Freedom. Or maybe one doesn't, but at least consider the quesion...
DNS service has always been a fairly open, cooperative system; one envisions broad swathes of net unwilling to DNS serve strangers, in reaction to a percieved expoit.
Like most good science these days, it's a beautiful idea and praxis - and has implications far beyond the original application...some exciting, glorious...some dark and forboding...
heh. heh.
Ah yes:
US, Europe, and Japan...
all famed for their efficient, cost-effective bureaucracies...
much better.
I would post all my special tricks and secret shibboleths on a public server, certain to be parsed at least daily by M$ and Echelon, and try to get everyone else involved in "covert coding" to do the same.
I think a webcam would be good too, though I'd have to wear a mask while I programmed. But this is the proce of being a tough underground developer.
There's an intersting ambiguity in your question.
Yes, 'hardware' gene banks exist, where the actual molecules are stored in solution for posterity. This isn't my area, but it looks like some other posts cover this.
Also online are 'software' databases of the actual basepair sequence, mostly searchable via web, Xwindows interfaces, and often downloadable as SQL or other DBs. For instance, GenBank has increasingly complete coverage of organisms ranging from Yeast through Fugu to Yo Mamma. I guess that sounds kinda bad.
Of course, if you're interested in Yo or Any Mamma, or humans in general, you can download the current 'draft freeze' from the public Human Genome Project via UC Santa Cruz.
Remember, when using the new GNU Genome Cross Compiler, to Save Early and Often...
Look, whether you agree with Katz's analysis or not, it's still great to see someone taking RPGs seriously.
I've held onto a hope that they could be a very powerful form of literature for years and years, but it's gets harder and harder. There's so much potential for terrific storytelling and interaction; and it's so rarely achieved. I like hack and slash and level gaining as much as the next life-long geek - but as you get older, and discover more subtle forms of myth and story, it wears thin. It seems to me as though Role Playing could be a lot more than it usually is.
Part of its becoming a fuller, richer form of literature/art has got to be these types of discussions about how it fits into the culture at large. Whether or not you buy the analysis, I think it's terrific to see this type of discussion. This is the kind of thing which might manage to convince those of us struggling to fight the good fight that there's hope, it's not all 12 year olds killing cliche monsters and giggling about NPC barmaids.
The other thing is whether it can ever be a less overwhelmingly male pastime.
Lucky for us geeks, we actually have a chance to win in the upcoming global social catastrophe. Pity about the other poor bastards, though.
You really think that if the serious shit goes down, some techno-elite is going to be in any better shape than the rest? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to think that too, but Sharper Image fantasyland aside, you really think you have a chance without the rest of society?
Who's going to make your Latte and install your DSL?
I agree that the balance between the individual and the group 'scales' of societal structure is shifting, but I think you can argue it's going the other direction:
The sovereign individual has reached its apogee in western culture, and is (arguably) on the decline in favor of dynamics, structures, and behavior based in the group or cultural entity. Certainly, the old-style nation-state is also fading; the structures I mean are based in cultural and informational substrates, not (traditional) politics or militarism.
This is not a good or bad thing, though I find aspects of it quite frightening and exciting. But I liken these times to a metaphorical moment when single-celled life began to give rise to multi-cellular organisms. One imagines that prokaryotes first discovered the advantages of cooperation and mutual support. Then, after a few (million...) generations, began to notice that they were increasingly less able to function as 'individuals', but had been subsumed into a larger structure, in which each played a needed role, but was unable to exist as a seperate entity. One can abuse the admittedly stretched metaphor further by imagining 'prokaryot rights' groups protesting the invasive behavior of the larger eukaryiotic structures: defending the privacy of individual nuclei, decrying the increasing lack of independance and moral fibre of the younger generations in favor of better assimilation - maybe even attempting to fight the tide with direct (chemical) action (the birth of immune systems - as Cops or Protesters?)...
Consider the increasing acceptance of the loss of individual privacy in deference to 'security' or 'societal cohesion'. Consider the increasing power of cultural phenomenon and movements in political and legal arenas. Time was, we'd look at these and cry 'conspiracy' but that's clearly old-school. I increasingly find that one can explain most conspiracy-like structures more satisfactorily without recourse to some star-chamber of indiviuduals planning the whole thing out.
Rather, I see these phenomenon as emergent behavior not originating in individual preference or schemes at all. Noam Chomsky loves to use NY Times complete avoidance of certain topics as an example of classical consiracy; I love to use the same thing as an example of 'emergent' or 'structural' conspiracy: one can imagine a thousand individual choices, all innocent and minor, based on style/mood/cultural trends/etc, having the same end result without any individual ever deciding to censor news about, say, East Timor. I see many political and societal changes coming about this way, with no individual choice except at a very local, simple level, yet with a higher level impact very reminicent of concious behavior. Increasing technological advance excacerbates this change, and we increasingly resemble the individual components comprising larger organisms, which in turn, depending on your point of view, look like something between: on the positive side, Vernor Vinge's 'Transcendant Powers' or some utopian 'society of mind'; on the negative, Star Treks' 'Borg' or Dr. Who's 'Daleks'...
Not that I neccesarily see things as this extreme, or even buy any of this at all. But I think it's an intersting way to look at things, and I can't resist viewing societal structures as large scale organisms - and this has some odd implications for the concept of 'The Sovereign Individual'....especially when you've had few cups of coffee and don't want to do your PHP coding....
Meanwhile, TeX is the choice of most mathematicians for publishing papers. It's changed very little over recent years, hardly like Word.
Yes. Still the standard, in most research circles. And Tex (LaTeX, etc) has the backwards compatibility most such tools only dream of. While the language and tools have grown over the years, they always grow 'outward', continuing to deal perfectly with existing documents - useful for those of us needing to print out decades-old preprints!
Long live TeX!
Yay!
I didn't think anyone with a keyboard cared about such things. Angryflower seems to have forgotten one of my favorite peeves:
you SHOULD add an apostrophe (only) when making a possesive out of a word ending in "s":
"The cats' bags were out on the town..."
I see this a lot, in places like the NY Times. I place the blame on spell checkers. We've become a lazy point-click-forget race of lazy proofreaders. And curmudgeons, too!
Come on, we live in the < SELF REFERENCE >Post Modern era, right?
Of course a film about the science fiction fandom phenomenon will score better with science fictions fans than an actual science fiction film!
Smoke and mirrors pointed at mirrors, Itellya...
I really don't care what people like to code in, it's a very personal choice and I enjoy the existence of lots of competing languages. By all means, if you like Python, excelsior. I've always avoided the Language Wars.
But Crucini touches on a point near and dear to my heart: the intimate relationship between Regular Expressions and PERL. Sure, other languages support REGEX matching. Maybe even faster, who cares (oh god, don't start). But no other language I've used includes REGEX matching in the very structure of the language.
Sure, I can write PHP or Python code to find and process all the URLs in a page. Of course. But (I think) only Perl let's me write an actual WHILE loop iterating over them. IE, in most languages, I write a standard control loop which grabs each (say) line in a file. I take that line, call a REGEX function on it; if I find a URL, I do something, then move on to the next. In, I can literally say: "for each thing that looks like http://(whatever), do with it."
...of course, the result is the same. But there's something very elegant (to me, or course) about being able to iterate over PATTERNS, not line numbers or file pointers. It's COOL, damnit!
Purely a subjective preference, I know Python and PHP do a lot of things very nicely too. Enough disclaimers?
Interesting points on both sides:
All life on, in, and around Earth is based on "combinations of preprogrammed parts" - only 24 of them in fact (I choose the Amino Acid scale for several reasons). In that sense, there is nothing new under the sun, and no truly 'new' life on Earth has developed since a lightening bolt put a little extra zing in that first order of Primoridial Soup (or the comet hit, whatever - choose your ontology).
Nevertheless, this is an academic point, and anyone who considers it meaningful needs to spend a LOT more time outside, looking at all the bizzare variations on a theme Mama Nature has cooked up.
So the difference seems to have something to do with scale, and how 'structure' and 'complexity' can emerge on higher scales out of pieces and processes on lower scales.
If you load a 'simulated evolution process' with a bunch of 'high-scale' adaptations (the equivalent of hands, wings, nervous systems, etc), let it run, and surprise surprise: get something that looks like what we in fact observe at that scale, you're wanking, scientifically speaking.
But if you start your system with a pile of much lower level building blocks, and find high level structure developing, then it DOESN'T MATTER that you started it with something, it's created emergent structure on a higher scale than it was started with, and THAT'S exciting.
My personal metaphor is the difference between rearranging action figures, and building new toys out of legos.
Tasmanian Tiger... will now also be part of human extended phenotype
heh heh...someone, Goethe maybe (?) has this idea that humanity kindof 'absorbs' the 'soul' or 'essence' of each species it makes extinct. I always though this was mushy silliness, but now I'm starting to wonder...
...of course, even if true, is it neccesarily a Good Thing? It surely doesn't justify or excuse the extinction. But it's tempting to see it that way...
you can't turn back the clock - a principle made abundently clear by the Second Law of Thermodynamics
:)
I'm as big a fan of metaphorically extending scientific principles over hill and under dale as the next geek, but I think you've misapplied this one. Actually, I just disagree with your conclusions, thus disapprove of how you got there
Firstly, statistical mechanics applies to a much smaller scale than societal decision making, and hence can be applied to questions like this only with great caution; you could argue both sides of most (societal/philosophical) issues using thermo metaphors, since there's so much interpretation involved in 'lifting' statistical mechanics to the level of culture and scientific policy. But many of my favorite thoughts involve entropy and emergent behavior at a societal level, so I can't really hold that against you, only point out the ambiguity.
So how about this:
The laws of thermodynamics aren't 'imposed' on nature, they are a description of what happens; just as evolution isn't a 'force' or even really a 'process' but a description of the effects of countless tiny mutation/selection/differentiation events at a higher scale. So whatever happens obeys the 2nd law, period. You can't use it as a decision criterion.
In summa: if we develop and use the technology to clone the Tasmanian Tiger, then that is a natural part of the time-process of our species. The only 'turning-back of the clock' would be to pretend that we didn't have the technology and desire to do this. Too late now, we've reached a new 'energy' state in our interaction with our environment, and can only hope it's a somewhat stable equilibrium!
um, call me paranoid, but I thought I should clarify that there are many teams within the Genome Project, and I'm only addressing my personal experience with one such.
There is no uniform approach to this throughout the various labs, and even someone in the same group as me might give a completely different report. And it might well be better informed...:) I'm a user, not an admin of our cluster.