Will there ever be another Einstein? YES, IMHO. Provided we have the same ENVIRONMENT, ECONOMIC and SOCIAL conditions. They seed and stimulate the right individual.
I know you mean to imply that better funding for social programs is a good thing, but the environment that created Einstein was the poverty of post WWI Germany and the hatred and violence of the Holocaust.
I get awfully sick of people who are always overselling their pet causes. Just maybe even your most virtuous laundry list of social programs has little to do with the creation of genius, whatever other good they do.
I once had, or perhaps still have, a couple of physics books which posit that the effect that electromagnets have on each other can be formulated entirely from analyzing the statics attraction and repulsion of charged particles with special relativity.
The idea is that electrons move with relativistic speeds and thus if you have two wires running parallel, due to the space time effects, from the point of view of the moving electrons, the stationary positively charged nuclei will seem closer together and the moving electrons, further apart, thus creating a net positive charge for them to be attracted to.
From the point of view of the nuclei the situation is reversed, creating a net negative charge for them to be attracted to.
But when you consider that electromagnets also interact with spinning electrons you get a weird image where spin has to be a macroscopic field where the whole thing tilts in space-time together - the result just doesn't make sense from the point of view of single atoms or electrons.
I pointed this out to a scientist who told me that those physics books must just be wrong!
Since one of those books was written by a famous physicist, it brings up the question whether physicists tend to be fatally confused by quantum theory.
Or perhaps my scientist friend was wrong, and there's something macroscopic about quantum spin.
I suppose I should mention an actual physics book that claimed that electro magnetism could be explained without reference to spin, entirely through relativistic effects.
I don't remember the paradox that lead to, but I do remember talking to a scientist friend about it and agreeing that the formulation implied really freaky, unconsidered things about spin. He was convince that the formulation must be wrong.
I've read a few books on quantum theory (written by physicists) that were full of mistakes, some of them easy to disprove, such as the complete idiot who wrote an entire book claiming to have resolved the problem of the poping of the quantum wave by positing, not multiple universes (as one side step has it), but simply multiple simultanious states of mind without ever considering that believing that an experiment turned out in a given way will lead to different actions on the part of the person who made the observation (ie what result he will write down in his lab book). The amazing thing in that case was that he ever got such a book printed and sold!
Then there was that ever popular book by Penrose, "The Emperor's new mind" that was full of naive bullshit about the limits of computability that any computer scientist could debunk in a second and even worse philosophy that claimed impossible magical abilities for the human mind that any cognitive scientist could have shot down in a second. His theory, that mind depends on quantum entanglement, remains interesting, but it's 100% unsupported by his stupid book.
I think quantum physics confuses the hell out of even the people who claim to understand it.
When we have hype headlines like this one, it's a sign that Slashdot is really dead.
I'm insulted. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that "recognizing one's image in a mirror" is not the meaning of self awareness, except as a bad pun.
The quality of slashdot articles continues to be shit.
heh, I'm an old timer who would rant that object oriented programming was a damn good idea in smalltalk 80 that got perverted by C++ and turned into a mess.
Of course the fact that I programmed in C++ for 15 years and only learned smalltalk this year makes things a little backwards.
Really, if you tried to learn every unfinished, undocumented, unsupported technology that Microsoft generates in a year, you'd never get anything done and never know anything useful. Because the truth is that Microsoft generates an infinite number of ill concieved technologies per year, and most of them will never be finished and will be abandoned eventually.
it took 4 months at a large corporation. There are too many steps to go into, but it is a stutter step of forms to fill, required estimation of the size of the project, impact analysis (even if you know there is none), approval of the pmo office, more required forms, required kickoff meetings, (actual coding & testing), required weekly status meetings, required regression testing, approval of the database team, coordination with our outside hardware partners. Sarbanes Oxley can be responsible for about 1 month of that - the pmo office can be another month of that.
You know it occured to me the other day that commercial programming practice hasn't caught up with the ease of understanding large systems that smalltalk 80 made possible in, yes 1980. Maybe I should go back to Smalltalk 76 which probably wasn't so different from Smalltalk 80...
So that's TWENTY NINE FUCKING YEARS AGO!!!
Do you think Microsoft will ever catch up with 1976?!
Think it's corporate stupidity? How about the open source community? They're programming in C!
Oh and the FSF is calling a license that allows programmers every right except, say, <i>owning their code so that they can sell it and make a living <b>"freedom".</b></i>
I used to work program from 60 to 100 hours a week for stock options (now usable as toilet paper) and also to get ready for Comdex etc etc.
I started a business that doesn't take so many hours per week so that I have some chance of having a life, interests and friends again.
I'd tell you what I'm doing now, but I don't want any competition. If you're all so bright, maybe you can figure out how to get a job that isn't slavery disguised as a profession.
Most probably the reason that that " females also can carry the variation, [and] it does not appear to affect their IQ" is that females carry two mostly different X chromosomes and therefor have a backup for any defective gene, while men have only one X chromosome plus some dumb little Y chromosome that encodes our dicks and little else.
If they knew what they were talking about they'd ask whether a women with TWO of this gene had a lower IQ just like a man with one.
Probably they do, but also, no doubt, they couldn't find a large enough population of women with two of this gene to know.
The first article had the following challenge: <i>So far, no one has found a road-and wheel combination in which the road has the same shape as the wheel. That's an intriguing challenge for mathematicians.</i>
Uhm, make a tricycle with spherical wheels and make my road the whole earth.
Dude, don't assume that LSD has the same effect on everyone.
There's a sort of Russian Roulette effect.
Some people can take a moderately sized dose with few apparent after effects (probably some change in color perception is unavoidable) - other people find their lives ruined.
I knew one kid in college who was failing engineering - he said that he couldn't think straight after trying LSD once.
Actually LSD isn't the only drug with that sort of Russian Roulette effect - though it probably has it for a larger population than other drugs.
It's clear that schizophrenics and people who are on biochemically the edge of schizophrenia can be badly and permanently hurt by trying even a few doses of many drugs, pot and amphetamines included. Read Mark Vonnogate's book, "The Eden Express" for the experience of someone with that sort of vulnerability.
In any case, what the doctor observed is the most common response. Chronic use of LSD causes some deterioration over time. That one use - bad damage effect isn't the most common effect.
They did a lot of harm in Sask. because they had no idea how much LSD to use and used HUGE doses. One of the doctors, and probably some of the patients became basket cases.
They tested it on drunks, terminally ill people and prisoners.
My mom was a doctor in Sask. She said that in general, LSD seemed to be helpful to some people, at first - then they deteriorated.
Just because a drug hits the same receptor doesn't mean it will have the same effect.
Until they have a test that shows that THC causes cell growth, I will assume that nothing of the sort has been shown.
For instance, think of all of the drugs that bind seratonin receptors... LSD is one of them, but very few seratonin agonists are psychadelic.
For another example a few years back, a drug that was believed to be just another GABA binding tranquilizer was taken off the market for causing memory loss. As far as anyone knew, it should have exactly the same effects as all of the other drugs in that class (valium, xanax etc.) - but actually it had worse side effects.
Hmm, I did make one misstatement.
The solutions I have prove which solutions can't exits, but they don't actually prove that any solution exists.
That is, when you can prove that something is solvable in a game with less restricted rules, then you haven't proved that the original, more restricted game has a cooresponding solution.
But when you prove that a game with less restricted rules is not solvable, then you know for sure that the game with more restricted rules is also not solvable.
It turns out to be the case that there ARE solutions in the restricted game that coorespond to the solutions in the less restricted one, but that may be a coincidence.
Maybe looking into that can be a metapuzzle for someone smarter than me...
My favorite puzzles are what you might call meta-puzzles. That is, sometimes a puzzle will have properties that you can analyze in a non-brute force way.
in a puzzle similar to HI-Q you start off with pieces on all of the "1" square except for one, and then you jump piece over each other, taking the jumped piece and try to end up with a single piece on the board.
Unlike HIQ, this puzzle isn't solvable when you start with the hole in the center of the board.
The first meta puzzle is to prove this.
The second meta-puzzle is to discover a general rule that lets you know what starting holes can lead to a solution, and what squares the final piece can end up on.
There is such a rule, and it doesn't require brute force to find it.
Once you understand the mathematics of this game, it's trivial to prove that the HI-Q board (which looks like this):
is ALWAYS solvable, no matter which piece is the first hole.
I'll give you one hint. The trick is to find a game with rules that are much easier to analyze than "jump over a piece and take it" but where "jump over a piece and take it" is a legal move. If you can prove that there's no solution in this game, then there can't be a solution in the more restricted game.
Another hint that may be more malicious than helpful is to consider an infinite board - if you can simplify that, then understanding a finite board is easier. Of course if you can do that, then you already know most of the answer.
Rather than stop people from being able to edit an article, it would be better to allow the user the option of reading a "stable snapshot" article or to go with the current version in flux.
There's no reason to take the wiki out of the wikipedia just so that people can see the last well liked version of an article.
If you really want creativity, you can have allow a voting system for "best versions" and allow the reader to various versions prefered differing constituencies.
Unless this product is producing chemical bonds OTHER than the water (which I suppose is possible in a flame) or unless it's venting gas without burning it, it's not wasting any energy at all.
Get it straight, this is how physics works, all of the energy expending is creating heat or light, where else is supposedly going??!!! You can't destroy energy therefor there is nothing inefficient about this round-about way of creating heat and light.
So all of the grousing about this being "innefficient" just shows that slashdotters don't know their physics.
Physics is so perfectly zero sum that a spinning top is heavier than a stationary one, because just as the energy stored in the atoms and their bonds has mass, so does the energy of the spinning. And you can calculate it different ways (using the increase in mass from motion in relativity for instance) and you end up with the same number.
Ok, I suppose you could lose a little heat in this contraption if it does some work, pushing open a valve or something, but that work would be unmeasurably small compared with the heat and light.
Slashdot Mirror
Will there ever be another Einstein? YES, IMHO. Provided we have the same ENVIRONMENT, ECONOMIC and SOCIAL conditions. They seed and stimulate the right individual.
I know you mean to imply that better funding for social programs is a good thing, but the environment that created Einstein was the poverty of post WWI Germany and the hatred and violence of the Holocaust.
I get awfully sick of people who are always overselling their pet causes. Just maybe even your most virtuous laundry list of social programs has little to do with the creation of genius, whatever other good they do.
I once had, or perhaps still have, a couple of physics books which posit that the effect that electromagnets have on each other can be formulated entirely from analyzing the statics attraction and repulsion of charged particles with special relativity.
The idea is that electrons move with relativistic speeds and thus if you have two wires running parallel, due to the space time effects, from the point of view of the moving electrons, the stationary positively charged nuclei will seem closer together and the moving electrons, further apart, thus creating a net positive charge for them to be attracted to.
From the point of view of the nuclei the situation is reversed, creating a net negative charge for them to be attracted to.
But when you consider that electromagnets also interact with spinning electrons you get a weird image where spin has to be a macroscopic field where the whole thing tilts in space-time together - the result just doesn't make sense from the point of view of single atoms or electrons.
I pointed this out to a scientist who told me that those physics books must just be wrong!
Since one of those books was written by a famous physicist, it brings up the question whether physicists tend to be fatally confused by quantum theory.
Or perhaps my scientist friend was wrong, and there's something macroscopic about quantum spin.
I suppose I should mention an actual physics book that claimed that electro magnetism could be explained without reference to spin, entirely through relativistic effects.
I don't remember the paradox that lead to, but I do remember talking to a scientist friend about it and agreeing that the formulation implied really freaky, unconsidered things about spin. He was convince that the formulation must be wrong.
I've read a few books on quantum theory (written by physicists) that were full of mistakes, some of them easy to disprove, such as the complete idiot who wrote an entire book claiming to have resolved the problem of the poping of the quantum wave by positing, not multiple universes (as one side step has it), but simply multiple simultanious states of mind without ever considering that believing that an experiment turned out in a given way will lead to different actions on the part of the person who made the observation (ie what result he will write down in his lab book). The amazing thing in that case was that he ever got such a book printed and sold!
Then there was that ever popular book by Penrose, "The Emperor's new mind" that was full of naive bullshit about the limits of computability that any computer scientist could debunk in a second and even worse philosophy that claimed impossible magical abilities for the human mind that any cognitive scientist could have shot down in a second. His theory, that mind depends on quantum entanglement, remains interesting, but it's 100% unsupported by his stupid book.
I think quantum physics confuses the hell out of even the people who claim to understand it.
Why oh why won't Slashdot let me mod down the whole idiotic article!
When we have hype headlines like this one, it's a sign that Slashdot is really dead.
I'm insulted. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that "recognizing one's image in a mirror" is not the meaning of self awareness, except as a bad pun.
The quality of slashdot articles continues to be shit.
heh, I'm an old timer who would rant that object oriented programming was a damn good idea in smalltalk 80 that got perverted by C++ and turned into a mess.
Of course the fact that I programmed in C++ for 15 years and only learned smalltalk this year makes things a little backwards.
Really, if you tried to learn every unfinished, undocumented, unsupported technology that Microsoft generates in a year, you'd never get anything done and never know anything useful. Because the truth is that Microsoft generates an infinite number of ill concieved technologies per year, and most of them will never be finished and will be abandoned eventually.
Pick your battles.
it took 4 months at a large corporation. There are too many steps to go into, but it is a stutter step of forms to fill, required estimation of the size of the project, impact analysis (even if you know there is none), approval of the pmo office, more required forms, required kickoff meetings, (actual coding & testing), required weekly status meetings, required regression testing, approval of the database team, coordination with our outside hardware partners. Sarbanes Oxley can be responsible for about 1 month of that - the pmo office can be another month of that.
The horror. THE HORROR!!!Cynical,why would that be?
You know it occured to me the other day that commercial programming practice hasn't caught up with the ease of understanding large systems that smalltalk 80 made possible in, yes 1980. Maybe I should go back to Smalltalk 76 which probably wasn't so different from Smalltalk 80...
So that's TWENTY NINE FUCKING YEARS AGO!!!
Do you think Microsoft will ever catch up with 1976?!
Think it's corporate stupidity? How about the open source community? They're programming in C!
Oh and the FSF is calling a license that allows programmers every right except, say, <i>owning their code so that they can sell it and make a living <b>"freedom".</b></i>
Oh never mind.
Getting a life is certainly MY plan.
I used to work program from 60 to 100 hours a week for stock options (now usable as toilet paper) and also to get ready for Comdex etc etc.
I started a business that doesn't take so many hours per week so that I have some chance of having a life, interests and friends again.
I'd tell you what I'm doing now, but I don't want any competition. If you're all so bright, maybe you can figure out how to get a job that isn't slavery disguised as a profession.
Most probably the reason that that " females also can carry the variation, [and] it does not appear to affect their IQ" is that females carry two mostly different X chromosomes and therefor have a backup for any defective gene, while men have only one X chromosome plus some dumb little Y chromosome that encodes our dicks and little else.
If they knew what they were talking about they'd ask whether a women with TWO of this gene had a lower IQ just like a man with one.
Probably they do, but also, no doubt, they couldn't find a large enough population of women with two of this gene to know.
The first article had the following challenge:
<i>So far, no one has found a road-and wheel combination in which the road has the same shape as the wheel. That's an intriguing challenge for mathematicians.</i>
Uhm, make a tricycle with spherical wheels and make my road the whole earth.
Can someone explain to me who would trust the security of software written in C?
I'd that by now people would know better than to use C when security matters.
Dude, don't assume that LSD has the same effect on everyone.
There's a sort of Russian Roulette effect.
Some people can take a moderately sized dose with few apparent after effects (probably some change in color perception is unavoidable) - other people find their lives ruined.
I knew one kid in college who was failing engineering - he said that he couldn't think straight after trying LSD once.
Actually LSD isn't the only drug with that sort of Russian Roulette effect - though it probably has it for a larger population than other drugs.
It's clear that schizophrenics and people who are on biochemically the edge of schizophrenia can be badly and permanently hurt by trying even a few doses of many drugs, pot and amphetamines included. Read Mark Vonnogate's book, "The Eden Express" for the experience of someone with that sort of vulnerability.
In any case, what the doctor observed is the most common response. Chronic use of LSD causes some deterioration over time. That one use - bad damage effect isn't the most common effect.
They did a lot of harm in Sask. because they had no idea how much LSD to use and used HUGE doses. One of the doctors, and probably some of the patients became basket cases. They tested it on drunks, terminally ill people and prisoners. My mom was a doctor in Sask. She said that in general, LSD seemed to be helpful to some people, at first - then they deteriorated.
why not just remove the battery? Because that suggestion would actually work?
Just because a drug hits the same receptor doesn't mean it will have the same effect.
Until they have a test that shows that THC causes cell growth, I will assume that nothing of the sort has been shown.
For instance, think of all of the drugs that bind seratonin receptors... LSD is one of them, but very few seratonin agonists are psychadelic.
For another example a few years back, a drug that was believed to be just another GABA binding tranquilizer was taken off the market for causing memory loss. As far as anyone knew, it should have exactly the same effects as all of the other drugs in that class (valium, xanax etc.) - but actually it had worse side effects.
Hmm, I did make one misstatement. The solutions I have prove which solutions can't exits, but they don't actually prove that any solution exists. That is, when you can prove that something is solvable in a game with less restricted rules, then you haven't proved that the original, more restricted game has a cooresponding solution. But when you prove that a game with less restricted rules is not solvable, then you know for sure that the game with more restricted rules is also not solvable. It turns out to be the case that there ARE solutions in the restricted game that coorespond to the solutions in the less restricted one, but that may be a coincidence. Maybe looking into that can be a metapuzzle for someone smarter than me...
My favorite puzzles are what you might call meta-puzzles. That is, sometimes a puzzle will have properties that you can analyze in a non-brute force way.
For instance, consider a board with the following shape (1 represents usable squares, and 0 unusable squares):
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 1 1 1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 0
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
in a puzzle similar to HI-Q you start off with pieces on all of the "1" square except for one, and then you jump piece over each other, taking the jumped piece and try to end up with a single piece on the board.
Unlike HIQ, this puzzle isn't solvable when you start with the hole in the center of the board.
The first meta puzzle is to prove this.
The second meta-puzzle is to discover a general rule that lets you know what starting holes can lead to a solution, and what squares the final piece can end up on.
There is such a rule, and it doesn't require brute force to find it.
Once you understand the mathematics of this game, it's trivial to prove that the HI-Q board (which looks like this):
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0
is ALWAYS solvable, no matter which piece is the first hole.
I'll give you one hint. The trick is to find a game with rules that are much easier to analyze than "jump over a piece and take it" but where "jump over a piece and take it" is a legal move. If you can prove that there's no solution in this game, then there can't be a solution in the more restricted game.
Another hint that may be more malicious than helpful is to consider an infinite board - if you can simplify that, then understanding a finite board is easier. Of course if you can do that, then you already know most of the answer.
To upgrade my Window's Vista laptop to run Windows 2000?
But I'll bet that the energy lost separating hydrogen and oxygen became heat which is what we're trying to generate.
In other words it ISN'T lost.
If it didn't become heat, where did it go?
Rather than stop people from being able to edit an article, it would be better to allow the user the option of reading a "stable snapshot" article or to go with the current version in flux.
There's no reason to take the wiki out of the wikipedia just so that people can see the last well liked version of an article.
If you really want creativity, you can have allow a voting system for "best versions" and allow the reader to various versions prefered differing constituencies.
Heh. In that case you'd lose some of your heat to creating order inside your supercomputer.
Unless this product is producing chemical bonds OTHER than the water (which I suppose is possible in a flame) or unless it's venting gas without burning it, it's not wasting any energy at all.
Get it straight, this is how physics works, all of the energy expending is creating heat or light, where else is supposedly going??!!! You can't destroy energy therefor there is nothing inefficient about this round-about way of creating heat and light.
So all of the grousing about this being "innefficient" just shows that slashdotters don't know their physics.
Physics is so perfectly zero sum that a spinning top is heavier than a stationary one, because just as the energy stored in the atoms and their bonds has mass, so does the energy of the spinning. And you can calculate it different ways (using the increase in mass from motion in relativity for instance) and you end up with the same number.
Ok, I suppose you could lose a little heat in this contraption if it does some work, pushing open a valve or something, but that work would be unmeasurably small compared with the heat and light.