The map is 2-D, not 3-D, the redshifts are indicated only as colors, no distance conversion has been made. All galaxies observed with a positive redshift were included, most of the dots are galaxies with redshifts under 0.02. The greatest redshifts on the map are around 0.07. This is a tiny fraction of the largest observed redshifts, less than 3%, and the volume is likely to be correspondingly small compared to the volume of the universe (something like 1/50000 of the universe's volume if the redshift-distance correlation hypothesis is correct.) We are talking about a redshift map of our local galaxies, not a map of the universe.
If consciousness is fundamental that seems to imply panpsychism extending to all quanta rather than a need for brains, let alone humans. The universe somehow had to cope before there were brains, after all.
Also looking at how the distinguishing between two alternate possible future states (the "legs" of the trousers of time, lines of the Feynman diagram) of a given elementary particle can arise, it can only be the particle itself (the "waist" of the trousers, vertex of the Feynman diagram) that does the distinguishing, otherwise one would have to come up with an outside entity to distinguish them and a way of distinguishing that outside entity from both possibilities without separate interactions that would lead to an infinite regress. That ability to distinguish different possibilities could be considered particle proto-consciousness.
How on earth did this pap straight from the nattering neocon "expert" echo-chamber ever get modded up? The shredding of the bill of rights not about terrorism. The military spending is not about defense. The whole scam is designed to get powerful psychopaths even more power. They don't care about anything else, least of all the rights of mere people. Freedom for others would limit the psychopaths' power, but terror enhances it. Therefore these psychopaths have waged war not on terror but on freedom. Thus they are the common enemies of all who desire freedom. If they were treated as they themselves have treated the powerless, who would call it unjust?
"Most Americans are OK with spying on people in direct contact with terrorist organizations [state.gov], or who are plotting an attack."
But what percentage of the time that the powers of the Act are invoked is the target " in direct contact with terrorist organizations"? (Which is a faulty and fear-mongering standard, by the way.) A few percent, if that? No, these powers have nothing to do with terrorism, but with power-seeking. This Act gives them the power to do whatever they like to anyone, including you and me, even up to having us assassinated for no reason that they are required to state, let alone prove. The supposed safeguards are toothless even if followed, and entirely meaningless to the vast majority who don't know their rights were violated, or to those who do not have vast sums to pursue their case in a court. Even those who can afford to go to court must file in a system that is virtually always obsequious to the other branches of the government and considers talk of rights as mere noise.
"Temporary" is meaningless, (it may be decades or generations before a "temporary" measure ends). Any assurances from government officials as to how a statute will be used are also meaningless - the wording is inevitably stretched as far as it will go in the interests of those in power who are using the law.
Sounds like a good idea, but I'd want a little statistical selectivity in the pool - people who have graduated from an accredited college are automatically in the pool, everyone else who wants to be in the pool has to file a form.
It might also be a good idea to weight the pool - people paying lots of taxes, people with advanced degrees or degrees in harder subjects, people who are more engaged, and so forth should have a higher likelihood of being selected (but to keep the power-seekers out it shouldn't be an overwhelming weighting, but something that maxes out at say, a factor equal to the log_2 of the size of the pool, and maxes out rarely, few people having more than a slight edge.)
How could this system be adapted to encourage a coherent long-term view and policies, though? How can we judge who likely has the best-supported views, the greatest insight on any given issue and make them the most likely to be setting policy on that issue? That's the real problem. Representation by sortition may keep most of the lizards out, but how can we do even better, selecting the wisest rather than the worst or the most widespread?
Actually the earthquake was predicted and the warnings were ignored. Italy 'Dismissed Expert's Quake Warning Sky News / 9:06pm UK, Monday April 06, 2009 / Nick Pisa in Rome:
Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani had warned "a big one" was on the way and even toured the region in a van with loudspeakers warning people, as late as last week.
But he was reported to the police by authorities for "needlessly spreading panic" and also dismissed by L'Aquila's mayor and other civic officials.
Dr Giuliani based his theory on increasingly high levels of radon gas that had been noted in the area and even posted his findings on his website.
However, he was forced to take them down and the site has not been working.
Dr Giuliani, who works at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at nearby Gran Sasso, said: "There are people who need to apologise to me. These people will have these deaths on their conscience."
It isn't possible to be in such complete compliance with the secret, proprietary, expensive, rigid and potentially self-contradictory building codes that a motivated inspector can't find something to cite you for. Appealing the citation, even if possible, will cost you about the same or more as just paying the danegeld. Such a system creates a bounty rewarding violating privacy and property rights and picky bureaucratic interpretations of secret laws, resulting in effective $5000 fines for using ones own property in ways that are quite reasonable and safe.
Meth is still legal, it just isn't produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies anymore. It's the liability for a product with so many ugly side effects that ended production, not banning it outright.
Censorship in an absolute sense isn't generally how it's done - it's more of a statistical, dynamic way of working. Some stories are marginalized, others are pushed. The science and art of public opinion manipulation has so many techniques that it would require several books to describe. Virtually anything or anyone that is on the national news is there for the purpose of influencing the public, and this is coordinated by a fairly small number of informally associated people. Go to the Project Censored Top 25 list for some of the marginalized stories.
But more seriously, there are some tenuous public associations at one remove - early Facebook investor Breyer served on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Gilman Louie from In-Q-Tel, which is the (or at least the least secret) VC arm of the CIA. This is a very weak link but it seems to be the best anybody's been able to find so far. Google has much stronger links with In-Q-Tel, having bought Keyhole from them. (Facebook, the CIA, and You
While the intelligence agencies may not have started Facebook, there is no reasonable doubt that they use it for data mining.
Take a look at Geomerics. Most of the visual quality that raytracing is supposed to provide is really better handled by radiosity, and Geomerics real-time radiosity and dynamic lighting is the best I have seen. It is being used in the new version of EVE Online and Battlefield 3. CUDA acceleration was just released for the SDK, which should bring radiosity lighting calculations down to less than 3ms/frame.
It is based on "geometric algebra" (GA,real-valued Clifford algebra) which without any exaggeration is the most general and elegant form of math that can be used to describe physics and geometry. It works in any dimension of any signature, (5D "conformal" with two null-square dimensions being common for graphics) and allows operations and primitives which aren't effectively possible in conventional computer geometry. About half the top people in the GA field founded Geomerics.
One of the rare experts in GA in the UK who didn't join Geomerics is Ian G.C. Bell who co-wrote Elite, the seminal 3-D and space trading game from which Eve is descended. Ian has a free book, "Maths for (Games) Programmers" online, but the encoding of the HTML math requires using something like Netscape 4.79.
A far more usable introduction is Leo Dorst's free, small GA Viewer program and its associated pdf tutorials, which include the conformal model. This allows playing with the math visually (and it is fun), while also having rigorous but comprehensible instruction.
I'm no supporter of Chinese methods, whether official or not, but it's not quite as extreme as it looks at first glance- only a maximum of 1.9% sex selection against girls, virtually all by abortion, not infanticide per se, yielding a 3.8% excess of boys. In fact most of the imbalance comes from not enforcing the one-child policy, allowing mothers of girls to try again for a son.
Agreed that standards of living are main determinant of birthrates, but China's birthrates are well below what one would expect given their GDP/capita. Births per 1000 pop.: China 12.29 (ranked right between Australia and France) Pakistan 24.81 India 20.97 Indonesia 18.10 Brazil 17.79
China's rates will fall a lot further if the more industrialized Chinese-dominated nations/enclaves are any guide: Taiwan 8.90 Singapore 8.50 Hong Kong 7.49
But currently a large portion of the parent-age population grew up in a districts with a level of development closer to that in Cambodia or Laos, which have birthrates about double that in China today.
With fewer than 180 million women age 18-40 and falling (about 9% of whom are giving birth each year), compared to 120 million people already over the age of 65 (and rising), the demographic bulge will work its way through the population in the next two or three decades and there will be a difficult transition.
So long as an ad campaign has the tag "***Avalanche Power!***" with lots of hot sexy blonde Swedish chicks, I think I speak for most American men in saying, "I don't care what it is you're selling, I wanna buy it. No, wait - gimme two."
Don't blame the weather on global warming. There was about as much snow as usual in Europe this winter, it just happened to fall in the UK. While their pundits also blamed global warming, they insisted on calling it "climate change" (until the snow melted, at least.) In the US the Sierras and the Rockies got 50% more snow than usual, as did much of the plains, thus leading to a huge Mississippi flood.
Swiss rain will return, the more important thing is that there are a limited number of streams to dam and certainly it would be just about impossible to expand hydropower by a factor of two or three there. (Though it could be great for load-leveling pumped storage.) Becoming dependent on external supplies of electricity doesn't seem like the Swiss way, nor does vandalizing every ridge with wind turbines. Solar and geothermal won't work well there, wave and tidal are right out, coal is more polluting in every way (including released radioactivity) than nuclear is, gas would have to be shipped in, making it almost as bad as electricity imports... nuclear is really the only option for a good chunk of Swiss energy needs.
It would be better to be designing and building safer nukes with less long-term waste than planning to stop using nuclear power. This plan to shut down the nukes is implicitly a long-term plan to either stop being an industrialized nation, or to become wholly dependent on continuous energy imports and thus effectively subject to your neighbors and to the EU central government.
Most shields are compatible, most others can be made compatible with jumper wires. Take a look at the LeafLabs site, they mention some that have been tested. The forums there might be able to help you out if you have a specific shield in question.
That's a very nice board, but Maple certainly isn't crap by comparison. The Maple is cheaper, maybe more well-supported, nearly as fast. Many will prefer ARM to PIC - it is certainly more popular professionally. The peripherals are also different - while Ethernet and CAN could be vital for some things, the ST ARM has dual 12-bit ADCs while the PIC chip only has 1 10 bit ADC. The upcoming Maples will also have just as much flash as the PIC plus 12-bit DACs. Maple looks better for many purposes.
It uses the same software as the Arduino so far as the new user can tell. Shields are mostly compatible, and nearly all the rest could be made so with a few jumper wires. The format of the headers is the same. (for the main model, at least) The extra RAM, flash, and peripherals make more projects possible than the Arduino. Maple is 100% open source, including the hardware, and while it isn't yet as big as Arduino's, the developer community seems active and helpful, both to novices and experts.
Yes, 16k SRAM, 4k EEPROM, 128k flash (120k accessible). Souped-up version has 64k SRAM, 512k flash (plus dual 12 bit DACs and some other improvements). The ARMs are 32 bit and the STM-made version in the Maple has many other advantages over the 8-bit Atmels in the Arduino.
Compared to Arduino's Atmel (2,32kB) the Maple STM32/ARM (20, 120kB) has way more RAM and flash (also far more than the TI MSP430 series, while not requiring that much more power). The Maple RET6 gives 64kB SRAM/512kB flash and DACs rather than just PWM for only $10 more than the regular version. A version with FPGA on-board is in development. The Maple Mini which is just 2.02 x 0.72 inches and emulates a 40-pin DIP for breadboarding should be shipping in a few days.
Maples are capable of driving QVGA LCDs, doing modest signal processing (see LeafLabs wiki for a guitar pedal project), controlling motors, doing data-logging and complex control and much more.
While they can be pressed into service for doing traditional computing, microcontrollers are distinguished mainly by their built-in peripherals such as timers, ADC, DAC,sensors, encoders, communications etc. The STM / Cortex devices do very well on this measure, particularly the higher-end parts. The Maple forums are active and helpful; some ongoing topics are on using real-time OSes and interfacing with SD card flash memory.
For a cheaper start to working with the STM ARM chips Mouser carries a rather nice-looking, hackableboard with USB, LCD, blinkenlights, buttons, and capacitive touch sensor slider for just $15.
Fantastic link - anybody seriously interested in prototyping should take a look at the Tormach mill systems. High quality, adaptable, professional capabilities, and not that expensive for what they can do, especially when resale value is taken into account.
Slashdot Mirror
The map is 2-D, not 3-D, the redshifts are indicated only as colors, no distance conversion has been made. All galaxies observed with a positive redshift were included, most of the dots are galaxies with redshifts under 0.02. The greatest redshifts on the map are around 0.07. This is a tiny fraction of the largest observed redshifts, less than 3%, and the volume is likely to be correspondingly small compared to the volume of the universe (something like 1/50000 of the universe's volume if the redshift-distance correlation hypothesis is correct.) We are talking about a redshift map of our local galaxies, not a map of the universe.
If consciousness is fundamental that seems to imply panpsychism extending to all quanta rather than a need for brains, let alone humans. The universe somehow had to cope before there were brains, after all.
Also looking at how the distinguishing between two alternate possible future states (the "legs" of the trousers of time, lines of the Feynman diagram) of a given elementary particle can arise, it can only be the particle itself (the "waist" of the trousers, vertex of the Feynman diagram) that does the distinguishing, otherwise one would have to come up with an outside entity to distinguish them and a way of distinguishing that outside entity from both possibilities without separate interactions that would lead to an infinite regress. That ability to distinguish different possibilities could be considered particle proto-consciousness.
They were. The rhetoric is that letting them expire = tax increase.
How on earth did this pap straight from the nattering neocon "expert" echo-chamber ever get modded up?
The shredding of the bill of rights not about terrorism.
The military spending is not about defense.
The whole scam is designed to get powerful psychopaths even more power.
They don't care about anything else, least of all the rights of mere people.
Freedom for others would limit the psychopaths' power, but terror enhances it.
Therefore these psychopaths have waged war not on terror but on freedom.
Thus they are the common enemies of all who desire freedom.
If they were treated as they themselves have treated the powerless, who would call it unjust?
"Most Americans are OK with spying on people in direct contact with terrorist organizations [state.gov], or who are plotting an attack."
But what percentage of the time that the powers of the Act are invoked is the target " in direct contact with terrorist organizations"? (Which is a faulty and fear-mongering standard, by the way.) A few percent, if that? No, these powers have nothing to do with terrorism, but with power-seeking. This Act gives them the power to do whatever they like to anyone, including you and me, even up to having us assassinated for no reason that they are required to state, let alone prove. The supposed safeguards are toothless even if followed, and entirely meaningless to the vast majority who don't know their rights were violated, or to those who do not have vast sums to pursue their case in a court. Even those who can afford to go to court must file in a system that is virtually always obsequious to the other branches of the government and considers talk of rights as mere noise.
"Temporary" is meaningless, (it may be decades or generations before a "temporary" measure ends). Any assurances from government officials as to how a statute will be used are also meaningless - the wording is inevitably stretched as far as it will go in the interests of those in power who are using the law.
Sounds like a good idea, but I'd want a little statistical selectivity in the pool - people who have graduated from an accredited college are automatically in the pool, everyone else who wants to be in the pool has to file a form.
It might also be a good idea to weight the pool - people paying lots of taxes, people with advanced degrees or degrees in harder subjects, people who are more engaged, and so forth should have a higher likelihood of being selected (but to keep the power-seekers out it shouldn't be an overwhelming weighting, but something that maxes out at say, a factor equal to the log_2 of the size of the pool, and maxes out rarely, few people having more than a slight edge.)
How could this system be adapted to encourage a coherent long-term view and policies, though? How can we judge who likely has the best-supported views, the greatest insight on any given issue and make them the most likely to be setting policy on that issue? That's the real problem. Representation by sortition may keep most of the lizards out, but how can we do even better, selecting the wisest rather than the worst or the most widespread?
Actually the earthquake was predicted and the warnings were ignored. Italy 'Dismissed Expert's Quake Warning Sky News / 9:06pm UK, Monday April 06, 2009 / Nick Pisa in Rome :
It isn't possible to be in such complete compliance with the secret, proprietary, expensive, rigid and potentially self-contradictory building codes that a motivated inspector can't find something to cite you for. Appealing the citation, even if possible, will cost you about the same or more as just paying the danegeld. Such a system creates a bounty rewarding violating privacy and property rights and picky bureaucratic interpretations of secret laws, resulting in effective $5000 fines for using ones own property in ways that are quite reasonable and safe.
Meth is still legal, it just isn't produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies anymore. It's the liability for a product with so many ugly side effects that ended production, not banning it outright.
Censorship in an absolute sense isn't generally how it's done - it's more of a statistical, dynamic way of working. Some stories are marginalized, others are pushed. The science and art of public opinion manipulation has so many techniques that it would require several books to describe. Virtually anything or anyone that is on the national news is there for the purpose of influencing the public, and this is coordinated by a fairly small number of informally associated people. Go to the Project Censored Top 25 list for some of the marginalized stories.
America's finest news source reports:CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs .
But more seriously, there are some tenuous public associations at one remove - early Facebook investor Breyer served on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Gilman Louie from In-Q-Tel, which is the (or at least the least secret) VC arm of the CIA. This is a very weak link but it seems to be the best anybody's been able to find so far. Google has much stronger links with In-Q-Tel, having bought Keyhole from them. (Facebook, the CIA, and You
While the intelligence agencies may not have started Facebook, there is no reasonable doubt that they use it for data mining.
Take a look at Geomerics. Most of the visual quality that raytracing is supposed to provide is really better handled by radiosity, and Geomerics real-time radiosity and dynamic lighting is the best I have seen. It is being used in the new version of EVE Online and Battlefield 3. CUDA acceleration was just released for the SDK, which should bring radiosity lighting calculations down to less than 3ms/frame.
It is based on "geometric algebra" (GA,real-valued Clifford algebra) which without any exaggeration is the most general and elegant form of math that can be used to describe physics and geometry. It works in any dimension of any signature, (5D "conformal" with two null-square dimensions being common for graphics) and allows operations and primitives which aren't effectively possible in conventional computer geometry. About half the top people in the GA field founded Geomerics.
One of the rare experts in GA in the UK who didn't join Geomerics is Ian G.C. Bell who co-wrote Elite, the seminal 3-D and space trading game from which Eve is descended. Ian has a free book, "Maths for (Games) Programmers" online, but the encoding of the HTML math requires using something like Netscape 4.79.
A far more usable introduction is Leo Dorst's free, small GA Viewer program and its associated pdf tutorials, which include the conformal model. This allows playing with the math visually (and it is fun), while also having rigorous but comprehensible instruction.
I think you meant trolls.
Unless, of course, you stood under the beam.
I'm no supporter of Chinese methods, whether official or not, but it's not quite as extreme as it looks at first glance- only a maximum of 1.9% sex selection against girls, virtually all by abortion, not infanticide per se, yielding a 3.8% excess of boys. In fact most of the imbalance comes from not enforcing the one-child policy, allowing mothers of girls to try again for a son.
Agreed that standards of living are main determinant of birthrates, but China's birthrates are well below what one would expect given their GDP/capita.
Births per 1000 pop.:
China 12.29 (ranked right between Australia and France)
Pakistan 24.81
India 20.97
Indonesia 18.10
Brazil 17.79
China's rates will fall a lot further if the more industrialized Chinese-dominated nations/enclaves are any guide:
Taiwan 8.90
Singapore 8.50
Hong Kong 7.49
But currently a large portion of the parent-age population grew up in a districts with a level of development closer to that in Cambodia or Laos, which have birthrates about double that in China today.
With fewer than 180 million women age 18-40 and falling (about 9% of whom are giving birth each year), compared to 120 million people already over the age of 65 (and rising), the demographic bulge will work its way through the population in the next two or three decades and there will be a difficult transition.
So long as an ad campaign has the tag "***Avalanche Power!***" with lots of hot sexy blonde Swedish chicks, I think I speak for most American men in saying, "I don't care what it is you're selling, I wanna buy it. No, wait - gimme two."
Don't blame the weather on global warming. There was about as much snow as usual in Europe this winter, it just happened to fall in the UK. While their pundits also blamed global warming, they insisted on calling it "climate change" (until the snow melted, at least.) In the US the Sierras and the Rockies got 50% more snow than usual, as did much of the plains, thus leading to a huge Mississippi flood.
Swiss rain will return, the more important thing is that there are a limited number of streams to dam and certainly it would be just about impossible to expand hydropower by a factor of two or three there. (Though it could be great for load-leveling pumped storage.) Becoming dependent on external supplies of electricity doesn't seem like the Swiss way, nor does vandalizing every ridge with wind turbines. Solar and geothermal won't work well there, wave and tidal are right out, coal is more polluting in every way (including released radioactivity) than nuclear is, gas would have to be shipped in, making it almost as bad as electricity imports... nuclear is really the only option for a good chunk of Swiss energy needs.
It would be better to be designing and building safer nukes with less long-term waste than planning to stop using nuclear power. This plan to shut down the nukes is implicitly a long-term plan to either stop being an industrialized nation, or to become wholly dependent on continuous energy imports and thus effectively subject to your neighbors and to the EU central government.
You must mean the flow leaving Swiss banks as their government guts customer privacy rules.
Most shields are compatible, most others can be made compatible with jumper wires. Take a look at the LeafLabs site, they mention some that have been tested. The forums there might be able to help you out if you have a specific shield in question.
That's a very nice board, but Maple certainly isn't crap by comparison. The Maple is cheaper, maybe more well-supported, nearly as fast. Many will prefer ARM to PIC - it is certainly more popular professionally. The peripherals are also different - while Ethernet and CAN could be vital for some things, the ST ARM has dual 12-bit ADCs while the PIC chip only has 1 10 bit ADC. The upcoming Maples will also have just as much flash as the PIC plus 12-bit DACs. Maple looks better for many purposes.
It uses the same software as the Arduino so far as the new user can tell. Shields are mostly compatible, and nearly all the rest could be made so with a few jumper wires. The format of the headers is the same. (for the main model, at least) The extra RAM, flash, and peripherals make more projects possible than the Arduino. Maple is 100% open source, including the hardware, and while it isn't yet as big as Arduino's, the developer community seems active and helpful, both to novices and experts.
Yes, 16k SRAM, 4k EEPROM, 128k flash (120k accessible). Souped-up version has 64k SRAM, 512k flash (plus dual 12 bit DACs and some other improvements). The ARMs are 32 bit and the STM-made version in the Maple has many other advantages over the 8-bit Atmels in the Arduino.
Compared to Arduino's Atmel (2,32kB) the Maple STM32/ARM (20, 120kB) has way more RAM and flash (also far more than the TI MSP430 series, while not requiring that much more power). The Maple RET6 gives 64kB SRAM /512kB flash and DACs rather than just PWM for only $10 more than the regular version. A version with FPGA on-board is in development. The Maple Mini which is just 2.02 x 0.72 inches and emulates a 40-pin DIP for breadboarding should be shipping in a few days.
Maples are capable of driving QVGA LCDs, doing modest signal processing (see LeafLabs wiki for a guitar pedal project), controlling motors, doing data-logging and complex control and much more.
While they can be pressed into service for doing traditional computing, microcontrollers are distinguished mainly by their built-in peripherals such as timers, ADC, DAC,sensors, encoders, communications etc. The STM / Cortex devices do very well on this measure, particularly the higher-end parts. The Maple forums are active and helpful; some ongoing topics are on using real-time OSes and interfacing with SD card flash memory.
For a cheaper start to working with the STM ARM chips Mouser carries a rather nice-looking, hackableboard with USB, LCD, blinkenlights, buttons, and capacitive touch sensor slider for just $15.
Fantastic link - anybody seriously interested in prototyping should take a look at the Tormach mill systems. High quality, adaptable, professional capabilities, and not that expensive for what they can do, especially when resale value is taken into account.