Mathematica may have more use for some folks than for others
Unquestionably. I was just a wee bit disappointed in how much good it was in heavily mathematical (but not mathematics) research. It doesn't replace the graduate student, it turns out.
I don't think it is fair in the sense one person or a very few can define the acceptable beliefs of others.
Fair enough. Where I might extend this, which is just a vague sympathy for democracy, is that I also believe a very large number of people, even an overwhelming majority, should not be able to define the acceptable beliefs of a very few people, or of even just one.
I should add I sell items on Ebay and intend to continue to do so but that is largely due to financial necessity.
On the other hand, I don't use E-Bay at all, so I could "boycott" them at zero personal cost. However, I defend their right to engage in behaviour the majority (including me) find obnoxious because I don't want that same majority to have the right to judge my behaviour at some later date. Liberty is a funny thing; if you don't defend the liberty of others even when they use it in a way you find personally repugnant, it kind of dries up and evaporates after a while. There are always too many people around who (1) don't mind being told what to do, or (2) like the idea of telling other people what to do. It takes eternal vigilance on the part of lone wolves to preserve a little space to exist apart from the sheep and the shepherds.
I dunno. I've used Mathematica since it was beta -- no, really, I knew one of the founders at one point -- and it is certainly very interesting, and undoubtably very useful in the educational setting.
But I found when working on the algebra/calculus problems you might find in a bit of cutting-edge physical-science research, it wasn't all that helpful. If I didn't have a pretty good idea where I was trying to go -- e.g. how this algebra should reduce, or what this integral should be, or how this function should behave -- then Mathematica would often either (1) grind to a halt, or (2) give me a horrible multipage expression that defied any kind of gestalt understanding. And, of course, if I did know pretty well where I was going to go, then it was usually faster and somewhat more illuminating to do it myself on paper. What Mathematica ended up doing for me, and this is nothing to sneeze at, is checking my algebra and math, making sure I hadn't added 1 and 1 and gotten 11, that kind of thing.
My feeling is that Mathematica is great for educational stuff, and useful for quick and simple calculations where you pretty much know the answer but don't want to do invest the time it would take to work it out on paper (and you'll instantly recognize whether the result is what it should be), and generally useful for checking your math. But as a serious tool to do difficult math for you with useful results -- I would say it hasn't worked out so well. There's some curious facet of human intelligence that it lacks, some ability to grasp the essentials of a mathematical expression or process that it doesn't have. I admit I can't defined what "the essentials" of a piece of math are, but I can tell when I understand them and when I don't, and probably anyone who's worked with a lot of complex math can, too. (Indeed, I suspect the truly brilliant at math are those who can grasp these mysterious essentials faster and with more clarity than the rest of us.)
I'm not trying to diss Mathematica per se; it's a substantial accomplishment. But like most of Wolfram's stuff, it falls a smidgen short of being the Singularity-enabling tool its most rabid fans seem to think it is.
Oh that's right, because Physical Review is edited and typeset by elves, who don't need a salary, so WTF is the journal insisting on an income for? Wretched selfish antisocial bastards.
I doubt Ebay could make a compelling argument for this in the court of public opinion.
I'm sure you're right about that, and that's the proper place to try the issue.
That said, the unfortunate aspect of the court of public opinion is that it's only available to people who are very sympathetic victims (poor single crippled mothers, whatever) and who have some kind of megaphone to get their story out. It's rough justice, but hardly equal justice.
You do realize the only way E-Bay could hire the platoons of lawyers and programmers it would take to enforce rights compliance in a nonlazy would be to take it out of user fees, right?
I mean, E-Bay like all of us doesn't know where the magic money tree is, that you merely shake to get plenty of cash to Do What's Right.
I'm guessing E-Bay made a simple calculation:
(1) Do our users want to pay the fees needed for a top-notch rights compliance program?
(2) Uh, no!
(3) OK, let's roll out the cheapest alternative we can.
Well, if you say so. You're putting a pretty big premium on the behaviour of a vendor towards some tiny group of sufferers (ex-Scientologists vending E-Meters for profit). I mean, do you apply the same thorough ethical vetting to everyone who offers to sell you stuff? You won't by gas from the corner grocery because the owner verbally abused his wife before she left him? Or his kid is in jail for car theft?
Are you quite sure injecting all this moral judgmentalism into a simple commercial transaction is a good idea? Isn't that the kind of thing people get pissed off about when it comes to crazed right-wing Christian evangelicals, who won't buy a car unless the dealer has been born again?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- you have the right to buy from whom you choose, and the right to apply any criteria you wish to the seller. I'm just asking whether you've fully thought this through. Either you're going to have to ask an awful lot of rather personal moral questions about the people selling you stuff -- doing your share to see us moving towards a theocracy where issues of morals and beliefs pervade every aspect of social life -- or you're going to be hypocritically inconsistent, applying the moral test when the evidence of misbehaviour is brought to your attention (as here) and otherwise letting sleeping dogs lie. That just encourages people to lie and cover up, you know.
Don't be silly. There is no such thing as a "religious discrimination suit" except in very narrow circumstances directly related to your employment, courtesy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, e.g. you can't be fired from your job serving popcorn at the local movieplex just because you're a Jew. (There are some other grounds related to your right to buy a house and get a mortgage, too, provided the seller or mortgage broker meets certain arcane grounds related to whether the Commerce Clause even in the Burger Court's active imagination can be stretched to apply.)
But you have gravely mistaken the First Amendment (the one about religious freedom) if you think it protects you from hostility from your fellow private citizens (or private firms) based on your religion. E-Bay is free to think well of Scientologists and decline to do business with their detractors, just as you are free to decline to buy stuff from a store run by rabid evangelicals who insist on giving you a lecture about letting Jesus into your life before they'll count out your change.
That's the nature of a free and liberal society. We don't ask the government to protect us all the time and in all ways from the opinions -- even the prejudiced, illiberal, dumfuk opinions -- of our fellow citizens, because we are smart enough to realize that the only way it can do so is to take away everybody's liberty. If you want absolute protection from being persecuted by the government for having the "wrong" religious attitudes, then you have to extend the exact same right and privilege to everybody else, including the management of E-Bay.
E-Bay is private firm, and they're free to list or not list sales on their site for any reason whatsoever, including because the "Church" of Scientology asserts some utterly bogus intellectual property right, or because they just feel like it.
The C of S is not "preventing the resale of their product," they're just preventing the resale through E-Bay and with E-Bay's cooperation. You can still put an ad in the paper and sell it, or put up a notice in your neighborhood market, or just walk around town with a sign attached to you saying "E-Meter Cheap!"
And who gives a shit what the lawyers think? Why should the law be relevant here? This isn't a question you want the lawyers thinking about, because you can be damn sure that any solution they think up is going to cost you far more in cash and personal liberty than you would like to part with. Do you want there to be a law telling you what you can and cannot sell on your personal website? Do you want to have to get your Craigslist ad vetted by the police before it can go up? Do you want the FBI to have the right to interrogate you about whether you sold your pet cat or unused furniture to the right people, and in the right way?
Christ, let us keep the lawyers in the fridge, OK? If there's a big market for secondhand E-meters, and E-Bay foolishly foregoes it because they want to keep the Scientologists happy, then let someone start up a private website devoted to reselling E-Meters, and he will make scads of money, more than enough to dare the "Church" to sue him, and get their clueless clock cleaned and get hit for beaucoup lawyer fees on top of it.
But what I suspect is that ex-Scientologists who want to recoup some of the financial loss associated with their recent vacation from rationality are a very small group, and while it kinda sucks that when there's very few of you and a whole lot of someone else (in this case, non-ex-Scientologists, or pre-ex-Scientologists), you have to tread carefully, that's just life in a wide-open democracy. It's not like an intelligent and determined person can't work around this problem fairly easily. I'm sure if I had an E-Meter to sell, I could do it easily enough without E-Bay or the Church getting a clue. Probably my 16-year-old could, too.
The short version of my criticism of your theory is that you've based it entirely on energetics, and have forgotten that the Second Law (i.e. considerations of entropy) dominates in low-energy situations. That's why the crucial question is not so much whether this or that chemical reaction is downhill (very slightly), but whether this or that transformation is entropically favored (or, more plausibly, not too disfavored).
What I would propose instead is that the crucial development in the evolution of life was a segregation between environment and cell, between "out there" and "in here," the development of a cell membrane or similar structure. Once you have segregated a small area, you can start relying on all kinds of relatively rare chemical reactions, because you have a very small area in which you need to control reaction conditions. Things can find each other.
Otherwise, what you're talking about is more or less making the entire ocean, or at least your entire puddle, be the inside of a living system. That's just not plausible.
I think you do your generation too little credit. There are some real entrepreneurs amongst you, the folks who invented Facebook and all that jazz. There are also some very serious and responsible folk, like the guys and gals carrying rifles and building a democratic civilization more or less with their bare hands in Iraq.
I agree the Facebook users and the folks who blog about Obamamania are a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But many others of your generation are out there quietly Getting Stuff Done, and they will be an awesome force when their time of leadership comes.
Be patient. You hear most from the noisy, and they are indeed silly, but there are quiet and serious people out there who will earn the respect of their descendants.
From your comment, I would say I know history way better than you do, if you think China was a fount of invention as late as the 1800s.
Go read the Wikipedia entry on the Opium Wars (1840s) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899) just to get started, and ask yourself how a massive nation could be so humiliated by a handful of foreign devils if they had been "the pinnacle of world innovation and inventions" for the preceding 1500 years.
Your problem is that you've swallowed the pseudo-Marxist collectivist-worshipping crap that passes for "education" in the modern school system, without assessing the actual facts for yourself. Get a viewpoint of your own!
Well, first of all, the question of what it means to be the "leading civilization" is hardly as obvious as you think. Some people would say China's peacefulness and the quality of the average life made them the "leading civilization" in about 1500, just as they might say the fat paychecks and generous benefits of Microsoft, and the stability of the company and modesty of its aims make it the leading software firm today.
Others might say the wildly more dynamic and creative ferment in the West at the same time makes it the more creative and ultimately the "leading" civilization, just as some might say an energetic small start-up with amazing new ideas about computing and the Internet is, despite the instability and occasional abrupt changes in direction, the more "leading edge" company, compared to the Redmond behemoth.
You're free to take the former, widely-accepted, establishment view. But more independent thinkers may not agree. I certainly don't.
Like it or not, China is well on its way to reclaim the lost honor
Yeah right. Just like the Soviet Union was the wave of the future in the 1970s, and Japan, Inc. was going to take over the world in the 1980s, and the Asian Tigers are going to start dominating world trade Any Day Now, and so forth and so on ad infinitum. You get back to me when that "overtaking" has turned into "overtaken," Chicken Little.
As someone who has actually worked with academics and entrepreneurs in this field, I call bullshit on this. No professional scientist or engineer I've met has spent a moment's thought on what any putative "don't play God" faction thinks, or even thinks he needs to. There's zero evidence that any such faction, should it even exist outside of your imagination, has ever had any significant effect on technological advancement in this country.
Furthermore, my experience suggests that the Chinese have a much more substantial and real cultural barrier to any kind of technological progress (which is, I think, one reason why a society civilized a thousand years before the West, and having had a far larger population for far longer, has nevertheless consistently lagged behind the West in terms of invention and innovation, at least on a per capita basis).
The problem is that the Confucian tradition strongly reinforcea an acceptance of existing heirarchy, and of paying the utmost respect to your elders and those better educated and more experienced than yourself. This is antithetical to innovation and invention. The only way you can invent something new is by doing something that older and wiser heads think is foolish. (If they didn't think it was dumb, they'd have done it themselves already.)
Consequently true innovation happens only in a culture that does not value established wisdom too much, which is willing to take some chances on a young, hot-headed, crazy contrarian way of thinking. China has a long and strong cultural tradition of valuing established wisdom, and I think that is a much more significant cultural barrier to innovation than any silly Chicken-Little faddish fear that evangelicals are going to rise up and smite researchers working on nanoscopic gears and motors because the latter weren't described in the Bible.
Yes, both proteins and nucleic acids in very rare circumstances show auto-catalytic activity. But to suggest that this means they descended from molecules that reproduced entirely that way is a giant -- and totally unjustified -- leap of faith. It's like noticing that a screwdriver can, in rare circumstances, be used successfully as a hammer, and then leaping to the conclusion that screwdrives were originally designed for the purpose of hammering in nails. Not logical.
Also the formation of long chains does not necessarily require enzymatic activity, if the correct conditions are present
Making simple organic polymers (e.g. PE or PS) with a polymerization index of a few thousand requires unusual reactions and unusual reaction conditions. Making polymers with polymerization indices in the 100,000s to millions, like DNA, absolutely requires some very, very reliable method of favoring chain growth over chain shrinkage.
Yes, you could make it cold, to disfavor the dS > 0 reaction. But to build up a huge chain you'd have to make it so cold the environment couldn't supply activation energy for anything other than a massively exothermic reaction, which brings us to...
Third thing is that you do not need plentiful products at first, only stable ones that can survive until enough precursors come around for a copy to be made
Life does not use "stable" molecules, molecules that are the result of strongly exothermic reactions. Indeed, stable molecules are of little use to life. What life needs is metastable molecules, molecules that are barely stable, so that they can easily be created and degraded. If, every time you created a genetic molecule, it was very stable, there'd be no way to get rid of it, or modify it, or for it to participate in any kind of chemical reaction. It would be inert, useless, "sludge" on the bottom of your cellular "engine."
Just look at the existing molecules of life: Proteins are hardly what any chemist would call "stable." Raise the temperature barely to the boiling point of water and they denature and decompose. But this is important, because it allows cells to easily modify proteins, digest them and reconstruct them elsewhere, et cetera. They are the bricks and mortar of cells not so much because they are durable, but because they aren't, because they can easily be taken apart and rebuilt, over and over again.
A genetic molecule that is so stable it can wait around a long time for some necessary partner to appear is a genetic molecule that is useless to life, because it can't easily be changed.
What you're missing is the fact that self-replication is a bit of a misnomer when applied to the only model of genetic molecule we know of. Nucleic acids can't really self-replicate -- they need the help of proteins. Similarly, proteins need the help of nucleic acids to replicate. The question of how these different molecules find each other is by no means trivial.
You're also forgetting that the ratio of concentration of big molecules to small precursors goes something like the inverse of the square of the concentration of the small guys. Plentiful precursors does not imply plentiful products.
Goodness, yes. Indeed, for all we know, a very salty liquid water environment helps get life started.
After all, one way to describe a living cell (leaving out its ability to replicate) is a system that maintains across a membrane various ion concentration gradients and uses them for various purposes. Surely one of the most primitive possible cells one can imagine is just a closed membrane with membrane-bound ion pumps actively maintaining a different ionic environment inside than outside, and using the gradient when necessary to effect chemical transport across the membrane.
We focus a lot on the issue of replication and imagine this must have been the first part of life to get going, that there were first a lot of free-floating self-replicating genetic molecules. But perhaps this is naive. In an ocean (or even big puddle of water) those molecules will never find each other. Maybe the first step in life is walling off the outside world with a membrane and controlling the ionic strength inside, thus defining a compact "walled garden" in which something delicate -- like self-replication of big genetic molecules -- can take place safely. And perhaps such a system is more likely to arise in a system that has high ion strength to begin with, and most likely larger random concentration gradients that can drive some kind of organization process.
So what's your point? Should we attempt to pursue every conceivable technological development that might shave energy usage, even by teensy percentages? That's not possible. We don't have infinite resources.
My point is just that goals should always be prioritized, either personally or as a nation. Assuming energy efficiency is a reasonable national goal, technologies which improve it should be pursued in order of their likely cost-benefit ratio. That means we work on stuff like improved traffic flow before we work on LED lights everywhere. How much gasoline is wasted by cars idling on the 5000 miles of Los Angeles freeway system twice a day? Compare that to how much energy you might save if you got a realistic fraction of people to switch to LED bulbs.
Or for that matter, how much energy is wasted by cars that aren't properly tuned up? By building codes that encourage saving money up front on things like sensible window placement and good insulation, at the cost of several decades of magnified heating and cooling costs?
The thing to do is rank all these things in order of what kind of savings you can get for what kind of investment, and start from the top. When I look at (1) the small amount of electricity used for lighting, (2) the modest gains in efficiency represented by white-light LEDs over incandescents, (3) the substantial cost of converting millions of lighting fixtures from trailer-park porch lights to kitchen lights in ritzy mansions to LEDs, and (4) the fact that most people like incandescent light and it will take massive subsidies or heavy-handed regulation to get them to switch....I have the strong suspicion that this particular investment is not likely to pay off.
I could be wrong, of course. But the question must be asked, and a credible positive answer given, before one can say big government investment in LED lights makes any kind of sense.
Of course it is. That's because you're only one person. But it isn't impressive to an entire nation, or an entire world, just the way you probably thought your mother and father were enormous mighty giants when you were six months old, but you don't now that you have a larger perspective.
Let's put it another way: divide that world consumption by the world population to see what your share is. The answer is less than a tenth of a barrel, or about 4 gallons of oil a year. You probably burn 100 times more oil in your car every year. Would you pay a few hundred dollars to save 4 gallons of oil a year? Or can you think, perhaps, of some better uses for that money, even if you restrict yourself to energy conservation?
The goal in life is not to randomly pursue every goal that is desirable, willy nilly. The goal is to pursue desirable goals in order of their importance. First you make sure you have a job you like, then you make sure your cubicle is decorated pleasantly. If you reverse the order in which you pursue these goals, you will not be happy.
Similarly, the sub-goals under the overall goal of energy efficiency should be pursued in order of their importance. Better traffic management on major city freeways -- linking cars through low-powered radios, say, and adding GPS receivers and some good traffic algorithms in an on-board module that can suggest optimal routes to drivers in real time -- would save more oil in a week than replacing everyone's desk lamp with an LED lamp would save in a century.
Building codes for sunny climates that take into account air-conditioning costs, so that, for example, windows are placed strategically to minimize solar heating, roofs are designed to avoid trapping hot air, attic fans are routinely installed, windows are double-glazed and weather-stripped to avoid heat losses, etc., would also save much more.
The plain fact is that most energy we use is used to either move heat from one place to another, or to move things from one place to another. Improving efficiency in those areas is the low-hanging fruit. Improving lighting efficiency is a glitzy feel-good measure that does very little, except that if it sucks up all the oxygen in a public energy efficiency impulse, it prevents us from doing stuff that really would have a serious impact.
According to government data, only about 9% of the household electricity used in the United States is used for lighting. Most household electricity goes to refrigeration, water heating, air-conditioning, space heating, clothes drying, and so forth. That's why electricity usage spikes in the summer and in hot weather.
For that matter, only about 20% of our entire energy usage is represented by electricity, the rest being direct use of thermal energy (i.e. burning stuff like oil and gas) in factories, home heating furnaces, and in cars, trucks and railroad engines.
So overall the amount of our energy usage that goes to household lighting is 0.09 x 0.20 = about 2% of our total energy usage. If you manage to make lighting that is, say, 10 times more efficient than incandescent, then you will replace 2% with 0.2%, for a grand savings of 1.8%. Not impressive.
Well, speculating about c varying during the lifetime of the Universe is quite different than speculating that it varies from galaxy to galaxy, but yes, I've heard this.
I even have a theory of my own! Suppose c begins at infinity and decrease to 0. When c is infinity, then there is no distance dimension, since everything happens everywhere at once. There is only time. The Universe "occupies" a point, in the sense that it occupies anything at all. That is, we've the primordial Big Bang.
As soon as c decreases from infinity, distance acquires meaning, and things can happen here but not there. And as c gets lower and lower, the time it takes for signals to get from here to there increases, i.e. the Universe expands.
When c falls to zero, there is no more time dimension, there is only space. Nothing ever changes, because each individual particle (or generic degree of freedom) is locked into utter isolation, unable to interact with anything else.
We can also finally explain the Second Law of thermodynamics: the Universe begins in a pure quantum state, since it has perfect communication over its entirety. It has an entropy of zero. As c falls, larger and larger chunks of it fall out of communication, and it begins to take on more of the character of a mixed state. That is, entropy begins to take on meaning, at least over large distances, and the entropy of the Universe rises above zero. The further c falls, the smaller the chunks that don't communicate with each other, and the higher the entropy. When c reaches zero, each and every degree of freedom can be in any quantum state -- because the requirement of symmetry or antisymmetry no longer applies, and because conservation of energy can no longer be meaningfully enforced -- and the entropy of the Universe reaches its theoretical maximum. Voila! The Second Law appears at intermediate times.
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First of all, let's make it clear what an amazing level of prediction we're talking about here. Compared to predicting the entire spectrum of effects on society, decades and centuries into the future, of a whole new technology, predicting who will win the 2008 US Presidential election, or which stocks will rise in the year ahead and which will fall, is complete child's play. Predicting what team will win the Super Bowl would be something you could do half drunk.
It's not just a question of an intelligence massive enough to comprehend a bazillion different factors, the hopes and ambitions and prejudices and tendencies of half a billion people, but also being able to do so in the near absence of data. Because we know very little, in detail, about our society. We know only such gross overall measures as our total national income, how many of us there are, how many are registered Republican and Democrat, our age distribution, our stated religious preferences, and so forth.
But do we even have the merest beginnings of data that would tell us as much about strangers in Idaho or Poughkeepsie as we know about, say, our own children, our own parents, or our own spouse? Not at all. And keep in mind how easy it is to make mistakes even when you predict the behaviour of those nearest and dearest to you, about whom you know enormously more than you know about strangers thousands of miles away, perhaps from cultural backgrounds totally different from yours.
Furthermore, even if you have the intelligence and access to the data, and form the correct conclusions, how do you prove they're correct to everyone else? Because, unless you live in a dictatorship and happen to be the dictator, you aren't going to be able to do anything about your insight unless you convince a whole lot of other, ordinary people that you can see the future. Hence our putative Messiah here has to not only be superintelligent and nearly omniscient, he has to have superhuman persuasive power.
This is an amazing fact about human beings. They understand perfectly well how difficult it is to predict the behaviour and reactions of people they know well -- what will the boss say about this screw-up? How will my teenage daughter react to this new restriction? Will my wife like this birthday present or not? And they're usually fairly humble about their ability to predict that behaviour, or modify it by gentle persuasion.
But when it comes to millions of strangers, all of a sudden it's seen as fairly easy to (1) predict how they'll react to any random change, and (2) gently persuade them (so you don't have to institute a police state) to act in the proper way.
Doesn't that make any logical consistency alarm bells go off?
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Thanks.
Mathematica may have more use for some folks than for others
Unquestionably. I was just a wee bit disappointed in how much good it was in heavily mathematical (but not mathematics) research. It doesn't replace the graduate student, it turns out.
I don't think it is fair in the sense one person or a very few can define the acceptable beliefs of others.
Fair enough. Where I might extend this, which is just a vague sympathy for democracy, is that I also believe a very large number of people, even an overwhelming majority, should not be able to define the acceptable beliefs of a very few people, or of even just one.
I should add I sell items on Ebay and intend to continue to do so but that is largely due to financial necessity.
On the other hand, I don't use E-Bay at all, so I could "boycott" them at zero personal cost. However, I defend their right to engage in behaviour the majority (including me) find obnoxious because I don't want that same majority to have the right to judge my behaviour at some later date. Liberty is a funny thing; if you don't defend the liberty of others even when they use it in a way you find personally repugnant, it kind of dries up and evaporates after a while. There are always too many people around who (1) don't mind being told what to do, or (2) like the idea of telling other people what to do. It takes eternal vigilance on the part of lone wolves to preserve a little space to exist apart from the sheep and the shepherds.
I dunno. I've used Mathematica since it was beta -- no, really, I knew one of the founders at one point -- and it is certainly very interesting, and undoubtably very useful in the educational setting.
But I found when working on the algebra/calculus problems you might find in a bit of cutting-edge physical-science research, it wasn't all that helpful. If I didn't have a pretty good idea where I was trying to go -- e.g. how this algebra should reduce, or what this integral should be, or how this function should behave -- then Mathematica would often either (1) grind to a halt, or (2) give me a horrible multipage expression that defied any kind of gestalt understanding. And, of course, if I did know pretty well where I was going to go, then it was usually faster and somewhat more illuminating to do it myself on paper. What Mathematica ended up doing for me, and this is nothing to sneeze at, is checking my algebra and math, making sure I hadn't added 1 and 1 and gotten 11, that kind of thing.
My feeling is that Mathematica is great for educational stuff, and useful for quick and simple calculations where you pretty much know the answer but don't want to do invest the time it would take to work it out on paper (and you'll instantly recognize whether the result is what it should be), and generally useful for checking your math. But as a serious tool to do difficult math for you with useful results -- I would say it hasn't worked out so well. There's some curious facet of human intelligence that it lacks, some ability to grasp the essentials of a mathematical expression or process that it doesn't have. I admit I can't defined what "the essentials" of a piece of math are, but I can tell when I understand them and when I don't, and probably anyone who's worked with a lot of complex math can, too. (Indeed, I suspect the truly brilliant at math are those who can grasp these mysterious essentials faster and with more clarity than the rest of us.)
I'm not trying to diss Mathematica per se; it's a substantial accomplishment. But like most of Wolfram's stuff, it falls a smidgen short of being the Singularity-enabling tool its most rabid fans seem to think it is.
Oh that's right, because Physical Review is edited and typeset by elves, who don't need a salary, so WTF is the journal insisting on an income for? Wretched selfish antisocial bastards.
I doubt Ebay could make a compelling argument for this in the court of public opinion.
I'm sure you're right about that, and that's the proper place to try the issue.
That said, the unfortunate aspect of the court of public opinion is that it's only available to people who are very sympathetic victims (poor single crippled mothers, whatever) and who have some kind of megaphone to get their story out. It's rough justice, but hardly equal justice.
You do realize the only way E-Bay could hire the platoons of lawyers and programmers it would take to enforce rights compliance in a nonlazy would be to take it out of user fees, right?
I mean, E-Bay like all of us doesn't know where the magic money tree is, that you merely shake to get plenty of cash to Do What's Right.
I'm guessing E-Bay made a simple calculation:
(1) Do our users want to pay the fees needed for a top-notch rights compliance program?
(2) Uh, no!
(3) OK, let's roll out the cheapest alternative we can.
When (2) changes, so will (3), and not before.
Well, if you say so. You're putting a pretty big premium on the behaviour of a vendor towards some tiny group of sufferers (ex-Scientologists vending E-Meters for profit). I mean, do you apply the same thorough ethical vetting to everyone who offers to sell you stuff? You won't by gas from the corner grocery because the owner verbally abused his wife before she left him? Or his kid is in jail for car theft?
Are you quite sure injecting all this moral judgmentalism into a simple commercial transaction is a good idea? Isn't that the kind of thing people get pissed off about when it comes to crazed right-wing Christian evangelicals, who won't buy a car unless the dealer has been born again?
I'm not saying you're wrong -- you have the right to buy from whom you choose, and the right to apply any criteria you wish to the seller. I'm just asking whether you've fully thought this through. Either you're going to have to ask an awful lot of rather personal moral questions about the people selling you stuff -- doing your share to see us moving towards a theocracy where issues of morals and beliefs pervade every aspect of social life -- or you're going to be hypocritically inconsistent, applying the moral test when the evidence of misbehaviour is brought to your attention (as here) and otherwise letting sleeping dogs lie. That just encourages people to lie and cover up, you know.
Don't be silly. There is no such thing as a "religious discrimination suit" except in very narrow circumstances directly related to your employment, courtesy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, e.g. you can't be fired from your job serving popcorn at the local movieplex just because you're a Jew. (There are some other grounds related to your right to buy a house and get a mortgage, too, provided the seller or mortgage broker meets certain arcane grounds related to whether the Commerce Clause even in the Burger Court's active imagination can be stretched to apply.)
But you have gravely mistaken the First Amendment (the one about religious freedom) if you think it protects you from hostility from your fellow private citizens (or private firms) based on your religion. E-Bay is free to think well of Scientologists and decline to do business with their detractors, just as you are free to decline to buy stuff from a store run by rabid evangelicals who insist on giving you a lecture about letting Jesus into your life before they'll count out your change.
That's the nature of a free and liberal society. We don't ask the government to protect us all the time and in all ways from the opinions -- even the prejudiced, illiberal, dumfuk opinions -- of our fellow citizens, because we are smart enough to realize that the only way it can do so is to take away everybody's liberty. If you want absolute protection from being persecuted by the government for having the "wrong" religious attitudes, then you have to extend the exact same right and privilege to everybody else, including the management of E-Bay.
E-Bay is private firm, and they're free to list or not list sales on their site for any reason whatsoever, including because the "Church" of Scientology asserts some utterly bogus intellectual property right, or because they just feel like it.
The C of S is not "preventing the resale of their product," they're just preventing the resale through E-Bay and with E-Bay's cooperation. You can still put an ad in the paper and sell it, or put up a notice in your neighborhood market, or just walk around town with a sign attached to you saying "E-Meter Cheap!"
And who gives a shit what the lawyers think? Why should the law be relevant here? This isn't a question you want the lawyers thinking about, because you can be damn sure that any solution they think up is going to cost you far more in cash and personal liberty than you would like to part with. Do you want there to be a law telling you what you can and cannot sell on your personal website? Do you want to have to get your Craigslist ad vetted by the police before it can go up? Do you want the FBI to have the right to interrogate you about whether you sold your pet cat or unused furniture to the right people, and in the right way?
Christ, let us keep the lawyers in the fridge, OK? If there's a big market for secondhand E-meters, and E-Bay foolishly foregoes it because they want to keep the Scientologists happy, then let someone start up a private website devoted to reselling E-Meters, and he will make scads of money, more than enough to dare the "Church" to sue him, and get their clueless clock cleaned and get hit for beaucoup lawyer fees on top of it.
But what I suspect is that ex-Scientologists who want to recoup some of the financial loss associated with their recent vacation from rationality are a very small group, and while it kinda sucks that when there's very few of you and a whole lot of someone else (in this case, non-ex-Scientologists, or pre-ex-Scientologists), you have to tread carefully, that's just life in a wide-open democracy. It's not like an intelligent and determined person can't work around this problem fairly easily. I'm sure if I had an E-Meter to sell, I could do it easily enough without E-Bay or the Church getting a clue. Probably my 16-year-old could, too.
The short version of my criticism of your theory is that you've based it entirely on energetics, and have forgotten that the Second Law (i.e. considerations of entropy) dominates in low-energy situations. That's why the crucial question is not so much whether this or that chemical reaction is downhill (very slightly), but whether this or that transformation is entropically favored (or, more plausibly, not too disfavored).
What I would propose instead is that the crucial development in the evolution of life was a segregation between environment and cell, between "out there" and "in here," the development of a cell membrane or similar structure. Once you have segregated a small area, you can start relying on all kinds of relatively rare chemical reactions, because you have a very small area in which you need to control reaction conditions. Things can find each other.
Otherwise, what you're talking about is more or less making the entire ocean, or at least your entire puddle, be the inside of a living system. That's just not plausible.
I think you do your generation too little credit. There are some real entrepreneurs amongst you, the folks who invented Facebook and all that jazz. There are also some very serious and responsible folk, like the guys and gals carrying rifles and building a democratic civilization more or less with their bare hands in Iraq.
I agree the Facebook users and the folks who blog about Obamamania are a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But many others of your generation are out there quietly Getting Stuff Done, and they will be an awesome force when their time of leadership comes.
Be patient. You hear most from the noisy, and they are indeed silly, but there are quiet and serious people out there who will earn the respect of their descendants.
From your comment, I would say I know history way better than you do, if you think China was a fount of invention as late as the 1800s.
Go read the Wikipedia entry on the Opium Wars (1840s) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899) just to get started, and ask yourself how a massive nation could be so humiliated by a handful of foreign devils if they had been "the pinnacle of world innovation and inventions" for the preceding 1500 years.
Your problem is that you've swallowed the pseudo-Marxist collectivist-worshipping crap that passes for "education" in the modern school system, without assessing the actual facts for yourself. Get a viewpoint of your own!
Well, first of all, the question of what it means to be the "leading civilization" is hardly as obvious as you think. Some people would say China's peacefulness and the quality of the average life made them the "leading civilization" in about 1500, just as they might say the fat paychecks and generous benefits of Microsoft, and the stability of the company and modesty of its aims make it the leading software firm today.
Others might say the wildly more dynamic and creative ferment in the West at the same time makes it the more creative and ultimately the "leading" civilization, just as some might say an energetic small start-up with amazing new ideas about computing and the Internet is, despite the instability and occasional abrupt changes in direction, the more "leading edge" company, compared to the Redmond behemoth.
You're free to take the former, widely-accepted, establishment view. But more independent thinkers may not agree. I certainly don't.
Like it or not, China is well on its way to reclaim the lost honor
Yeah right. Just like the Soviet Union was the wave of the future in the 1970s, and Japan, Inc. was going to take over the world in the 1980s, and the Asian Tigers are going to start dominating world trade Any Day Now, and so forth and so on ad infinitum. You get back to me when that "overtaking" has turned into "overtaken," Chicken Little.
As someone who has actually worked with academics and entrepreneurs in this field, I call bullshit on this. No professional scientist or engineer I've met has spent a moment's thought on what any putative "don't play God" faction thinks, or even thinks he needs to. There's zero evidence that any such faction, should it even exist outside of your imagination, has ever had any significant effect on technological advancement in this country.
Furthermore, my experience suggests that the Chinese have a much more substantial and real cultural barrier to any kind of technological progress (which is, I think, one reason why a society civilized a thousand years before the West, and having had a far larger population for far longer, has nevertheless consistently lagged behind the West in terms of invention and innovation, at least on a per capita basis).
The problem is that the Confucian tradition strongly reinforcea an acceptance of existing heirarchy, and of paying the utmost respect to your elders and those better educated and more experienced than yourself. This is antithetical to innovation and invention. The only way you can invent something new is by doing something that older and wiser heads think is foolish. (If they didn't think it was dumb, they'd have done it themselves already.)
Consequently true innovation happens only in a culture that does not value established wisdom too much, which is willing to take some chances on a young, hot-headed, crazy contrarian way of thinking. China has a long and strong cultural tradition of valuing established wisdom, and I think that is a much more significant cultural barrier to innovation than any silly Chicken-Little faddish fear that evangelicals are going to rise up and smite researchers working on nanoscopic gears and motors because the latter weren't described in the Bible.
Yes, both proteins and nucleic acids in very rare circumstances show auto-catalytic activity. But to suggest that this means they descended from molecules that reproduced entirely that way is a giant -- and totally unjustified -- leap of faith. It's like noticing that a screwdriver can, in rare circumstances, be used successfully as a hammer, and then leaping to the conclusion that screwdrives were originally designed for the purpose of hammering in nails. Not logical.
Also the formation of long chains does not necessarily require enzymatic activity, if the correct conditions are present
Making simple organic polymers (e.g. PE or PS) with a polymerization index of a few thousand requires unusual reactions and unusual reaction conditions. Making polymers with polymerization indices in the 100,000s to millions, like DNA, absolutely requires some very, very reliable method of favoring chain growth over chain shrinkage.
Yes, you could make it cold, to disfavor the dS > 0 reaction. But to build up a huge chain you'd have to make it so cold the environment couldn't supply activation energy for anything other than a massively exothermic reaction, which brings us to...
Third thing is that you do not need plentiful products at first, only stable ones that can survive until enough precursors come around for a copy to be made
Life does not use "stable" molecules, molecules that are the result of strongly exothermic reactions. Indeed, stable molecules are of little use to life. What life needs is metastable molecules, molecules that are barely stable, so that they can easily be created and degraded. If, every time you created a genetic molecule, it was very stable, there'd be no way to get rid of it, or modify it, or for it to participate in any kind of chemical reaction. It would be inert, useless, "sludge" on the bottom of your cellular "engine."
Just look at the existing molecules of life: Proteins are hardly what any chemist would call "stable." Raise the temperature barely to the boiling point of water and they denature and decompose. But this is important, because it allows cells to easily modify proteins, digest them and reconstruct them elsewhere, et cetera. They are the bricks and mortar of cells not so much because they are durable, but because they aren't, because they can easily be taken apart and rebuilt, over and over again.
A genetic molecule that is so stable it can wait around a long time for some necessary partner to appear is a genetic molecule that is useless to life, because it can't easily be changed.
What you're missing is the fact that self-replication is a bit of a misnomer when applied to the only model of genetic molecule we know of. Nucleic acids can't really self-replicate -- they need the help of proteins. Similarly, proteins need the help of nucleic acids to replicate. The question of how these different molecules find each other is by no means trivial.
You're also forgetting that the ratio of concentration of big molecules to small precursors goes something like the inverse of the square of the concentration of the small guys. Plentiful precursors does not imply plentiful products.
Geez, or perhaps user applications like fucking browsers shouldn't run with system-level God privileges.
But that's a whole 'nother (mega)thread...
Goodness, yes. Indeed, for all we know, a very salty liquid water environment helps get life started.
After all, one way to describe a living cell (leaving out its ability to replicate) is a system that maintains across a membrane various ion concentration gradients and uses them for various purposes. Surely one of the most primitive possible cells one can imagine is just a closed membrane with membrane-bound ion pumps actively maintaining a different ionic environment inside than outside, and using the gradient when necessary to effect chemical transport across the membrane.
We focus a lot on the issue of replication and imagine this must have been the first part of life to get going, that there were first a lot of free-floating self-replicating genetic molecules. But perhaps this is naive. In an ocean (or even big puddle of water) those molecules will never find each other. Maybe the first step in life is walling off the outside world with a membrane and controlling the ionic strength inside, thus defining a compact "walled garden" in which something delicate -- like self-replication of big genetic molecules -- can take place safely. And perhaps such a system is more likely to arise in a system that has high ion strength to begin with, and most likely larger random concentration gradients that can drive some kind of organization process.
So what's your point? Should we attempt to pursue every conceivable technological development that might shave energy usage, even by teensy percentages? That's not possible. We don't have infinite resources.
My point is just that goals should always be prioritized, either personally or as a nation. Assuming energy efficiency is a reasonable national goal, technologies which improve it should be pursued in order of their likely cost-benefit ratio. That means we work on stuff like improved traffic flow before we work on LED lights everywhere. How much gasoline is wasted by cars idling on the 5000 miles of Los Angeles freeway system twice a day? Compare that to how much energy you might save if you got a realistic fraction of people to switch to LED bulbs.
Or for that matter, how much energy is wasted by cars that aren't properly tuned up? By building codes that encourage saving money up front on things like sensible window placement and good insulation, at the cost of several decades of magnified heating and cooling costs?
The thing to do is rank all these things in order of what kind of savings you can get for what kind of investment, and start from the top. When I look at (1) the small amount of electricity used for lighting, (2) the modest gains in efficiency represented by white-light LEDs over incandescents, (3) the substantial cost of converting millions of lighting fixtures from trailer-park porch lights to kitchen lights in ritzy mansions to LEDs, and (4) the fact that most people like incandescent light and it will take massive subsidies or heavy-handed regulation to get them to switch....I have the strong suspicion that this particular investment is not likely to pay off.
I could be wrong, of course. But the question must be asked, and a credible positive answer given, before one can say big government investment in LED lights makes any kind of sense.
Of course it is. That's because you're only one person. But it isn't impressive to an entire nation, or an entire world, just the way you probably thought your mother and father were enormous mighty giants when you were six months old, but you don't now that you have a larger perspective.
Let's put it another way: divide that world consumption by the world population to see what your share is. The answer is less than a tenth of a barrel, or about 4 gallons of oil a year. You probably burn 100 times more oil in your car every year. Would you pay a few hundred dollars to save 4 gallons of oil a year? Or can you think, perhaps, of some better uses for that money, even if you restrict yourself to energy conservation?
The goal in life is not to randomly pursue every goal that is desirable, willy nilly. The goal is to pursue desirable goals in order of their importance. First you make sure you have a job you like, then you make sure your cubicle is decorated pleasantly. If you reverse the order in which you pursue these goals, you will not be happy.
Similarly, the sub-goals under the overall goal of energy efficiency should be pursued in order of their importance. Better traffic management on major city freeways -- linking cars through low-powered radios, say, and adding GPS receivers and some good traffic algorithms in an on-board module that can suggest optimal routes to drivers in real time -- would save more oil in a week than replacing everyone's desk lamp with an LED lamp would save in a century.
Building codes for sunny climates that take into account air-conditioning costs, so that, for example, windows are placed strategically to minimize solar heating, roofs are designed to avoid trapping hot air, attic fans are routinely installed, windows are double-glazed and weather-stripped to avoid heat losses, etc., would also save much more.
The plain fact is that most energy we use is used to either move heat from one place to another, or to move things from one place to another. Improving efficiency in those areas is the low-hanging fruit. Improving lighting efficiency is a glitzy feel-good measure that does very little, except that if it sucks up all the oxygen in a public energy efficiency impulse, it prevents us from doing stuff that really would have a serious impact.
am I susceptible to a man-in-the-way-of-my-light attack?
Sound like you need one of these.
According to government data, only about 9% of the household electricity used in the United States is used for lighting. Most household electricity goes to refrigeration, water heating, air-conditioning, space heating, clothes drying, and so forth. That's why electricity usage spikes in the summer and in hot weather.
For that matter, only about 20% of our entire energy usage is represented by electricity, the rest being direct use of thermal energy (i.e. burning stuff like oil and gas) in factories, home heating furnaces, and in cars, trucks and railroad engines.
So overall the amount of our energy usage that goes to household lighting is 0.09 x 0.20 = about 2% of our total energy usage. If you manage to make lighting that is, say, 10 times more efficient than incandescent, then you will replace 2% with 0.2%, for a grand savings of 1.8%. Not impressive.
Blacklight Power is a well-known combination of perpetual-motion and pyramid scams.
Well, speculating about c varying during the lifetime of the Universe is quite different than speculating that it varies from galaxy to galaxy, but yes, I've heard this.
I even have a theory of my own! Suppose c begins at infinity and decrease to 0. When c is infinity, then there is no distance dimension, since everything happens everywhere at once. There is only time. The Universe "occupies" a point, in the sense that it occupies anything at all. That is, we've the primordial Big Bang.
As soon as c decreases from infinity, distance acquires meaning, and things can happen here but not there. And as c gets lower and lower, the time it takes for signals to get from here to there increases, i.e. the Universe expands.
When c falls to zero, there is no more time dimension, there is only space. Nothing ever changes, because each individual particle (or generic degree of freedom) is locked into utter isolation, unable to interact with anything else.
We can also finally explain the Second Law of thermodynamics: the Universe begins in a pure quantum state, since it has perfect communication over its entirety. It has an entropy of zero. As c falls, larger and larger chunks of it fall out of communication, and it begins to take on more of the character of a mixed state. That is, entropy begins to take on meaning, at least over large distances, and the entropy of the Universe rises above zero. The further c falls, the smaller the chunks that don't communicate with each other, and the higher the entropy. When c reaches zero, each and every degree of freedom can be in any quantum state -- because the requirement of symmetry or antisymmetry no longer applies, and because conservation of energy can no longer be meaningfully enforced -- and the entropy of the Universe reaches its theoretical maximum. Voila! The Second Law appears at intermediate times.
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First of all, let's make it clear what an amazing level of prediction we're talking about here. Compared to predicting the entire spectrum of effects on society, decades and centuries into the future, of a whole new technology, predicting who will win the 2008 US Presidential election, or which stocks will rise in the year ahead and which will fall, is complete child's play. Predicting what team will win the Super Bowl would be something you could do half drunk.
It's not just a question of an intelligence massive enough to comprehend a bazillion different factors, the hopes and ambitions and prejudices and tendencies of half a billion people, but also being able to do so in the near absence of data. Because we know very little, in detail, about our society. We know only such gross overall measures as our total national income, how many of us there are, how many are registered Republican and Democrat, our age distribution, our stated religious preferences, and so forth.
But do we even have the merest beginnings of data that would tell us as much about strangers in Idaho or Poughkeepsie as we know about, say, our own children, our own parents, or our own spouse? Not at all. And keep in mind how easy it is to make mistakes even when you predict the behaviour of those nearest and dearest to you, about whom you know enormously more than you know about strangers thousands of miles away, perhaps from cultural backgrounds totally different from yours.
Furthermore, even if you have the intelligence and access to the data, and form the correct conclusions, how do you prove they're correct to everyone else? Because, unless you live in a dictatorship and happen to be the dictator, you aren't going to be able to do anything about your insight unless you convince a whole lot of other, ordinary people that you can see the future. Hence our putative Messiah here has to not only be superintelligent and nearly omniscient, he has to have superhuman persuasive power.
This is an amazing fact about human beings. They understand perfectly well how difficult it is to predict the behaviour and reactions of people they know well -- what will the boss say about this screw-up? How will my teenage daughter react to this new restriction? Will my wife like this birthday present or not? And they're usually fairly humble about their ability to predict that behaviour, or modify it by gentle persuasion.
But when it comes to millions of strangers, all of a sudden it's seen as fairly easy to (1) predict how they'll react to any random change, and (2) gently persuade them (so you don't have to institute a police state) to act in the proper way.
Doesn't that make any logical consistency alarm bells go off?