Despite all the navigation systems available to the modern world, even to the United States Navy, we still have gaps in our knowledge of the ocean. Recently a US sub crashed into an undersea mountain! Cold War-era data on the seafloor has been declassified, but still our navigation isn't all that great.
Without further comment, I think it's worth pointing out the recent case of Cetaceans v. Bush on this topic. (386 F.3d 1169 (9th Cir. 2004)) The court ruled that the world's dolphins do not have standing to sue.
No, I mean, if government can auction off the ability to speak by radio on certain frequencies and impose controls over what can be said (see eg. the "Fairness Doctrine"), then why don't the same justifications used for radio also justify controls over normal speech?
(Obvious response: "But that'd violate the First Amendment."
Response to that: "Yes, but don't the controls over radio speech do that too?")
Will this have the ability to run Pygame, the main game toolkit for Python?
On a different note, Vernor Vinge's recent novel Rainbows End says something about a popular online game that's an obvious knockoff of a certain pocket monster game, mentioning that some of the creatures involved were designed by Third World kids. Maybe we'll see the OLPC spawn some kind of loose-protocol indie game vaguely comparable to GURPS.
I've never understood the argument that the "airwaves," the radio portion of the EM spectrum, a public resource, therefore government-owned and controlled. You can transmit many radio signals at once in the same place without interference -- especially with modern frequency-hopping tech -- yet you can't easily have many people transmitting "signals" by sound waves in the same area, at once, without interference. Since the air is considered a public resource, isn't there at least as strong a case for government regulation of audio as for its control of radio?
In the AI field, nobody has actually proven they know what they're doing yet, so you can't be too far behind!
As an amateur programmer who's dabbled with AI and game design, some things I found helpful and interesting were:
-Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct (readable and entertaining)
-Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (brilliant but baffling, touching on a lot of topics, some of which are worth skipping over; not the best book to pick up lightly)
-Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (more AI-focused, describing how you might model creativity on a computer)
-Chapman's Vision, Instruction and Action (obscure book by an MIT student who built an AI to play a Gauntlet-like game)
-Playing with the Python programming language, which is free, multi-platform, easy to learn and use, and has a good game library (Pygame) and a developer community. Look for the free online book "Dive Into Python" as one guide, or just start playing. Why use a super-efficient macho language at this point when the current limitation on AI isn't raw speed?
-Looking up a few of the famous real AIs and thinking about their limitations: ELIZA, ALICE, Cyc, and SHRDLU for instance. A version of Hofstadter's "Metacat" is available online along with the others, I think. Also look into real robots like Stanley, RoboSapien, Kismet, Cog, and Qrio, which may change your perception of what a robot can be like.
-Writing fiction! How do you think an AI should work? How would it deal with real-world problems? Reading SF is good food for thought too; what do you think of Asimov's Laws?
-Joining the Robitron discussion list for talk about AI by people associated with the Loebner Prize Contest, though often from a perspective I disagree with.
Let me know if you do get into this! Even if you don't build anything yourself, that material will help tell you what's been going on in the field and some of the ongoing debates.
I flipped through that (several times!) and found it interesting, but then I ended up buying Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies instead. It's a follow-up to the philosophical Godel, Escher, Bach, in which his research group tries to model creativity using computers. His general technique is different from neural network modeling. Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works is also interesting, and well-written.
I hang out, via e-mail, with people involved in the Loebner Prize Contest, so I have kind of a skewed view of AI. The people there focus on the "chatterbot" approach, descendants of ELIZA, and some of them actually think that's a good model of intelligence. (They're wrong.) I'd like to see some kind of open-source AI project, but what I know of the existing ones is that each backer has their own fixed theory of the mind, and the confusion of programming languages and other details make it hard to coalesce around any one idea.
A recent book (reviewed here) denounces the entire concept of manned spaceflight as the useless "madness" of boys who never outgrew childish games. Milder critics of the space program ask why we should send humans into space when automated probes are supposedly more useful for their price. Not too long ago, Discover Magazine had a cover article asking whether, maybe, space is so innately dangerous (with all that radiation) that we should avoid going back until we have robots or gengineered humans (!) able to cope with it. Others such as Vox Day, hater of humanity, begin using their word processors to declare that "science has outlived its usefulness to Mankind." And here, we have NASA saying hold everything; we're afraid of the dust.
(An excerpt from the book: "If there is a lesson to be learned, it is in the futility of seeking fulfillment in outer space. We need to judge ourselves by who we are, not by where we go... Hubris took America to the Moon, a barren, soulless place where humans do not belong... If the voyage has had any positive benefit at all, it has reminded us that everything that is good reside on Earth.")
"We're not worthy, it's not safe, nothing we've ever done is worthwhile." I see this line of thinking as suicidal for the human race. If transhumanism is a supposedly unrealistic fantasy of doing more things than have ever been done before, then shall we call this sentiment "subhumanism," the desire for people to set their sights below what's been accomplished already?
Re:why not spend 1 billion on asteroid location
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
This article was about Lunar dust, and it turns into a denunciation of the Iraq War? It would be equally justified to say "We can't afford it because we're spending so much on the prescription drug program/the war on drugs/illegal immigration policy/any other spending item," but instead we pin everything on the war.
I'm not sure I agree that laws in general are a socialist agenda.
That doesn't sound like what I said, which was a complaint against specific laws that "demand substantially increased government control over our lives, to the point of seriously proposing forced rationing."
If you really believe that "people who are contributing a disproportionate amount to pollution are trying to kill [you]," then call the police and have them arrested for attempted murder. But realistically, since there's absolutely no intent to harm you in any way, the best charge you could get is reckless homicide.
Yeah, sorry; I was thinking only of American copyright law. Here in the US, I mean, the copyright term has been repeatedly extended as what's been called "forever, on the installment plan." So it's not a matter of creators being paid for their work, which is fine, but creators' kids and grandkids and great-grandkids milking their 69-years-dead ancestor's work.
Note that at this rate of repeated extensions (>1 year/yr), there will never be any new out-of-copyright music except for works released to the public domain by their creators' consent.
Sure, there are plenty of environmental problems that deserve our attention. I don't think anyone disputes that part. The big questions are 1) how to deal with those problems, 2) with respect to global warming, whether the threat is real, major, and manageable enough to justify drastic action, and 3) what form (if any) that action should take.
The tendency among activists convinced that the answer to (2) is "yes" is to demand substantially increased government control over our lives, to the point of seriously proposing forced rationing via "carbon credit cards". See also here. (Friends of the Earth reacted to the proposal by saying it wasn't drastic enough.) So, part of the motivation for "arguing against global warming" (on its reality or on the need for action) is that GW is apparently being used, by some, to push a socialist agenda.
These days more regulations and taxes have been established as the answer to all problems, and the automatic first reaction of politicians to any situation regardless of party. It's not only oppressive, it's unimaginative.
There's a parallel here with the "shipbreaking" industry (photo essay) in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries. It's dirty, dangerous work, and people willingly do it because it pays and it's one of the country's main sources of metal. What Greenpeace and others are lobbying for is to forbid those people from being able to volunteer for the job, awful as it is.
There's a former Canadian government official calling for the release of secret alien technology to fight global warming! I'd be more interested in the power armor, myself.
What you say about journals is true, but the same is true of books in general now that reading electronic versions is becoming practical. (Still waiting for an e-ink book with pages, though.) There's money to be made in selling a physical object that's more expensive than it needs to be.
Has anyone yet put together a physical artifact containing a few thousand key scientific papers, blueprints, engineers' memoirs, and raw data collections? Not that we have any real use for such a thing at the moment, but it'd be cool to have the sort of object that could theoretically boost a civilization's technology level or bootstrap a space colony.
Heh. I wrote an article years ago making the case for that sort of "UFO."
Sagan's book blames widespread belief in the alien kind of UFO on bad science education and a set of popular media that make no effort to distinguish between magical Atlantean healing crystals and legitimate science. Surprisingly, I found the Roswell UFO Museum fairly rational, willing to show the interesting stories behind purported alien encounters. (In one incident the "alien wreckage" happened to resemble the work of the discoverer's friend, who practiced an obscure Japanese metalworking technique. The museum freely explained this.) Now that Sagan is dead, we need more people willing and able to articulate real science to the public.
I'm reminded of Ghost In the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex (the anime series), in which a secretive group treats kids with a form of Internet addiction. The treatment actually consists of using them to create and crack security codes.
You're probably right that "big scientific ideas have to be assimilated" over time. In fact there's some evidence that even the heliocentric theory of the solar system is still in doubt by enough people to make a stink. Other data about US religious beliefs claims that 47% of Americans agree with the statement, "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
While in the strictest sense "evolution" refers only to changes in distribution of alleles in a population of living creatures, the concept of groups changing in response to selection pressures applies in some way to pretty much every field of science. It's needlessly limiting to say evolution is only what Darwin said it was.
I don't have a problem with 'macro evolution'. My question is how on earth did a self replicating cell form by chance in the first place. That's what just seems to boggle my mind; how did all the necessary parts get into the right place at the right time...
Good question! While evolution is typically portrayed as explaining how life got from The First Cell to Modern Man, it doesn't seem to address where life came from in the first place. We could invoke a "God of the gaps" here, maybe justifying Deism. But we probably don't need to.
Already there's been some speculation into ideas such as the "RNA World" hypothesis and microspheres, which give a tentative, partial explanation. The "RNA World" idea is the notion that life started not with DNA -- and the chicken-and-egg problem that DNA codes for protein and protein reads DNA -- but with the simpler structures of RNA. We've found sequences like the "hammerhead RNA" that have at least partial ability to serve as both a data storage method and a system for copying that data. "Microspheres" refer to the fact that some cell-like structures self-assemble without any DNA or other directive force. You know that cells are formed of a two-layered membrane of fat (lipid) molecules around them, yes? As it turns out, because these molecules have one water-seeking and one water-avoiding end, mixing them with water makes them spontaneously arrange themselves into (among other things) two-layered membranes. And the lipids themselves aren't very complex. You can get an impressive and useful structure without any conscious mind involved.
So, one possibility is that out of the stew of various molecules existing on early Earth, there appeared globs of fatty membranes that separated "inside" from "outside," incidentally offering some protection to some very early chemicals that tended to make more of themselves appear. Just as fire releases energy that allows the fire to spread, the blind physical processes of organic chemistry allowed the lucky appearance -- painfully slowly -- of a handful of structures slightly good at copying themselves. And then all hell broke loose.
Maybe. We don't know for certain that that's what happened, especially in the details of the chemistry involved, although in a few decades we should know a lot more. So, if your main problem with evolution is the apparent impossibility of life's ultimate origin, please consider that impersonal physical forces offer a possible explanation for that as well.
As for religion, my own take on this part of the dispute is that scientists mostly (mostly) stick to the facts and claim authority only to the extent that they have evidence or at least a decent hypothesis; while religionists tend to make claims that are not factually well-supported and then demand equal or greater respect for those beliefs. The point here is not to disprove a particular religion, not outright, but to say we shouldn't believe things beyond what the facts justify -- and certainly not base public policy on unjustified beliefs. Science may not be able to answer the question of whether a Deist God exists, but it can say that the miracle stories of particular theistic religions just aren't supported by the facts and that there's no honest basis for believing in them. Or at least science can debate that point! Whether praying for someone can regrow a severed limb is within the realm of science to test. When I and other science types get frustrated in this debate, it's often because a religious believer is claiming we have no right to challenge their beliefs, when we normally consider that kind of challenge a service to those we criticize and even as a necessary part of democracy and capitalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite all the navigation systems available to the modern world, even to the United States Navy, we still have gaps in our knowledge of the ocean. Recently a US sub crashed into an undersea mountain! Cold War-era data on the seafloor has been declassified, but still our navigation isn't all that great.
By the way, here is a free oceanography textbook!
Without further comment, I think it's worth pointing out the recent case of Cetaceans v. Bush on this topic. (386 F.3d 1169 (9th Cir. 2004)) The court ruled that the world's dolphins do not have standing to sue.
No, I mean, if government can auction off the ability to speak by radio on certain frequencies and impose controls over what can be said (see eg. the "Fairness Doctrine"), then why don't the same justifications used for radio also justify controls over normal speech?
(Obvious response: "But that'd violate the First Amendment."
Response to that: "Yes, but don't the controls over radio speech do that too?")
Will this have the ability to run Pygame, the main game toolkit for Python?
On a different note, Vernor Vinge's recent novel Rainbows End says something about a popular online game that's an obvious knockoff of a certain pocket monster game, mentioning that some of the creatures involved were designed by Third World kids. Maybe we'll see the OLPC spawn some kind of loose-protocol indie game vaguely comparable to GURPS.
I've never understood the argument that the "airwaves," the radio portion of the EM spectrum, a public resource, therefore government-owned and controlled. You can transmit many radio signals at once in the same place without interference -- especially with modern frequency-hopping tech -- yet you can't easily have many people transmitting "signals" by sound waves in the same area, at once, without interference. Since the air is considered a public resource, isn't there at least as strong a case for government regulation of audio as for its control of radio?
In the AI field, nobody has actually proven they know what they're doing yet, so you can't be too far behind!
As an amateur programmer who's dabbled with AI and game design, some things I found helpful and interesting were:
-Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct (readable and entertaining)
-Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (brilliant but baffling, touching on a lot of topics, some of which are worth skipping over; not the best book to pick up lightly)
-Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (more AI-focused, describing how you might model creativity on a computer)
-Chapman's Vision, Instruction and Action (obscure book by an MIT student who built an AI to play a Gauntlet-like game)
-Playing with the Python programming language, which is free, multi-platform, easy to learn and use, and has a good game library (Pygame) and a developer community. Look for the free online book "Dive Into Python" as one guide, or just start playing. Why use a super-efficient macho language at this point when the current limitation on AI isn't raw speed?
-Looking up a few of the famous real AIs and thinking about their limitations: ELIZA, ALICE, Cyc, and SHRDLU for instance. A version of Hofstadter's "Metacat" is available online along with the others, I think. Also look into real robots like Stanley, RoboSapien, Kismet, Cog, and Qrio, which may change your perception of what a robot can be like.
-Writing fiction! How do you think an AI should work? How would it deal with real-world problems? Reading SF is good food for thought too; what do you think of Asimov's Laws?
-Joining the Robitron discussion list for talk about AI by people associated with the Loebner Prize Contest, though often from a perspective I disagree with.
Let me know if you do get into this! Even if you don't build anything yourself, that material will help tell you what's been going on in the field and some of the ongoing debates.
I flipped through that (several times!) and found it interesting, but then I ended up buying Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies instead. It's a follow-up to the philosophical Godel, Escher, Bach, in which his research group tries to model creativity using computers. His general technique is different from neural network modeling. Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works is also interesting, and well-written.
I hang out, via e-mail, with people involved in the Loebner Prize Contest, so I have kind of a skewed view of AI. The people there focus on the "chatterbot" approach, descendants of ELIZA, and some of them actually think that's a good model of intelligence. (They're wrong.) I'd like to see some kind of open-source AI project, but what I know of the existing ones is that each backer has their own fixed theory of the mind, and the confusion of programming languages and other details make it hard to coalesce around any one idea.
A recent book (reviewed here) denounces the entire concept of manned spaceflight as the useless "madness" of boys who never outgrew childish games. Milder critics of the space program ask why we should send humans into space when automated probes are supposedly more useful for their price. Not too long ago, Discover Magazine had a cover article asking whether, maybe, space is so innately dangerous (with all that radiation) that we should avoid going back until we have robots or gengineered humans (!) able to cope with it. Others such as Vox Day, hater of humanity, begin using their word processors to declare that "science has outlived its usefulness to Mankind." And here, we have NASA saying hold everything; we're afraid of the dust.
(An excerpt from the book:
"If there is a lesson to be learned, it is in the futility of seeking fulfillment in outer space. We need to judge ourselves by who we are, not by where we go... Hubris took America to the Moon, a barren, soulless place where humans do not belong... If the voyage has had any positive benefit at all, it has reminded us that everything that is good reside on Earth.")
"We're not worthy, it's not safe, nothing we've ever done is worthwhile." I see this line of thinking as suicidal for the human race. If transhumanism is a supposedly unrealistic fantasy of doing more things than have ever been done before, then shall we call this sentiment "subhumanism," the desire for people to set their sights below what's been accomplished already?
This article was about Lunar dust, and it turns into a denunciation of the Iraq War? It would be equally justified to say "We can't afford it because we're spending so much on the prescription drug program/the war on drugs/illegal immigration policy/any other spending item," but instead we pin everything on the war.
All right, we'll keep that in mind the next time there's a world war.
For that I suggest Toymallet $.40, a game of tabletop toy combat.
I'm not sure I agree that laws in general are a socialist agenda.
That doesn't sound like what I said, which was a complaint against specific laws that "demand substantially increased government control over our lives, to the point of seriously proposing forced rationing."
If you really believe that "people who are contributing a disproportionate amount to pollution are trying to kill [you]," then call the police and have them arrested for attempted murder. But realistically, since there's absolutely no intent to harm you in any way, the best charge you could get is reckless homicide.
Yeah, sorry; I was thinking only of American copyright law. Here in the US, I mean, the copyright term has been repeatedly extended as what's been called "forever, on the installment plan." So it's not a matter of creators being paid for their work, which is fine, but creators' kids and grandkids and great-grandkids milking their 69-years-dead ancestor's work.
Note that at this rate of repeated extensions (>1 year/yr), there will never be any new out-of-copyright music except for works released to the public domain by their creators' consent.
It could be, but hopefully we will "infect" Mars before long with terraforming bacteria.
Sure, there are plenty of environmental problems that deserve our attention. I don't think anyone disputes that part. The big questions are 1) how to deal with those problems, 2) with respect to global warming, whether the threat is real, major, and manageable enough to justify drastic action, and 3) what form (if any) that action should take.
The tendency among activists convinced that the answer to (2) is "yes" is to demand substantially increased government control over our lives, to the point of seriously proposing forced rationing via "carbon credit cards". See also here. (Friends of the Earth reacted to the proposal by saying it wasn't drastic enough.) So, part of the motivation for "arguing against global warming" (on its reality or on the need for action) is that GW is apparently being used, by some, to push a socialist agenda.
Some of us would rather not have our own clothing reporting our location and activities elsewhere!
These days more regulations and taxes have been established as the answer to all problems, and the automatic first reaction of politicians to any situation regardless of party. It's not only oppressive, it's unimaginative.
There's a parallel here with the "shipbreaking" industry (photo essay) in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries. It's dirty, dangerous work, and people willingly do it because it pays and it's one of the country's main sources of metal. What Greenpeace and others are lobbying for is to forbid those people from being able to volunteer for the job, awful as it is.
There's a former Canadian government official calling for the release of secret alien technology to fight global warming! I'd be more interested in the power armor, myself.
What you say about journals is true, but the same is true of books in general now that reading electronic versions is becoming practical. (Still waiting for an e-ink book with pages, though.) There's money to be made in selling a physical object that's more expensive than it needs to be.
Has anyone yet put together a physical artifact containing a few thousand key scientific papers, blueprints, engineers' memoirs, and raw data collections? Not that we have any real use for such a thing at the moment, but it'd be cool to have the sort of object that could theoretically boost a civilization's technology level or bootstrap a space colony.
Heh. I wrote an article years ago making the case for that sort of "UFO."
Sagan's book blames widespread belief in the alien kind of UFO on bad science education and a set of popular media that make no effort to distinguish between magical Atlantean healing crystals and legitimate science. Surprisingly, I found the Roswell UFO Museum fairly rational, willing to show the interesting stories behind purported alien encounters. (In one incident the "alien wreckage" happened to resemble the work of the discoverer's friend, who practiced an obscure Japanese metalworking technique. The museum freely explained this.) Now that Sagan is dead, we need more people willing and able to articulate real science to the public.
I'm reminded of Ghost In the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex (the anime series), in which a secretive group treats kids with a form of Internet addiction. The treatment actually consists of using them to create and crack security codes.
You're probably right that "big scientific ideas have to be assimilated" over time. In fact there's some evidence that even the heliocentric theory of the solar system is still in doubt by enough people to make a stink. Other data about US religious beliefs claims that 47% of Americans agree with the statement, "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
While in the strictest sense "evolution" refers only to changes in distribution of alleles in a population of living creatures, the concept of groups changing in response to selection pressures applies in some way to pretty much every field of science. It's needlessly limiting to say evolution is only what Darwin said it was.
I don't have a problem with 'macro evolution'. My question is how on earth did a self replicating cell form by chance in the first place. That's what just seems to boggle my mind; how did all the necessary parts get into the right place at the right time...
Good question! While evolution is typically portrayed as explaining how life got from The First Cell to Modern Man, it doesn't seem to address where life came from in the first place. We could invoke a "God of the gaps" here, maybe justifying Deism. But we probably don't need to.
Already there's been some speculation into ideas such as the "RNA World" hypothesis and microspheres, which give a tentative, partial explanation. The "RNA World" idea is the notion that life started not with DNA -- and the chicken-and-egg problem that DNA codes for protein and protein reads DNA -- but with the simpler structures of RNA. We've found sequences like the "hammerhead RNA" that have at least partial ability to serve as both a data storage method and a system for copying that data. "Microspheres" refer to the fact that some cell-like structures self-assemble without any DNA or other directive force. You know that cells are formed of a two-layered membrane of fat (lipid) molecules around them, yes? As it turns out, because these molecules have one water-seeking and one water-avoiding end, mixing them with water makes them spontaneously arrange themselves into (among other things) two-layered membranes. And the lipids themselves aren't very complex. You can get an impressive and useful structure without any conscious mind involved.
So, one possibility is that out of the stew of various molecules existing on early Earth, there appeared globs of fatty membranes that separated "inside" from "outside," incidentally offering some protection to some very early chemicals that tended to make more of themselves appear. Just as fire releases energy that allows the fire to spread, the blind physical processes of organic chemistry allowed the lucky appearance -- painfully slowly -- of a handful of structures slightly good at copying themselves. And then all hell broke loose.
Maybe. We don't know for certain that that's what happened, especially in the details of the chemistry involved, although in a few decades we should know a lot more. So, if your main problem with evolution is the apparent impossibility of life's ultimate origin, please consider that impersonal physical forces offer a possible explanation for that as well.
As for religion, my own take on this part of the dispute is that scientists mostly (mostly) stick to the facts and claim authority only to the extent that they have evidence or at least a decent hypothesis; while religionists tend to make claims that are not factually well-supported and then demand equal or greater respect for those beliefs. The point here is not to disprove a particular religion, not outright, but to say we shouldn't believe things beyond what the facts justify -- and certainly not base public policy on unjustified beliefs. Science may not be able to answer the question of whether a Deist God exists, but it can say that the miracle stories of particular theistic religions just aren't supported by the facts and that there's no honest basis for believing in them. Or at least science can debate that point! Whether praying for someone can regrow a severed limb is within the realm of science to test. When I and other science types get frustrated in this debate, it's often because a religious believer is claiming we have no right to challenge their beliefs, when we normally consider that kind of challenge a service to those we criticize and even as a necessary part of democracy and capitalism.