Re:I've got an even better idea
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 2
What good is an entire array of solar-power stations somewhere if it's an overcast day and NONE of them recieve power?
OK, you have to siphon off some of the G$50 to pay for reservoirs, big pumps and turbines. On the really sunny days you pump waters up a mountain into the reservoir. On the cloudy days you generate hydroelectric power with the water you pumped up. And if it's cloudy for a really long time you use the money you earnt renting out jetskis to tourists visiting the reservoir and spend it on importing power.
I've got an even better idea
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why not spend $50,000,000,000 on solar panels for use on Earth. This proposal has a number of cool features:
You don't have to send lots of equipment up to the moon
You don't have the hassle of building microwave transmitters and receivers to transmit the energy to the Earth
They couldn't easily be hijacked to make a nasty weapon
The equipment would be easy to service. You wouldn't need regular flights carrying crews to the moon.
If we have digital intellectual property rights it seems entirely reasonable that companies go out of their way to protect theirs and that other companies provide what is needed to enable them to do that (and protect their own ability to do that as well - hence the patent). I don't see any alternative besides (1) abolishing digital IP or (2) having the government manage digital property rights. Both seem scary to me.
If there is life on Europa I'd speculate that it was more likely that it shares a common history with life on earth (and maybe DNA) than that it arose independently.
It's probably not completely crazy to suggest that biological material could have been carried from Earth to Europa or vice versa (though trying to work out a viable trajectory for volcanic ejecta, say, that takes less than 4 billion years, might be tricky!).
It seems to me less likely that life would have arisen completely independently in both environments. (If life could have arisen independently on two planets in the solar system I'd expect the universe to be teeming with life and we'd have received a message from them!)
I don't see why people get so worked up about the Anthropic Principle. It's trivially true (at least in its less extreme varieties). If you want to reason probabilistically, say, about the universe, you have to make sure you condition everything on the fact that you are there to reason about it.
There's a nice example that goes back to Boltzmann. Given a disordered set of particles (call them a mini 'universe') you can write an expression for their entropy. If you pick a 'typical' state it will have high entropy and if you let the system evolve chances are the entropy will stay high. Let the system evolve for long enough and you expect the entropy to dip down low occasionally through chance. Suppose the entropy needs to be very low for life to evolve in the system. Then typically any organism that evolves in this system is going to get a skewed view: they're going to find that they live in a universe with unusually low entropy. Their scientists might spend ages trying to figure out just why they live in a low entropy universe but from an 'observer' outside their universe there's nothing surprising - their universe is a long expanse of extereme boredom with occasional low entropy islands, some of which contain life.
Suppose that out there there are lots of different universes - not connected to each other and with different laws of physics. Some laws of physics are conducive to the existemce of life, some aren't. It's trivially obvious that we live in one of those universes that is suitable for life. It may actually be the case that only one in a billion universes are suitable for life. It doesn't matter how unlikely a randomly picked set of laws of physics is conducive to life - we clearly live on one that is. That means that the universe may actually look like it's tailored for the existence of life.
There are various variants of this including SAP (strong anthropic principle), WAP (weak AP) and CRAP (well...Martin Gardner invented that one and it somes up is whole opnion of AP). But basically they don't say much more than "there is life in the universe and that gives us a biased point of view".
Or Permutation City (also by Greg Egan) where the universe that exists is one that has within it a point of view from which it seems ordered enough for someone to have a point of view...
...The Cosmological Anthropic Principle. It has some nice discussion of how the symmetries we observe in particle physics might 'emerge' from low energy regimes of physical systems that are in some sense lawless. In general it's an interesting book that discusses why we have order in the universe quite a bit. But the part on order apparently emerging from a lawless universe seems to be what the current discussion is based on.
I mean, something is good scientific work, or it's not, and the politics are irrelevant.
Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted. But even before reading what Gould has to say on the matter you can guarantee he'll settle for the more recent end of the spectrum (barring the views of cretinists) because that's more convenient for his political views. Maybe there will come a day when we'll have a pretty accurate handle on when this human lived - but that's quite a way off and anything published now on that subject is likely to be a collection of facts with gaps between filled in by speculation and opinion.
For a more concrete example check out Wonderful Life where he makes his strongest case that there is no direction to evolution (a thoroughly bizarre claim IMHO). Armed with this opinion he makes a great many suggestions about how various pieces of fossil evidence should be interpreted. It turns out that the great majority of these claims were actually demonstrated likely to be false in a relatively small time (do a web search on the names of the various fossils that he talks about in the book). A little thought will reveal the real reason why he argues against a direction to evolution.
However I'd hate to put people off Gould. Much as he pisses me off no end he's very worth reading and The Mismeasure of Man is an excellent book. Same goes for Wonderful Life.
There is a very good exposition of all of these issues in Steven J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man
Oh yes. Stephen J Gould is well known as being completely unbiased in his expositions. I mean there's no way Gould would let his political ideas have any influence on what he reports as fact in his articles. I've read a dozen books by Gould and I still have no ideas where along the political spectrum his opinions lie.
I'd never have guessed. I thought it was just a coincidence that most humans seemed to be more intelligent that members of other species. It's amazing what these scientists discover.
And the first step in fixing the problem is noticing that there is a problem and publishing this fact so that people can get on and deal with it. So why don't you stop whining about people who are doing exactly that.
Oh please! You don't actually believe the hype you read do you? Chemist's can't even explain many of the properties of water, a teeny little molecule. If you think that (1) it is possible to simulate protein folding reliably and (2) there's actually a use for being able to do it then you're being deluded.
It's a good quotation with lots of relevance to many things in physics. However the word 'elderly' is crucial to the meaning of his quotation. We all know that we have to wait for the old generation of physicists to die off before a scientific revolution can be completed. The quantum computing critics aren't the sceptical old however - they're the enthusiastic young who think quantum computing is a cool subject but makes some fundamentally flawed assumptions.
I still don't get the connection between souls and quantum mechanics.
I don't recall any religious tradition that makes unpredictability a property of souls. In fact man religious traditions claim an omniscient God making souls entirely predictable. And even if they did claim an association betwen uncertainty and souls I see no reason for that to be evidence for the existence of souls, because, as I point out, people were unable to predict human behaviour before QM was invented.
Why would unpredictability leave room for a 'higher power'? If it turned out that these so-called random events were controlled by such a power they would no longer be random would they? They'd be amenable to study like anything else. If we expect something to happen 50% of the time but due to a higher power it happened 51% of the time instead then that wouldn't be QM 'leaving room', it'd be QM being wrong. QM in fact leaves no room for such 'higher powers' because the 'random' quantum events are just as subject to the laws of statistics as any other random event.
Anyway, why might there not be laws describing these 'higher powers'?
Why would it change the debate on whether humans have souls? My memory is poor but I don't recall any religion that makes any connection between quantum computing and souls.
I'm inclined to compare building a quantum computer to building a perpetual motion machine. There is nothing in the fundamental laws of physics that says it's impossible. They're obviously not impossible, an individual atom is in effect in perpetual motion. But start building multi-atom constructions and it's going to get harder and harder. Although we don't have a macroscopic perpetual motion machine I'd be disinclined to actually put a limit on how big a perpetual motion machine can get. I just think it gets exponentially harder the larger you want it to be. The same goes for quantum computers - and for the very same reason: entropy.
For some speculative ideas along these lines you could do worse than read Teranesia by Greg Egan. Actually Egan thinks the idea is purel hokum but at least one biologist has taken the ideas in Teranesia seriously.
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OK, you have to siphon off some of the G$50 to pay for reservoirs, big pumps and turbines. On the really sunny days you pump waters up a mountain into the reservoir. On the cloudy days you generate hydroelectric power with the water you pumped up. And if it's cloudy for a really long time you use the money you earnt renting out jetskis to tourists visiting the reservoir and spend it on importing power.
If we have digital intellectual property rights it seems entirely reasonable that companies go out of their way to protect theirs and that other companies provide what is needed to enable them to do that (and protect their own ability to do that as well - hence the patent). I don't see any alternative besides (1) abolishing digital IP or (2) having the government manage digital property rights. Both seem scary to me.
Why did you spoil it? This could have been a good troll if you hadn't added the nonsense about VB/Linux.
It's probably not completely crazy to suggest that biological material could have been carried from Earth to Europa or vice versa (though trying to work out a viable trajectory for volcanic ejecta, say, that takes less than 4 billion years, might be tricky!).
It seems to me less likely that life would have arisen completely independently in both environments. (If life could have arisen independently on two planets in the solar system I'd expect the universe to be teeming with life and we'd have received a message from them!)
There's a nice example that goes back to Boltzmann. Given a disordered set of particles (call them a mini 'universe') you can write an expression for their entropy. If you pick a 'typical' state it will have high entropy and if you let the system evolve chances are the entropy will stay high. Let the system evolve for long enough and you expect the entropy to dip down low occasionally through chance. Suppose the entropy needs to be very low for life to evolve in the system. Then typically any organism that evolves in this system is going to get a skewed view: they're going to find that they live in a universe with unusually low entropy. Their scientists might spend ages trying to figure out just why they live in a low entropy universe but from an 'observer' outside their universe there's nothing surprising - their universe is a long expanse of extereme boredom with occasional low entropy islands, some of which contain life.
Having said that - I agree that PAP is CRAP!
Suppose that out there there are lots of different universes - not connected to each other and with different laws of physics. Some laws of physics are conducive to the existemce of life, some aren't. It's trivially obvious that we live in one of those universes that is suitable for life. It may actually be the case that only one in a billion universes are suitable for life. It doesn't matter how unlikely a randomly picked set of laws of physics is conducive to life - we clearly live on one that is. That means that the universe may actually look like it's tailored for the existence of life.
There are various variants of this including SAP (strong anthropic principle), WAP (weak AP) and CRAP (well...Martin Gardner invented that one and it somes up is whole opnion of AP). But basically they don't say much more than "there is life in the universe and that gives us a biased point of view".
Or Permutation City (also by Greg Egan) where the universe that exists is one that has within it a point of view from which it seems ordered enough for someone to have a point of view...
...The Cosmological Anthropic Principle. It has some nice discussion of how the symmetries we observe in particle physics might 'emerge' from low energy regimes of physical systems that are in some sense lawless. In general it's an interesting book that discusses why we have order in the universe quite a bit. But the part on order apparently emerging from a lawless universe seems to be what the current discussion is based on.
Not so, for example in a field like paleontology there is such an incomplete fossil record that there is plenty of room for debate. For example there's the question of how recent the most common ancestor of all humans alive today lived. Some give more recent dates than others depending on how the evidence is interpreted. But even before reading what Gould has to say on the matter you can guarantee he'll settle for the more recent end of the spectrum (barring the views of cretinists) because that's more convenient for his political views. Maybe there will come a day when we'll have a pretty accurate handle on when this human lived - but that's quite a way off and anything published now on that subject is likely to be a collection of facts with gaps between filled in by speculation and opinion.
For a more concrete example check out Wonderful Life where he makes his strongest case that there is no direction to evolution (a thoroughly bizarre claim IMHO). Armed with this opinion he makes a great many suggestions about how various pieces of fossil evidence should be interpreted. It turns out that the great majority of these claims were actually demonstrated likely to be false in a relatively small time (do a web search on the names of the various fossils that he talks about in the book). A little thought will reveal the real reason why he argues against a direction to evolution.
However I'd hate to put people off Gould. Much as he pisses me off no end he's very worth reading and The Mismeasure of Man is an excellent book. Same goes for Wonderful Life.
Oh yes. Stephen J Gould is well known as being completely unbiased in his expositions. I mean there's no way Gould would let his political ideas have any influence on what he reports as fact in his articles. I've read a dozen books by Gould and I still have no ideas where along the political spectrum his opinions lie.
I'd never have guessed. I thought it was just a coincidence that most humans seemed to be more intelligent that members of other species. It's amazing what these scientists discover.
Hey! I looked at that link and they're giving away free copies of Linux! Shouldn't Linus be suing them?
That way you can have a settlement with the DOJ in which you give away free copies of Linux.
A developer could build a ski resort on the equator.
And the first step in fixing the problem is noticing that there is a problem and publishing this fact so that people can get on and deal with it. So why don't you stop whining about people who are doing exactly that.
Sorry!
You've discovered the secret of psychology.
God is omniscient => God can predict the behaviour of a person => the behavior of a person is predictable
It's a good quotation with lots of relevance to many things in physics. However the word 'elderly' is crucial to the meaning of his quotation. We all know that we have to wait for the old generation of physicists to die off before a scientific revolution can be completed. The quantum computing critics aren't the sceptical old however - they're the enthusiastic young who think quantum computing is a cool subject but makes some fundamentally flawed assumptions.
That your own code doesn't find optimal solutions to a problem has little to contribute to the issue of how optimal evolution is.
I don't recall any religious tradition that makes unpredictability a property of souls. In fact man religious traditions claim an omniscient God making souls entirely predictable. And even if they did claim an association betwen uncertainty and souls I see no reason for that to be evidence for the existence of souls, because, as I point out, people were unable to predict human behaviour before QM was invented.
Why would unpredictability leave room for a 'higher power'? If it turned out that these so-called random events were controlled by such a power they would no longer be random would they? They'd be amenable to study like anything else. If we expect something to happen 50% of the time but due to a higher power it happened 51% of the time instead then that wouldn't be QM 'leaving room', it'd be QM being wrong. QM in fact leaves no room for such 'higher powers' because the 'random' quantum events are just as subject to the laws of statistics as any other random event.
Anyway, why might there not be laws describing these 'higher powers'?
Why would it change the debate on whether humans have souls? My memory is poor but I don't recall any religion that makes any connection between quantum computing and souls.
I'm inclined to compare building a quantum computer to building a perpetual motion machine. There is nothing in the fundamental laws of physics that says it's impossible. They're obviously not impossible, an individual atom is in effect in perpetual motion. But start building multi-atom constructions and it's going to get harder and harder. Although we don't have a macroscopic perpetual motion machine I'd be disinclined to actually put a limit on how big a perpetual motion machine can get. I just think it gets exponentially harder the larger you want it to be. The same goes for quantum computers - and for the very same reason: entropy.
For some speculative ideas along these lines you could do worse than read Teranesia by Greg Egan. Actually Egan thinks the idea is purel hokum but at least one biologist has taken the ideas in Teranesia seriously.