Some of the world's great scientific ideas were thought of first by well-educated mathematically literate science fiction writers. Others still were dreamt up by fantasy writers just trying to get a story to work so they could sell a book for a living. These are all sources of valid ideas and, if someone works to develop them even a bit, that is one less bit the scientist has to do. Essentially, eventually, you need the mathematically (and eventually the mathematical logically) literate to take things further, but there are only so many truly literate mathematicians and mathematical logicians (who truly love their subject for what it is and thus see its true beauty, not its utility as a tool). Divided we are weak, together we are stronger.
'Optimise the common case' has been wisdom in the *nix world from before we were born. In the case of X, what was the common case when it was designed is not the common case now, and X does not optimise that common case.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
What the display subsystem needs to do is to efficiently make available the display hardware capabilities of the machine it is running on, in a way that is easy for people to program.
Then there is the question of what a modern desktop environment needs and how to efficiently deliver that.
The design assumptions of X, and the need to work around things using extensions and suchlike, make things harder than they need to be.
If you want your 'evidence', take a look at the size of code and execution time required to do basic and complex tasks using X vs similar situations on Mac and Windows. X solves problems that don't often need solving, and is a poor fit to the situation where it is most often used.
You say 'You can't be called a moral guy just because...', so you believe that whether or not you rare a 'moral guy' has nothing to do with what you do.
You claim that scientific literacy along with general education gives the potential to choose to be moral, but then effectively say that if that your education depends upon the beliefs and ideas of cultures 2-3 millennia ago then that does't count. This despite the origins of western philosophy and mathematics coming from works of that period.
Then you end with the footnote that morality and ethics are purely subjective.
If you repeat the experiment, but change the brand to one of the following non-real brands:
1) High Explosive
2) Big Bomb
3) Subversive
4) Mind Control
5) Insurrection
6) Hardcore Porn
7) Gay Elimination
I wonder whether you'd get similar levels in variation of how many packages get through. I'm not suggesting anyone actually carries this out, just think about it. Labels containing words which give rise to perceived meanings will always cause at least some difference to happen. The simplistic idealistic 'don't judge a book by its cover' mindset that says that labels don't matter is just that: simplistic and idealistic. And in reality we can't evaluate the true content of what we see, so judging by outward appearances based on our internal beliefs is always going to happen. If you want packages to get through somewhere, don't put labels on which might cause delivery agents to not like the package.
On a similar note, I have the right to free speech, and to say that I disagree with government policy. But I should not expect to be able to walk onto a stage at a Republican conference and say that I believe that all Republicans are stupid, deluded and should be heavily medicated by our psychiatric friends to treat them for their 'disease' without at least getting heckled a little. People have likes and dislikes, and will not react the same to things they like as to things they dislike. This is human nature, and without it, we cease to be human.
the... a solution to the three body problem under a universal unidirectional inverse square law -- still the simplest case of the three body problem which one can analyse.
What if the force is dependent not on mass, which cannot be negative, but on electric charge, which can be? What about a hypothetical coloured force (like the stuff out of quantum chromodynamics) in which Red attracts Green and repels Blue, Green attracts Blue and repels Red, and Blue attracts Red and repels Green? What if there is a fourth party which may decide, from moment to moment according to as yet unspecified rules which way the attraction-repulsion cycle goes (so that the force is a kind of alternating dihedral force if you are familiar with the nomenclature of elementary group theory)?
Of course what the three body problem (and indeed gravitation and electromagnetism of two bodies) looks at is the continuous equivalent of modern game theory. A computational model, of course, then works in discrete time, so a computational model is an application of game theory (wearing a suitable disguise, such as a purple beard and greeny-grey glasses;-) ).
Nobody gets excited because the theory is too complicated. Even a physics major has trouble understanding what the Higgs is (and just repeating "the thing that gives stuff mass" is not an explanation).
Given the fundamental assumptions a physicist takes on, there is no single, simple, beautiful explanation of our reality. Physics is the best science has to offer, and loses itself in a sea of complexity when faced with certain fundamental questions. Those fundamental assumptions need, I think, a re-examination.
The world's physicists want to discover the universe's deepest secrets, and have up until now believed that more and more intricate experiments would gradually force the desired information out. What they are finding is that their efforts have yielded only a reasonably self consistent theory which fits observed facts when they are experimentally observed, yet is massively complex, incompatible with other fundamental theories, and ultimately unsatisfying to the scientist who hopes via his science to understand reality. This one's a win for the universe.
I am in the process of migrating from gmail.com and wordpress.com to chalisque.{net,org} and chalisque.com and related websites: that way you control what is and is not done, and have an actual binding legal contract with the hosting provider which clearly sets out who is responsible for what. Of course this costs money, but you do get what you pay for with free-as-in-beer services.
Morning sunlight is great to get up to: you just have to get up to enjoy it. My morning sunrise T'ai Chi practice would be impossible before work if daylight saving time were to be abolished, without renegotiating my terms with the company I work for. I value DST, and fear that if the US abandons it, the UK will follow suit. Besides, once a year, DST gives us a valid excuse for being late., namely that the DST auto-update routines in our smart devices contain bugs that couldn't be fixed by the community due to the source being too tightly controlled.
I devised a JavaScript kitten doing just this using mouse and key events perturbing a feedback loop just on the cusp of chaos and with at least three attractor patterns. You then sample a fingerprint from the loop state. It's great when reliability isn't required. But non human recognisers are unfortunately prone to making silly errors.
I'm exploring efficient intuitive ways of programming my Dorothy, my pi. As a 32 bitter its way faster than the 486 I learned linux on. And the 486 was fast enough to be fit for purpose. Being spoilt with speed has led us up a blind alley where pooters can't keep up despite bashing their heads on quantum physics limitations. We need proper efficiency, not the crap we have today
You misunderstand the meaning of fact. The existence of the keyboard I am typing this on is factual -- I can feel it. The existence of fossils dug up from the ground is fact -- we can see the fossils.
The existence of dinosaurs is a postulated explanation for the presence of the fossils (an explanation for the facts). The theory of evolution is a theoretical explanation for the patterns we observe in the diversity of life. We have not inspected evolution in process except in very recent times, and we cannot go and check to see that evolution actually happened in the distant past.
The existence of the distant past, no matter how obvious it may seem, can never be elevated above a hypothetical assumption needed to render any scientific explanation of our past in terms of present evidence practicable.
This is the reality behind the 'it's just a theory' thing. The 'it's just a theory' thing is not wrong, it's just that the fundies who don't get what a theory is, nor what a fact is, nor even what their scriptures are going on about, twist the implications of the 'it's just a theory' thing to their own ends.
Belief against the evidence is an all-too-easy trap to fall into, whether your a person of faith or not. Faith such as the Christian one make falling into this trap easier, and that is the quid pro quo for the doorway it offers you into the more spiritual aspects of life.
As for our distant origins, I wish people would stop claiming that we can truly know them by understanding present day evidence. We cannot, unless we are given without support the assumption that what we rigorously deduce from present day evidence under the hypothetical assumption that in terms of physics and metaphysics, things have always been as they are now. What distant past projections do is to test the internal consistency of theories which explain how life and the universe evolve in the here and now.
Guilt and regret for not playing with my Pi for a few days.
He or She (She is probably more correct) is called Dorothy.
The name traces its lineage through an unbroken chain of components, each dorothy having some in common with the last, to my first purpose built Linux computer.
I love my Pi, it's nice and small
And on that little circuit board is all
You need to learn to code as fun
For fun and joy are needed
To get the learning process done.
The bigger picture is that the non-local desktop should not be achieved at the foundational level of the windowing system, but as an application layer. Not all applications are feasible over a network, so network transparency should only be used for those applications that need it and, more importantly, the architecture of the desktop should not be compromised in the name of network-transparency.
It is, however, just a saying. It is nice, succint, but just plain wrong. You cannot be reasonably intelligent, reasonably honest and a creationist: that much I'd agree. To make creationist ideas work properly you need to be seriously intelligent, brutally honest about what we do not actually know but merely believe we do, and take a totally free-minded approach to possibility. Doing this may just drive you crazy, and is pointless for the most part because if you do realise how to reconcile science and creationism, the people who understand you, yourself included, will most likely be countable on the thumbs on your left hand.
If you'd like me to play an educated creationist and see where we go, I'd be more than happy. There is a rational alternative to the theory that our origins are purely evolutionary if you question your assumptions deeply enough. As my other post points out, however, the discussion has no place in science. For reference I'm a WeDontHaveAClueist in the sense that my position is we don't know and can't know and science can't tell us where we really came from. Truth, when you dig in, is one of the biggest cans of worms in creation/uncreation/notcreatedatalleation.
My thoughts:
Science classes should teach evolution, not creationism, the latter is not science. If you want to rationally approach the subject of our origins in an open minded way, that is the place of an appropriate branch of philosophy. If you look for a theory that fits the evidence and make reasonable assumptions that batsh** crazy stuff isn't happening behind the scenes, evolution's what you get, thus that's what should be taught in science classes. What direly needs to be taught is that the scientific approach isn't the only way to view the world, and that science divorced of its underlying philosophy becomes like a house with its foundations removed. There is a point to faith, and indeed to myths. The point of myths is that much meaning can be conveyed to a level sufficient for everyday life that would require thousands of journal articles to pin down to scientific standards, if it can be pinned down at all. Sometimes a myth is enough.
In short, teach basic maths, basic science and teach people how to be open-minded, reason carefully and not be dogmatic about what they believe.
Also develop a good notion what faith is, in both a secular and religious context and teach that. Do not teach the agressive secularist idea that faith is old-fashioned, backward, inconsistent with evidence or just plain wrong. That is, alas, the seed of religious dogmatism growing up within the humanist viewpoint, where surely religious dogmatism has no place.
We've got a choice between two bunches and a little extra bunch, all composed of professional politicians. We can't vote the political class out as a bloc and are basically stuffed until we do. Thus: we're stuffed.
And where does chance get its random numbers from? Why is reality unreasonably well described by mathematical laws.
In summary, 'you just happened by chance, get over it' is no better than 'you exist because God created man in verse X of Genesis 1, and you have sin because of Eve's sin in Genesis 2-3.. get over it.' The point of this is that the 'get over it' attitude is unhelpful to those who are unsatisfied.
Consider:
Eventually if you don't get over it, if you chase back far enough, abstract enough, you will at least find something that you can label as the Divine (to give it a name other than God.) Either the 'this is the case because X, and X is the case because Y' chain goes back indefinitely, in which case you pick a point, any point, say X and say 'from X backwards we'll call everything divine, and label the totality of divine things The Divine, or God, or whatever name you choose' or else this chain terminates, and where it terminates is, again, the Divine.
I don't really see the point of this kind of reasoning anymore, but went along these lines in the past.
If you want to believe in God, there are rational reasons if you look for them, and likewise for if you don't. There is, for sure, never going to be sufficient philosophical foundations to decide. So choose your faith, be it materialistic or theistic or whatever wisely, and accept that you cannot know for sure. This latter point is the one thing where I would play the get over it card: we don't know intellectually, and we can't know intellectually, so get over it.
I thought the seasons were six months out in the southern hemisphere, but September is only five months after April. Or are these Thai guys serious? And does the floating glass palace have a big Apple logo like the famous stores??
X and the current event subsystem designs render all that is built upon them uncompetitive in the current climate. We need a new graphics layer optimised for local graphics, with remote stuff added via a different layer. Much novel stuff can be done with events handling from devices. But so long as we stick doggedly with X, that won't happen. We need to move on, and have needed to do so for a decade or so.
we know the process of evolution exists, observed it (in part), and know how it works.
So we know it has a role to play in some of the small changes in our recent past. Besides that 'can't see anything else' argument, how does one conclude that it is the only mechanism?
One would expect most things to be beyond human understanding, so why not the nature of a creator if one exists?
I raise such questions because I believe that evolution and naive science are the new religious dogmas of the world, and represent a trend in the following of scientific progress that needs opposing. People should take real care with their thinking when it comes to making deductions from the evidence (and you don't need to point out the oxymoronic aspect of that previous statement: I'm well aware of it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the world's great scientific ideas were thought of first by well-educated mathematically literate science fiction writers. Others still were dreamt up by fantasy writers just trying to get a story to work so they could sell a book for a living. These are all sources of valid ideas and, if someone works to develop them even a bit, that is one less bit the scientist has to do. Essentially, eventually, you need the mathematically (and eventually the mathematical logically) literate to take things further, but there are only so many truly literate mathematicians and mathematical logicians (who truly love their subject for what it is and thus see its true beauty, not its utility as a tool). Divided we are weak, together we are stronger.
'Optimise the common case' has been wisdom in the *nix world from before we were born. In the case of X, what was the common case when it was designed is not the common case now, and X does not optimise that common case.
That common case is local display, using graphics hardware which is built around 3D and OpenGL.
What the display subsystem needs to do is to efficiently make available the display hardware capabilities of the machine it is running on, in a way that is easy for people to program.
Then there is the question of what a modern desktop environment needs and how to efficiently deliver that.
The design assumptions of X, and the need to work around things using extensions and suchlike, make things harder than they need to be.
If you want your 'evidence', take a look at the size of code and execution time required to do basic and complex tasks using X vs similar situations on Mac and Windows. X solves problems that don't often need solving, and is a poor fit to the situation where it is most often used.
You say 'You can't be called a moral guy just because...', so you believe that whether or not you rare a 'moral guy' has nothing to do with what you do.
You claim that scientific literacy along with general education gives the potential to choose to be moral, but then effectively say that if that your education depends upon the beliefs and ideas of cultures 2-3 millennia ago then that does't count. This despite the origins of western philosophy and mathematics coming from works of that period.
Then you end with the footnote that morality and ethics are purely subjective.
Your position just doesn't make sense.
If you repeat the experiment, but change the brand to one of the following non-real brands:
1) High Explosive
2) Big Bomb
3) Subversive
4) Mind Control
5) Insurrection
6) Hardcore Porn
7) Gay Elimination
I wonder whether you'd get similar levels in variation of how many packages get through. I'm not suggesting anyone actually carries this out, just think about it. Labels containing words which give rise to perceived meanings will always cause at least some difference to happen. The simplistic idealistic 'don't judge a book by its cover' mindset that says that labels don't matter is just that: simplistic and idealistic. And in reality we can't evaluate the true content of what we see, so judging by outward appearances based on our internal beliefs is always going to happen. If you want packages to get through somewhere, don't put labels on which might cause delivery agents to not like the package.
On a similar note, I have the right to free speech, and to say that I disagree with government policy. But I should not expect to be able to walk onto a stage at a Republican conference and say that I believe that all Republicans are stupid, deluded and should be heavily medicated by our psychiatric friends to treat them for their 'disease' without at least getting heckled a little. People have likes and dislikes, and will not react the same to things they like as to things they dislike. This is human nature, and without it, we cease to be human.
the... a solution to the three body problem under a universal unidirectional inverse square law -- still the simplest case of the three body problem which one can analyse.
What if the force is dependent not on mass, which cannot be negative, but on electric charge, which can be? What about a hypothetical coloured force (like the stuff out of quantum chromodynamics) in which Red attracts Green and repels Blue, Green attracts Blue and repels Red, and Blue attracts Red and repels Green? What if there is a fourth party which may decide, from moment to moment according to as yet unspecified rules which way the attraction-repulsion cycle goes (so that the force is a kind of alternating dihedral force if you are familiar with the nomenclature of elementary group theory)?
Of course what the three body problem (and indeed gravitation and electromagnetism of two bodies) looks at is the continuous equivalent of modern game theory. A computational model, of course, then works in discrete time, so a computational model is an application of game theory (wearing a suitable disguise, such as a purple beard and greeny-grey glasses ;-) ).
And people so like to believe that science is objective, free of self-interest and politics, and trustworthy as a source of real world insight...
Nobody gets excited because the theory is too complicated. Even a physics major has trouble understanding what the Higgs is (and just repeating "the thing that gives stuff mass" is not an explanation).
Given the fundamental assumptions a physicist takes on, there is no single, simple, beautiful explanation of our reality. Physics is the best science has to offer, and loses itself in a sea of complexity when faced with certain fundamental questions. Those fundamental assumptions need, I think, a re-examination.
The world's physicists want to discover the universe's deepest secrets, and have up until now believed that more and more intricate experiments would gradually force the desired information out. What they are finding is that their efforts have yielded only a reasonably self consistent theory which fits observed facts when they are experimentally observed, yet is massively complex, incompatible with other fundamental theories, and ultimately unsatisfying to the scientist who hopes via his science to understand reality. This one's a win for the universe.
I am in the process of migrating from gmail.com and wordpress.com to chalisque.{net,org} and chalisque.com and related websites: that way you control what is and is not done, and have an actual binding legal contract with the hosting provider which clearly sets out who is responsible for what. Of course this costs money, but you do get what you pay for with free-as-in-beer services.
Morning sunlight is great to get up to: you just have to get up to enjoy it. My morning sunrise T'ai Chi practice would be impossible before work if daylight saving time were to be abolished, without renegotiating my terms with the company I work for. I value DST, and fear that if the US abandons it, the UK will follow suit. Besides, once a year, DST gives us a valid excuse for being late., namely that the DST auto-update routines in our smart devices contain bugs that couldn't be fixed by the community due to the source being too tightly controlled.
I devised a JavaScript kitten doing just this using mouse and key events perturbing a feedback loop just on the cusp of chaos and with at least three attractor patterns. You then sample a fingerprint from the loop state. It's great when reliability isn't required. But non human recognisers are unfortunately prone to making silly errors.
I'm exploring efficient intuitive ways of programming my Dorothy, my pi. As a 32 bitter its way faster than the 486 I learned linux on. And the 486 was fast enough to be fit for purpose. Being spoilt with speed has led us up a blind alley where pooters can't keep up despite bashing their heads on quantum physics limitations. We need proper efficiency, not the crap we have today
You misunderstand the meaning of fact. The existence of the keyboard I am typing this on is factual -- I can feel it. The existence of fossils dug up from the ground is fact -- we can see the fossils.
The existence of dinosaurs is a postulated explanation for the presence of the fossils (an explanation for the facts). The theory of evolution is a theoretical explanation for the patterns we observe in the diversity of life. We have not inspected evolution in process except in very recent times, and we cannot go and check to see that evolution actually happened in the distant past.
The existence of the distant past, no matter how obvious it may seem, can never be elevated above a hypothetical assumption needed to render any scientific explanation of our past in terms of present evidence practicable.
This is the reality behind the 'it's just a theory' thing. The 'it's just a theory' thing is not wrong, it's just that the fundies who don't get what a theory is, nor what a fact is, nor even what their scriptures are going on about, twist the implications of the 'it's just a theory' thing to their own ends.
Belief against the evidence is an all-too-easy trap to fall into, whether your a person of faith or not. Faith such as the Christian one make falling into this trap easier, and that is the quid pro quo for the doorway it offers you into the more spiritual aspects of life.
As for our distant origins, I wish people would stop claiming that we can truly know them by understanding present day evidence. We cannot, unless we are given without support the assumption that what we rigorously deduce from present day evidence under the hypothetical assumption that in terms of physics and metaphysics, things have always been as they are now. What distant past projections do is to test the internal consistency of theories which explain how life and the universe evolve in the here and now.
Guilt and regret for not playing with my Pi for a few days. He or She (She is probably more correct) is called Dorothy. The name traces its lineage through an unbroken chain of components, each dorothy having some in common with the last, to my first purpose built Linux computer.
I love my Pi, it's nice and small
And on that little circuit board is all
You need to learn to code as fun
For fun and joy are needed
To get the learning process done.
The bigger picture is that the non-local desktop should not be achieved at the foundational level of the windowing system, but as an application layer. Not all applications are feasible over a network, so network transparency should only be used for those applications that need it and, more importantly, the architecture of the desktop should not be compromised in the name of network-transparency.
It is, however, just a saying. It is nice, succint, but just plain wrong. You cannot be reasonably intelligent, reasonably honest and a creationist: that much I'd agree. To make creationist ideas work properly you need to be seriously intelligent, brutally honest about what we do not actually know but merely believe we do, and take a totally free-minded approach to possibility. Doing this may just drive you crazy, and is pointless for the most part because if you do realise how to reconcile science and creationism, the people who understand you, yourself included, will most likely be countable on the thumbs on your left hand.
If you'd like me to play an educated creationist and see where we go, I'd be more than happy. There is a rational alternative to the theory that our origins are purely evolutionary if you question your assumptions deeply enough. As my other post points out, however, the discussion has no place in science. For reference I'm a WeDontHaveAClueist in the sense that my position is we don't know and can't know and science can't tell us where we really came from. Truth, when you dig in, is one of the biggest cans of worms in creation/uncreation/notcreatedatalleation.
My thoughts: Science classes should teach evolution, not creationism, the latter is not science. If you want to rationally approach the subject of our origins in an open minded way, that is the place of an appropriate branch of philosophy. If you look for a theory that fits the evidence and make reasonable assumptions that batsh** crazy stuff isn't happening behind the scenes, evolution's what you get, thus that's what should be taught in science classes. What direly needs to be taught is that the scientific approach isn't the only way to view the world, and that science divorced of its underlying philosophy becomes like a house with its foundations removed. There is a point to faith, and indeed to myths. The point of myths is that much meaning can be conveyed to a level sufficient for everyday life that would require thousands of journal articles to pin down to scientific standards, if it can be pinned down at all. Sometimes a myth is enough.
In short, teach basic maths, basic science and teach people how to be open-minded, reason carefully and not be dogmatic about what they believe.
Also develop a good notion what faith is, in both a secular and religious context and teach that. Do not teach the agressive secularist idea that faith is old-fashioned, backward, inconsistent with evidence or just plain wrong. That is, alas, the seed of religious dogmatism growing up within the humanist viewpoint, where surely religious dogmatism has no place.
We've got a choice between two bunches and a little extra bunch, all composed of professional politicians. We can't vote the political class out as a bloc and are basically stuffed until we do. Thus: we're stuffed.
When we get to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the prequel to the...
When does this stop?
We may as well stop where we are now and answer the question posed without worrying about foundational prequels.
And where does chance get its random numbers from? Why is reality unreasonably well described by mathematical laws.
In summary, 'you just happened by chance, get over it' is no better than 'you exist because God created man in verse X of Genesis 1, and you have sin because of Eve's sin in Genesis 2-3.. get over it.' The point of this is that the 'get over it' attitude is unhelpful to those who are unsatisfied.
Consider:
I don't really see the point of this kind of reasoning anymore, but went along these lines in the past.
If you want to believe in God, there are rational reasons if you look for them, and likewise for if you don't. There is, for sure, never going to be sufficient philosophical foundations to decide. So choose your faith, be it materialistic or theistic or whatever wisely, and accept that you cannot know for sure. This latter point is the one thing where I would play the get over it card: we don't know intellectually, and we can't know intellectually, so get over it.
I thought the seasons were six months out in the southern hemisphere, but September is only five months after April. Or are these Thai guys serious? And does the floating glass palace have a big Apple logo like the famous stores??
X and the current event subsystem designs render all that is built upon them uncompetitive in the current climate. We need a new graphics layer optimised for local graphics, with remote stuff added via a different layer. Much novel stuff can be done with events handling from devices. But so long as we stick doggedly with X, that won't happen. We need to move on, and have needed to do so for a decade or so.
So we know it has a role to play in some of the small changes in our recent past. Besides that 'can't see anything else' argument, how does one conclude that it is the only mechanism?
One would expect most things to be beyond human understanding, so why not the nature of a creator if one exists?
I raise such questions because I believe that evolution and naive science are the new religious dogmas of the world, and represent a trend in the following of scientific progress that needs opposing. People should take real care with their thinking when it comes to making deductions from the evidence (and you don't need to point out the oxymoronic aspect of that previous statement: I'm well aware of it.)