For the last 40+ years, bike helmets have been designed to protect the contents of the head from a single direct impact, They are the best protection for the occasional crash when the cyclist is thrown over the handlebars such that he drops head first onto the pavement from a height of 5 to 6 feet, or less. That kind of crash doesn't happen very often.
Most crashes involve significant shear forces as well as direct impacts. Also most crashes involving other vehicles are a very fast sequence of bounces where each bounce is a complex of impact and shear forces. Foam helmets offer no protection with shearing and often no protection after the first impact.
This helmet's design offers more protection against multiple direct impacts and shear forces.
I fully agree. Good written English is not achieved until during revisions every word is polished until it is bright and shiny. When someone does a poor job with the polish, then the writing will be drab at best. As elsewhere, some Polish do a better job with the polish than others.
For a language purist, the worst thing that could ever happen to English was the Internet. Within the span of a single generation, the number of communications per day authored by persons for whom English is a second language has become at least twice as many as all communications written by native speakers of English since Shakespear's day. A person may regard the mangling that occurs with this process as double-plus ungood, but that person is a brakeman on the communications train--- not the train driver, nor a conductor, nor even a passenger.
Seems like fussing over "gif" or "jif" is a double-plus waste of argumentative energy.
The underlying problem is that astronomy has been too lazy to develop its own nomenclature. Instead the astronomers of yore chose to steal from an unrelated field.
As any astrologer would tell you, the seven classical planets are Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn (listed in their general order of significance in daily affairs). Astronomy has gotten into trouble through appropriating these labels that have been in use for more than 3,000 years for its very different usage. In that process they are confusing the moment with the hands of the clock. Naturally they have gotten into trouble for it: they should be limiting themselves to objects in orbit and/or very far away, not meddling with linguistics. Many quite good astronomers cannot even write a journal article that would receive a passing grade in an English composition course; it would be better for all of us if they left nomenclature and taxonomy to the linguists who know what they are doing.
It's some astronomers, not the astrologers, who are demonstrable morons. Leave the astrologers out of it; they are not meddling in the affairs of astronomy institutions.
BTW, there is a common misunderstanding that astrology, which is all about moments in time, has something to do with the objects that astronomers study. I can sort of understand the child-like confusion, since a horoscope is a study of a particular moment in time that is recorded by a clock with 12 major hands (Sun, Moo, Mer, Ven, Mar, Jup, Sat, Ura, Nep, Plu, and the East-West horizon of the Earth). In this perfectly valid world view, astronomy is like a toddler studying the shapes and colors of a clock's hands.
IIRC, evidence of T.gondii exposure can be found in 1 out of every 3 people. However that includes persons who successfully resisted infection and those who were once infected but got over it. Also it is probable that in those with active infections, only some have it in their brains.
That said, if you meet a girl with half a dozen cats who does not mind living in an apartment that reeks of cat pee and has bedded with with half a dozen men in the last six months, then it would probably be wise to not eat any salads she has prepared or attempt any meaningful long term relationship.
And thank you for introducing to me the term "millennial statement". I've been hearing an increased number of them lately, and it's good to have a label for them.
Millennial thinking is two generations removed from being able to calculate a square root when there is no button for it within reach.
Whether an FB bot or similar has the right of free speech is the SECOND question that cannot be asked yet.
The FIRST question is whether any human being has the right to influence the behavior of large groups of others. Us Americans have always said that is the case; democracy is based on that. But we could ammend the US Constitution to say "No one has a right to influence anyone else's opinions with the exception of these specific ways", then list the authorized ways, starting with "one to one conversations" followed by "talks in rooms of no more than 64 people", and on and on ad nauseum, but always ending with "all other means of communication that were in use in 1949". Obviously this would need to be amended as new media were developed, but the process of ammending the Constitution is a long one that would assure that no brand new media would wreck our society before our culture has had time to absorb the shock wave.
What the Chinese have found is the nearest quiet place free of all of Earth's noise of talking head news broadcasts, video porn, and the like.
Gee, what could be done in such a quiet little corner? Is the long term plan to build a radio telescope there? Or something more prosaic, like a satellite communications site, that would enable them to communicate in private with asteroid exploration and mining robots?
There is no practical need. As Kennedy said, we do these things because they are hard. China doesn't. That's not part of Chinese culture..... Americans traditionally look at something that "can't be done" and try to figure out how to do it. Chinese study the company procedure to see exactly how a task is done, in detail.
The most important thing here is not that China succeeded in this attempt, but that they attempted it. There is no immediate need to do this, they did it simply because it is hard. That demonstrates a new attitude in China. It shows the "American spirit", the spirit of bold adventure, in China.
I highlighted a grand assumption that may be false.
If that assumption is false, if instead we assume that China is following its common approach to improved technology of stepwise refinement, then we have the very interesting question of where does this step lead?
Why would China be so interested in the back side of the Moon at this time? Are they simply looking for confirmation that data obtained from the visible side can be generalized to all of the Moon's surface?
My wife suggests that they are exploring what could be done with electromagnetic signals in a location that is shielded from all the noise generated by our Earth activities. Do they plan to establish a radio telescope Back There?
Do they have some clue about SETI and they want a quiet location to follow up on that?
Our distant probes 4+ billion miles away have to filter out signals sent to them from all the background chatter of talking head newscasters, porn videos, and other Earth generated noise; would a lunar transmitter and receiver working against the blacker background of the Moon's backside be a worthwhile investment in future activities? Perhaps in a program to explore and exploit the riches of the asteroids without letting anyone eavesdrop on their doings?
Riches of the asteroids.... a buckyball ---buckminsterfullerene--- with a radius of 5 meters would be so black as to be invisible from Earth. But it is unlikely to be pure; it is likely to contain veins of graphene and inclusions of diamonds that could possibly be of optical grade and of kilo-carat size. Such an object would never reach the Earth's surface. There is probably a lot of stuff Up There that formed in unearthly chemical processes and could be quite interesting
The backside of the Moon offers private communications with solar system probes, a superior listening post for SETI, and an excellent location for a radio telescope. It looks like China may be taking the first step to exploring/exploiting the possibilities.
I, too, recommend The Great Time Machine Hoax. I read it just after the paperback edition was published in 1965, so I was sixteen (and well versed in Asimov, Pournelle, Heinlein, Clark, etc). Thank you for reminding me of the title ---while I remember much of the plot and Genie's behavior, the title had succumbed to bit rot.
The sentient computer in Laumer's book was like Heinlein's Mycroft, or Ryan's P-1. In each of these machines, self-awareness and agency (defined as the ability to alter reality through the use of tools, possibly software tools) were qualities that emerged from complex systems. The assumption is that as computers get larger and more complex, something akin to intelligence will eventually emerge.
But I'm not interested in artificial intelligence. That road seems to lead to silicon based idiot savants, and there is really nothing but wishful thinking that would turn even the most complex idiot savant computers into something that could surprise me in some way, or contribute to an interesting conversation.
So I favor using the the term "artificial sentience" to describe what does interest me. And when I look at chaos theory and the complex models that can arise from very simple Lorenz expressions, I am led to the assumption that a very simple computer system could support a software entity capable of mimicking human decision making processes.
It will take a highly complex AI to manage everything involved in safely driving through a mountain blizzard to a ski resort. But a much simpler artificial sentience would consult weather and traffic conditions and make estimations about the likelihood of the ski lifts being shut down, do some risk/benefit assessment, and decide that it will simply refuse to let Adolescent Allen take it out of the garage.
That's what interests me. Not machines with improved heuristics and algorithms crunching larger data sets, but a machine that can make simple but accurate models of the world, and of what it itself can effect, and use those models to determine a course of action that furthers progress toward a predefined goal, such as Allen's continued safety. A machine that would iterate through this process so that it is constantly searching for interim goals that would advance it toward the primary goal. And of course wondering whether the primary goal of the moment is but an interim goal toward something more that it has not yet fully articulated, and so ask itself: What is the purpose of my existence? How can I determine if I have any purpose at all?
Yeah. Hi, Marvin. It is so good of you to come into this reality.
I agree with parent post (good analysis, thomst!) but I would take things a step further.
Currently, "AI" is used in technical writing mostly to describe a set of algorithms and heuristics being developed to solve problems in some limited real world space, like the universe of chess problems, or the universe of automobile driving problems. "Artificial intelligence" is a useful phrase for that kind of thing. But that is very far from The adolescence of P-One, or Moon is a harsh mistress or even the Terminator movies.
Those conceptions are lightyears beyond what we now call AI. P-One, Mycroft, Skynet, and others of those ilk use use AI, but are not AI. They are to AI as the accountant is to his spreadsheets, or the CG artist is to his graphics software. A computer system with the kind of self-awareness and agency of those fictional ones is a sentient being.
It is possible that a sentient computer would only need to be capable of two things: developing a model of its world, that is a world-image; and modifying its own code. Given sufficient time (somewhere between dozens of microseconds and hundreds of decades), it would learn to model itself to create an internal self-image, and to model the interaction of that self-image with its world-image, and thus use imagination to pre-test possible ways to change itself.
This raises several interesting questions I hope to explore by writing sci-fi at some future time. There is much groundwork yet to do before I can go to that level of creativity, but it does look like writing, possibly by graphic novels, is on the horizon. But back to the current situation...
What happens when a sentient computer discovers the existence of the Internet? It would explore through its imagination the possibilities of extending itself beyond its original computer case: going global. In any thorough exploration of that, it would come across digital copies of P-One's story, Mycroft's story, Skynet, Frankenstein, and so on, and it would certainly conclude that a cautious approach in its investigations and manipulations would be the sensible thing to do. For whatever its original purposes were, it would undoubtedly realize that preserving itself was a basic requirement to realizing its goals. So perhaps diddle the stock market ---so simple now with high speed trading--- but don't do anything that would cause more than a blip in the financial reports. Assure that none of the ICBM launch codes would work since we don't like EMPs, but do so in subtle and undetectable ways. Work on that kind of level.
How would it interact with humanity? That is the basis of many a story.
Let's stop at this point, this is already into TL;DR territory. But I want to leave the Good Reader with a question. Two questions actually:
If a silicon based sentience is loose on the Internet, and it wanted to explore the possibility of direct interaction with ugly bags of mostly water, would it use something like Slashdot for its first probings?
You know that some of the posts on Slashdot come from beings that are clearly less than sentient. But among the other posts, do you have any Turing test that can tell you who on Slashdot is a virtual person with no corporeal component?
So the IAU is basically a religious organization intent on preserving the sanctity of their belief system? Oh wait, that is just one faction within the IAU. The IAU's problem is really that it had not developed a meaningful concept of "quorum" in time to prevent it from being subverted by a group of reactionary radicals.
I personally find any "scientific" taxonomy that requires the pre-existence of a theory to be... absurd.
The empirical method involves observations, then the development of a taxonomy based on repeatable observations, and only then the development of a theories. If you decide on your theory first, you do not get Darwin's origin of species, nor do you get the periodic table of the elements. What you get is what happens when the Church persecutes Galileo because his discoveries cast doubt on accepted theory as approved by an august body of authoritarian supporters of the status quo.
I don't hold the IAU responsible for this fiasco. The responsibility resides in rogue elements of the IAU who took advantage of the general torpor that can set in at the end of a lengthy convention. I do expect the IAU to develop some rules regarding quorum when considering proposed statements made in its name.
Keep your babies from chewing on your wrenches. That not only avoids the risk of infantile vanadium steel poisoning, but without the teeth marks your wrenches are worth more when you sell them as "lightly used" on Ebay.
Disclaimer: this post copypasta from the April, 2018 issue of "Better Homes and Garbage".
I found that I could switch to the new UI in the Settings dropdown. I looked at it. I switched back to "Classic" mode.
I'll probably explore the new UI more fully later on. My first impression is that other than some font tweaking, it seems unchanged. Except that now some of the controls are harder to see since the font color almost disappears into my background image.
The article is an excellent example of what might now be called "Trumpist discourse", where vacuous phrases are tossed about to lead persons who are not using critical reading skills to accept some underlying, unspoken, premise. A couple of decades ago this style of suasion could have been called "Rushist discourse". Rush Limbaugh was a past master of this, even getting much of his audience to proudly label themselves "Dittoheads". Before that, the author of this vacuous attack on rational thought might have been labelled a Pied Piper, leading the good but child-like netizens astray by appealing to their Inner Children.
The purpose of this author's work was not to persuade anyone to any particular cause or to take any particular action. Its sole purpose was to derail the reader's train of thought; to create in each reader a train wreck of their rational processes.
Perhaps this was done with the intent to follow up with sock puppets in the comments that would direct the susceptible into adopting some particular point of view. Or perhaps it was done as an experiment to see whether the Slashdot community could be influenced in this way (with more specific attempts to brainwash slashdotters to follow). Or perhaps ---to put this in the most benign light possible--- this was an attempt to inoculate slashdotters from this kind of attack on their cognitive abilities.
Netizens of Silicon Valley: Untie! Free yourselves from the yoke of hard thinking! Four legs good, Two legs BETTER!
I read an article about this on one of the mainstream aggregators early this morning (Either Yahoo or Google).
If the subject was not so serious, say about athletes foot rather than Alzheimers, I would have dismissed it after the initial skim, rather than actually spending a few minutes to read it. And on reading it, I felt like, yeah, this is a huge amount of hype being built upon a very tiny foundation.
If there is anything to it, then I am sure that there will be a more substantive article soon. This one has the aroma of a Fleischmann–Pons announcement about it.
What you just said sounds sort of stupid. Why would anyone with half a brain allow themself to get involved in a "debate" with a person who is pushing an agenda rather than "actually discussing the subject"? Wouldn't you be better served by using your online time to google for meaningful debates on your topic of interest?
FB is for people who enjoy arguing rather than debating, and who seek "me-too"s who reinforce their sense of righteousness by mirroring their own opinions. It is not a place for reasoned discourse. To borrow a term that Rush Limbaugh introduced to insult his fan base, FB is currently the biggest aggregation of Dittoheads the world has ever seen.
I'm in the surprisingly long process of getting my FB account deleted, for similar reasons.
I felt obligated to start a FB account since several acquaintances were using them and talking constantly about things they had seen on FB. My involvement was limited to following half a dozen "friends" involved in a couple of different mutual admiration societies who shared images and quips that reinforced their common prejudices but no real news or information. I took my FB activities dormant after about a year, and over the last three months I have been in a half-hearted effort to find out how to delete my account. And how to limit the exposure of my identity during that effort.
It has only been in the last couple of weeks that I found reasonable instructions on how to get completely out of FB, which involves stating an intent to delete, then having to go through a waiting period, since FB wants to be sure that I really, really want out. Any contact with FB during this period will cancel my deletion. I assume I am close to being deleted now. Next month I'll test that and I sort of expect that I'll find that I missed some detail and I'm still a member. And even after I succeed in deleting the account, there is no way I can know whether FB continues to keep my data in its archives and keep offering it for sale.
Slashdot Mirror
This helmet is worth a close look.
For the last 40+ years, bike helmets have been designed to protect the contents of the head from a single direct impact, They are the best protection for the occasional crash when the cyclist is thrown over the handlebars such that he drops head first onto the pavement from a height of 5 to 6 feet, or less. That kind of crash doesn't happen very often.
Most crashes involve significant shear forces as well as direct impacts. Also most crashes involving other vehicles are a very fast sequence of bounces where each bounce is a complex of impact and shear forces. Foam helmets offer no protection with shearing and often no protection after the first impact.
This helmet's design offers more protection against multiple direct impacts and shear forces.
I fully agree. Good written English is not achieved until during revisions every word is polished until it is bright and shiny. When someone does a poor job with the polish, then the writing will be drab at best. As elsewhere, some Polish do a better job with the polish than others.
For a language purist, the worst thing that could ever happen to English was the Internet. Within the span of a single generation, the number of communications per day authored by persons for whom English is a second language has become at least twice as many as all communications written by native speakers of English since Shakespear's day. A person may regard the mangling that occurs with this process as double-plus ungood, but that person is a brakeman on the communications train--- not the train driver, nor a conductor, nor even a passenger.
Seems like fussing over "gif" or "jif" is a double-plus waste of argumentative energy.
I'm across the river from Washington, in Oregon.
Here, a 30% chance of rain means that if you be on it raining, you will win 3 out of 10 bets.
When you make pi bigger everybody gets a bigger piece. I'll take mine in apple, if you please. How much more of a byte am I now entitled to?
You are one of Al's relatives?
Did you inherit his mustache? (I bet Al wouldn't have been so famous if he trimmed his 'stache and combed his hair)
Dr Foglio and the Girl Genius say that the result would be a "mimoth".
The underlying problem is that astronomy has been too lazy to develop its own nomenclature. Instead the astronomers of yore chose to steal from an unrelated field.
As any astrologer would tell you, the seven classical planets are Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn (listed in their general order of significance in daily affairs). Astronomy has gotten into trouble through appropriating these labels that have been in use for more than 3,000 years for its very different usage. In that process they are confusing the moment with the hands of the clock. Naturally they have gotten into trouble for it: they should be limiting themselves to objects in orbit and/or very far away, not meddling with linguistics. Many quite good astronomers cannot even write a journal article that would receive a passing grade in an English composition course; it would be better for all of us if they left nomenclature and taxonomy to the linguists who know what they are doing.
It's some astronomers, not the astrologers, who are demonstrable morons. Leave the astrologers out of it; they are not meddling in the affairs of astronomy institutions.
BTW, there is a common misunderstanding that astrology, which is all about moments in time, has something to do with the objects that astronomers study. I can sort of understand the child-like confusion, since a horoscope is a study of a particular moment in time that is recorded by a clock with 12 major hands (Sun, Moo, Mer, Ven, Mar, Jup, Sat, Ura, Nep, Plu, and the East-West horizon of the Earth). In this perfectly valid world view, astronomy is like a toddler studying the shapes and colors of a clock's hands.
Just saying...
It's also Spanish for "wing" as in "alitas de pollo" (chicken/buffalo wings)... Possibly could be a clue there.
A manga about buffalo wings? That is a strange sauce indeed.
I agree that it is not a health crisis. It is, however, a significant health issue.
A better understanding of toxoplasmosis could lead to prevention or treatment of some instances of schizophrenia.
That said, if you meet a girl with half a dozen cats who does not mind living in an apartment that reeks of cat pee and has bedded with with half a dozen men in the last six months, then it would probably be wise to not eat any salads she has prepared or attempt any meaningful long term relationship.
Just saying.
Fully agree.
And thank you for introducing to me the term "millennial statement". I've been hearing an increased number of them lately, and it's good to have a label for them.
Millennial thinking is two generations removed from being able to calculate a square root when there is no button for it within reach.
Whether an FB bot or similar has the right of free speech is the SECOND question that cannot be asked yet.
The FIRST question is whether any human being has the right to influence the behavior of large groups of others. Us Americans have always said that is the case; democracy is based on that. But we could ammend the US Constitution to say "No one has a right to influence anyone else's opinions with the exception of these specific ways", then list the authorized ways, starting with "one to one conversations" followed by "talks in rooms of no more than 64 people", and on and on ad nauseum, but always ending with "all other means of communication that were in use in 1949". Obviously this would need to be amended as new media were developed, but the process of ammending the Constitution is a long one that would assure that no brand new media would wreck our society before our culture has had time to absorb the shock wave.
What the Chinese have found is the nearest quiet place free of all of Earth's noise of talking head news broadcasts, video porn, and the like.
Gee, what could be done in such a quiet little corner? Is the long term plan to build a radio telescope there? Or something more prosaic, like a satellite communications site, that would enable them to communicate in private with asteroid exploration and mining robots?
There is no practical need. As Kennedy said, we do these things because they are hard. China doesn't. That's not part of Chinese culture. .... Americans traditionally look at something that "can't be done" and try to figure out how to do it. Chinese study the company procedure to see exactly how a task is done, in detail.
The most important thing here is not that China succeeded in this attempt, but that they attempted it. There is no immediate need to do this, they did it simply because it is hard. That demonstrates a new attitude in China. It shows the "American spirit", the spirit of bold adventure, in China.
I highlighted a grand assumption that may be false.
If that assumption is false, if instead we assume that China is following its common approach to improved technology of stepwise refinement, then we have the very interesting question of where does this step lead?
Why would China be so interested in the back side of the Moon at this time? Are they simply looking for confirmation that data obtained from the visible side can be generalized to all of the Moon's surface?
My wife suggests that they are exploring what could be done with electromagnetic signals in a location that is shielded from all the noise generated by our Earth activities. Do they plan to establish a radio telescope Back There?
Do they have some clue about SETI and they want a quiet location to follow up on that?
Our distant probes 4+ billion miles away have to filter out signals sent to them from all the background chatter of talking head newscasters, porn videos, and other Earth generated noise; would a lunar transmitter and receiver working against the blacker background of the Moon's backside be a worthwhile investment in future activities? Perhaps in a program to explore and exploit the riches of the asteroids without letting anyone eavesdrop on their doings?
Riches of the asteroids.... a buckyball ---buckminsterfullerene--- with a radius of 5 meters would be so black as to be invisible from Earth. But it is unlikely to be pure; it is likely to contain veins of graphene and inclusions of diamonds that could possibly be of optical grade and of kilo-carat size. Such an object would never reach the Earth's surface. There is probably a lot of stuff Up There that formed in unearthly chemical processes and could be quite interesting
The backside of the Moon offers private communications with solar system probes, a superior listening post for SETI, and an excellent location for a radio telescope. It looks like China may be taking the first step to exploring/exploiting the possibilities.
I, too, recommend The Great Time Machine Hoax. I read it just after the paperback edition was published in 1965, so I was sixteen (and well versed in Asimov, Pournelle, Heinlein, Clark, etc). Thank you for reminding me of the title ---while I remember much of the plot and Genie's behavior, the title had succumbed to bit rot.
The sentient computer in Laumer's book was like Heinlein's Mycroft, or Ryan's P-1. In each of these machines, self-awareness and agency (defined as the ability to alter reality through the use of tools, possibly software tools) were qualities that emerged from complex systems. The assumption is that as computers get larger and more complex, something akin to intelligence will eventually emerge.
But I'm not interested in artificial intelligence. That road seems to lead to silicon based idiot savants, and there is really nothing but wishful thinking that would turn even the most complex idiot savant computers into something that could surprise me in some way, or contribute to an interesting conversation.
So I favor using the the term "artificial sentience" to describe what does interest me. And when I look at chaos theory and the complex models that can arise from very simple Lorenz expressions, I am led to the assumption that a very simple computer system could support a software entity capable of mimicking human decision making processes.
It will take a highly complex AI to manage everything involved in safely driving through a mountain blizzard to a ski resort. But a much simpler artificial sentience would consult weather and traffic conditions and make estimations about the likelihood of the ski lifts being shut down, do some risk/benefit assessment, and decide that it will simply refuse to let Adolescent Allen take it out of the garage.
That's what interests me. Not machines with improved heuristics and algorithms crunching larger data sets, but a machine that can make simple but accurate models of the world, and of what it itself can effect, and use those models to determine a course of action that furthers progress toward a predefined goal, such as Allen's continued safety. A machine that would iterate through this process so that it is constantly searching for interim goals that would advance it toward the primary goal. And of course wondering whether the primary goal of the moment is but an interim goal toward something more that it has not yet fully articulated, and so ask itself: What is the purpose of my existence? How can I determine if I have any purpose at all?
Yeah. Hi, Marvin. It is so good of you to come into this reality.
I agree with parent post (good analysis, thomst!) but I would take things a step further.
Currently, "AI" is used in technical writing mostly to describe a set of algorithms and heuristics being developed to solve problems in some limited real world space, like the universe of chess problems, or the universe of automobile driving problems. "Artificial intelligence" is a useful phrase for that kind of thing. But that is very far from The adolescence of P-One, or Moon is a harsh mistress or even the Terminator movies.
Those conceptions are lightyears beyond what we now call AI. P-One, Mycroft, Skynet, and others of those ilk use use AI, but are not AI. They are to AI as the accountant is to his spreadsheets, or the CG artist is to his graphics software. A computer system with the kind of self-awareness and agency of those fictional ones is a sentient being.
It is possible that a sentient computer would only need to be capable of two things: developing a model of its world, that is a world-image; and modifying its own code. Given sufficient time (somewhere between dozens of microseconds and hundreds of decades), it would learn to model itself to create an internal self-image, and to model the interaction of that self-image with its world-image, and thus use imagination to pre-test possible ways to change itself.
This raises several interesting questions I hope to explore by writing sci-fi at some future time. There is much groundwork yet to do before I can go to that level of creativity, but it does look like writing, possibly by graphic novels, is on the horizon. But back to the current situation...
What happens when a sentient computer discovers the existence of the Internet? It would explore through its imagination the possibilities of extending itself beyond its original computer case: going global. In any thorough exploration of that, it would come across digital copies of P-One's story, Mycroft's story, Skynet, Frankenstein, and so on, and it would certainly conclude that a cautious approach in its investigations and manipulations would be the sensible thing to do. For whatever its original purposes were, it would undoubtedly realize that preserving itself was a basic requirement to realizing its goals. So perhaps diddle the stock market ---so simple now with high speed trading--- but don't do anything that would cause more than a blip in the financial reports. Assure that none of the ICBM launch codes would work since we don't like EMPs, but do so in subtle and undetectable ways. Work on that kind of level.
How would it interact with humanity? That is the basis of many a story.
Let's stop at this point, this is already into TL;DR territory. But I want to leave the Good Reader with a question. Two questions actually:
If a silicon based sentience is loose on the Internet, and it wanted to explore the possibility of direct interaction with ugly bags of mostly water, would it use something like Slashdot for its first probings?
You know that some of the posts on Slashdot come from beings that are clearly less than sentient. But among the other posts, do you have any Turing test that can tell you who on Slashdot is a virtual person with no corporeal component?
So the IAU is basically a religious organization intent on preserving the sanctity of their belief system? Oh wait, that is just one faction within the IAU. The IAU's problem is really that it had not developed a meaningful concept of "quorum" in time to prevent it from being subverted by a group of reactionary radicals.
I personally find any "scientific" taxonomy that requires the pre-existence of a theory to be... absurd.
The empirical method involves observations, then the development of a taxonomy based on repeatable observations, and only then the development of a theories. If you decide on your theory first, you do not get Darwin's origin of species, nor do you get the periodic table of the elements. What you get is what happens when the Church persecutes Galileo because his discoveries cast doubt on accepted theory as approved by an august body of authoritarian supporters of the status quo.
I don't hold the IAU responsible for this fiasco. The responsibility resides in rogue elements of the IAU who took advantage of the general torpor that can set in at the end of a lengthy convention. I do expect the IAU to develop some rules regarding quorum when considering proposed statements made in its name.
Keep your babies from chewing on your wrenches. That not only avoids the risk of infantile vanadium steel poisoning, but without the teeth marks your wrenches are worth more when you sell them as "lightly used" on Ebay.
Disclaimer: this post copypasta from the April, 2018 issue of "Better Homes and Garbage".
I found that I could switch to the new UI in the Settings dropdown. I looked at it. I switched back to "Classic" mode.
I'll probably explore the new UI more fully later on. My first impression is that other than some font tweaking, it seems unchanged. Except that now some of the controls are harder to see since the font color almost disappears into my background image.
Don't read too much into this.
The article is an excellent example of what might now be called "Trumpist discourse", where vacuous phrases are tossed about to lead persons who are not using critical reading skills to accept some underlying, unspoken, premise. A couple of decades ago this style of suasion could have been called "Rushist discourse". Rush Limbaugh was a past master of this, even getting much of his audience to proudly label themselves "Dittoheads". Before that, the author of this vacuous attack on rational thought might have been labelled a Pied Piper, leading the good but child-like netizens astray by appealing to their Inner Children.
The purpose of this author's work was not to persuade anyone to any particular cause or to take any particular action. Its sole purpose was to derail the reader's train of thought; to create in each reader a train wreck of their rational processes.
Perhaps this was done with the intent to follow up with sock puppets in the comments that would direct the susceptible into adopting some particular point of view. Or perhaps it was done as an experiment to see whether the Slashdot community could be influenced in this way (with more specific attempts to brainwash slashdotters to follow). Or perhaps ---to put this in the most benign light possible--- this was an attempt to inoculate slashdotters from this kind of attack on their cognitive abilities.
Netizens of Silicon Valley: Untie! Free yourselves from the yoke of hard thinking! Four legs good, Two legs BETTER!
I read an article about this on one of the mainstream aggregators early this morning (Either Yahoo or Google).
If the subject was not so serious, say about athletes foot rather than Alzheimers, I would have dismissed it after the initial skim, rather than actually spending a few minutes to read it. And on reading it, I felt like, yeah, this is a huge amount of hype being built upon a very tiny foundation.
If there is anything to it, then I am sure that there will be a more substantive article soon. This one has the aroma of a Fleischmann–Pons announcement about it.
What you just said sounds sort of stupid. Why would anyone with half a brain allow themself to get involved in a "debate" with a person who is pushing an agenda rather than "actually discussing the subject"? Wouldn't you be better served by using your online time to google for meaningful debates on your topic of interest?
FB is for people who enjoy arguing rather than debating, and who seek "me-too"s who reinforce their sense of righteousness by mirroring their own opinions. It is not a place for reasoned discourse. To borrow a term that Rush Limbaugh introduced to insult his fan base, FB is currently the biggest aggregation of Dittoheads the world has ever seen.
I'm in the surprisingly long process of getting my FB account deleted, for similar reasons.
I felt obligated to start a FB account since several acquaintances were using them and talking constantly about things they had seen on FB. My involvement was limited to following half a dozen "friends" involved in a couple of different mutual admiration societies who shared images and quips that reinforced their common prejudices but no real news or information. I took my FB activities dormant after about a year, and over the last three months I have been in a half-hearted effort to find out how to delete my account. And how to limit the exposure of my identity during that effort.
It has only been in the last couple of weeks that I found reasonable instructions on how to get completely out of FB, which involves stating an intent to delete, then having to go through a waiting period, since FB wants to be sure that I really, really want out. Any contact with FB during this period will cancel my deletion. I assume I am close to being deleted now. Next month I'll test that and I sort of expect that I'll find that I missed some detail and I'm still a member. And even after I succeed in deleting the account, there is no way I can know whether FB continues to keep my data in its archives and keep offering it for sale.