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(Note to non-US people: this thread refers to the US housing market) As a followup to this thread... So, I'm examining the present situation the US housing market is in, and I can't help but feel a tinge of the Savings and Loan Scandal which occurred under Reagan. In that case deregulation of the banking industry gave savings and loan companies many of the same powers as banks. This lead to the subsequent bankruptcy of over 500 savings and loans. The same thing is happening now thanks to deregulation of mortgage brokers. It's largely owed to the combination of mortgage brokers offering subprime loans, people willing to accept them, and the cluster**** which ensued. It's a case of two parties looking for a deal in the other mutually screwing each other and in the process, everyone else. http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070302/ts_csm/asubprime The problem goes like follows: Ignorant consumers shop for the lowest mortgage in town and find a subprime ARM. They don't read the fine print (by which I mean the large faced print on their Good Faith Estimate) and fail to realize that two years down the road their APR would ratchet up to some grossly above-prime value. Great if you intend to flip your house in two years! Guess how many people were thinking that way, versus just not paying attention. Scandalous mortgage brokers laugh all the way to the bank, failing to realize one thing: maybe all these people they duped into overly expensive mortgages won't be able to pay them. While they can foreclose all they want, they're not in the real estate business. They're in the banking business. They don't want to own homes. They want to make money on helping people finance homes. Then it all comes crashing down... very very hard: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070319/ts_nm/usa_subprime_detroit_dc In motor city houses are now cheaper than cars thanks to record foreclosures. So, how are all those subprime lenders dealing with the situation? Well, at least for New Century Financial, which heralds itself as a "new shade of blue chip", their stock is in the toilet: http://www.ncen.com/ OUCH! Just look at that graph. The current news on their front page now reads: "NYSE Suspends Trading New Century Financial Corporation's Securities" Nobody's coming out of this one a winner, except those of us who bought homes when the bubble burst and were able to cash in on low prices.

I get my news from The Onion, America's Finest News Source:

I happen to love charts and graphs, mainly because they plainly illustrate the disparity between what's in people's heads and what the data actually show. In your case, that seems to be pretty severe. And you believe this because... Rush Limbaugh said it? http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/volgas.html

Well, there really are. Spacetime does not behave like a medium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment

Here we go, this is what I'm asking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_loopholes

And the scientific basis behind that statement is... People who build models of the climate system see a very different picture:

Referring to one cell per iteration as "c" in CA is just a useful convention and has nothing to do with the real world. I'm far more concerned with what would happen in a Bell test experiment where the observations took place at a distance too great for information travelling at c to have an impact on the outcome. My question is how do the present experiments rule this out?

Earlier I used Rule 30 as an example of a deterministic system which produces a statistically random distribution. However, Severian instructed me that Rule 30 does not use a system of non-local hidden variables which violation of Bell's inequality would necessitate. Information in Rule 30 moves no faster than "c" (one cell per second). Rule 30 is still very much a local system. However, my question would be have the Bell test experiments shown that the resulting distribution does not rely on information traveling at c? Why must it be superluminal and how has it experimentally shown to be otherwise?

Wow http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/uploads/scimaplarge.jpg

Soft AI and hard AI? I don't know where you got those terms, but they aren't in general usage. The correct terms are strong AI (SAI) and weak AI. Strong AI generally refers to self-modeling systems. There exists a smaller dichotomy: general intelligence versus narrow intelligence. General intelligence systems can be applied to all problems, whereas narrow intelligence systems are fitted to suit a particular problem. Some examples of these would be Jeff Hawkins' Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) versus a Bayesian spam filter. The latter does simple pattern matching using a simplistic learning model. Some people have suggested the term "synthetic intelligence" (SI)

Yes, there's something wrong with this picture, either: 1) FDNY covertly planted explosives days/weeks before 9/11, and on one who worked in the building has said a peep - OR - 2) Never before in history have buildings so large been brought down by explosions/fire. This is because never before in history have skyscrapers like the Twin Towers been hit by something containing as much flammable/explosive material as a transcontinetal Boeing 767. This, combined with the massive amount of petroleum products found in your typical office building, resulted in an unprecedented explosion/fire, spilling debris onto a building with a system of diesel-fueled backup generators. The combination of falling debris and a diesel-fueled fire brought the building down. Please think about these two possibilites. Then, try listening to Larry Silverstein's statements in the context of #2. Think about the "tremendous loss of life" which occured when a building full of firefighters collapsed. Now think that hundreds of firefighters died trying in futility to preserve buildings that you own. Now imagine two have collapsed already, and a third is about to. Do you: 1) ask the firefighters to keep fighting the good fight, even if they don't have water. Gotta fight for your property, even if it's futile. 2) pull the firefighters out of the building, let it collapse, and spare some human lives on a day when so many have already been lost.

I would consult your primary care provider, or if you don't have one a general practitioner of some sort.

We had a horrible, cold winter here with record snowfall. This article is stating that the global mean surface temperature for December 2006 through February 2007 is the highest on record. If you compare our regional average to the running average, we had a colder-than-average winter:

How long until the enormously wasteful incandescent light bulb is dead? http://www.physorg.com/news93198212.html According to this table this LED is approximately equivalent to a 67 watt incandescent bulb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

The 2006-07 winter was the warmest worldwide since the advent of instrumental recording, according to the US atmospheric agency NOAA. http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2007/s2819.htm Anyone else been feeling it? We've had one of the worst winters on record in terms of snowfall.

There already is, in the form of the "Ski Train" which runs from Denver to Winter Park (through the Moffat Tunnel): http://www.skitrain.com/ Winter Park is on the Western Slope, not the Front Range. Most of the good ski areas (Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen, Copper Mountain, Arapahoe, Keystone) are on the Western Slope. The best ski area on the Eastern Slope, Loveland, lies on the Great Continental Divide just miles from the Western Slope. However, this train is indicative of the poor financial planning which generally dogs privately owned mass transportation systems around here: 1. Tickets are $49 each round-trip, which is rather steep. 2. The train departs and returns once a day. It boards at 6:30 AM, departs at 7:15 AM, and arrives in Winter Park at 9:30 AM. The return departure is at 4:15 PM, arriving in Denver at 6:30PM. 3. All tickets are round-trip for the same day only. If you wish to ride to Winter Park one day, spend the night, and return the next, it costs a prohibitively expensive $98. 4. The train is direct from Denver to Winter Park. While the train cruises by many former stations, which are still standing, it stops at none of them. For someone living in Boulder to ride the Ski Train, they have to drive or ride the bus 23.5 miles to reach Union Station in Denver: (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=boulder,+co+to+union+station,+denver,+co&sll=39.87075,-105.505829&sspn=0.725144,1.223602&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=11&om=1) 5. Even if the train stopped by nearby Rollinsville, the RTD bus system doesn't go that far. It only goes as far as Nederland, which is approximately 5 miles from Rollinsville. I believe there's MASSIVE potential for interconnecting public transportation systems to provide service for the many skiers in Colorado. I live in Boulder, which is a city nearby yet rather disconnected from Denver. People here are rather "European" in their political views. We have an excellent local bus system which is funded by city taxes and interoperates with the larger Regional Transportation District (RTD) bus system. We also have an excellent system of bike trails. Boulderites are fairly committed to finding non-automobile based means of getting around. If I had the power to change both the public (RTD) and private (Ski Train) transportation systems around here, I'd extend RTD service to Rollinsville during the ski season, make the Ski Train stop in Rollinsville, and have discount tickets between Rollinsville and Winter Park. Here's Google Maps showing the distance. It's approximately 20 miles by train: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=rollinsville,+co&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=39.917636,-105.674744&spn=0.188798,0.41851&om=1 Here's a map showing the Boulder Canyon highway between Boulder and Nederland (which RTD covers) and the short distance from Nederland to Rollinsville (which RTD doesn't cover): http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=rollinsville,+co&layer=&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=12&ll=39.983697,-105.365067&spn=0.188616,0.41851 And finally, here's a map showing the circuitous 77 mile distance that must be traveled by automobile to accomplish the same trip: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=boulder,+co+to+winter+park,+co&sll=39.888929,-105.594749&sspn=0.188877,0.41851&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=10&om=1 The train route, which provides an environmentally-friendly mass transit system between the two cities, is unfortunately controlled by a private entity who seeks to maximize profit on it while minimizing risk. Rather than running a multiple-train, multi-stop service multiple times per day, and allowing people to opt for multiple day trips on round-trip tickets, they run what they consider to be a low-risk, once a day, use-it-or-lose-it-on-the-same-day service. This is retarded. Sometimes capitalistic ideals don't work out. Sometimes individual companies, who can monopolize a resource like the Moffat Tunnel, make retarded decisions that hurt everyone. When you have multiple forms of transportation like busses (RTD) and trains (Union Pacific), they can interoperate in a single, cohesive transportation network. But when there are private players, systems don't always get along. This is definitely the case with the Ski Train. Rollinsville provides the optimal boarding point for Boulderites to access not only Winter Park, but other skiing destinations such as Steamboat. However the train doesn't run to Steamboat. Even if it ran to Steamboat, it'd take a day, and then you wouldn't have time to ski. You couldn't ride the train there, spend the night in their hot springs pool, then ski the next day and board the train at 4PM for the return ride home. I'm not saying it's impossible for private transportation systems to work this way, but Union Pacific doesn't care to try. What's the result? I-70, the Interstate which provides the only transportation corridor between Denver and all the ski areas I listed above, is slated to undergo 10 years of construction to upgrade it from 2 lanes to three in each direction. The plan involves elevating the Interstate the entire distance from Denver to the Eisenhower and Johnson tunnels which run under the Continental Divide (approximately 30 miles). Various rail solutions have been proposed to compliment I-70, but they're all enormously expensive and would run along the existing I-70 corridor. What's really been neglected are the existing transportation systems in the form of the RTD bus system and the Union Pacific ski train. If RTD could go 10 miles farther and Union Pacific have their train stop in Rollinsville and allow passengers to ride the train for approximately 20 miles for, say, less that $49 round trip for trips spanning multiple days, and let Boulderites take a 20 mile bus ride to Rollinsville and a 20 mile train ride to Winter Park instead, I think they'd manage to divert a hell of a lot of traffic from I-70. As is, RTD does provide direct bus service from Boulder to the nearest (Front Range) ski area, Eldora / Indian Peaks, for approximately $5. However, I've got to say: Eldora sucks. It's small. It's cold. It's windy. It's a shadow of the awesomeness that is Winter Park. (And people wonder why I own a car...)

Yes, it's by Odeo author Evan Williams (Odeo was a direct competitor of ours before they wound up in the Web 2.0 deadpool) Very popular in Silicon Valley, not much popular elsewhere. But beware, you're basically selling your information for advertising statistics.

Last night I had a weird one. I was hanging out with Kevin Nealon and we were going to various parties on different floors of this giant hotel. We kept riding the elevators and they felt weirder and weirder. Then one time on the elevator it didn't make it all the way up, and the doors opened without the elevator car being all the way to the top. Then the whole thing started to tilt. There were people waiting for the elevator and they started screaming. There was this little girl in front of me and I lifted her up to all the people as the elevator car started to slowly tilt and sink down. Then I reached up and the people grabbed me and pulled me up onto the floor before the elevator car broke and started falling down the shaft. There were people still on the elevator car. We went down to the hotel lobby, where there was some sort of weird elevator monitoring screen going nuts, and no one at the hotel seemed to care. I think I woke up shortly after that one. Then I had a dream a friend of mine was getting married and giving away weird gift certificates. He asked me about how the collapse of the quantum wavefunction worked which is weird because he's a physics grad student. I think I said something about the double slit experiment. I was really trying to think about how to describe it, in a dream, which made the moment pretty damn vivid for a dream.

The plane landed at a secret airbase, where Bush and Cheney personally gassed the cabin, loaded all the dead bodies into the tip of a cruise missile, and fired it at the Pentagon. And that's not morbid humor. I have friends who actually believe that. It's really sad. Apparently that makes more sense to them than the "official explanation"

And for the most part the bike paths run alongside the various creeks that flow through Boulder, so some sort of culvert under the road is needed for the streams anyway. The underpasses provide both a place for the stream to flow through and a convenient system of bike trails. Haha, well it's not going to be an elevated maglev, but RTD plans to extend light rail service to Boulder by 2014. The idea I can hop on a train, be in downtown Denver in less than an hour, get completely sloshed, then ride the train back is extremely appealing Plus I-36 is one of the most congested interstates in the country, so some sort of solution is needed...

My hometown of Boulder is investing quite a bit of money in building underpasses for bikers. This means that us bikers can get anywhere in town without having to wait for traffic lights. Because of this biking is actually a much faster way of getting around here than driving! And rather than sitting in a sea of cars waiting for the light to change, I have a nice morning ride to work which goes alongside a creek. And rather than spending money on gas, I get free exercise! Woo! Until recently the weather prevented me from biking to work (we just had the worst winter on record here in terms of total snowfall), but now I'm biking again and loving it. Oh, and it's feeling unseasonably warm...

Point taken. In CA "c" is one cell per iteration. In Rule 30 both 001 and 100 will move at c. In other CA there are patterns which move at "c" as well. The "glider" pattern from Life is an example.

Wow, anyone get the same vibe as those creationist videos where they trot out a lot of people with impressive looking credentials to lambaste the dominant paradigm? Definitely a lot of criticism of the IPCC in this video. Some of it apt. The IPCC isn't perfect. There is a prevailing mindset, and because of that it is hostile to dissenting viewpoints. I used to work for an outspoken IPCC critic. However, like some of these people, while he was an IPCC critic, he was also an IPCC reviewer. This video is doing a pretty evil hack job. They're lumping critics of the IPCC together with critics who oppose the science demonstrating that CO2 is the predominant radiative forcing impacting the climate system and also with critics of the green movement. Many of the arguments are laughably specious: CO2 was not affecting the climate system the way it was now at a specific instance in the past. Therefore CO2 clearly can't affect the climate system that way today! And they intend for us to assume that the climate system is otherwise static. If you want to be critical of the IPCC, great. Want to argue that they're fitting science to policy rather than vice versa? Go right ahead. I don't agree with many of their policy recommendations. I think Kyoto is an absolutely horrible idea. That's not the way to apply policy to solving the problem. What things do I like? Banning incandescent bulbs. That's an excellent way to impact major change. A local professor has found a way to use CO2 from powerplants to enrich algae growth and thus provide a high-speed way of producing biomass for biodiesel. This video pits opponents of the "green" movement, opponents of the scientific basis for anthropogenic climate change, and opponents of the IPCC into a single video, while simultaneously lumping the climate science community, the IPCC, the UN, and the green movement into a single cohesive force whose sole intention is to shape policy. Yes, they're all in cahoots. It's a big conspiracy, whose sole purpose is to push an anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist agenda through the highest levels of government. This video is the biggest crock of shit since Oliver Stone's JFK, or at least Loose Change. But that's all moot. To the scientists who oppose global warming: Where's your GCM? Why aren't you doing reconstructions which implicate some radiative forcing other than CO2 as being predominant? Where's your science? Here's the IPCC's latest report on the physical science basis of climate change: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

I've mentioned Palm Pilot creator Jeff Hawkins and his most excellent book On Intelligence several times before. While writing a book about a comprehensive theory of how the brain works that wins the critical acclaim of neurophysiologists is an astounding enough task by itself, Jeff has since founded a startup company, Numenta, dedicated to implementing his model of how the brain works, which he calls the Memory-Prediction Framework. The result is a computer program known as Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Wired recently wrote an article on Hawkins' startup, noting that it has no sales force: interested customers are already lined up at his doorstep. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/hawkins.html?pg=1

That's okay. I just wanted to point out that "functional" has a very special meaning when describing programming languages. You can think of functional languages as being a purely mathematical system. This is generally described by functions not having "side effects". State is kept on the stack and in pure functional languages, there are no variables save for the value being returned. Examples of some functional languages include Lisp, Scheme, (O')(CA)ML, and Haskell. There are many languages that are deeply rooted in functional concepts as well, such as Python and Ruby.