bascule

Computer science refers to the mathematical theory behind computation, or to put it more precisely, a combination between theoretical mathematics and semiotics, the study of languages (or rather, symbols and sets of symbolic elements) Generally a programmer will express a set of instructions to a computer in the form of a context-free formal language description, which must be scanned, parsed, and compiled into a recursively enumerable language utilized by the computer hardware. The problem of scanning, parsing, and compiling context-free (and in a few scant cases such as Tcl, context-sensitive) languages into recursively enumerable ones is a classic computer science problem, and has lead to the development of meta-languages (e.g. lex, yacc) for tasks like scanning and parsing. Regular languages are used quite often by both programmers and non-programmers alike in the form of regular expressions. Regular expressions define a grammar for a potentially infinite-sized pattern matching language. This language can be expressed in the form of a deterministic finite automata (although much more typically in the form of a non-deterministic finite automata due to practical requirements of everyday pattern matching). Regular expressions remain the de-facto standard for expressing pattern matching state machines. However, it's possible to express a state machine in a meta-language rather than using a meta-language to construct its grammar. This can be done using a state machine compiler (e.g. Ragel) Many other computer science problems deal almost entirely in the domain of theoretical mathematics, such as algorithms and data structures (the former being an integral part of the latter). An example of such a problem is: How do I store one set of values such that they are keyed by another set of values (a process known as hashing) There are many solutions to the above problem, depending on what the key is. When using strings for keys, the typical approach is to use a hash table. In a hash table, you apply a hashing function to the input string which translates to an index in an array. Since many strings will hash to the same array index, some method of collision avoidance is required. One approach is chaining: use a linked list to store all the values in a given "bucket", then iterate through the list to find what value is associated with a given key. When dealing with integer keys there are much better approaches. One is a b-tree, which essentially aims to combine the beneficial properties of arrays and binary trees. Each node in a b-tree stores an array of values in order, and an array of branches which represent values which lie in between the values in the array. However, a much simpler, stochastic approach, a skip list, has actually been shown to be better than b-trees in most cases. So, there's a small sampling of some computer science problems. To sum it all up, computer science problems are generally in the realm of creating and formally classifying various approaches to solving theoretical mathematics or semiotics problems in such a way that they can be assessed for a given case so the best approach can be chosen. It's really the theory behind programming, and in most programming languages the most difficult computer science problems have already been solved for you, allowing you the programmer to pursue practical goals rather than having to worry about all the theory going into them. Generally, when you write a program, someone has already written a scanner and parser to build a compile tree of it, then either a compiler to translate it to recursively enumerable machine language or an interpreter expressed in a recursively enumerable language to execute your program. Someone has likely also provided you with a library of data structures, and chosen implementations which work best in the majority of cases. Generally you'd hope they've also implemented searching algorithms for you.

For a desktop, MacOS X or Windows Vista are both going to be better choices, in my opinion (I'm on MacOS X now) Ubuntu is great, but MacOS X and Vista both have it beaten in terms of both features and application availability. I think the Flash 9 port to Linux makes clear some of the fundamental problems that still remain. While the Linux Standards Base is trying to make Linux an easier target for developers, there remain gaping holes in the sorts of functionality it covers, whereas Windows and OS X have firmly cemented developer APIs that make them easy to target. As for a server, Linux is probably your best bet, although for a fileserver Solaris or FreeBSD with ZFS is probably the better choice. And yes, thanks to the USL lawsuit none of the open source BSD operating systems today share a single code with Unix, by legal necessity. That's what SCO sued IBM over in regard to Linux (and lost)

Fallacy: false dichotomy And funny, this same thread is going on over at TFN

Happy Festivulenalia!

There's nothing wrong with performing an assessment of regional climate change, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has done just that, and concluded that Australia is warming up (see figures from earlier in thread). For some reason JonathanLowe rejects mean surface surface temperature as a metric by which to assess regional warming. He's given no justification for doing so, and based his arguments on metrics I consider completely irrelevant to the question at hand. I have no doubt the figures he's computing are valid but he's trying to use those numbers to make arguments that aren't justified by the metrics being assessed.

I smoke pot and do a number of different hallucinogenic drugs. I think those should all be legal. I harm no one by doing so. Where is the basis of illegality? I guess I'm a mountain hick, but I believe gun ownership and ownership of weapons of many forms, including edged weapons but particularly those banned for specious reasons, such as spring assist knives, butterfly knives, and even switchblades, should continue. I think the "assault weapons ban" is a joke and own semiautomatic weapons which are just a small modification away from being considered an "assault weapon". I generally eschew deregulation and think many systems, including the health system and power grid, should be nationalized out of sheer practicality (maintaining oligarchian control of a particular market doesn't exactly scream free market to me). The power grid is a single, enormously complex interconnected machine that needs to be administered as such, and US health expendatures are wasted on a monsterous bureaucracy connecting health services with a multitude of health insurance companies. But other than that, I think the government should pursue a fiscally libertarian, hands off approach, so long as basic worker rights are assured. But perhaps the biggest issue for me is DRM, and particularly the DMCA. Nobody should be able to create a piece of hardware then sue you for modifying it. When you buy an electronic product, it becomes your own, and you should be free to use it to whatever ends you wish without fear of prosecution. The DMCA essentially says what you bought isn't your own after all, but more something you lease from the company that manufactured it. I didn't sign any fu*cking paperwork saying I leased my (whatever DRM-enabled device) and if I want to circumvent the DRM I damn well better be able to without fear of prosecution. John McCain, who I used to respect, is trying to push through legislation which would hold bloggers to the same standard as journalists, with the publication of misinformation punishable as libel, and worse, remove common carrier status for blog hosts, pushing through a number of Orwellian content regulation mechanisms for the blogosphere. Does this really mean that's the new agenda of "the right"? I guess time will tell, but I think you'll find the Democrats have much bigger bones to pick than violent video games.

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago this day. Here's to a great scientist, author, videographer, and a vocal advocate of science education. His books changed my life.

So I spent a long night talking to a relatively smart new ager (who's smart enough to realize a lot of new age crap is total bunk) about various topics, including Earth's climate system and all the feedback loops it contains, as well as the carbon cycle and how the amount of carbon locked up in various phases of matter impacts the global temperature (e.g. widespread conversion from carbon compounds in solid and liquid form are causing temperature increases) At one point he started talking about how plants respond to human behavior, and sort of perk up when people are having sex. I said I didn't believe it, and that while plants are full of chemical feedback loops which allow them to exhibit various behaviors (e.g. heliotropism, geotropism, thigmatropism), none of them would respond to any sort of metaphysical human behavioral energy field. It was after that he offered an alternative hypothesis: perhaps people breathing out a lot of CO2 during sex is what causes the plant to perk up. Now there's a hypothesis I can actually entertain. Any evidence of that one?

It's really easy, actually. Hit Search Put your user name into the "Search by User Name" field Look at the "Sort Results by" box and change "in Descending Order" to "in Ascending Order" Hit "Search Now" I chose the first thread I started, rather than my very first post which was a rather boring response to someone else's thread

Here's my equally silly first thread, from April 2005: M-theory, the global consciousness, psychic powers, and the psychedelic experience That was way back when back I saw something to the Global Consciousness Project (which I implicitly trusted because it had Princeton's name on it), and, for that matter, had just read Brian Greene's Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos and was all into the idea of M-theory. Well, soon I learned that while the Global Consciousness Project claimed their "eggs" use quantum random event generators (quantum!!!), many were in fact using the standard entropy harvesting mechanisms of the Linux kernel for random number generation, and therefore whatver statistical correlation between the "eggs" and world events existed could easily be explained by differing input patterns into computers following massive worldwide events like 9/11. 9/11 changed human behavior which changed how humans interacted with computers which changed the data the eggs harvested. I convinced myself if they were demonstrating anything, it was the weakness of using interrupt patterns as a source of truly random numbers. Later, I discovered the Global Consciousness Project was a subproject of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) center, and that their analysis of GCP data was rife with bad math. The group had been searching for scientific evidence of the paranormal for decades, and turned up jack. This was all a pretty good lesson in appeal to authority... just because something has Princeton's name on it does not make it credible. Princeton's PEAR program is run by total whack jobs. I still believe metaconsciousness is emerging on the Internet, especially when I see collective intelligence harvesting systems like digg, reddit, and Google Trends which let you see what "the Internet" is "thinking" about. They're just taking place within the environment of information systems, no crazy quantum quackery required.

Well, then you missed the point of my post. I was making the point that liberals advocating PC/tolerance/wholesomeness over free speech is nothing new, citing PNAC. Joseph Lieberman (who I would at least consider to be a moderate liberal) has perhaps been one of the most staunch opponents of violence in video games, at least as far as someone holding office goes. My point was that trying to group these movement in with "the right" and "the left" employs a category fallacy, one you use often and one you've admitted to in the past. I would've had no problem had you titled this thread "More Game Censorship From PC Thugs" but for some reason you felt the need to turn this into a liberal/conservative issue. I could use a similar category fallacy to claim that "the right" is responsible for the Holocaust (oops, Godwin's law) Who is really missing whom's point here, eh? C'mon Pangloss, we're both libertarians supporting free speech rights. I'm a liberal and you're, well, not. If you want to focus on problems like PC/overpromotion of "tolerance"/wholesomeness vs. freedom of expression, you should keep it in those terms. As for this particular video game, I think I'll at least be warezing a copy, if only to provide myself with hours of entertainment (I hope)

Pangloss, time and time again, you use a category fallacy of taking the actions of certain individuals and trying to apply them to a group as a whole. I'm pretty sure you'd consider Hillary Clinton a member of "the left" and she came out vocally against Grand Theft Auto. PNAC was masterminded by a member of "the left", Tipper Gore, and most vocally opposed by Frank Zappa, also a member of "the left". Guess who sided against Zappa and with Tipper Gore on PNAC? Robert Novak, a member of "the right", who appears on CNN which is allegedly a tool of "the left" There are no direct connections between liberalism/conservatism and anti-religiocity, intolerance, or political correctness. Why don't you come out against what these people truly represent? I hate political correctness and an overzealous promotion of "tolerance" too. If you want to make a point against these groups, great! Do that. But don't go blaming the whole problem on "the left".

Sorry if this has been posted already, but I found it fascinating as I respect both of these indivudals greatly: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5670911

Isn't the tendency for any thermodynamic system to seek equilibrium? I've entertained this idea myself sometimes. If you really want to see something nuts, check out Christopher Michael Langan's crazy universe theory (namely he'd describes an equilibrium state called "unbound telesis" from which Self-Configuring Self-Programming Turing machines would somehow spontaneously emerge, with computation, semiotics, and ontology all spontaneously arising from perfect equilibrium. I like to wonder about these sorts of questions (i.e. if intelligent systems didn't manage to consume the universe, or even if they did and simply ran out of resources to continue their own existence, what would happen?) but they're terribly speculative and difficult.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=39396

Robbo, you may want to have a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecund_universes

I went to see Mutaytor, the Burning Man band. They were pretty damn insane.

So, what you're saying is that you didn't calculate the regional mean surface temperature because... it varies throughout the region. Aren't you a statistics major? You are familiar with using the amazing power of an "average" to summarize variadic data, are you not? I think it'd really help you out quite a bit if you were to take some introductory college level classes in atmospheric science. From reading your posts all I gather is that you're completely unfamiliar with the reasoning behing using periodic mean regional surface temperatures as the most practical metric for assessing radiative imbalance. Instead you're introducing metrics which are, frankly, irrelevant to the point. If you want a thorough assessment of the flaws in your analysis, I suggest you compile it in the form of a scientific paper and attempt to submit it to a regional atmospheric or climate science journal. That would be the quickest way to receive a thorough deconstruction of why the metrics you are choosing to assess are both inappropriate and fail to address the problem at hand, namely that of a radiative imbalance within a regional atmospheric system.

So is an adult bonobo. An adult bonobo is a hell of a lot more of a being than a blastocyst. An adult bonobo, after all, started out as a blastocyst which is for all intents and purposes identical to the one you started from, save for its DNA contents. Is a adult bonobo more or less of a being than a human blastocyst? Is a adult human more or less of a being than an adult bonobo?

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53327 That is the hypothesis of the author of the above article. His contention is that a consumption of soy products containing phytoestrogen will result in homosexual tendencies. So, who agrees with this awesome hypothesis? I say flawless logic! sarcasm sarsasm sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm sarcasm

Vista is pretty f*cking sweet

I bathe her whenever she returns from outside excessively dirty, particularly if she got muddy or walked through some dirty slush and is tracking mud and dirt all over the house. I do this to prevent her from trashing my house or leaving mudprints on my bed, which is particularly annoying. It's not something I do frequently as she usually manages to avoid mud/slush most of the time.

Uhh, I'm going to go with: THE INTERNET

And now we get to empathy, which if you ask me is the basis of all morality. We treat people certain ways because we can empathise with how they feel about things. We don't afford moral consideration to a rock because if we were a rock, we'd merely be an inanimate, solid object and therefore have no basis from which to care how we were treated. We afford feeling beings moral consideration because, like us, they can feel, and shouldn't make people feel ways that we would't want to feel ourselves. The golden rule, do unto others as you would have do unto you, is a basic, guiding moral principle which is almost universally agreed upon. I do not afford a blastocyst moral consideration because it has no more hardware for giving rise to perception than does a rock.

I have an automatic pet door which raises in the presence of an electromagnetic field. My cat wears a collar with a permanent magnet on it to trigger the door. I taught my cat how to use it in no time by putting her into a 10'x10' fenced in area outside. She explored around for a bit, and in no time found the door which automatically opens to let her back outside. And after walking back in, she investigated the door again, only to see that it opened whenever she approached. From then on she used the system constantly, confident the door would raise whenever she walked toward it, and she started running through it fairly quickly whenever she wanted to go outside. A few weeks later I took the collar off to bathe her. Per her usual bathing ritual, she meowed violently as I held her down, then jumped out of the tub at the first opportunity she could slip through my fingers, shook herself off, and darted to hide in the lining beneath the boxed spring of my mattress. Later, after she had dried off, I was in the kitchen and saw her dart for the pet door, only to smack stright into it when it didn't raise as expected. She turned at and meowed at me, standing by the door requesting me, her human slave, to solve the problem for her. She followed me as I went and got the collar fwith the magnet it on it from the bathroom, put it back on, and set her down by the door which opened. She then used the door with confidence again. The next time I bathed her she came and found me then lead me to the door and sat by it and meowed. She again followed me to go get the collar from the bathroom and put it on her, then she went and used the door. We repeated this process a few times, until one time she did something unusual. Rather than the usual process of leading me to the door, she lead me to the collar. Eventually she figured out that the collar was what made the door work, figured out where it was (sitting next to the bathtub) and lead me there, rather than to the door. I'm simply amazed by how smart she is about things like this.