Sepiraph

I disagree, through wikipedia you can more easily find research papers. If you ever had to look for those research papers before wikipedia and internet became popular, you'd know what a hassle it was. Finding a research papers means you usually have to order the papers from a University library and then you'd have to usually photocopy them. It was a huge waste of time. I understand most people are concerned about people taking the easy route through wikipedia, but no original research is ever going to come off from people who opted to take the easy route anyway. I'd rather pay attention to the people who use wikipedia as a general reference and as a reference points to dip deeper into the subject. For example, do you have any idea how amazing it is to find a translated version of Riemann original paper on the Zeta function nicely referenced at the end of wikipedia? A lot of scientific articles in wikipedia have very good reference papers, and together with google no library in the world could ever rival them. Also don't even get me started on the subject of high school education, instead read Paul Graham's article on why the whole education system is worse than a farce.

I agree, "Are we playing God" is a truly meaningless question, often asked by people who also happened to be idiots. I would imagine when men first started to use fire, some of the monkeys around him was thinking along the same thoughts.

Actually I don't hate Paris Hilton at all, she seems like a decently attractive and extremely rich young lady that I wouldnt mind being friends with. I actually hate the people who actually professed to hate Paris Hilton a lot more, to me they epitomize hypocrisy.

Blocking wikipedia should be considered as an Internet crime.

At the very least it allows you to practice to be ambidextrous in writing (although nowaday I think people can either just type or use their cellphone for voice/video capture). Although frankly I think reading textbooks and notes on my own has been far more useful than attending classes.

No, that would be a false analogy and it was a rather poor attempt at strawman. Good attempt at fitting two logical fallacies in one post though!

In that case, you can just go to your local library and grab a few math books. Generally, none of them are beyond high school level.

I'd like to see an article on the monetary value of the British subjects who came to the land of the Indians before they took everything over and called it America. (and do it relative to the Indians, I reckon it would be something that approaches negative infinity) However having said that, I would probably voice the same concern as the Americans if tons of illegal immigrants started to go through our borders.

Well said. It doesn't really matter if their missile defense system is a joke as long as the defense contractors and certain individuals in government would get billions for it.

Super-human at what? At killing people and using weapons, putting themsleves in danger and risking their own lives while taking orders from some politicians seem like super-human at being dumb.

Depending on the level but the basic mathematics required would be linear algebra (Hilbert space, matrix theory etc.), differential equation (ODE, PDE), calculus of variation etc. You should just grab a few QM texts from your University library.

Being a E & M theory, it has to be if it was to be correct ... Although I think Einstien deserves the credit for special relativity, his insight goes beyond merely a E & M theory.

I think you understand the principle behind Occam's Razor, but you are applying it incorrectly. The examples you provided has to do with incorrect conclusion (possibly due to incorrect understanding) rather than using extraneous assumptions to reach a conclusion.

I believe it is generally meant to refer to the "original post" or "original poster", depending on the context being used.

That's a good question, but I don't think resipiratory system is necessary at all and perhaps you should re-think the order of the question. I think the important criteria are for an entity to: 1) self-replicate and 2)"evolve" or adapt (and allowing the possibillity for the increase in its complexity). Then it seems that the passing of information is merely the necessary condition in order to achieve these criteria. Also we know that life happened, at least once, on Earth in carbon-based form because we are here. So what makes anyone presume that it cannot happen again in a digital (perhaps sillicon-based) form?

I prefer the original Google Zeitgeist, I have no idea why Google replaced it with Hot Trend since it seems much worse (and sounds terrible too). The international Zeitgeist was pretty interesting: http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html

In some primitive way, many species in Nature already exercised certain degree of this "designer babies" syndrome by being selective in their matings. For humans, this manifested itself in the perception of physical and (perhaps somewhat lesser) mental attractiveness. So designer babies can be in some sense be seen as a more intelligence-driven form of selection. And really we aren't talking about transhumanism, but more along the line of making sure that your babies don't have genetic defects. Therefore I don't see how one can argue against it, especially if they don't force everyone to have designer babies. However, I can think of special cases where genetic disorder runs prominently in a family where one may still choose to be an irresponsible parent by not taking advantage of this technology, then I personally cannot agree with allowing that type of stupidity to happen.

I think the internet that we are creating right now is rather like the "structure" that will one day support digital lifeform of the future. So in some sense we are literally creating an early digital universe. My thoughts have been influenced by Steven Levy's Artificial Life and the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex. I think encountering the ideas from those sources really open ones' perspective of the question: What is life? Interesting, I also happened to independently think of similar ideas back in the early nineties, although I was partially influenced by John Wyndham's The Chrysalids that I read while I was in high school.

Claude Shannon work in the 40s established the field of information theory, and in his "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" he introduced the concept of Information entropy. This established a connection to the work done in the 19th century in the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Specifically, there are relationship between the statistical mechanical definition of the entrophy of a physical system and the concept of information entropy. The paradigm shift is that information is physical. Later physicsts, mathematicans and computer scientists such as Szilard, Landauer, Fredkin, etc investigated this idea. Some later speculated about the idea of a computational universe, which has its root traced back from the early days during the development of the digital computer, as the mathematican Ulam already speculated about the possibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory Basically, if you really want to know, you needed some understanding of quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Specifically, the field of quantum computation happens to link these fields together.

I haven't, but I studied physics in University. I do have something to say about biology courses that I took as electives though, I think they do rely too much on rote memorization and not much actual understanding. For example, I took a 3rd year, core biology evolutionary genetics course where they did talk a lot on genetics, but mainly from a historical perspective. One thing that bothered me is that they never even mention the genetic algorithm, which I think is more interesting and important than almost anything else that was said in the entire course. Also there is almost no math at all in any of the biology course that I took.

Although gravitational interaction isn't included in the Standard Model, there is certainly the hypothetical elementary particle of graviton to describe gravity in the framework of quantum field theory. In regards to Higgs boson, I think a correct understanding in the mechanism on the origins of the mass of other elementary particles would be important in contributing to the understanding of gravity, or perhaps you have good reasons to naysay otherwise? Otherwise, I just happen to find argument on nomenclature rather trivial, afterall if you call a rose by any other name would it smell as sweet? Disclaimer: I'm certainly not an expert on quantum gravity or String Theory. p.s. I haven't violated any forum rules in using a colour that I find pleasing, and as a forum that strive to promote sharing and learning, I think the freedom of expression in the use of different colours should be encourged, rather than stifled. If you happen to find it ugly, that's fine and it is your own personal aesthetic. (Also you browser has an option to set a default to all the text colour).

What part of it do you not understand? I have to know this stuff also since I'm taking the CCNA exam soon, are you by any chance planning to take as well?. Regarding wildcard, ACL uses a wildcard mask to define the portion of the IP address that should be examined. The wildcard mask's 0 and 1 bit specify the matching logic: 0 bit in the wildcard corresponds to address bit that must be compared while 1 bit instructs the router that the corresponding address bit do not need to be compared. As an example: Wildcard Mask: 0.0.0.0 Binary Version: 00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000 Meaning: Entire IP address must match Example 2 Wildcard Mask: 255.255.255.255 Binary Version: 11111111.11111111.11111111.11111111 Meaning: Automatically considered to match Example 3 Wildcard Mask: 0.0.0.15 Binary Version: 00000000.00000000.00000000.00001111 Meaning: First 28 bits must match

The most surprising fact that I personally find regarding this development is the actual technology that they ended up using: superconduction material. http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?page=hardware I mean it seems rather brilliant and maybe even obvious in hindsight. But even as recent as only 3 years ago, when I did my undergrad. thesis on Quantum Computation, they have still toying around (or even focusing on, at least based on my impression) with other ideas such as using Atomic lasers traps, optical circuits, or Liquid NMR (the one topic that I chose).

Hello to the fellow members of SFN, I'm fairly new here (but definitely not to forum & been using BBS since the early 90s) so I figure I should introduce myself. I'm 27, graduated with a B.Sc in Physics in 04. My interests are (rather obviously) scientific and mathematical in nature. Specifically I'm fascinated by in areas of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), A.F. (Artificial Life) and A.C. (Artificial Consciousness). In mathematics, I loved Calculus/Analysis (e.g. vector calculus and complex analysis) and Abstract Algebra (e.g. Linear Algebra, Field Theory, Group Theory, and a bit of Galois Theory). After my graduation, I took a few years to "find myself", so to speak, and at the end of that process I came to a conclusion in which I was able to find a surprising yet satisfying answer to the meaning of life and my own self-identity. Professionally, I am currently studying in areas in the field of computer networking.

The nomenclature of calling gravity a force or not is really rather irrelevant, ultimately we'll just have to wait and see if the Higgs boson can be found to test our model of gravity within the QFT/SM framework. Keep in mind, however that the Newtonian force-vector approach of gravity works very well classically, so really there is no argument macroscopically.