Re: Superpowers distribute 750,000 shoulder-fired missiles, cook their own gooses
At 04:38 PM 08/17/2003 -0400, Tim Meehan wrote: The CIA's official explanation of the event, even to this layman, is aerodynamically impossible. Let me say that the TWA 800 coverup has a lot to do with my cynicism about what really happened on 9/11. The Feds spent a lot of time saying We haven't proven it's not terrorists Just in case it's terrorists we'll impede your right to travel Could be terrorists, but we haven't definitively ruled it out Civil rights? What civil rights? Be afraid, it might have been terrorists No, we're not requiring the airlines to demand ID, that's voluntary Unabombers under the bed! Of course you need Gov't ID to travel Really, we're in control, trust us! Those aren't the civil rights you're looking for [expletive deleted]! Looks like it was an electrical problem on TWA800 Give *what* civil rights back? You've *always* had to give ID to travel! The real coverup was that the Feds didn't have the jurisdiction to impose travel controls on Americans, but they could get the airlines to claim that the Feds were requiring them to do it, which the airlines liked because it reduced the ability of travellers to resell cheap tickets, and that when the ostensible terrorists were accounted for (TWA800 was a genuine accident, and Teddy the K was caught), they weren't going to reduce their controls or lying, because they really *liked* controlling our travel.
Re: paradoxes of randomness
Sarad AV wrote: We say that, we-don't know or it wont be random. Then we say that we must see roughly equal numbers of heads and tails for large trials. Thats what I fail to understand. its the difference between any one test (which will be completely unpredictable) and probabilities (where you know that, unless there is a weighting in force, the odds of any one of n options coming up will be 1 in n, so you would expect to see roughly equal numbers of each) as an analogy - imagine a horse race where all five horses are roughly equal in fitness and rider skill. a bookie would give equal odds on each (not 1 in 5, as he has to make a profit, but no horse would be worth more than another). You would *expect* that, if the race was run enough times, each horse would run about a fifth of them - but that won't help you predict the result of any one race in particular, nor would it be impossible for one horse to win all the races, purely from luck.
Re: Viral DNS Attack, DDos Idea
At 10:11 AM 8/17/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: Many evolved diseases _DO_ kill their hosts. Look around. It is true that there are tradeoffs in lethality, time to death, and virulence, and that a disease which kills too quickly and too many won't spread adequately, but quite clearly all of the diseases of the past were evolved (until recently, none were created) and yet they often killed their hosts. This objection jammed in my memegrinder so I had to examine it. I'll argue that the nastiness of many human diseases are *temporary* exceptions to the evolved pathogens don't kill observation. Because humans are not in equilibrium: * Human population is growing. This means you can kill your host, two new ones are born every minute (except in a few places, eg W. Europe). If your host population is growing like that, you can be extra lethal, temporarily. If the host numbers are stable, you could wipe them all out if you're too lethal. * Humans are expanding their range. This means new diseases are introduced from existing resivoirs so they have not adapted to humans --especially the conditions of modern humans-- yet. Ebola, HIV, etc. * Humans only *recently* live in dense (and stationary) groups. This means that pathogens have not adapted yet. Cities are incubators. Bubonic plague, TB are good examples here. * Rapid travel is even more recent an invention. Populations who have never seen a pathogen (West nile, etc.) are getting exposed for the first time. No equilibrium there. The Cortez effect, amplified by Whittle's jet engine. Globalization means everyone gets exposed to everyone else's pathogens. A sick chinese chicken can ruin your day in America. Guns, germs, and steel. BTW Globalization also means that everyone gets exposed to everyone's plants, insects, etc. A lot of isolated species (e.g., Hawaii) that can't deal with competition will be toast just as much as the Amerinds who met Mr. Cortez. Guns, germs, and steel. Meet Mr. Kudzu. Obviously, the scale of temporary should be taken in the larger context, not that of one's own lifespan. Of course a coadapted pathogen (eg flu) can spontaneously become newly virulent simply because of mutation or recombination. If the hosts aren't all connected, then merely one particular host-group dies, along with the newly virulent strain. Losing some village is not a big deal (until someone gets on a plane). ... Interesting to extend the analogy to say virii that zap cellphones or PCs permenantly vs. merely being annoyances. A PC-zapping virus would give Macs the kind of ripe open field not seen since the days of the Bering Strait. Also interesting to view the RIAA vs. Networked-Computer struggle in a biological (evo/eco) light. Ms. Dodo, meet Mr. Kudzu. And of course fascinating to watch how the new dense mobile humans (or their lawyers :-) adapt behaviorally.
Re: paradoxes of randomness
On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 03:13 AM, Sarad AV wrote: In a perfectly random experiment,how many tails and how many heads do we get? we don't know - or it wouldn't be random :) for a sufficiently large sample you *should* see roughly equal numbers of heads and tails in the average case. We say that, we-don't know or it wont be random. Then we say that we must see roughly equal numbers of heads and tails for large trials. Thats what I fail to understand. Start small. Do some experiments _yourself_. Take a coin out of your pocket. I assume your local coin has something that may be called a head and something that may be called a tail. In any case, decide what you want to call each side. Flip the coin very high in the air and let it land on the ground without any interference by you. This is a fair toss. (That subtle air currents may affect the landing is completely unimportant, as you will see even if you have doubts about it now.) Now let's try a little piece of induction on this one, single toss. Remember when you had said earlier that a perfectly random coin toss would have exactly equal numbers of heads and tails? Well, with a single toss there can ONLY be either a head or a tail. The outcome will be ONE of these, not some mixture of half and half. This proves, by the way, that any claim that a random coin toss must result in equal numbers of heads and tails in any particular experiment. Now toss the coin a second time and record the results. (I strongly urge you to actually do this experiment. Really. These are the experiments which teach probability theory. No amount of book learning substitutes.) So the coin has been tossed twice in this particular experiment. There is now the possibility for equal numbers of heads and tailsbut for the second coin toss to give the opposite result of the first toss, every time, to balance the outcomes, the coin or the wind currents would have to conspire to make the outcome the opposite of what the first toss gave. (This is so absurd as to be not worth discussing, except that I know of no other way to convince you that your theory that equal numbers of heads and tails must be seen cannot be true in any particular experiment. The more mathematical way of saying this is that the outcomes are independent. The result of one coin toss does not affect the next one, which may take place far away, in another room, and so on.) In any case, by the time a third coin toss happens there again cannot be equal numbers of heads and tails, for obvious reasons. And so on. Do this experiment. Do this experiment for at least 10 coin tosses. Write down the results. This will take you only a few minutes. Then repeat the experiment and write down the results. Repeat it as many times as you need to to get a good feeling for what is going on. And then think of variations with dice, with cards, with other sources of randomness. And don't dry lab the results by imagining what they must be in your head. Actually get your hands dirty by flipping the coins, or dealing the cards, or whatever. Don't cheat by telling yourself you already know what the results must be. Only worry about the deep philosophical implications of randomness after you have grasped, or grokked, the essence. (Stuff about Kripke's possible worlds semantics, Bayesian outlooks, Kolmogoroff-Chaitin measures, etc., is very exciting, but it's based on the foundations.) --Tim May We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter- day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability. --George H. W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998
Re: paradoxes of randomness
At 08:45 AM 8/19/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: Only worry about the deep philosophical implications of randomness after you have grasped, or grokked, the essence. Then do this: get a block cipher or crypto-hash algorithm, and pick a key. Now encrypt 0, then 1, then 2, etc. Examine the 17th bit of each output as you encrypt the integers. Is this sequence random? Compressible? How could you tell whether this sequence is random or not, if you didn't know the key? Hint: those are trick questions intended to lure you into crypto. And if you ask why 17? you get whacked by a virtual bamboo cane.
Re: paradoxes of randomness
Is this sequence random? Compressible? How could you tell whether this sequence is random or not, if you didn't know the key? This is the a way to describe so-called randomness. One simply has no adequate access to the Key and/or the Algorithm. Both coin flipping and quantum noise fall into this category. Actually, it's a pretty good method of authenticating Allah. = end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
