Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
*Some Incomplete and Scattered Thoughts* I missed some of the discussion and will have to catch up once I get the number of unread emails I have at least less than the current year :P but I don't see why true transparency wouldn't affect people becoming dominant through a better understanding of the system - would not that understanding be public knowledge if indeed all parts of the system were transparent? Unless we are talking about gut instinct / intuition, in which case inequality is probably unavoidable. Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. I think Mr. Franklin's point was that you get what you deserve (which is true only in narrow contexts) and they will certainly get neither. In other words, if you want something done right, do it yourself :P Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view. Many people would agree with you, but I also think the whole point of community is that we keep each other in check, that is, on the path towards some goal. We can't do that if we don't have the freedom to be different from one another, which requires some degree of autonomy. It's like balancing an ecosystem. At the risk of mixing metaphors, there have to be enough wolves to keep the sheep in check but also few enough to keep them from hunting the sheep to extinction (of both populations). No, I think that definitely mixed the metaphors / crossed the streams. Oh well. Anyway, my point was that adolescence is often claimed to be one of the most formative parts of people's lives, along with maturity, if/when that comes along. Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am As I think you were heading towards with your previous comments, one shouldn't be faulted for the shortcomings of the system wherein one resides, in this case the consumer computer market that makes a couple sub-prime setups most convenient. I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riechhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/13/inequality_for_all_robert_reich_warnson his new film, Inequality for All. Still puzzling over that title, but then I was in and out of the room while my parents were watching the show. Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting code development? And isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) I find it interesting and maybe (or maybe not) significant that criminal justice seems to have a less clear role in this analogy. Perhaps this relates to how varied the number of opinions one can find regarding it's purpose are? Is there a large enough contingent of aspiring technocrats such as ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. I think several related projects have been discussed on this list (FOSS Estonian voting software, Citizens Elect [right name?]), but I think none of them get at what you are saying. I think the problem is that (like microchips and the computers that play a major role in designing / building them) society is a lower-level construct which produces the higher-level construct of technology, and (unlike microchips, perhaps) we want / expect society to work even when tech does not, rather than the other way around (with some exceptions, I suppose. Zombie http://www.kabar.com kniveshttp://zombietools.net/tools/? I can't really think of any non-trivial examples. I guess some more realistic survival gear like water filters). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] The rise and fall of the Microsoft empire
While MS may have lost loyal users who had used Office 2003 or 199X for years when they introduced the Ribbon, but they gained a bunch of new users. The goal was doubtless to 'freshen' Microsoft's (or more specifically Office's) image, and it worked at least for a while. It is not uncommon to see applications trying to be user-friendly blatantly rip off the Ribbon, for example WinZip (not to be confused with WinRAR or 7zip). There are many reasons why this is a silly, useless thing to do, but the sentiment was definitely out there: people were overreaching when they said that Microsoft had revolutionized the word processor user experience, but that still shows that many people reacted favourably towards the ribbon, and that is real. I don't think it really affected the long-term perception or fate of MS, though. Two things still keeping the behemoth in place are an odd sort of nostalgia, back to the time when larger parts of the general public still thought of Microsoft as technologically-minded innovators, like recent articles about Bing Translate now featuring Klingon (emphasizing that the Microsoft engineer who worked on the project was fluent) hearken to; and tech deals - it is just one extra step to have to install something else over Windows rather than over a blank disck, which takes no more practical effort but has the added difficulty of convincing yourself that the advantage of having Linux or whatever is greater than the convenience of just using the substandard but already available OS, Windows (and this is for the consumer that even knows of Linux, and how right it's price is, and it's advantages). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic
[Edit: ninja'd by Glen Grant since I got distracted by explaining the Zooniverse https://www.zooniverse.org/ to my science teacher] I think the distinction between singularists and technologists more generally is how their function curves; the singularity being a cultural asymptote, requiring a quicker function than just the maybe-exponential Moore's Law, or even something like a factorial. The contributing factor to the increasing of the increasing of the slope seems to be said by singularists to be strong AI, as machines can start to design (improve) and build themselves. We are not there yet but surprisingly close, as we discussed with the Open Google. What Just Happened? discussion. There also seems to be, especially in popular perceptions of singularists (or if you think they are more evangelical, Singularitarians with a capital S), an aspect of body modification, and beyond that identity modification, and beyond that mind/hivemind modification. Apropos is this article by rich entrepreneur (founder of HowStuffWorks.com, which I learned about from a book they published that I read as a kid, *How Much Does the Earth Weigh?*) Marshall Brain which seems very singularist but does not call itself so (it was published in 2005, the same year *the Singularity is Near* came out, the book that made the singularity a household word although Kurzweil et al had been talking about it for quite a while): The Day You Discard Your Bodyhttp://marshallbrain.com/discard1.htm And the obligatory XKCD reference: Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'. http://xkcd.com/1084/ And this parody of intellectual discussion of the matter by Aaron Diaz: A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianismhttp://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/15/a-thinking-apes-critique-of-trans-simianism-repost/ -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Santa Fe Institute scientists team up with MASTERS Program students for DWI study - The Santa Fe New Mexican: Local News
Thanks all for the congratulations. Robert Nott contacted us a week or two before the presentation, and then gathered our responses and names/ages/grades/etc. on the day of, so it was kind of a pleasant surprise. To respond to the communication issue and the 'how should we perceive interlocks' issue (not actually sure that is what it is, but I think I get the gist of your intent introducing the issue?): We spent several meetings leading up to the presentation deciding how technical we wanted it to be - on one hand, it needed to be entertaining and fit into a short presentation (we did not know we would get 30 minutes, although we knew we would get more than most mentorship groups' 10 minutes because we had more people) and one angled towards high-schoolers, but we also did not want to underestimate the audience's ability to understand and enjoy the details of the study. Another factor was that it was not just a presentation of our findings, as it would be (say) in a recommendation to a committee, but a summary of our mentorship experience - so we wanted to go into what it was actually like, what we actually did at SFI. Our plan was to put the details on the slides and soften them in our patter, by leading up to and explaining them; in retrospect we did not do that very well and probably should have practiced more beforehand. I felt that otherwise the presentation went well. As to the elitism you brought up, and I know you were speaking generally: I acknowledge that it could be a possible outcome, but was not our experience at all. It felt instead very disappointing when we realised as we were talking that the audience was not understanding something or couldn't relate. As we explained to Robert Nott afterwards, when you are doing a study that takes in our case months and in many studies years, you tend to get wrapped up in the data and it's meaning, which can represent reality sometimes very well and sometimes not; either way, it is important to recognize that most people have a different interaction with the issue (whatever you are studying, there are probably people affected by it). In our case, it was a particularly personal issue* for many New Mexicans. Not mentioned in the article was the long question we got at the end from a woman whose relative was killed, not in a vehicle but outside her house (as I remember) from a drunk driver. Her question was about the effectiveness of interlocks, and although we found that they do have some significant effectiveness, we agreed that multiple solutions had to be brought to bear on the issue. I was less cynical about how easily interlocks could be bypassed after this study than I was before. For example, having a sober friend breathe into the interlock before driving makes less sense when you think about it: why would the sober friend endanger hir friend's life? And apparently the interlocks periodically signal you to pull over and breathe into it again, and also have tampering alarms. As to whether they remove personal responsibility or rights from the driver, one has to consider how much damage a car can do. Around 500 kilograms at 27 meters per second is 13,500 Newton-seconds, enough momentum to impart a velocity of 193 m/s [431 mph] to a 70-kg mass (which is what I am) [please, somebody tell me if my math or physics understanding is wrong here]. So I consider a car a powerful weapon. This is important because if a person behaves recklessly enough with a weapon we take that weapon away and often fine / jail the person. There are differences, such as fine points of intent (and also that cars take a lot of concentration and some skill to use at all, whereas guns also do but less so), but the fact that by buying a car and registering for a drivers licence one makes a social if not a legal contract to behave in certain ways (following the rules of the road) and not in others (vehicular homicide). If it was just a danger to the driver you could make a case for letting personal decisions have their personal consequences, although the loss of life would still be tragic; but that is not the case, anyone on the road or simply near it is at increased and considerable risk when some percentage of drivers are impaired. I don't believe jail is a good solution for most things, but particularly not for DWI, because it just disrupts people's lives which leads them to depend on the comforting effects of drinking after they get out. Indeed, data compiled by Dr. Roth (we did not verify it) shows that a higher percentage of first-time offenders than second-time offenders (and so on down the line) never have an additional infraction, and that interlocked offenders show this trend more clearly than jailed offenders. In the end, most of the DWI crashes in any given year are from first-time offenders, so no reactionary measures will help those - and that is why Dr. Roth thinks public education, such as the attention brought to a public case like Scott Owens, or simply the
Re: [FRIAM] API alternative?
For either phrase, either assume your audience knows what you are talking about or define the terms before you go on. Explain that it is like a control panel you can receive data from and send instructions through, and being so generally defined does not go into details of implementation. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Separate Vacations This Summer
Get a tan, have some pina coladas and come back rested and ready. rAmen. I subscribed to the Discuss list at about the same time as I subscribed to another list, that of the Aerican Empire (there is a strong sense of community there, and a lot of noisy signal). A year or so ago we had the most posts in a month of any month in the list's 15-year history, because of several controversial threads where many lurkers chimed in, and the list's frequent mailers had intense arguments (some very edifying, some ending in flame wars such that the Emperor had to put a moratorium on posts for a day or so to let people cool down). Although everything was quite interesting, it was somewhat tedious to read and very difficult after the initial stretch of conversation because the discussions had boiled themselves down to very specific topics, and members who had wanted to make a more general comment missed their chance. Although recent events here have been a lot more amicable and mild by comparison, I felt a little like there was not much I could contribute to the threads that most interested me, which is not always a bad thing - for example, I was asked by name (among others) to comment on the tautology discussion a week or two ago, but I felt I did not know enough about the topic without some substantial research to add anything that had not already been said. It was OK, because the thread continued on to some fascinating areas. (For the record, I used 'tautology' because it had been used previously in the thread, not because I necessarily thought it was the best word for the definition I was thinking of. My knowledge about how I conceive of 'tautology' is currently limited to XKCD http://xkcd.com/703/and the ensuing discussion http://fora.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7t=56593 [particularly herehttp://fora.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7t=56593p=2012943hilit=703#p2012943 ]). The Aerican discussion simmered down because people got tired, stopped posting, and then started posting about more mundane stuff, which seemed to give some relief, an outlet for social interaction without obligation. Here I guess people agreed to disagree (Your Interpretation May Vary). So I wonder if [online] communities consistently tend to have cycles like this, and whether the nature of the autoredirection across groups is similar (for instance, in periodicity). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Killing vs. Letting Die (was Re: Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services)
[still going through old drafts] I agree that killing is for most intents/purposes the same as letting die since trying to ascertain a difference between the two is trying to find the 'natural' state of whatever is being killed/let die, and that is often very hard if not impossible to establish. I also agree that in some cases (relevantly, wherein a killing is empathetic, although I would not extend that assertion so categorically as you seem to) death is a good thing - although I generally do not use such sensitive examples, the death of an ailing person is also their relief from further extensive suffering. Extending such a poignant topic to Google's actions seems quite inappropriate, which was the intended air of my two sentences you quoted above. If we do, however, some things hold: While it is disappointing that Google dropped the service (let it die), how could we compare it to them 'killing' a service? It seems that the difference might be dependent on whether Reader would continue existing in it's previous state independent of Google, even if Google disappeared. Unless the company sells Reader, it seems obvious that it would not. Whether that actually counts as a significant difference is up for debate. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Separate Vacations This Summer
I am rapidly becoming envious of a generation (there I said it) who will have the option of saying everything I know, I learned from XKCD. I'm already guilty of imagining that everything I know, I learned from Wikipedia. Wikipedia having it's own feeling of being self-generating. Well, it always feels convenient to obtain a consistent body of knowledge from a single source, but as we have (I think) discussed before, learning widely and in a varied manner gives you at least the best sense for how information flows through society, if not an education; and any monolithic source doubtless has it's roots in a similarly variegated assortment of origins. This is why teachers always tell you to read the sources on Wikipedia immediately after you have read the article, a rare piece of good advice seldom followed. Just today on the radio, I heard a story about an author finding the existence of a women's subcategory under the novels category without an accompanying men's subcategory sexist (a quick Google search turns up little because searches with 'Wikipedia' included turn up Wikipedia articles foremost). Basing my judgement only on what I heard in the news report, it sounded like she was quite right about it being sexist, but her subsequent action, threatening to sue Wikipedia, confused me. Why not just reorganise the category and scold the editor who first organised it that way? Do people not understand where stuff on Wikipedia comes from? Perhaps this is another case of assuming a single origin when in fact the origins are myriad - all the editors and the notable external sources they cite. Though one could make the argument that the author was merely trying to create a wider awareness of how we act when constructing public information resources by bringing the attention of the world to a small case study, but in my opinion it sours the public perception of her issue with the situation as pedantic. I also appreciate the comparison made here between FRIAM and the Aerican Empire, though I have no idea what said Empire might be other than a virtual/game world created by a combination of individual genius and the combined imagination of thousands of internet-mediated game play or storytelling. I should have linked it. The site http://AericanEmpire.com explains it and here http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aerican is the mailing list. I presume you didn't Google it, in which case you made a spot-on guess. Less roleplay than community discussion, though. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Shouting...
` Geez, owen. I see what you mean! At first I thought this was a joke because the first couple of days I saw this thread both inline images were giving me the broken image icon: Kinda like the XKCD Umlaut comic. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Cell phone turns 40
Going through some old emails and completing and sending drafts I had. I voted for Obama more because he was young than because he was not-white. He is young compared to most presidents, but JFK and Teddy Roosevelt outflanked him, and nobody can go younger than 35 (I don't believe the 30s-40s barrier has been breached yet). Not that it matters - I think two 42-year-olds can relate to each other as much or as little as a 25- and a 55-year-old; what depends more is interests, and their living situation. However, the *perception* of age still seems to matter to people for whatever reason. You may notice that when Obama wants to look like the fresh new face (whenever I think of that expression, I think of how acne is predominantly a teenage affliction) of America, hope and change and all that (as seen in election campaign events), he dyes his hair black...when he wants to look put-upon, as when dealing with Republican leadership, he dyes it greyer. Probably it is naturally somewhere in between. I want my children's generation I recognize that it is a colloquialism, but is there really any good reason to use the concept of 'generations'? I may have said this before on this list, and have definitely said it elsewhere, and will doubtless say in in the future. After all, humans are not born in batches, and most societal changes either happen gradually or affect people of all ages. And there is the question of how generations are defined: for example, my parents born circa 1950 are solidly in the Baby Boomer generation, so as their child I might fall in Generation X - but many Generation Xers have children or even in some cases grandchildren my age. And what generation they are called is uncertain also...are they Generation Y? Generation Next, as the New Mexican seems to call them? The Internet generation (Vince Cerf, Doug Engelbart, Tim Berners Lee et al. should feel a bit ignored for that)? What was the 'Me' generation again? Some people are calling the youngest members of society right now 'Generation Z' - once we run out of Latin characters do we switch to Greek, like hurricanes? Basically I think it is a silly arbitrary system, but would welcome any and all arguments to the contrary. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] robodialers and other kinds of phone spam
I think a small portion of it is accounted for by businesses having different ideas of what pisses people off from some of their customers. For example, many times after signing up for an account with a small startup, to see what it is, I get an email or often a series of emails from an employee wanting to help me get started, check in to see how I am doing, ask for feedback on how I like my experience so far. I usually try to politely respond by saying I am just checking out their service and don't need any special attention. And I have been getting some missed calls to my Google Voice account from a toll-free number a Google Search identified as Nuance Software; I had helped my school install Dragon Naturally Speaking on several computers and must have foolishly put my number down somewhere in the installation/registration process. But no doubt much of it is the 'this is cheap, and it will make one in a thousand people buy [more] stuff from us, so it is worth it' ethic. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Splitting? was Re: How do forces work?
[Week-old draft] But subgroups require me to know what I want and what I don't want so I can absolutely have or not have them, respectively. This does not reflect real mail, where I am not sure whether I think Phunny Stuph is amusing or crass and have to see it first. The best way to do this would be to have all the mail delivered, but in separate bins, so that I can see each pertinent part of the whole at a time without having to work my way through all the rest, mixed in. This would require some mechanism in the email system to do this, though, like the mail program remotely implementing Gmail's filters (auto-applied labels, which are just non-exclusive categories [tags, in other words]) - probably a security problem, and just hypothetical anyway. I suppose you could consider separate mailing lists to be Better Binning like that, and then if so we have the machinery for a solution (since many [but importantly not all] members are shared between FriAm, WedTech, and Discuss, so it is basically the same general community binned by topic type), we just need to keep the definitions in the lists clearer in our minds. So...what are they? As I understand it, the WedTech list is for planning WedTech and discussing topics that would be discussed at a WedTech event, and in the same manner: so, an instance of technology and what it means for the world? I guess the only WedTech event that I have actually attended is the one where my Supercomputing Challenge team presented our project, mostly involving an explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm. Then Discuss is discussing news items (including those local to Santa Fe, but maybe in not a predominant enough volume for that distinction to be significant) relating to the list's interests, namely technology, world affairs, and social trends. And then there is FriAm...which also has physical meetings, so presumably some of it is organising that, though from the time I have been subscribed it has been discussions ranging all over tech, science, philosophy, and social issues, incorporating both news and olds, with a good dose of interpersonal flavouring. I guess long story short, organising discussion is nontrivial. -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] google glass-
And it will change who we are in ways we probably can't anticipate. For example, the short film Sight on YouTube. :P -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] glasses free 3D - multiview - omnisteroscopic
Especially with the icebergs melting! *Zing*! ...Too soon? In other news, I went to the holography workshop Steve mentioned and it was great to meet him, Fred Rebecca, and many other interesting people IRL. And now I have a hologram of a skullpture and some knowledge of how it was made / how it works! Definitely a demonstration of how satisfying 'doing' rather than merely (although there was much enjoyable activity concerning this going on too) talking / thinking. So, agreed on the 'demo' aspect (not to be confused with the demoscene, as in pouet.net, though related) being encourageable (as possibly opposed to incorrigable). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] DIY science
I would say self-control is a sufficient but not necessary condition for doing science. Besides the joy that it gives me to find out about it, my life will be more or less the same whether I know the ratio of blue to red elliptical galaxies or not. I saw there was another (currently small) thread about this, but I have not read it yet, so please excuse any repetition. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] digital ethics
But it sounds like it is out of your price range, at least for now. The author (nor the publisherhttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder-why-theres-no-tipjar.html) gets no money from you checking the book out of the library, so what are they losing from you pirating the book? Not that I am suggesting that is what you *should* do - it is an individual decision, after all - but I always find it interesting what people consider their 'boundary' and why. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Best Video Storage and Streaming Site
I have watched a two-hour video on Youtube before, for what it is worth. What matters even more perhaps is who the intended audience is. If it is of the artsy variety of footage Vimeo might take it...of course since most video sites are self-moderated with some exception, it would really be finding a suitable place rather than worrying about the absolute * possibility* of upload. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: 7 Billion World - 7 billion people on 1 page
When/if we get ubiquitous volumetric displays, the webpage could be a 1000-person-wide cube; if the voxels-per-inch-cube-edge resolution was the same as the current http://www.7billionworld.com/howbig.php pixels-per-inch resolutionhttp://www.7billionworld.com/counting.php#How_many_people_are_there_on_every_row_and_every_column%2A, the hypothetical cube would still be 6.25 meters to a side. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] pluralism in science
I thought the tautology is that scientists are trying to converge on Truth, but Truth is defined as what scientists converge on. I would break the cycle by arguing that scientists are not trying to converge on anything, at least not if they are doing it right. They would expect that minus experimental error and statistical variation the results of their experiments would reflect some single coherent model of reality, even one that we currently have no conception of, but they are not supposed to and possibly can't assume such. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] scientific evidence
In an economics class we watched a video of Malcolm Gladwell at a TED talk relating the commercial history of spaghetti sauces, and demonstrating how an individual in the industry (I forget his name) changed the reigning paradigm from finding the perfect spaghetti sauce to seeing what areas of preference of taste, texture, and so on people tend to cluster around, and then creating multiple varieties that offer the consumer a choice. Then we watched a different TED talk about how choice could be paralyzing, but it goes to show that there is a case where a non-convergence strategy was at least temporarily or partially successful compared to the convergence case. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
Unfortunately I think I am coming into this a bit too late to read through the whole thread and respond, but I would like to present a couple of related topics and see what people think. The first is in response to 'would I like people to burst my placebo/nocebo bubble?': the latest issue of Science magazine has an article on recommendations by the American College of Medicine of whether people should be told without being asked that they have alleles that indicate an elevated risk of disease when looking at genes related to common diseases (mostly cancers and tissue defects) as a course of a full-genome analysis for another disease/syndrome/disorder (pointing out that people may already be in an emotionally fragile state from said disease). Link herehttp://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1507.full?sid=7561e634-f578-431a-8299-e86ef03891f4 . Secondly, I agree that how likable a belief is relies not on how close to reality it is (although that helps) but how 'humble' it is, how willing to admit that it could be wrong (put another way, beliefs that come with an accurate measure of where they came from and therefore how widely they can be applied). So there is likable woo (cold fusion or the new cold fusion, LENR; based on my [admittedly minor] perusing of websites and documents the proponents seem to welcome outside experimentation/verification, and open-source device plans. That doesn't mean the device works as advertised, though) and dislikable woo (iridology?) with chemtrails in between (while it seems very paranoid, I wouldn't put it past refineries that produce jet fuel to get rid of waste chemicals through their product; and although neither that nor any other intentional human activity [unless we can count GHG emissions as intentional just through negligence now?] has effectively controlled the weather, it is not for lack of trying. Contemporary benign activities like silver iodide cloud seeding, speak to this) along with homeopathy (my school tutor keeps recommending this method, whatever that means in practice, and I just politely change the subject; While I don't understand the fractionation thing, the idea that it contains the cause of what it is treating gets some mental preparation from the idea of vaccines). May be unrelated: the discovery of the sodium layer, and the ICEhttp://photovalet.com/181459[Ionosphere Communication Experiment] Station Otto [Not to be confused with Ice Station Zebra], outside Vaughn, NM. Similarly, there is likable and dislikable skepticism. I think the best part of science is the experimentation itself rather than the results per se (although obviously the fruitful part for society is the resulting tech or best practices); perhaps this is related to Feynman's pleasure of finding things out (I believe it was that book in which he stirs a pot of jello that he is holding out a window to see if it will congeal faster in the cold, or the one in which he and a classmate realise they have different ways of counting, one auditory, one visual). When this turns into ridiculing people, however justified, it becomes just no fun anymore. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED Controversy is Sending
Compare Urban Dictionary: woothttp://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woot . -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] John Resig - Asm.js: The JavaScript Compile Target
Or perhaps they wanted it to sound futuristic, and believe in the Used Future http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UsedFuture design ethic. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Google Nose BETA
I am disappointed they chose to support the proprietary SMELLCD™ format - OpenAroma may be small, but it is growing, and since it is not limited to just a few brands of devices, I am confident it is the future of olfactory computing. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] perplexed by netflix
One thing to consider is that as time goes on, the disc population 'ages' - probably discs are only replaced when they are completely broken, or enough people complain. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] re lofty wrong issue
To give my input on a related recent topic, I would rather be uncertain or silent than vague, but would rather be any of those than wrong. That implies certainty in an unverified belief, which is something fixed with science, some effort, and a little introspection. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Please sign this thing! Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time
Steve, thank you for linking the WikiMedia Commons SVG, I like vector graphics, particularly ones that are also infographics. However, it does not display what is really going on with DST. Although everybody has stories about how it came about and was implemented and why (for factories, for gas lamps, whatever) including the urban legend that Ben Franklin invented it, the general goal behind all of those specific purposes is to align more closely the clock day with the light day. For example, a clock says 0600; how light is it outside? Is it dawn? Earlier? Later? Well, that changes throughout the year because the Earth is tilted. It would not if the Earth was vertical (to clarify, if it's pole of rotation was parallel to the pole of orbit) and a year was exactly 365 days, and each day were exactly 24 hours, and if [a more minor factor] there were no precession, and so on). So what DST is really doing is shifting the time scale 'down' relative to the light scale (in the WM diagram [or perhaps *dia*gram]) to more closely 'fit' that sunset/sunrise curve. Now, yes, we might be able to simply ignore that curve, pick a place for the time day to start and stick with it; after all, electric lights are ubiquitous and few of our jobs actually depend on being up at the same time as the sun (perhaps farmers still, but there are fewer and fewer of them). But I am saying I think it is possible and doable to have a system that follows the variance in the amount of daylight versus dark throughout the year, if we as a society think it is valuable to go that route. After all, before the invention of more and more specialised calendar systems that is what people would have considered a day: from sunrise to sunset and the following dark period, no matter what time of year. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Ho, Hum. Another Day, Another Blog Post Critical of Google
I propose a new, potentially lengthy discussion topic for FRIAM: why, and/or why not plain ASCII text email readers are/are not superior to html readers. Points awarded for verbosity. Points detracted for succinctness. You have been advised. What are the points awarded/detracted for using other people's arguments? fASCIIsm - Everything2.com http://everything2.com/title/fASCIIsm versus www.textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Firefox will block third-party cookies in a future version | Ars Technica
I believe the 'cookies in the omnibar' icon is from a plugin, not vanilla Chrome. Is this correct? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Please sign this thing! Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time
I have heard a proposal for doing smaller adjustments more often - but why not take that to the logical extreme and do it continuously? Most people use some form or other of computer to tell time nowadays anyway, and even physical mechanisms would not be extremely difficult (I think) to redesign to change smoothly throughout the year. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Google Reader and More: Google Abandoning of Apps/Services
[email composed 5 messages back] There is a lot I don't know about Google, and considering it's complexity I agree that some aspects may be unknowable. But it is not going to drop Gmail soon. Although it may not be as much of a money maker as it was when ads were more prominent, it is the main way for drawing people into the Google pantheon, aside from maybe the search service itself. In fact, many people conflate Gmail and Google because of this. I think many (though maybe not most) of Google's decisions are generated at least in part because of public appearance - for instance, many of it's services were cut a few years back when Page Brin took a more executive role again, because (according to them) the company was getting 'cluttered'. At the time I was a little disappointed, as some of my favorite projects were Google's quirkiest (GOOG-411, for instance) and therefore at the top of the list to be cut. But I could see what the reasoning behind it was. And Reader had already been cut before now, when they removed social sharing so that it would not compete with Google Plus (Google seems touchy about social things; both Buzz and Wave were cut, for reasons that were predictable if not acceptable at the time). Now, there are many things Google does that could be considered evil (or at least heading that way; all that foofaraw with Verizon?), but not providing service previously provided for free is not one of them. It is merely annoying, or at worst (if all your workflow is locked into the service) frustrating/infuriating. As for opening Gmail, didn't they try that with Gears when that was still a thing? I don't recall. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Professors' Big Stage
I was at the Santa Fe Institute on Friday, where they were filming for Melanie Mitchell's MOOC. Also, I have been getting into MOOs a bit lately, and noticed many were set up partially or fully for educational purposes; has anyone here some experience with how well they worked? Wikipedia lists the precursors of MOOCs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course (not to be confused with Mooks http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks) as things like Khan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_AcademyAcademy, so more recent endeavors. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Twitter
I thought the whole point of twitter was the noise. At least, that is what I put on my feed and how I use it - it is like the fleeting pleasure of being in a loud, crowded room. I find it indicative that most of Twitters pageviews come from external sites, being linked in from people's little embedded boxes listing their recent tweets. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Wow. 6 whole days without a Nexus 4 post.
And would things have gone the way they did if they kept the 'BackRub' name? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Fwd: cloud backup recomendations wanted
I don't have an answer for your general question, but as for your Illustrator files: Google Docs recognizes few formats itself, but can handle more if you install 'apps' (found on the Chrome webstore but might be available to other browsers if Docs is 'installing' them to the Google account itself). Since .ai is a proprietary format, it may be hard to find an app that includes it, but perhaps you could export your files in another format, like SVG with extended metadata. Even Google Docs' default Drawing utility should open that. Or perhaps someone will suggest another collaborative service that works for you! -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another Personalized Service: SlideShare Weekly Digest
Here is an interesting use of a slide-show-like format (nothing I would not rather have in a lecture, but): Conformal Models of Hyperbolic Geometry (1) http://bulatov.org/math/1001/ (via ogre's gallery http://bendwavy.org/doodle/, via User:Tamfang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tamfang, via File:H2checkers iii.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:H2checkers_iii.png, via Henry Segerman's YouTube Channel http://youtube.com/henryseg, via Clockwork Quartet http://clockworkquartet.com. Memex ahoy!) No proprietary formats from Microsoft or Adobe/Macromedia, just HTML CSS [Edit: looks like it is something from W3C: HTML Slidy (1)http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/Overview.html#(1) ]. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] The Blog I just sent you
Ugh, this argument again. I have to admit, it would be neat to deflect an asteroid - but neater still to have a space colony, unlikely as that seems (unless we get terraforming down pat or just find a habitable planet/moon a convenient distance away, a poor bet). -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor
Not sure I quite understand the situation, but CCleaner has a utility to look at the StartUp folder (where startups come from, of course) and the registry to see what is being run at startup, and removing these insures that you have to muck around with Task Manager Processes less. Of course, some applications just change this back again when they are run, but on the other hand some applications will not allow you to kill them at the process or application level (AVG, for instance. Why I now have only ClamWin and Piriform scanners. I had to delete what I could of the AVG program files over several reboots to get rid of it). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Arcane Points
The MASTERS Program at the community college has one (a tabletop version). The samples they give you are graphite and a CD, but I will suggest trying floppy discs. We are just now getting the kinks of using it out. -Arlo James Barnes On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: I think I want one. With topography vibrating mode, please. http://www.afmworkshop.com/np-**atomic-force-microscope.phphttp://www.afmworkshop.com/np-atomic-force-microscope.php FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Theory of Nothing
Perhaps it is called larding because it is a more acceptable version of spam? Although the only similarities are that both are content one might not read (then again, one might). See *bacn*. -Arlo James Barnes *PostScript*: For a relatively SFW (though as we all know, little on the web is actually advisable to view at work) discussion of the *other* definition of fluffing, see The Proof is in the Popcornhttp://proofisinthepopcorn.podomatic.com/ . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Subscription Requests
Yeah, when they came out with it Facebook was billing it as the email-killer - well, we see how that turned out. Apropos:spam, apparently FileZilla Forums blocks users from signing up using a Gmail, citing spam. I am not sure where most spam comes from, but it seems a little unfair to single out one provider... -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Preserving email correspondence
You mean...he has gone to the Vi side? :P -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] here we go
One of the downsides of email's serial format rather than hypermedia's tree format is that I cannot make this message just a child of an earlier message, but instead the whole threas. Old (drafted days ago):To focus on a different aspect: Clips are one thing, but it does not seem 3-D printed parts would be appropriate for most parts of a gun. Barrels, for example, have to withstand both high heat and pressure, and be smooth so that the bullet can exit easily. I would doubt ABS/PLA plastics could perform as needed, but then again I have read that Glock was also regarded suspiciously as a 'plastic gun', but then grew to be favored. Then again, it is a special plastic. New: Is this the selfsame Axiom of Choice that enables Banach-Tarski if used? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Dropbox big-time
I got Dropbox mainly for collaboration (sharing datasets and R files), and now I use it as the central storage location for all my photos - they go straight from the card (which is then cleared to make room) to Dropbox through it's automatic transfer function. I have had no problems, although the occasional horror story of individual files being lost without a trace has prompted me to start uploading them to a photoblog. I use Chrome sync[h] but because the computers I use are generally somewhat slow (especially with the number of tabs I am in the habit of opening) I don't often use the extensions that are synchronized. I am not impressed with the bookmark sync[h], as old folders that have been deleted on one computer are often restored from another. Then again, I have somewhat given up hope on keeping track of things I want to investigate with bookmarks anyway, as I create just too many. To-do lists have supplanted them for the most part; I still use Chrome's save this window as a folder-full of bookmarks function to save a browsing/work session for a time when my computer is less bogged down. For the most part, though, I have been trying to eliminate the need for backups altogether. As a student with not much budget for purchasing memory, and one that uses temporarily loaned computers and ones that break after only a year or two of use, I find it much easier to use online services for most program and data storage - using Google Docs rather than Word or Open Office, for instance. It makes collaboration and sharing a lot easier, too - I can worry less about file formats. To pick another example, instead of using iTunes or WinAmp or VLC (although I also have the latter for miscellaneous purposes) with a music library I use Grooveshark. There are still many things that need to be offline due to the paucity of Internet access in my house and sometimes at school, but many things can just be re-found - it is easier for me to re-download my ebooks, and various programs (Pidgin, GIMP, Inkscape, Notepad++, Chrome of course, a tuner program, and others including those mentioned above [Dropbox and VLC]) than to find and transfer them on a jumpdrive or such. However, I noticed I have also taken increasingly to putting all my files in one place - a folder on the desktop - rather than using My Documents. I even run programs that do not need to alter the registry and therefore self-install, such as tkMOO, from the desktop. With all this centrally located it is easier to pick up and move shop should I need to. And now I have a website I can put stuff I don't mind being public in one place, too. This all might be oblique to your question since I am not using the pay Dropbox, or Dropbox in a big way at all. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] slide projector?
My parents have a slide projector, I can ask them in the morning whether it is available to be loaned out. Personal use, I am assuming (not that it matters)? What are the drop off / pick up details? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Winter Solstice Sunrise
While they HAVE noticed that the sunset/rise moves N and south along the horizon in spring and fall, Few have noticed that the moon makes that same trip in a month. So where is our moonalemma? I guess I have a Googling/Photography project now. outside the normal flyways for airlines and during the early era of satellites, meaning that anything moving in the night sky was *really cool*!) Lucky, there are way too many planes where I live. I'm appalled when I hear white folks ooh and aww about how much this native or that native tribe (contemporary or ancient) knew about the night sky, about the movements of the celestial bodies... *of course* you notice them if you are not in your glass/steel skyscraper watching a big screen TV! And it helps that they (sun, moon,planets, stars),are among the flashier things of the world, only having to compete with torches and camp/bonfires (and I suppose forest fires, lightning, et cetera) instead of electric lights and LCD/other screens. Possibly flashy meant (and perhaps still does) holy, so such objects were worthy of closer scrutiny. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe Institute offering free online course on Complexity
Excellent! I loved *Complexity: A Guided Tour*, I will be sure to sign up for updates on this. Thanks, -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Simulations again
I doubt a convincing Turing test will ever be made, so while we are still just playing around with the idea, another thing to consider is that the gamemaster, being lazy, does not have to create a compelling game (with just the right amount of challenge, as you mentioned); s/he simply has to alter your conviction of what a good game is. Kind of a boring programming job, really. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] How to avoid shootings
To add on to that, the original values-hating email was not a contradiction - Lee did not claim he did not have values, just that he hated them. In fact, perhaps someone would care less about values one way or the other if they did not have them. From my perspective, because values seemingly cannot be avoided, it is fine to have them as long as they are set by an algorithm that makes sense in context. So I hate puppies for no reason is not a useful value (it contributes no information to a decision) but I hate the fact that puppies ruin my new shoes, because I need those shoes to win a marathon with is an analogue to an observation (expensive shoes and puppies are co-anathemae). Really, it is a superfluous system to simply methodically observing the world, because it becomes that system plus obfuscated terminology like right/wrong which are really true/false. (I consider morals the same as values, but values is a better word because it conjures up the sense of variables that can be set to a quantitative or qualitative amount). So in the context of shootings one could try to analyze motive in this way: did the perpetrator commit the crime out of [misplaced or overblown] revenge (as it seems in the case of the deadliest school massacre [but not the deadliest school shooting which goes to Virginia Tech as it involved explosives instead] around the turn of the 20*th* century; a farmer blows up a school that would have received money from the foreclosure of his farm, despite the fact that he could have paid off the mortgage with the value of the materials he bought to plan the revenge), a disproportionate sense of self-defense, et cetera? Then we can try to see the error in judgement the perpetrator made that lead to them considering slaughter a necessary step in their goal to whatever. This seems to be a good way to go about it - but because it is analysis-intensive and slow, insensitive measures lie gun-control might be used as a stopgap measure. Just assorted thoughts, -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Simulations again
Apropos of the Turing Test: collision detection: The female Turing Testhttp://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/04/most_people_thi.php (that is a good blog by the way). Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#The_standard_interpretation also covers the topic pretty well. So it raises questions of how the gender and (species? What is the category under which computers and humans are considered different?) of the questioner, and subjects A and B plus how the test is framed to all involved affects the final verdict. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Simulations again
But then that implies a false positive: if in other configurations we don't notice it as a puzzle, then we only (or are more likely to) notice the more 'puzzle-like' phenomena, and interpret that as meaning we are in a game. But is a game the same as a simulation? Sure, games can have elements of simulation (where I define simulation as recreating a system in perhaps simpler terms) but I believe it exists as a separate conceptual entity. Besides, it seems that all these discussions of whether we live in a real universe or not get caught up in circularity because we generally define reality *as* the universe. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] jellyfish songs
I finally got around to closing some tabs, so I had enough memory to load the flash to watch the video. The singing and guitar playing was pretty good, even if all I had to go on to understand the lyrics was the translation (I will send it to my Japanese/English bilingual cousins), so I may check out his other videos. It reminded me that I used to be subscribed to a podcast called geek pop http://geekpop.co.uk, although the only song I remember was one by someone named Johnny Berliner called Where Are All the Science Songs?. Tangentially related is this SMBC link that someone posted on one of the lists a while back: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cerealhttp://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comicsid=2088 -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] jellyfish songs
Goodness, no. I like to do science, and I like to play music, and I support and enjoy both and the combining of both, but a scientist's job is to do science, not promote it through music or otherwise. Not that it would not be good for them to do it anyway, just that it should not be a requirement. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Udacity - HTML5 Game Development Course (CS 255)
I will be meeting with my uncle in a little less than a month, perhaps I could give him your email and he could tell you about it? -Arlo James Barnes On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Ron Newman ron.new...@gmail.com wrote: Arlo, I'd be more interested in hearing about this. In music theory, you can assign harmonies to a given melody by matching the melody note to various degrees of a chord: root, third, 5th, and if you're more creative, 6th, 9th, etc. The trick is to at the same time honor chord-to-chord transitions that make theoretical sense in a given style. I've been doing this using the digits in peoples' birthdates, see www.yoursongcode.com . There's been a lot of work done at my alma mater (after I left) UNT on algorithmic composition. There are so many variables, however, that I have my doubts that the results of such efforts are consistently aesthetically pleasing, albeit interesting from a technical / complexity point of view. Ron On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Arlo Barnes arlo.bar...@gmail.comwrote: My uncle, an accomplished musician, just told me he started learning Python to apply different chord formations to arbitrary intervals (I do not really understand the music theory, but that is what he told me), and he seems to really like it. -Arlo James Barnes On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.netwrote: Mainly folks who did not start out programming for the sake of programming, but were led to it indirectly. Possibly better: their first use of computers was not programming. I.e. they did not have to use programming languages in the course work or job, but were self-motivated via, for example, building plug-ins for games or wordpress. -- Owen On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Joshua Thorp jth...@redfish.comwrote: Which was the second generation of programmers? On Nov 7, 2012, at 8:46 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Nifty: Udacity has a HTML5/JS/CSS class that builds a game as the structure of the class. That's interesting to me because I found so many of the second generation of programmers got into programming via games. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1 Education, is you getting sweet? -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Ron Newman MyIdeatree.com http://www.Ideatree.us The World Happiness Meter http://worldhappinessmeter.com YourSongCode.com http://www.yourSongCode.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Eileen Mendel wants to share new pictures with you
I am always fascinated by spam - who makes it and why. Fully 50% of the now significant amount of spam I get per week is from Zoosk. At what point does this unintentionally become negative advertising? -Arlo James Barnes On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:51 AM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: They eventually find me, no matter where I hide. Stand back, I'll take care of this. :) -Doug On Nov 8, 2012 9:08 AM, Stephen Guerin stephen.gue...@redfish.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Robert Holmes rob...@robertholmes.org wrote: According to their website it's where you can create and share your romantic journey. It seems that FRIAM has a suitor… Ok...take a deep breath. Let's not come on too strong. And for God sakes, don't reveal Doug too soon. :-) -S -- --- -. . ..-. .. ... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... stephen.gue...@redfish.com office: 505-995-0206 tollfree: 888-414-3855 mobile: 505-577-5828 tw: @redfishgroup redfish.com | simtable.com | cityknowledge.net FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Udacity - HTML5 Game Development Course (CS 255)
My uncle, an accomplished musician, just told me he started learning Python to apply different chord formations to arbitrary intervals (I do not really understand the music theory, but that is what he told me), and he seems to really like it. -Arlo James Barnes On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Mainly folks who did not start out programming for the sake of programming, but were led to it indirectly. Possibly better: their first use of computers was not programming. I.e. they did not have to use programming languages in the course work or job, but were self-motivated via, for example, building plug-ins for games or wordpress. -- Owen On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Joshua Thorp jth...@redfish.com wrote: Which was the second generation of programmers? On Nov 7, 2012, at 8:46 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Nifty: Udacity has a HTML5/JS/CSS class that builds a game as the structure of the class. That's interesting to me because I found so many of the second generation of programmers got into programming via games. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1 Education, is you getting sweet? -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Linked-in endorsement storm?
I was endorsed for 'teaching' and 'research'. It makes one wonder to what extent the people responsible for hiring actually use LinkedIn to search for / verify candidates - it seems there are better (albeit specialized) sites, like Behance for artists, et cetera). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] attachment
Our economic system could use some preferential detachment. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] faith
Thank you Nick, I was going to say the same thing. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cognition and Calculus, WAS: faith, zombies, and crazy people
Well, this was an interesting thread, I will definitely have to follow some of the math concepts mentioned above. My response was at least partly flippant, as I do not think humans are quite that easy to model, but I do appreciate the fact that some people at least pretended to take it seriously for the sake of FriAm. It is a good cause. Steve, sorry my sentence was not clear to you. It is something that I have experienced from both sides a lot recently, to the point that I wonder whether, in the few times it seems I have communicated well, whether it was all just a fantastic coincidence, where my perception that the other person understood me (or vice versa) was just another concept subject to misinterpretation. More likely, though, it is just an indicator that I need to pay more attention to listening and editing. For those who enjoy being more evasive with meaning, who like constructing unlikely sentences (as I and I suspect some of you do), I found an interesting site: quadrivialquandary.com Doug, I gladly accept the honour of Sentence of the Year, although I have not paid sufficient attention for the past 9 months to confirm this, and there are still some months to go. Since this is the double distinction of apparently being the first to receive this award at leasthttps://www.google.com/webhp?q=friam+%22sentence+of+the+year under that name, I would like to reciprocate by admiring the prodigious one-liner delivered not three emails after mine. Thank you. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Cognition and Calculus, WAS: faith, zombies, and crazy people
So if you are saying that actions are the derivative of feelings, because feelings are [an interpretation of] a trend, does that mean all we have to do to perceive intent is to find the integral of an action function, indefinite as the result may be? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] faith, zombies, and crazy people
It's something else ... perhaps a type of action distinguishable from other types of action ... perhaps something called state, which is distinguishable from process? Well, if we are being literalists, it could be construed as the chemical actions taking place in a brain, or perhaps electrical actions taking place microprocessor (depending on who we are talking about). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] faith, zombies, and crazy people
But what if the compressible class turns out to be the same as the uncompressible class? It seems the only way to tell is to test every possible case, as you say in your second paragraph. What it comes down to, though, is that, again as you say, you are talking about knowledge, how people model the world. But do you [not] believe there is a world if there is nobody to model it? COuld there not be the objective fact of physical laws, even if they are never articulated, or at least not correctly or fully? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] One more, I'm afraid. Who started this, anyhow?
I'm afraid I have not been following the news, but wasn't some of the discussion about Muslims who have no opinion on the video or don't take it seriously being antagonized? If so, I think the tenet that nobody has the same religion, just their own views of what they say their religion is may be a useful way to consider the issue. -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] faith, zombies, and crazy people (was America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist)
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Robert Holmes rob...@robertholmes.orgwrote: You guys clearly know too much about philosophy and not enough about zombies. Your notion that there is a single type of zombie has long been discredited. Not to mention the original meaning, which is somebody who was slipped a poison that gives the appearance of death, but can be reversed later after they are dug out of the grave and drugged to become servants - often to be the motive force of a crime so that the schemer can act with impunity due to the zombie scapegoat. It brings another whole level to the discussion about free will. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Ocado and Sensors in NYTimes Tech
Off-topic, but the two hyphens acting as an em dash in your signature prepend a Morse 'm' to your message. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Down the Rabbit Hole: atmospherics
Composition of Reply in Progress (should have put that up when you first sent this) -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Something for physicists
The next one is about the SAT, and we get the third one this coming Tuesday. Everyone submit their own what-ifs! -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] atmospherics
The innocence of many of your questions as posed should be more overtly valued... many of us are busy asking (quietly) similar or related questions. Amen! A thing to think about re: mixing of alcohol and water is that both are polar molecules, and thus mutually attracted, which no doubt helps keep them from separating. However, since they are also equally attracted to themselves, they could conceivably settle out were it not for the aforementioned phenomena such as convection, et cetera. A solution however (and I think no distinction is made about the states of the materials [for example, the gas CO2 can dissolve in water to form carbonic acid, the burning sensation felt when consuming carbonated drinks], although it is hard to imagine a solid dissolving in a solid) would need to be electrolytically separated, is my understanding of the difference in definitions. The reason for this is, taking the example of salt in water, is that the salt separates into it's ionic components (for reasons unknown to me pending further reading) which then would repel each other...or only the like-charged ones would. Hm, I guess that too is pending further reading. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] sorta xkcd-ish: Pi backwards is Pie
...336264832397985356295141.3 ...EEaSaPBESEeBZEZaSeZIPI.E ...Easy as pi(e)? Not sure if XKCD would do this - first saw it in *Joy of Pi*. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology
Contents of email that I thought I had sent minutes after my last one: s/someone else/others http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SedAlso I wanted to note that this counted as my belated reply to the alternative medicine thread: perhaps most medicines, not just 'alternative' varieties, are still 'magic'; that is, not fully understood but used because they seem to work for a certain problem when used a certain way. Obviously if people's lives and well-being/comfort are at stake we should use any solution, but not settle for leaving things unexplained. Eric: I think the difference between chemistry and psychology, although your point is well-taken, is that if I want to measure pH I simply use litmus or electronic testing, whereas if I want to measure stress I ask questions about how someone is feeling, which takes other factors into account (like whether they trust me enough to tell me). I suppose there could be interference between the actual pH and me through my methods of testing - the litmus - but it seems it leaves less room for error and is more easily fiddled with. The fact is, there are ethical considerations for tinkering with someone's mind - it would be considered out of line to test how someone reacts to stress by insulting their parents, for instance. And a direct test of the brain would fall more under neurology, I think. (This is the point at which Eric sent the email 7 minutes ago) The big problem in psychology (IMHO) is the lack of a paradigm that effectively organizes the accepted results and shows where to seek results in the future. Perhaps this is what I am getting at. How does one untangle the complex web of cause and effect that makes up a mind? It takes a very logical series of tests that eliminate possibilities until only one is left to make a direct link from. I also would like to note that since you are actually a professional in the field and I am not, you have a much better knowledge of specific studies and general phenomena, and so maybe this discussion is more about the public perception of psychology rather than psychology itself. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Unsolved Problems in Psychology
It seems so far science and tech have been regarded as thing, or adjectives to describe 'problem' - whereas I consider them processes (and to a much lesser extent philosophies in the) and not necessarily even ones with discrete ends, but more a recursive approach - I see a phenomena, I make a 'magic' explanation, I collect data on it, and see if the magic matches the data. If not, I revise the explanation. If so, I see if it predicts more data. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Really we are making rules (that are not perfect and have exceptions, and are therefore not 'done') and making more rules that govern the exceptions (and those rules also have exceptions). So we have something asymptotically approaching whatever objective Truth/reality there is by way of infinite regression. Then if we are doing tech, we makes things that take advantage of this set of rules and therefore work most of the time. I think something difficult about psychology is that much of the data has to be collected through someone else - those involved in the study. -Arlo James Barnes. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Erik Naggum's XML rant
Mr. Schnada favours his views on sexp, judging from the sitehttp://schnada.de. What must be taken into consideration is that the Usenet post copied at the link http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html you posted says that it was posted at 03:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and considering that Mr. Naggum (judging from his site naggum.no) is from the Netherlands (Central European Time, CET, which is +1 or +2 GMT depending on whether it is Daylight Savings Time or not) that rant was probably written at four in the morning, when many rants are. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] re alternative medicine
You speak to statistical support of at least an anecdotal nature with The research and validation on both Chinese and Ayurvedic Medicine goes back millenium, with many cases. But I would be curious about what mechanistic explanations have been offered for the effectiveness/efficacy of specific treatments, and what support each one has. I will accept any medicine that has a well-supported mechanism for function, regardless of whether it is 'alternative' or not (what a silly term, of course each treatment is an alternative to every other treatment meant to address the same condition. As to how well each addresses it, the proof is in the pudding). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] So, *Are* We Alone?
Aside: It seems the Gmane archive of this conversation is the last listing on the first page of a Google search for 'MerKaBa antenna'. The rest (I did not bother to look farther than the first page) are all references to the first hit, In5D.org. Additionally, all are very wu and rather in coherent, and none of them explain the name, they just show this 'antenna' to be interlocked tetrahedra. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] So, *Are* We Alone?
Ah, one of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clarke. Well, in 2012 the von Neumann machines were used to increase the density of Jupiter to fusion point, creating Lucifer, the solar system's second star, in order that the life on Europa might have a more stable source of heat to evolve in than the mercurial hotspots on the ocean bottom created by Jupiter's tidal forces. This is why human beings must ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE, so they do not interfere with the process of advancement to civilisation as arranged by the mysterious monolith-controlling aliens (who have energy bodies like Dave Bowman has at the end of *2001* [who by the way becomes incorporated with the energy body of HAL to become Halman after 2010] but who used to have spaceship bodies like Rama in Clarke's *Rama* series). For those who enjoyed the films, I highly recommend the book series, it is excellent. But perhaps a better literary comparison is Isaac Asimov's short story *The Last Question*, the eponymous question being Will we [humans] ever reverse entropy?. In the story, we have a series of vignettes of a human asking a computer the question, from engineers asking it of a huge supercomputer on Earth (contemporary to the time of writing) to a family asking it of a starship they are living on to a pair of transgalactic (energy-body, again) conversers asking it of a mystical supercomputer keeping it's vast mass in hyperspace. None of the computers can answer, and prefer to wait for more data. Eventually the computers and humans merge (that theme again) into a single being (I guess that is the Singularity?) and slip into hyperspace just before the universe heat-dies (correct usage?) and the HumPuter (my term, I forget what Asimov calls it) ponders the Question, eventually deciding it has figured it out. Thus entropy is reversed and the universe was created, with the implication that this is what God is (the religion conversation sneaking back into this thread). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] online privacy (again)
I actually have not turned off such a switch. This is not because I am lazy or because I do not care about matters of privacy - on the contrary, I care a great deal that people have the law-guaranteed right to create, reveal, own, and trade/barter/buy/sell as much or as little data about or by them as they want. Of course, saying who owns data gets tricky in some areas, but it is pretty clear when it comes to content made (rather than gathered) by someone that they own it and can control it's dissemination, and also personal facts such as name/location are subject to requests for retraction. I believe anyone should be able to be psedonymous and anonymous, as I do not believe any crimes are unavoidably enabled by these things. If a population cannot protect itself from an enemy it does not know, it cannot protect itself at all. This is why security through obscurity is intrinsically faulty, without equivocation. This is, interestingly, also my reason why I do not turn off tracking and switches and things - even taking into account the very real and probable possibility that any government or company can view any data I have, regardless of what promises or user agreements they have made, I can think of nothing that I do not want them to have, that they could leverage against me. [EDIT: Glen just said most of what I was going to say. The rest:] Also, we should not differentiate ideologically (as well as the aforementioned technologically) between one activity and another. Everybody does what they do for an honest reason, and most of us do most of those things for a well-intentioned (subjectively speaking) reason. If somebody looks on the Internet for bomb-making recipes, it may be 1) out of harmless curiosity or 2) to make a bomb, to blow up something they have a problem with. If we deal with this as a legitimate opinion, albeit one threatening to be expressed very badly, perhaps we can come to some sort of decision on how to address that. Or perhaps that is naiive...it is also a bad example, but what I mean is that just as we must insist that 'fake names' are just as valid as real names, there is no wrong use of the internet, just bad consequences. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] defeat vs surrender
I would hope respect for the right to privacy is not a fringe extreme opinion. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads
But there are a lot more strings that will have a tail in it (infinite, or infinite minus one if you like) than there are strings that are all heads, randomly generated or otherwise. If randomly generated, we assume all strings are equally likely, so the chance of never getting a tail gets it's fair but minimal chance 1/infinity, which is a small number and therefore an unlikely occurence. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Handling Your QR Code Marketing Successfully
I have seen artistic modifications to QR codes - things like the Go board, but also different colourations across a code, and even logos obscuring parts of the center (not sure how that works, I guess there is a lot of redundancy?) I think the most interesting was a QR cookie (I shall endeavor to find pictures). -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] A Good Question - Should the United States join OPEC?
Gasland was an excellent movie. It's point was that gas is not the clean fuel it advertises to be, it just shifts some (not even all) of it's impact from when it is used by the consumer to when it is extracted. It is not just fracking, although of course that worsens things; gas drilling is just a disruptive activity by itself. And the film also emphasized that the gas companies are irresponsible, not out for our interests, and so will not bother to find more ecologically sound practices. The best way, it seems, to make our energy environmentally conscious (so to speak) is to produce it ourselves, and the easiest way to do that is to use small renewable stations like solar, or perhaps a small wind/water turbine. Or polywells, I suppose, if they ever take off. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Elsevier — my part in its downfall « Gowers's Weblog
I was elated to find JoVE (the Journal of Visual Experiments, a video database of footage of experiments and techniques) but deeply disappointed to find it was not open access. -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] SOPA URLs
Dear All: To shift slightly... Aren't there conflicting metaphors here? How can something be free, and yet be a marketplace? In marketplaces people are orderly, follow the rules, pay for things, etc. The idea of a free marketplace of ideas is inherently contradictory. Either it is an anarchy, or it is a marketplace. What am I missing? My feeling is that when someone uses the term free, equality, ( in engineering - robust, optimal, etc.) It must always be applied with respects to something. I assume the congressman means free with respects to entry into the marketplace, essentially against rent seeking, barriers to entry, etc. I've always found this particularly annoying in political cases applying equality, where capitalist and communist systems apply it to different parameters (opportunity vs. wealth distribution ). Also, the Internet is an anarchy if sorts (there is no overall government besides technological necessity, only localised governments [site administration] and citizen action [wikis, comments, and so on]), and a marketplace in that ideas (including any content, any media) compete via appeal and/or quality for attention/consumption, just as businesses in a market, free (in the 'enterprise' sense) or otherwise, compete with prices for customers. Sincerely, Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Complex Numbers .. the end of the line?
Sadly, I am not going to answer your question, because I am still focussing in my current education on vanilla complex number geometries anyway. Instead, I am going to comment on are there higher order numbers beyond complex needed for algebraic operations by emphasizing 'needed' - I always considered math as methods that could be applied to various hypothetical structures/ideas to provide an interesting train of thought. If this is a useful perception of mathematics(and if it is not, please feel free to say so), then would there be a necessary but as-yet undiscovered need for any particular concept? Would it not be better to say, are there number(data?)-structures that provide for interesting algebras not yet considered? -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Complex Numbers .. the end of the line?
Actually, I can think of one application for which quaternions and such are not enough: 3D fractals. I will have to find the thread on fractalforums.com, but it describes the creation of the MandelBox and MandelBulb in accessible language but technical detail, as the story of an artist being unsatisfied with quaternions, which take Mandelbrot-type fractals and make them 'look like whipped cream', as they only preserve their ragged nature in one dimension, and the others are something like rotations. So the artist in question figured out something that looked more Mandelbrottish, I forget how, but it might be interesting. -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Understanding the Occupy Movementf
Jochen, it seems like your question is generating a variety of types of answers, maybe you want to clarify your meaning in the context of the answers given so far? That said, this would be an excellent Quora http://quora.com question/set-of-answers. I think (from my very tangential experience, I am perhaps the least informed in this matter of the answers so far) that the intent of the Occupy movement[s] is something that both Eric and Nick have mentioned but not directly addressed: the diversity of agenda (already a plural of agendum [something that embodies agere - past participle, I believe?], by the way). If one is communist, part of the attendant ideology is recognizing the tend towards imbalance that capitalism engenders, but there are many other conclusions drawn in Marx/Engels and subsequent works: that the way to break the cycle of power via wealth is to have a [violent] revolution of the proletariat leading to a unified party guiding collectivisation (of resources, labour, et cetera) and other activities, for example. If one is socialist, one may advocate more (perhaps opt-in) social programs provided by the government. If one is anarchist, one may advocate localised individual decision-making within communities. And so on. However, this specialisation will lead to predictable reactions: if one is communist, one may expect (at least in the modern-day United States) a 'Red Scare' - a dismissal of ideals due to political alignment. This goes for any philosophy. So such an association with an 'old wineskin', though perhaps not disdained or frowned upon, might not help one's arguments to be heard. So the Occupy movement seemed to decide that only one axiom would be required: the statement that corporate interference in matters of governance leads to inequality (via pork and vested interests and many other systemic phenomena). As this was a common observance among much of American society anyway, it was not likely to be too controversial. However, by marking this statement with an officialised movement, and making this movement publicly visible in prominent places (like Wall Street) made (or attempted to make) it the Main Issue up for public discussion and analysis, which (one would expect) would naturally lead to it being dealt with as an issue more easily/quickly/effectively. Thus Occupy served as a forum, rather than an organisation or individual or faction or party to be ignored, or cynically considered. Indeed, I have rarely heard even opponents of the movement describe it in terms of being untrustworthy - it just does not apply to this kind of social structure. The criticisms have concerned whether or not Occupy will fail in it's goal of popularising social change. While it may be just lust for revolution/rebellion, it is not produced restlessly or without forethought. Anyway, this openness of aims is why there is a spectrum from 'reformers' to 'radicals' (a word much abused, and best used in context of etymology: anything dealing with the 'root' of a problem/issue) or between '1/99' and 'Occupy' as noted by Eric. I hope this helps. Sincerely, Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] parislemon • Why I Hate Android
Open source hardware and software can spread quickly to those who want it, and clearly companies that sell mobile phones do not want it. But there are enough smart people out there that communities could build the phones they want. So the issue is coverage. nG should be like WiFi - as open or closed as the owner of the hotspot wants, controllable, et cetera. As has been pointed out, a little weak on security, but nothing that cannot be fixed. The problem is that mobile devices move around more than the average computer, even including laptops. This is why cell towers have been built to cover wide areas, and of course companies need to be big enough to have enough money to build them. Big companies tend to not like 'open'. Communities might be able to raise enough money, but towers are unsightly and some people claim they cause health problems. So the answer might be mesh networks - chances are, a given mobile device is a lot closer to another device than the nearest tower, so signals do not have to have quite a strong amplitude. This means that people can provide each other with coverage, bypassing vendors. -Arlo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] parislemon • Why I Hate Android
I assume you mean 'free kittens' as in free up front but thousands of dollars in food and veterinary checkups per year for ten plus years? As to how one would go about constructing a meshnet, I *think* all that would be required is a program constantly running on devices, looking for signals from other devices, and acting as a translator for those signals; I suppose as a merger, also (device asks for a resource from connected devices, devices check for resource on accessible networks, out of the ones that can get it, one device is selected to perform the transfer). But I had only heard of the concept recently, and have only heard of one strong effort to do such a thing (One LapTop Per Child [OLPC], according to my friend Max Bond) so my knowledge is fairly minimal, I am working off guesswork so far. I shall have to do more research... -Arlo James Barnes FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
