Re: [FRIAM] on stupidity
Hm. But you can't deny that we're all stupid at some time, in some context, for some isolated decision. The point is that a slight deviation is "yet another episode of my stupidity", whereas a large deviation implies a different basis ... like the garbage poetry I wrote as a kid. It's so stupid, I can't come to any conclusion BUT that those words came from someone else. On February 14, 2020 7:54:33 PM PST, Marcus Daniels wrote: >A fundamental assumption is that one shouldn't be disgusting. Being >slightly stupid and disgusting isn't redeeming. The meritocracy thing >is a straw man. -- glen ep ropella 971-599-3737 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
[FRIAM] but it feels good
https://changelog.com/posts/why-do-so-many-developers-get-dry-wrong > Once you eeked out enough XP to reach Level 2, condensing that copy pasta > down felt amazing. Suddenly your code looked more impressive. Efficient! > Clean! Simple! This is like the lowest common form of refactoring. But it > feels good… -- glen ep ropella 971-599-3737 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
[FRIAM] another good bundle!
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/stem-books -- glen ep ropella 971-599-3737 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
[FRIAM] [ SPAM ] where is the real threat?
That scratch in my surface jumps me back, yet again, to the postmodern point: Beware of the online war of propaganda http://news.usc.edu/82853/beware-of-the-war-of-propaganda-taking-place-online/ “People normally trust online content,” said Farshad Kooti, one of the Ph.D. candidates at USC Viterbi who worked with Galstyan. “Unfortunately, this introduces an opportunity to spread misinformation by using automated bots that are very hard to detect.” Misinformation and disinformation are NOT the threat. Trust is the threat. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] [ SPAM ] The Fallacy Fork
The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life http://philpapers.org/rec/BOUTFT Abstract Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneou s type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life . On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] [ SPAM ] Stegasploit!
How to Hack a Computer Using Just An Image http://thehackernews.com/2015/06/Stegosploit-malware.html -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] [ SPAM ] Map of the complexity sciences
http://www.scimaps.org/maps/map/map_of_complexity_sc_154/detail What I found most interesting was the little street view dude... and that there are pictures located on the map! -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] metaphor and talking across skill levels
Never mind. Here it is: http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20150311/7998d381/attachment-0001.obj Just download it and rename it to logics.pdf. On 03/11/2015 03:46 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: Did you attach it? Or was it scrubbed? None seems to have made it to the archives, either: http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/2015-March/045633.html On 03/11/2015 03:41 PM, lrudo...@meganet.net wrote: And as long as we're passing around PDFs, I attach a chapter on (among other things) the *in*formal logic of mathematics. Only the last three pages of the text (pp. 63-65) address (one) metaphor directly. Like Cheng (and like Jody Azzouni, whose work I quote and possibly misuse liberally in the chapter--work I would never have read if it hadn't been for the semester FRIAM spent with Ruben Hersh) I'm trying to get at some aspects of the actual behavior of mathematicians. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] [ SPAM ] Re: metaphor and talking across skill levels
I feel like I'm stating the obvious but ya never know. Symmetry means the application of a measure produces the same result both before and after a transformation. The word symmetry is meaningless without reference to a particular transformation and a particular measure. If metaphor is a transformation (mapping) from one thing to another, then it will (or won't) exhibit symmetry under any particular transformation. Symmetry can be softened to similarity (or any number of concepts of equivalence), which (I think) is much more relevant to the traditional use of the word metaphor. If you do soften it, though, your error accumulates and we probably lose commutativity, associativity, transitivity, etc. (And is a well-behaved metaphor really considered a good metaphor? Or is it merely a tautology? Embrace Error!) I think what makes (some) scientists plain speaking is when they talk about what they actually _did_ rather than what they intended to do, what they wanted to do, what random nonsense was bouncing around in their head when they did what they did, etc. Metaphor seems to play a role in all the latter, but not much in the former. What you actually do is not metaphorical, despite the mental gymnastics you engaged in to arrive at doing what you did. On 03/09/2015 12:52 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: Historically, I have had terrible trouble with the way some folks employ “symmetry” on this list. Steve G. and I used to get into tangles about this. I get that crystals have “symmetry”, but beyond that, I am struggling to understand what you mean. Perhaps you might explicate for those of us who have a hard time not thinking of symmetry as just “being the same on the right as on the left, etc.” On 03/09/2015 12:22 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote: Speaking of metaphors: recently I thought that metaphors and poems are a bit like the gems of language. As you know gems are rare and valuable and have often a highly symmetrical structure. The rhymes in poems mirror the symmetries of words, while metaphors and analogies mirror the (timeless) symmetries of ideas. Take for example the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY. I think this is one of the metaphors in Metaphors We Live By from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. It indicates certain similarities and symmetries in the ideas behind the concepts for life and journey. There is a beginning and an end connected by long winding path, etc. So basically metaphors are all about symmetries which let you describe one idea in terms of another. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] for you 3D printer afficianados...
On 01/19/2015 08:36 AM, Steve Smith wrote: the stakes just raised a bit! http://3dprint.com/38144/3d-printed-apartment-building/ Interesting complement to this: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/03/-sp-wooden-skyscrapers-future-world-plyscrapers The development of engineered timber could herald a new era of eco-friendly ‘plyscrapers’. Christchurch welcomed its first multistorey timber structure this year, there are plans for Vancouver, and the talk is China could follow -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] If you have time to waste
circa Wed Dec 24 12:53:56 EST 2014 cody wrote: Also, The console. appears to be a javascript console. for instance type rotate. Yep. It works great, actually. It seems to save the history of your commands across invocations. But the functions I define seem to disappear between invocations. (e.g. define a function in the terminal, refresh the browser, function's gone.) Being incompetent in javascript, I don't know quite how to find out where those functions are defined and what might be preserved across an invocation. Of course, I've only tried it in Iceweasel... such is the limit of my interest. 8^) -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] If you have time to waste
For those of us who like emulators: http://www.windows93.net/ -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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 Astounding Link Between the P≠NP Problem and the Quantum Nature of Universe
On 11/06/2014 08:04 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote: No but the Newton was a badass pocket doodad before it was cool. Very nice! -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Telehack
I know some of you are old geezers and would appreciate this bit of history as much as I do: http://telehack.com/ cf: Playable Archaeology: An Interview with Telehack's Anonymous Creator http://waxy.org/2011/06/playable_archaeology_an_interview_with_the_telehacks_anonymous_creator/ -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Samsung Galaxy4 issues
For whatever it's worth, you will have much more control if you root and install a custom ROM, perhaps this one: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Jflte_Info Maybe you've already done that, though, in which case please ignore me. On 04/21/2014 02:57 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote: Greetings fellow technomancers, At small risk for re-asking a question: For TLDR: Ever since my Galaxy S4's android version got updated from Google and or Samsung. It's been having eradic (not be confused with erotic) issues that include: constantly not being able to connect to googles network, driving mode causing it segfault, and frequently only getting updates from apps when i'm driving- causing the phone to BSOD, coredump, and generally not be a phone. I've posted this issue to AndroidCentral, Android Pit, googles kinda-sorta support for the 'nexus experience' Though I did get some comsiration it doesn't solve the basic problem. Has anyone else experienced these issues, if so, how did they go about solving them For those that might like a little detail: Ever since some recent update a large range off basic features, and applications don't function consistantl, or the fundimental UX is dogy at best. For use I use the phone to stream music from googleplay, spotify, pandara and if a 'play list' peeks my interest youtube. Before a change somewhere in the pipeline I could turn off the video segment of youtube on my android. Or use 'mobile mode' on it and it'd do the same. Now after some update that's getting harder to do. Before some update I could type into 'Navi' the little floating bar on the start screen that to get a play list German basic phrases(for instance) and it'd send me the audio. Sufficed to say having having some effing 'youtube app' take over the device makes that neighimpossible to do. This all makes it harder and harder to resist pinging Rubin directly for tech support. I have a vague picture of how that'd go (no I won't support your phone comes to mind). -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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: FedEx Bandwidth
On 02/18/2014 07:49 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: It's true, atoms are still faster than bits. By a LOT! http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ I don't know... Have the same numbers been crunched accounting for the robustness of internet traffic? The linked Cisco page (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/ip-ngn-ip-next-generation-network/white_paper_c11-481360.html) doesn't seem to talk about overhead traffic. Maybe I missed it. If we did ship SD cards, we'd have to include the amount of time it takes to create an equal number of backup SD cards just in case of ... say, a 30-car pileup due to an errant polar vortex ... and include the amount of time it took to re-ship that packet. ;-) -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Creepy story: A VALUABLE REPUTATION
On 02/04/2014 06:27 PM, Alfredo Covaleda Vélez wrote: I am sure it is going to be of your interest. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all Excellent story! Thanks. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] group selection and the commons
On 01/13/2014 01:07 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: Perhaps I could get you guys to read it by promising hereafter to be an altruistic lurker. Do _not_ be more of a lurker. There are enough lurkers and not enough participants ... of course, I'm a big fan of noise, so I may not be the best touchstone. undacova - sciarex http://youtu.be/YHtplHywEyY The basic question is, In our explanations of human behavior, do we always have to appeal to benefits to Ego's germline, or can we appeal to explanations based on benefits to the group of which Ego is a part? Here, FWIW, is the most serious contribution that I made to that literature. http://www.clarku.edu/faculty/nthompson/1-websitestuff/Texts/2000-2005/Shif ting_the_natural_selection_metaphor_to_the_group_level.pdf What irritates me about the attempts to tie group selection to altruism is not the ambiguity [*] in selection or group or flock but the ambiguity in altruism. You do a bit of disambiguation by identifying reciprocal altruism. And if I extrapolate (or put words in your mouth), I can imagine the problems with the term altruism falling out as the other terms are clarified. But I still have this nagging feeling that altruism is illusory (hearkening back to Lee's recent post). We don't do anything we could reasonably call selfish or altruistic. We simply do things that make us feel good or bad. A more immediate question might be why do some actions make us feel good or bad? [*] I don't really like the way you use the word ambiguity in that paper... but I should leave that for another argument. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] auto-linking e-mail
On 01/08/2014 07:40 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
No sorry, no magic, I simply didn't spend the effort to find the arxiv
entry. My bad.
Damn it. I was hoping you found a browser or email client plugin that
would do something like this:
Link automatically all the highlighted words with the syntax [w:{term}]
on the definition from Wikipedia.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wikipedia-autolink/
If anyone knows of such a tool, please pass it on.
But you see, I'm not used to these philosophical discussions, I felt only
the wiki quote would suffice. And I definitely did not think those
considering logic would include Godel's later work which was not completed
during his life. Nor God for that matter.
Yeah, it's strange to me to think of the recent conversation as
philosophical. To me it seems extremely practical, especially when
thinking about interactive vs. isolated simulation. We had these
discussions about Swarm quite a bit in the early days surrounding the
value of the probes. The Game of Life is a good example. To what
extent is it important for a user to be able to interfere with the
evolution of the CA? To my mind, allowing interaction _prevents_ the
user from understanding the primary point of the game, i.e. to
(deistically) set up rules and initial state, then see how it turns out.
But people are inherently interactive. They want to engage. And only
a small subset of us really digs pure, autonomous deduction. Most of us
think theistically... a god should interact with its minions.
What sounds philosophical to you has very practical implications for me.
--
glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] logic can be irrational
Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of Gödel's Proof of God's Existence Christoph Benzmüller, Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.4526v4 All those links and I still had to use Google to find the actual article. ;-) Do you use a program (like the journalism sites seem to) that automatically links keywords in your e-mails? If so, what program do you use? On 01/07/2014 06:27 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: Logic has difficulties. But interestingly enough, this logic was proven valid recently by two computer scientists/mathematicians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof Basically: *Gödel's ontological proof* is a formal argument for Godhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God's existence by the mathematician Kurt Gödelhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del (1906-1978). -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Corporate responsibility wrt health insurance
However, sometimes the people you think are independent contractors actually aren't (determined by audit or by filing a request with the IRS and/or your state). As I understand it, if these people are determined to be employees, then you are an employer and the rules about providing health insurance plans for part- and/or full-time employees apply to you, whether or not you've incorporated. On 12/06/2013 06:34 AM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote: IMHO. You would presumably be doing business as a sole proprietor and not as a corporation and would hire them as independent contractors, then I think the answer is no, because their contract will bestow no employment benefits. But I am not an attorney, so I'd consult my local friendly employment lawyer. Robert C On 12/5/13 11:26 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: This (finally) leads to the question I want to ask. Let's assume that I as an individual hire 500 people to work for me. I do not incorporate; I just hire them individual to individual. Does anyone know if the law requires me to provide health insurance for them? 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 -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] VM within a VM (was UTAustinX: UT.5.01x: Linear Algebra - Foundations to Frontiers | edX)
On 12/06/2013 10:56 AM, Gary Schiltz wrote: Lately, I’ve been using a VM within a VM. One of the problems I have with this: http://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html is the potential for infinite regress. At that point, I think it boils down to whether you accept this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound I remember sitting in on a talk by this guy: http://www.isepp.org/Pages/12-13%20Pages/Bristol.html wherein he posited that a (hypothetical, of course) system of systems universe might actually loop... i.e. yes, it's turtles all the way down, but you could (in principle) mark any given turtle and find your way back to a marked turtle with an ongoing monotonic scale change. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Corporate responsibility wrt health insurance
Yeah, the feds are the lesser worry, though (in my opinion). It's the states you have to watch out for, especially during budget shortfalls and periods of high unemployment. On 12/06/2013 02:52 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote: You might find the IRS Topic 762 - Independent Contractor vs. Employee useful at: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc762.html It says it was updated in October this year so hopefully any ACA impacts have been applied. Some links to pdf docs provide expanded info. However this tends to approach the issue from the other end: if you provide certain benefits like medical insurance you are (probably) an employer not whether the law says you have to provide such benefits. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option
On 12/04/2013 07:39 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: Yes (he would say), assuming that you were chosen at random from the population of humans, it is a VALID inference from the fact that you can break concrete that humans can break concrete. It is valid because we would, if we continued to pick random individuals indefinitely come ultimately to the correct conclusion, say, that less than .01 percent of humans can break concrete. Unfortunately, though valid, this inference is extraordinarily weak. The adjective weak seems to relate to how much money you should be willing to bet on it. In this case, with the sample size at one, and the population at billions, Peirce would advise you to bet very little if anything, until you had a much larger sample. This effectively demonstrates the fragility of logic (or any purely delusional/mental construct). In practice, were you to go around actually testing people against concrete, the success rate would _increase_ over time for 2 reasons: 1) people would game the test and 2) your test would evolve. In the end, inference relies, in a rather circular way, on ever more inference. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Managing large numbers of passwords
Well, I have a 50k ascii file with all my passwords and security questions in it. It's ~800 lines long, but that doesn't mean 800 accounts, since some accounts require lots of security questions. Plus, I keep track of some old passwords after I change them and such. I keep this file encrypted with GPG. I shred http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shred-invocation.html#shred-invocation the unencrypted file each time I edit it... but it's not clear to me whether an unencrypted copy hangs around for awhile or not... plus, one of my machines uses SSD, which presents some issues http://static.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf of its own. But in the wake of this story http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/12/introducing-have-i-been-pwned.html and the Pony story http://blog.spiderlabs.com/2013/12/look-what-i-found-moar-pony.html, I decided to change a bunch of my passwords today. Does anyone have the data for the SSH credentials that were compromised? I can't imagine mine would be in there. But it did remind me that I don't have a practical policy for updating those. On 12/05/2013 11:08 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: 150, 240, 900 !? ?!What!? are you guys addicted to? Including PINs for bank-cards (not used online) I can't estimate over a dozen or two myself. Exactly! But you do have 100 and you know it! How many on-line gifts? How many forums, even for trivial use? How many mail lists? How many bank, credit card, paypal logins? Amazon? Google? Moocs? Travel related? Airlines? NetFlix/Hulu/iTunes? Gmail? Dropbox? GitHub? Clothing? Shopping in general? NYTimes and other news sources? LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+, ... I could go on but dozens. I seriously, Seriously doubt it. OK maybe hundreds over decades, but ... current? Not so fast, mister! They're still there and very hackable. Admittedly, I have probably cranked through a similar number of throwaways where I've signed up for something (because that is the only way to sample/test) and then let the login die or go fallow (and my hashword) with it.But hundreds? Really? I'm worried about you guys! They have groups and 12 step programs for things like this! Login die? You sure? And indeed, how many folks can delete an account? Most don't have an obvious way do do so. As for mnemonics or mental-hash-generators (hashwords?)... my decades of high security environments where writing my password down anywhere (including or especially electronically) or sharing it with anyone (e.g. speaking it aloud) was a felony or low treason or something, I just can't stand to see a password in clear text... it makes me cringe... so a whole spreadsheet of my family jewels... I just couldn't... I only wish there were a 2-factor system for the masses that isn't spoofable (the ones that use your Mac address of your device are better than nothing but not unspoofable by far). - Steve I am so worried about you guy who don't know just how many logins you have! :) -- Owen On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com mailto:sasm...@swcp.comwrote: 150, 240, 900 !? ?!What!? are you guys addicted to? Including PINs for bank-cards (not used online) I can't estimate over a dozen or two myself. Exactly! But you do have 100 and you know it! How many on-line gifts? How many forums, even for trivial use? How many mail lists? How many bank, credit card, paypal logins? Amazon? Google? Moocs? Travel related? Airlines? NetFlix/Hulu/iTunes? Gmail? Dropbox? GitHub? Clothing? Shopping in general? NYTimes and other news sources? LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, G+, ... I could go on but dozens. I seriously, Seriously doubt it. OK maybe hundreds over decades, but ... current? Not so fast, mister! They're still there and very hackable. Admittedly, I have probably cranked through a similar number of throwaways where I've signed up for something (because that is the only way to sample/test) and then let the login die or go fallow (and my hashword) with it.But hundreds? Really? I'm worried about you guys! They have groups and 12 step programs for things like this! Login die? You sure? And indeed, how many folks can delete an account? Most don't have an obvious way do do so. As for mnemonics or mental-hash-generators (hashwords?)... my decades of high security environments where writing my password down anywhere (including or especially electronically) or sharing it with anyone (e.g. speaking it aloud) was a felony or low treason or something, I just can't stand to see a password in clear text... it makes me cringe... so a whole spreadsheet of my family jewels... I just couldn't... I only wish there were a 2-factor system for the masses that isn't
Re: [FRIAM] Why I was wrong about the nuclear option
On 12/04/2013 09:46 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: if you take for granted that the world is not the sort of place that changes on a dime. And where else could you have learned that save by induction. Perhaps the fallacy doesn't lie in the general concept of reinforcement learning, but in the formulation of what induction means? I found it interesting that this guy was invited to give a talk at a local CFI meeting: Matt Thornton on Aliveness in Martial Arts http://youtu.be/WojPLwqYpzA the point, of course, being the difference between [un]predictability and the tightness of the coupling between your innards and your environment. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Rly
A (small) generator is useful, too. http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/models/eu2000i When your UPS beeps, hop over and start the generator. On 11/26/2013 02:17 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply pricy but worth it. I had been so spoiled after years of using laptops as my primary computer, that when I went back to a desktop machine I had no idea just how quick you can lose everything. An uninterruptible power supply gives you a chance to put things away in an orderly manner. —joshua On Nov 26, 2013, at 2:56 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com mailto:gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: Winter is here. Snow is as well. Nothing new. Why is it then santa fes pipelines dont salt the roads. Keep heat and power going? Today ive had the power crash at least 5 times. This does nothing but harm to my computer. It fs up work im doing. Is there a doodad l can get to elimiminate those issues? Asking here since friamers probably know more about options than I do. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Rly
Outside! ... of course ... Don't run generators inside your house or garage... of course ... goes without saying. 8^) But I have heard of some people dying of asphyxiation because they ran generators in their garage. On 11/26/2013 04:48 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: A (small) generator is useful, too. http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/models/eu2000i When your UPS beeps, hop over and start the generator. On 11/26/2013 02:17 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninterruptible_power_supply pricy but worth it. I had been so spoiled after years of using laptops as my primary computer, that when I went back to a desktop machine I had no idea just how quick you can lose everything. An uninterruptible power supply gives you a chance to put things away in an orderly manner. —joshua On Nov 26, 2013, at 2:56 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com mailto:gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: Winter is here. Snow is as well. Nothing new. Why is it then santa fes pipelines dont salt the roads. Keep heat and power going? Today ive had the power crash at least 5 times. This does nothing but harm to my computer. It fs up work im doing. Is there a doodad l can get to elimiminate those issues? Asking here since friamers probably know more about options than I do. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] [WedTech] BitCoin
On 11/21/2013 08:44 AM, cody dooderson wrote: What do you think the first country to adopt bitcoins as it's official currency will be? Has it happened yet? Will that make the value go up? I think it'll be one of these: http://www.seasteading.org/ -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Guidance could help.
On 11/21/2013 10:32 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote: Greetings fellow Technomancers: Where and or how does one go about getting some notion of how realistic a career goal is these days? The only advice I have is to start your own company and do some contract work through that corporation as a vehicle. If they have the LLC structure in NM, then do that. -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] TPP asymmetry
On 11/13/2013 09:05 AM, Steve Smith wrote: On 11/13/2013 07:00 AM, glen wrote: OK. I confess that I do have 2 primary measures of bad: 1) opacity - as we've discussed and 2) asymmetry. In any asymmetric relationship, the one(s) with the advantage has the moral responsibility to modify/regulate their own actions so that the one(s) with the disadvantage isn't (unwillingly) exploited or bullied. I should say _try_ to modify/regulate... because it's a _very_ difficult thing to do, for anyone. And if there are more than 2 parties, even perceiving 3 or more dimensions is hard, much less measuring the amount of symmetry in those dimensions. Yes... sounds like those good ole values of honesty and fair play to me. Huzzah! We at least share this one heuristic about moral behaviour it seems? Appropriate to this context, I stumbled on this: The United States is isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/18/the-united-states-is-isolated-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-negotiations/ -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] Historical Software Collection
Apparently, they had a fire. https://blog.archive.org/2013/11/06/scanning-center-fire-please-help-rebuild/ Scanning Center Fire — Please Help Rebuild Posted on November 6, 2013 by brewster Scanning Center Fire Scanning Center with Fire Damage to Left of Main Building This morning at about 3:30 a.m. a fire started at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center. The good news is that no one was hurt and no data was lost. Our main building was not affected except for damage to one electrical run. This power issue caused us to lose power to some servers for a while. On 10/29/2013 09:31 AM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) -- glen ep ropella -- 971-255-2847 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] more fun in psychology
On 10/31/2013 10:51 AM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: My priority is not to publish, but to attend my clients properly.” TRAINING iN MY MODEL?? Yipes! As scary as that is, the scarier thing is that the following sentiment is consistently, frequently, and loudly repeated and ignored: 'The essence of the criticism of [insert your favorite quantitative bullsh!t] is that it takes quantitative reasoning to its absurd extreme,' he says, 'that because we can talk about things in numerical terms, that that makes it scientific.' I remember one conference I went to where an audience member shouted, just before a talk, something like: If you aren't going to show any equations, I'm leaving. 8^) And he wasn't joking. 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] Historical Software Collection
https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Give good people the power to do good and that power eventually will be in the hands of bad people to do bad. -- Harry Browne 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] Historical Software Collection
For many of the same reasons, I also found this site interesting: http://www.compileonline.com/index.php Compile and Execute your favorite programming languages online, click any of the following to proceed! I honestly had never heard of Malbolge, Factor, and Fantom. Gary Schiltz wrote at 10/29/2013 09:43 AM: Wow, that�s cool. It�s a shame that so much software will never see the light of day. Many billions of dollars were spent developing software in the 80s for the DOD as well as Soviet agencies. I�ve heard it argued that the USSR lost the cold war mainly because the USA made them spend so much on defense, and quite a sizable chunk of that was for software. Gary On Oct 29, 2013, at 11:31 AM, glen e. p. ropella g...@tempusdictum.com wrote: https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com If you disclose the solution to the mystery you are simply depriving the other seekers of an important source of energy. -- Conchis, The Magus by John Fowles 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] hypothetical causes for semantic drift (was Notions of entropy)
Roger Critchlow wrote at 10/15/2013 08:24 AM: [...] correctly formed explanations can be uninformed opinions or fallacious reasonings or imaginary evidence, and flawed as they are they can still sound true to some social population, so people get positive feedback for ridiculous explanations and build up self-consistent systems of explanations. Steve Smith wrote at 10/15/2013 10:41 AM: I like this description. [...] The pursuit of Truth has an overtone of an absolute or objective rather than the mere relativism of finding resonance with others. Here is where I think Natural Science emerged... from the activities of humans that roughly fit the model of seeking resonance with nature, of hypothesis and experiment as call and response. [...] Those who know how to manipulate it's resonances get the bulk of it (to use the 1%/99% inequity argument). Excellent! Roger posits a fundamental twitch at the center of the generation. So, to sum up, we have: 1) metaphor as a source of mapping distinguishable constructs, 2) finite capacities as a source of error in such mappings, 3) a random (or mystery behind an event horizon) generator, and 4) selection for what (doesn't) work(s). I think these fit together quite well enough to provide for some hypotheses to answer Lee's question. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- H.L. Mencken 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] more climate change grist
What Is Climate Change and What To Do About It? -- John Baez http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/what-is-climate-change-and-what-to-do-about-it/ -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. -- Bertrand Russell 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] Mozilla plan seeks to debug scientific code
[via +Nathan Baker] http://www.nature.com/news/mozilla-plan-seeks-to-debug-scientific-code-1.13812 ... Mozilla opted to examine nine papers from PLoS Computational Biology that were selected by the journal’s editors in August. The reviewers looked at snippets of code up to 200 lines long that were included in the papers and written in widely used programming languages, such as R, Python and Perl. The Mozilla engineers have discussed their findings with the papers’ authors, who can now choose what, if anything, to do with the markups — including whether to permit disclosure of the results. Those findings will not affect the status of their publications, says Marian Petre, a computer scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, who will debrief the reviewers and authors. Thaney expects to release a preliminary report on the project within the next few weeks. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com A day an hour of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity of bondage. -- Cato 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] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote at 09/16/2013 03:45 PM: Well, I mean some mental models have to develop at the various levels of the organization. I used the term `motivation' to mean the process of understanding enough of a sub-problem to propose a solution. If the problem is hard, the it may have to be sent out to all of the leaves of the organization and come back to even determine feasibility. On the other hand, if there is a small super-knowledgeable and super-capable cadre of workers, there is less of this percolation to wait on.. Ah! OK. I admit there's a type of latency in the cabal/incentive structure that wouldn't exist in the more dynamic extracurricular ecology you propose. But I think it's more than compensated for by other latencies in the latter. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- H.L. Mencken 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] Hardware Trojans - was:] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
Steve Smith wrote at 09/13/2013 08:09 AM: On 9/12/13 6:23 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote: Or do you also need [..] doping [..] Saw this on /. this morning. http://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf Yikes.. Reading this article reminded me of the following: [...] looking for *significant* differences among the plenitude of noisy, *insignificant* differences. That is a fantastic paper! But I still wonder at the practical utility of their chosen use cases. I can kinda grok the utility of reduced attack complexity because you can simply produce trojans en masse and hope they percolate into the critical sub-systems you will need/want. But I'm too ignorant to understand the utility of the side-channel use case. How would the black hat get the chip into the right place? The same way? By flooding the target with chips that all contain the hidden side channel? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions. -- Milton Friedman 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] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/11/2013 07:55 PM: If there are bad statistics, that would suggest to me some benefit from security from obscurity? That reminds me. Did anyone see Stephanie's presentation? It has always struck me that diversity and co-evolution constitute a superset of obscurity. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 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] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote at 09/12/2013 09:30 AM: I posit that co-evolution moves faster in today's open source world, because: At first, I agreed vehemently. Then I started thinking (always a mistake). It depends on what you mean by faster. It's possible that the species diversity might increase. But, perhaps _like_ a fluid going through a diverging nozzle, as the cross-section grows, the velocity shrinks. Perhaps while the progress of any one lineage slows, more lineages arise? Of course, I'm assuming there's some conserved property. It's also possible there is no conserved property, or that the whole co-evolutionary machine takes better advantage of the various nooks and crannies of the world. 1) More independent thinkers. Drones tend not to care, and not caring leads to not thinking. Passive aggressive compliance, brain rot. I think it's important to consider that the drones are caring and thinking ... they're simply thinking about other stuff ... like who they'll vote for on some reality TV show, or whether to go to the mall or buy from amazon.com. The real trick is that of marketing. How to corral a bunch of drones into caring and thinking about what you want them to? How to manufacture care/thought? 2) Improved access to information -- the source code, and a community around it. This allows motivated individuals to educate themselves rapidly about things, and to be empowered to use this information. It also allows us to lavish kudos on the fame-tolerant we find there. E.g. Musk, Diamandis, Branson, Dawkins, Tyson, Lady Ada, etc. The more we can turn these unfortunate suckers into role models, the easier it will be to corral the drones. Without the improved access to information, we're stuck with the dually diagnosed (deeper-digging _and_ charismatic). Improved access to information allows us to worry less about charisma and focus on people who do things, regardless of what they look like or their stage/tv presence. 3) A culture that has low tolerance for secrets. I think you might be slightly off on this one. It's not a low tolerance for secrets so much as a need for _qualified_ secrets. We don't care if you won't answer a question, as long as we're happy with _why_ you won't answer it. The focus is on authenticity rather than openness. 4) Similar incentive structures for Linux in the server space as would exist for the Windows Server line. On the other hand, the Windows world surely has more people working on finding vulnerabilities. But many of those people are working without direct knowledge of how their target works. They have to infer it. Perhaps that has benefits, but it has costs too. As with my prattling about your (3), I'd suggest the issue is less with the reverse engineering (which is fun) and more with the monolithic nature of Windows. Tools in that world are too tightly coupled... it makes for a fragile tool chain... very efficient when used in the right context, but seemingly broken when abused. And, as with Merle's outsider everything, _abuse_ is the new _use_. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves. -- Robert Anton Wilson 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] Urgent: skype vulnerability?
mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote at 09/12/2013 02:32 PM: I think it is better to not deprive the drone prone of important existential angst. Make them sit around these people for a few days until they lose their religion. That won't happen if they just watch them on TED, or in carefully produced speeches in the East Room of the White House, or even in university lecture rooms. Yeah, I know. But that doesn't scale. Somehow we need to replace silly role models like Justin Bieber with real ones like Spot Draves (draves.org) ... or _you_. 8^) There's no way to get all the drones into a religion-losing interaction, especially when/if the role models really do continue working. 3) A culture that has low tolerance for secrets. If an interface promises to do Y when it sees X, and that is tested and declared `compliant', it doesn't tell me for sure what happens when it sees Z, when Z is never mentioned (e.g. in the documentation). Maybe it will indeed again deliver Y when X is seen again, but meanwhile also deliver X to the Mossad? I want to see the logic that leads to Y, and see exactly how it happens. Otherwise all I have is a sketchy contract and it is up to me to try to break it with Z and whatever other misuse one can think of, or break down the obsfucated artifact (executable) into smaller bits and try to rationalize that. But where do you stop, in your ideal? Do you stop at the source code? Or do you also need a transparent compiler? Linker? Run-time? System? Component, vhdl, ceramics, doping, drawing methods? Do you have to _be_ Yog-Sothoth in order to finally sit back and say to yourself OK, there are no secrets, here? Of course, the answer is that it depends on who you are. Some of us are satisfied quickly, very near the interface. Others need to dig in and pick every nit they can (and eventually go mad ;-). But, in the end, all of us tolerate secrets. It's just a matter of the quality/character of those secrets. As you point out, that's different than trying to POSIX open(2) a file and being given EPERM. That's a refusal, but it can be checked for consistency with other sorts of queries (e.g. stat(2)). Ha! Nice. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis 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] PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc
Owen Densmore wrote at 07/15/2013 08:47 AM: Regardless of opinions on the ethics/legal side, the collect it all approach seems just impossible for me to grok. Lets suppose you *did* have all the data generated on the internet every day for the last 20 years. What could you do with it? I think they're taking the usual approach to large data sets, save it all (or as much as you can) just in case you find an anomaly you want to study. The point of having the raw data available is to allow you to engage in hindsight. What interests me most is not what they _intend_ to do with it, but what they end up doing with it. For example, I used to keep every single e-mail I ever received. I started doing that way before I learned about Eddington typewriters. On several occasions, I've had reason to go back and mine that data for various things, including building various bots that could spit out text similar to various people and spam sources. An interesting tangent is that encryption was a significant irritant ... even where e-mails were encrypted with my public key. ;-) The more important question, I think, is how these agencies are organizing the long-term storage. What schema are they using? How is it indexed? What storage media do they use? These are the questions that make me want to apply for a job with the NSA. (BTW, I _did_ apply for a job there as I was finishing college. I didn't pursue it because I had a good offer from somewhere else. ... Plus, one of my roommates landed a job there. And he was so perky, sunny, and patriotic, he creeped me out. He asked why I liked the work of H.R. Giger, claiming it was too dark and depressing. He actually asked me to take down my prints ... which I did. [sigh]) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. -- F.A. Hayek 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] PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc
mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote at 07/15/2013 10:08 AM: A short term sample of all traffic could be used analogously to a UAV video recording. Take any suspect or event and look for any and all signals leading to them backward in time. Declare the source of those signals suspects find the correlated physical sites compromise them. Recurse. Yeah, that does imply a good index ... a kind of inverted light cone. I can imagine an explosion in the number of compromised sites, though. You'd need some way of rolling out ancillary sites, perhaps based on the number of associated indices. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. - Frank Herbert Dune 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] PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc
glen e. p. ropella wrote at 07/15/2013 10:21 AM: Yeah, that does imply a good index ... a kind of inverted light cone. I can imagine an explosion in the number of compromised sites, though. You'd need some way of rolling out ancillary sites, perhaps based on the number of associated indices. You'd also need upgrade survivable root kits and dynammic dns updates. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. -- H. L. Mencken 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] LitHive - Agile Publishing
I thought some of the authors on the list might get a kick out of this: http://lithive.com/ Write, Publish, and Connect Work solo or in a team to publish books, anthologies and periodicals and to create Hives to connect writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Learn more or visit our FAQ. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. -- H.L. Mencken 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] data gathering
I like the idea of informal data gathering: http://www.randomiseme.org/ RCTs are used by scientists to find out what works best. Here, you can create a trial on anything you wish, and participate in trials set up by other people. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. -- George W. Bush 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] data gathering
Steve Smith wrote at 06/28/2013 11:56 AM: These all seem like good tools *in principle*, I wonder what it takes to make them good tools *in practice*? I suppose an easy, trite answer is, *good participation*, and maybe it really is that simple? Kind of like (presumably) democracy, the free market, and innovation. Yeah, I agree with you. I particularly enjoyed trial 156: http://randomiseme.org/trials/156 As you know, people in Britain are often anaemic. Sometimes this is due to poor diet, but most often it's due to vampires. We need people who live in the vampire infested counties of British isles (consult Wikipedia for your local prevalence) to consume garlic on a daily basis, or not. I had a similar feeling about Quora when it started. A friend of mine gave me an account before it went public and I tried interacting, asking and answering questions to my best ability. I was put off by the snarky answers and inane questions. So I killed my account. But now it seems to be somewhat interesting, though far less successful than stackoverflow, I suppose. In the end, we have the age-old aphorism: You get what you put in or you reap what you sow. I expect that if randomiseme.org were _used_ by people who know and care about the difference between good data and bad, then it would become useful. Not surprisingly, this is why I still use Google+, but avoid Facebook like the plague. And, just like the transition from the internet to the WWW, I expect I'll soon have to abandon G+ as well. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Talking about non-linear mathematics is like talking about non-elephant zoology. -- Stanislaw Ulam 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 Engineering deck on the Enterprise..
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 05/18/2013 06:16 PM: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=3category=target_area If it weren't for the people, I'd have trouble knowing which way is up. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices. - E.O. Wilson 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
Barry MacKichan wrote at 05/20/2013 10:32 AM: Don't forget Clippy, RIP (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=322885136143set=a.440610716143.233250.322883156143type=1theater) Speaking of Clippy: https://www.smore.com/clippy-js -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. -- Malcolm X 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
Steve Smith wrote at 05/16/2013 04:40 PM: What I'm talking about is the (as yet to be identified in quality?) human experience of accelerated technology. [...] The (much) softer version involves who do we become as we assimilate or become assimilated by these new technologies?. Interesting. I still think we're talking about the same thing. But I'm wrong _all_ the time. ;-) I truly believe that we have always been in the midst of what you're calling accelerated technology. It's no different now than it was 10 millenia ago or 10 millenia from now. This is where I think we disagree. You (seem to) believe that now is somehow fundamentally different from previous eras. I base my belief on my personal experience and skepticism toward competing hypotheses. It's the same argument I give for my claim that idealism is delusion, that actions speak louder than words, and that good mathematicians will be Platonic, by definition. You've heard the argument before. I don't discount the possibility of machine intelligence or even ultimately the possibility of download/upload of the human mind but it does seem highly problematic and the issues not as easily swept under as the Kurzweilian Singularians would imply. *I* am not holding *my* breath waiting. And I expect that even if it comes about, the early nanoseconds will look pretty Frankensteinianly Nightmarish by any standard and the later picoseconds will be completely unrecognizeable to mere humans such as myself. In this regard, I may be more idealistic than you. I'm convicted by the conclusion that mind can't exist without the body ... without the inextricable _embedding_, holarchically enmeshed with the environment. So, although I believe artificial/machine intelligence is likely, it won't be logically abstracted inside a purely syntactic machine. A logical consequence of my conviction is that there won't be (CAN'T be) a Frankensteinianly Nightmarish transition of any kind. The transition will be banal, experienced in the same way a person experiences growth from a zygote to a middle-aged, pear-shaped, fart machine. (How did I get here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. -- E.O. Wilson 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
Great idea!
I actually think an accurate approximation would involve an
impredicative hierarchical model. I don't think one can isolate
technology from the humans that create it.
But absent the time to put that together, I'll go with something like:
{ 1/(1+e^-(h-h_o)), h near h_o
p(h) = {
{ 1/(1+e^(h+h_f)), h h_o
where h is the population of humans and h_o is some
tech-accelerating-maximum population of humans. h_o becomes some sort
of optimal clique size. h_f is some sort of failure size larger than h_o.
Grant Holland wrote at 05/17/2013 11:51 AM:
Glen's latest retort on this thread (see below) gave me this thought: It
would be interesting if you guys could offer an (admittedly
oversimplified) analytical model of your best guesses on what the
productivity function and the acceleration function (2nd derivative of
the production function) of technology over time would be. Such a
model, though simplistic, would force some careful thinking.
For example, if you believe that the production of technology over time
(p) is linear, or p = mt, then the acceleration would be 0. If you think
p is strict exponential, or p = e**t (as Steve might), then the
acceleration would be e**t. If you think it is cyclical (periodic) (say,
p = sin(t)), then the growth rate is cyclical, e.g. p = -sin(t). (Maybe
Glen thinks something like that.) Of course, the productivity function
is actually none of these but probably some analytic series, or whatever.
Anyway, this kind of thinking could at least be subjected to past
history and be a more quantifiable conversation promoter.
Just an idea.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.
-- William Allen White
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Re: [FRIAM] Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic
Damn it Grant. Why do responses to you not go to the list by default? ;-)
Grant Holland wrote at 05/17/2013 02:41 PM:
Looks like to me that your p(h) function's sensitivity to human
population size is well-considered. If I understand your parameter
constants h_o and h_f correctly, then I believe the exponent of e in
both of your cases is a positive integer. I believe this means that your
p(h) is monotonically decreasing in both cases.
Not quite. The first one is a normal S curve. The second mode is
inverted. I don't know if I can add attachments. So, try this:
first mode:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427eolc4anlkqf
second mode:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427elo9c75852c
So, together, the bimodal function should look like a mesa.
So, the next thing is to consider the acceleration of p(h) - its second
derivative. This means that we are interested in its convexity. I
suspect that it is always convex for positive h. If so, then its
acceleration is always positive. Of course, a more analytical approach
to taking these derivatives is called for.
{ (e^(h+h_o))/(e^(h+h_o)+1)^2
d/dh = {
{ -(e^(h+h_o))/(e^(h+h_o)+1)^2
(The sign on h_o doesn't really matter, I suppose.) So, the curvature is
positive for the first mode and negative for the second. The 2nd
derivative will have the same sign as the 1st derivative, I think, which
means the convexity flips at h_o.
So, assuming that the population h is always increasing with time -
probably a reasonable case, then p(t) is also convex. This implies, if I
am correct, that your production function is always accelerating. Is
this correct?
Given the above, no. It goes through a high acceleration period near
h_o, but much less h h_o and switches to mode 2 at h h_o.
Do these considerations reflect your thinking about technology growth?
Well, as I said before, I don't think it's accurate. But I do think my
mesa function might generally capture what people like Steve
_perceive_. I actually think that technology doesn't grow any faster or
slower on any variable. But I can see how one might _think_ it does.
E.g. with Geoff West's concept of more innovation in higher densities.
On 5/17/13 2:35 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
But absent the time to put that together, I'll go with something like:
{ 1/(1+e^-(h-h_o)), h near h_o
p(h) = {
{ 1/(1+e^(h+h_f)), h h_o
where h is the population of humans and h_o is some
tech-accelerating-maximum population of humans. h_o becomes some sort
of optimal clique size. h_f is some sort of failure size larger
than h_o.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. -- E.O. Wilson
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Re: [FRIAM] Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic
Grant Holland wrote at 05/17/2013 03:28 PM: Does Steve's position also get included under the right conditions? I think so. If the first mode were sharp enough 1/(1+e^(-t*(h-h_o))), where t 1 (t for threshold), then when h is just below h_o, the perceived acceleration of tech would seem very high, only to begin slowing after we crossed h_o. For example, if Steve were kidnapped and sold into slavery in India or Indonesia, to him h h_o. But at the near optimal population density for him where he is, he sees it accelerating. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trust either of them. -- P. J. O'Rourke 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] Belief in The Singularity is Fideistic
Given our conversations on the meaning of faith and various attempts to discuss the singularity hypothesis, I thought this might be interesting. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-32560-1_19 Selmer Bringsjord, Alexander Bringsjord and Paul Bello Abstract We deploy a framework for classifying the bases for belief in a category of events marked by being at once weighty, unseen, and temporally removed (wutr, for short). While the primary source of wutr events in Occidental philos- ophy is the list of miracle claims of credal Christianity, we apply the framework to belief in The Singularity, surely—whether or not religious in nature—a wutr event. We conclude from this application, and the failure of fit with both rationalist and empiricist argument schemas in support of this belief, not that The Singularity won’t come to pass, but rather that regardless of what the future holds, believers in the ‘‘machine intelligence explosion’’ are simply fideists. While it’s true that fideists have been taken seriously in the realm of religion (e.g. Kierkegaard in the case of some quarters of Christendom), even in that domain the likes of orthodox believers like Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and Paley find fideism to be little more than wishful, irrational thinking—and at any rate it’s rather doubtful that fideists should be taken seriously in the realm of science and engineering. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. -- Everett Martin 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
Steve Smith wrote at 05/16/2013 11:53 AM: I understand that the natural myopic perspective across history has our recent events seeming more important or auspicious than perhaps the older ones, but even factoring that out, I believe there IS some significant acceleration in technological progress. Aha! In spite of your attempts to change the subject, you couldn't help but say something on topic! And I was lucky enough to catch it. ;-) The assertion is that Singularitarianism is faith-based. It is _not_ about why the followers of Singularitarianism follow the movement. One could easily make the analogy to Catholicism, where many Catholics (most that I know) don't really believe in Transubstantiation ... or even the Trinity. It doesn't matter _why_ the followers follow. What matters are the ontological claims made by the religion. In the Singularitarianism case, the claim is a logical consequence of the claim you just made: There exists significant acceleration in technological progress. Their assertion then becomes that you are stating something you do not _know_. You believe it. But you don't know it. Hence, you are relying on faith to leap the chasm between what you know and what you believe. And that's why it's fideistic. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. -- Steven Weinberg 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
Steve Smith wrote at 05/16/2013 02:45 PM: We are on (yet another) cusp... are you denying the cusp? I am denying the evidence for the cusp (though not necessarily the cusp, itself). I'm a skeptic, which means I'm interested in whatever evidence you think you have. As such, you rightly focus on the measures. What are the measures? To me, all observations are theory-laden. And that means that no matter what measures you choose, they will be biased to reflect (in some way, directly or inversely) the perspective from which they arose. Let's consider the ones you list above: o Number of patents over time. o Number of articles in tech journals over time. o Number of consumer products over time. What is a patent? Is it a reflection of novelty? Or is it a reflection of the social-legal-political structure by which (some of us) make money? (I changed new ideas or devices to articles because measuring new vs. warmed over old seems problematic, as does distinguishing an idea or device from the paper on which it's described.) Do these articles exist as a result of the ideas or devices? Or is the cause-effect actually reversed, do the ideas/devices exist because of the articles? Or, more likely, are they independent processes? I.e. there aren't more/accelerating new ideas and devices now than there were 10,000 years ago. It's just that _now_ we publish articles on our new ideas and devices, whereas before we did not. In fact, one might make the argument that _now_, tech progression has _slowed_ because documenting them in articles and IP ownership forces the inventor to scour stacks of paper instead of spending time inventing. Same arguments apply with consumer products. Is it that there are more products changing our lives? Or is it simply that any particular product is more widespread, homogenous across a larger clique, so that we _think_ there are more products when there may actually be fewer? ^^^ here ends the meat, only empty calories below ^^^ One could easily make the analogy to Catholicism, where many Catholics (most that I know) don't really believe in Transubstantiation ... or even the Trinity. But they do like the idea of forgiveness on earth and a cushy life in heaven? Or just the warm feeling of being well inside a herd? The latter. The ones I know don't care about lofty nonsense like heaven or forgiveness. They just do what they do because everyone around them does it. I've noticed a similar trend with self-identified atheists. Oh, I do understand (implicitly) the point that the authors don't believe that the Singularians *have* evidence to support their beliefs. I agree with a lot of the Singularians beliefs not just all of their conclusions. Not quite. The Bringsjord et al argument isn't so much about there being a lack of evidence. It's about the Singularity Hypothesis not being _challengable_, or at least not well challenged, especially amongst its proponents. Summon Popper and the other dead white man ghosts! The point is that the Singularians are not _rational_. They are reasoning based on justificationism, one particularly egregious form of that being faith-based reasoning. So, is it that you would claim that there IS no bogey-man (technological progress either doesn't exist or isn't in any way threatening?) or that there *might be* but his reputation is overblown, or that it doesn't matter because he exists, is part of our life, get over it? Or something else entirely? If you mean me, personally, then my answer is none of the above. I am merely skeptical. The singularity argument is so ill-formed my skeptical homunculus can jump in anywhere at any time. A good question to ask a moron like me is: What would constitute sufficient evidence to convince you? To that, my answer would be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis except the affinity felt would be with a _machine_, not what we currently regard as life forms. In the end, it would have to be some form of artificial life that piqued my empathy. If/when you can show me such a machine, my skepticism will begin to wane. The device would have to take on a life of its own in some sense that appealed to my intuition. To convince _me_ (distinct from Bringsjord et al or anyone else), that's where we should hunt for appropriate measures ... measures that demonstrated progress in lifelike machines. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. -- Everett Martin 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
Thanks for that recommendation! It's a great little book. Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/10/2013 09:17 AM: By the way, there is a truly excellent summary of Peirce's thought, called */On Peirce/* ... just a hundred pages ... and expensive for all of that ... just a pamphlet, really, but worth every penny, by Cornelis DeWaal (Wadsworth). My Peirce mentor also approves of it. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com As it is most honourable to be an onlooker without making any acquisition, so in life, the contemplation of all things and the quest to know them greatly exceed every other pursuit. -- Pythagoras 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] API alternative?
On 05/10/2013 07:04 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote: I'm seeing a rise in the use of endpoints. Eg REST, SOAP and WMS endpoints Do you mean in the sense of leaves of a graph? -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Woo Peddlers, Visionaries and Cranks!
no idea what words I could type, here, to make it less puzzling. The key to the way I think of language and the way you discuss it seems to be that I'm assuming that sentient beings (or at least humans, or at least me) build simulations *in* language and execute them *in* logic. Of course, we have the stories of folks like UberGeek Nikolai Tesla who claimed to build models of devices in his mind and then execute them in his sleep, waking later knowing the performance/flaws of his simulated devices. I believe it's true, that most (if not all) people do something akin to building and running simulations in their head. However, where we _might_ disagree is that I believe the components of those simulations are NOT software, NOT thoughts, NOT ideas, not logic. They are wet, messy, globs of neurons, astrocytes, epithelials cells, free radicals, well-bound molecules, etc. Those are the building blocks of the simulations we build and execute in our heads. What you call logic is actually wet-n-messy biology ... or dirty-nasty physics, depending on your preference. Pretending you can extract an idealized logic from it's wet-n-messy machine is pure pretense, to me ... like denying your origins or some form of self-loathing. It is from that context that I talk of science being a real, dirty-nasty, objectively true thing, independent of, in spite of, the fantasies we engage in with our thoughts. And therein lies it's success over even more fantastically imaginary things like religion or Platonic mathematics. The reason science works and the rest fails is _because_ it's dirtier, nastier, wetter, messier, than whatever we might think ... which is why the methods section is the important part of a journal article. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. -- H. L. Mencken 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] Science, Language and (re)Hashing
and decompressing a LOT is not an abstracted thinking-in-isolation skill. It's a filtering skill, determining signal from noise, what to include in the compression and what to leave out. That's the key skill, not manipulating the abstractions/compressions inside our heads. The key to being a good scientist, doing science, lies in the embedding into or out of the environment, not the thinking/manipulating abstractions in one's head. Preserving the applicability or embeddability of what's in your head is the most important part, no matter how you manipulate thing in your head. PostScript: THIS is why I shot my TV! I also stay away from Youtube except for instructional videos for tearing down, repairing (and most importantly) re-assembling my complex devices (pieces of my Digital as well as my Analog ecology (aka Swamp)). And it's precisely why I will never willingly get rid of my TV, any more than I'd get rid of my scissors ... or my books ... or my belt, shoes, pencils, hammer, etc. It amazes me when people purposefully handicap themselves by refusing to use a tool. We have lots of self-described TV murderers here in Portland. I do turn off the TV just as often as I turn it on, though ... more, actually, since Renee' tends to leave it on. All tools need on-off buttons. ;-) I also reserve the right to pray to my imaginary friends and change my mind on a regular basis. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Power never takes a back step - only in the face of more power. -- Malcolm X 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] Science, Language and (re)Hashing
+???) to this imagined thing and we use some model which we received or discovered (by conjecture, testing,etc.) in the form perhaps of a set of differential equations. With values attached to the differential equations, we manipulate said equations according to the rules of calculus and algebra (independent of the compressed out qualities of the thing) until we, for example, derive a simpler form, such as the thing's position and velocity at some time (t). When we decompress, we apply the semantics of the thing (red billiard ball bouncing and rolling down an inclined plane?) . We definitely filtered when we decided that the compression (if I'm using your term correctly) of the features of the thing we measured was useful... We took it's position, mass, velocity, etc. at time t0, fit it to a model of rigid bodies in motion in a gravitational field and *ignored* it's redness, it's human-ascribed utility as a billiard ball etc. Preserving the applicability or embeddability of what's in your head is the most important part, no matter how you manipulate thing in your head. Ok... I think that is what I just said above? Making sure that the lossiness is really just separability... holding onto the redness and the billiardballness to re-apply at decompression? No, it sounds to me like you totally slice off the semantics, store it in a separate place, then re-apply it after your pure syntax computation is finished. I'm NOT saying that. I'm claiming that this slicing off of the semantics does not happen, ever. We simply do not slice off the semantics, at all, ever. The compression preserves some vestige of every detail, _as_ we're mixing and matching things in our heads. The constructs are never really _symbols_. They are, in some strong sense, the same thing we experienced before, the same patterns that were activated when we experienced the source material. Those patterns persist _through_ the thinking, through the evolution of the brain. Some vestige of the redness and billiardballness stay with the the thought the whole time. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced. -- Frank Zappa 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] Woo Peddlers, Visionaries and Cranks!
Saul Caganoff wrote at 05/05/2013 09:58 PM: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/why-listen-to-weird-ideas3f/4666056 I like her comment that mainstream science (or did she say physics?) consists of _collective_ theory. It re-raises our question of the importance of consensus to science. I also enjoyed that she lumped Wolfram in with the cranks ... [ahem] ... outsiders. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com What luck for rulers that men do not think. -- Adolf Hitler 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] Woo Peddlers, Visionaries and Cranks!
Steve Smith wrote at 05/06/2013 02:06 PM: It is an interesting paradox to compare what things are and what things aspire to be. I do agree that Science(tm) *is* a collective/consensus model with some self-limiting features that help it to be relatively coherent. But it *aspires* to be a little more objective/universal than that (yet the methodology acknowledges the need for and therefore dependence on fallible humans). Hm. I don't think science _aspires_ to be anything. And I'm not just making a cheap rhetorical jab, either. ;-) Science isn't really a thing, at all, much less an entity that can aspire. It's an amalgam of behaviors that we cherry-pick and call science. In order to impute science with the ability to aspire, we'd have to go back to our discussion of Rosen's anticipatory systems or perhaps Kauffman's attempt to place Final Cause in our lexicon. Until we do that, science is a collection of behaviors we identify through the rearview mirror. E.g. Jim Carter (circlons) is not a scientist, whereas Lord Kelvin was. Etc. But my point was more the contrast between a collectively defined thing versus a consensus thing. And that distinction leads us back to the discussion John Kennison started about whether there can be science without language. Behaviors (like using a stick to catch ants, or learning to be afraid of snakes) can be learned without the super structure of what we call language. (I maintain that it still requires the substructure for language, namely empathy and the ability to point.) Perhaps there exist collectively defined things (like science) that don't really depend on consensus so much as a shared physiological or anatomical structure? Of course, one might argue that consensus doesn't _have_ to come about through language. Perhaps consensus isn't necessarily about thought agreement so much as it is behavior agreement. If that's the case, then one could argue that consensus and collective are synonymous. But I think that would seem strange to most people, at least until you co-learned enough, interactively behaved together enough to agree that they were the same. ;-) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The assertion that our ego consists of protein molecules seems to me one of the most ridiculous ever made. -- Kurt Gödel. 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] API alternative?
Owen Densmore wrote at 05/01/2013 08:45 PM: From twitter: Anyone have a better word/phrase for API -- Application Programming Interface? Nick, this should be great for the Village Pragmatist. I like control surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_control_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_surfaces It's still jargonal, but it does span a few domains. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com http://meat.org 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] Picture of the Internet
I think you answer your own questions, right? The reason for people's (false) expectations regarding computers like set top boxes or webcams is _because_ of your latter argument. If the goal is a clear security model, then when I install a webcam on my TV, I expect a clear security model, not sporadic hack attempts by script kiddies or anonymous internet mappers. Your advocacy of engineering is what provides the false/misplaced confidence of the average Joe. Personally, I think we should stop trying to convince average Joes that there exist white hat engineers who spend their time looking out for us. Instead, we should tell the average Joe that these devices are _fun_ and anytime you bring a fun device to a party, there will be at least one or two yahoos at the party who will use it in a way you cannot predict. Similarly, if someone else brings a device to a party, you are _obligated_ to abuse that device in some way befitting your personality. If they didn't want their device abused, they should have left it at home, preferably turned off, in their safe ... or better yet, smash it with a hammer and stop buying fun devices. Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 05/01/2013 08:39 PM: What is good or bad? If someone installs an internet webcam without a password, why would they expect internet users not to reach that webcam? If someone installs a set-top box to a cable TV coax, do they seriously not expect that their viewing habits won't be recordable? Immunity to the bad first has to determine that something can even be defined to be bad. When a person shops at a mall, do they expect to be anonymous? If so, I hope they wear dark glasses and a trench coat! Or if they go to a favorite restaurant and the waiter asks The usual? should they be alarmed?What's the general immunity here? Choosing to be conversational or aloof is personality trait, not a universal. If the waiter doesn't ask a second time, that's a choice of the waiter, presumably a function of the model they've inferred of their patron's behavior. In so far as computing environments, or operating systems, are concerned, I think the goal should be to state a clear security model and implement it correctly. I think these evolutionary layers are just a way of saying, Golly, we just don't understand what we want or how to implement it. If the goal is to have a open negotiation process between all kinds of agents over scheduling, that's a novel use case for connected devices. But I'd say most people aren't interested in facilitating computational internet terrariums (though that would be neat). That there exist botnets is just to say there exist exploitable bugs, and that users have a poor understanding of what they expect -- that there exist careless and irresponsible people. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. -- Bertrand Russell 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] Picture of the Internet
This Is the Most Detailed Picture of the Internet Ever (and Making it Was Very Illegal) http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-is-most-detailed-picture-internet-ever The resultant map isn't perfect, but it is beautiful. Based on the parameter's of the researcher's study, the map is already on its way to becoming obsolete, since it shows only devices with IPv4 addresses. (The latest standard is IPv6, but IPv4 is still pretty common.) The map is further limited to Linux-based computers with a certain amount of processing power. And finally, because of the parameters of the hack, it shows some amount of bias towards naive users who don't put passwords on their computers. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Picture of the Internet
I can't help but wonder why we don't extend the virus (or infection) metaphor all the way out. The way viruses interact with our bodies is pretty !@#@$@ complex. I don't know of any naturally occurring viruses that are (purely) beneficial. But there are many that are, in some sense, neutral. It's reasonable to think there exist beneficial viruses, analogous to probiotic gut flora. Toss that into the hat with endogenous retroviruses and a somewhat rebellious attitude I hear from some people about purposefully exposing themselves to dirty contexts and refusing to use hand sanitizers in order to keep their immune system in good shape, and you begin to see a stark difference between the metaphor as used in computer networks versus the real thing. (Sheesh, is that a run-on sentence?) I know a few radically open advocates here in Portland who refuse to secure their wifi access points/routers with passwords, allowing their neighbors and passers by to access a demilitarized zone on their network. This results in a donation of bandwidth to the public. But despite their technical efforts and skills with their internal firewalls, it still puts their network at risk. I would think we might extend the infection metaphor deeper and develop layers and sub-systems of different sorts of immunity against botnet, worm, and virus infections. But some of them, perhaps running BOINC or like this mapping botnet, could be considered healthy infections, perhaps even crowding out bad infections (e.g. Aida) like the good bacteria in our guts. On 05/01/2013 11:46 AM, Steve Smith wrote: I have read the paper (but only once through) and it appears that most if not all of the machines in question are in fact embedded computers running inside of printers, webcams, NAS devices, set-top internet devices (game consoles/Netflix boxes/etc) and even industrial control systems. I do not see anywhere where real computers are excluded, I assume that they are (mostly) self-excluded by not having a telnet port open and/or having more security than no password or admin/admin or root/root as password. I would call this more of an exploit than a hack (if the difference matters)... and the humility shown in the work and in the paper is surprising. If you read deep enough, you will discover that a side-effect of this work was to take very limited steps to lame another botnet being deployed at the same time, known as Aida. All of the resulting data is available online ~.6TB worth... I'll be interested in subsequent analysis! -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] MOOCy
You MOOCy people might be interested in this, if you haven't already seen it: Major Players in the MOOC Universe http://chronicle.com/article/Major-Players-in-the-MOOC/138817/ I found it via: https://plus.google.com/111474406259561102151/posts/97Y5hz8WtMu -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Picture of the Internet
On 05/01/2013 03:06 PM, Steve Smith wrote: You might have known her during your time at SFI? Last time I had an in-depth visit with her was maybe 2007 and I'm sure a great deal has happened since! It seemed like a lot was funded by DARPA at the time and therefore some of that wasn't being published in the open (or was being delayed?) Yeah, I talked to her a number of times while I was there. It would be interesting to find out she's continued to work on it, or if someone else took it further. In Berkeley ca 2005, if I felt sluggish (I mean my internet), I can imagine a more urban area being more problematic. I've heard that some ISPs include restrictions on wifi sharing in their terms of service agreements: http://w2.eff.org/Infrastructure/Wireless_cellular_radio/wireless_friendly_isp_list.html -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Four Color Theorem and beyond!
I agree with you about the numerological or anthropomorphic feel of this attempt to unify disparate subjects with a common pattern. But I can only speak to the bias I see in example 3. At this point, I'm sure I sound like a broken record. So, I'll merely raise the point again and leave it be unless others chime in. The discretization into 4 types (set, class, set member, class member) is violated in lots of mathematics as it's practiced, namely in impredicative definitions (sets defined by a quantification over the set being defined). This is indirectly related to the openness of practical math raised by Feferman and the demonstrations of the practical utility of formal systems that are both complete and consistent (i.e. simple enough to escape the GIT, but complex enough for engineers to use to good effect). Aczel helped to formulate this rigorously and demonstrated a foundational math where a set can be a member of itself, which means the magic number would not be 4, but 3 (or perhaps 2). So, the bias toward 4 is situational, I think. That does NOT mean the idea isn't interesting, though. On 04/27/2013 08:28 AM, Steve Smith wrote: SAS commentary I have not taken the time to follow all of Jack's references and this expose' verges on numerological argumentation, at least half of the bullet points below are convincing to me on their own merits. The position is that 4 is a certain kind of magic number in a topological sense, relevant to some fundamental things like Cartography, Language, Aboriginal Cosmology, Mathematics, Genetics, and most oblique... the Celtic Knot. Reminds me of the anthropic posit-ion that we live in 3 (perceptible) spatial dimensions because it is the lowest number of dimensions where all graphs can be embedded without edge-crossings. Can't remember the source of this - Original Message - *From:* Jack K. Horner mailto:jhor...@cybermesa.com *To:* X *Sent:* Friday, April 26, 2013 8:04 AM *Subject:* Re: The Notorious Four-Color Problem Jeremy Martin's KU mini-course (see thread below) on the Four-Color Theorem (FCT, Every planar map is four colorable, [1]) promises to be a spectacle. It's hard to overestimate the importance of the FCT, and on any dispassionate reckoning, it would have to ranked among the 100 most important theorems of mathematics. A color, in the sense of the FCT, is any nominal distinguishable property; red, green, blue, and yellow work as well as any. Given this meaning of color, the FCT, at the heart of which is the notion of four-foldness, is much more than a cartographic curiosity. To sketch a few: [...] 3. Adherents of the logicist program in mathematics ([5], esp. Chaps. II-III) hold that all of mathematics *could* be expressed in set theory (together with a logic and a raft of mere definitions).In its most rigorous form, set theory presumes a four-fold set of distinctions (is a class, is a set (a restriction of a class), is a member of a class, and is a member of a set ([9]). This view of mathematics is thus equivalent to a set-theoretic version of the FCT. [...] [5] Körner S. The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay. 1968. Dover reprint, 1986. [9] Fraenkel A and Bar-Hillel Y. Foundations of Set Theory. North Hollnad. 1958. Jack K. Horner P.O. Box 266 Los Alamos, NM 87544 Voice: 505-455-0381 Fax: 505-455-0382 email: jhor...@cybermesa.com mailto:jhor...@cybermesa.com -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Meta-discussion
Steve Smith wrote at 04/25/2013 08:08 PM: But let's see if something emerges on FOAR of merit regarding Deutsch and the Multiverse! I subscribed. But, _sheesh_, 41 e-mails since I stopped reading yesterday. And lots of acronyms and jargon. It'll take quite an investment to ramp up. Thanks for the link Russell. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Give good people the power to do good and that power eventually will be in the hands of bad people to do bad. -- Harry Browne 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
Steve Smith wrote at 04/25/2013 10:35 PM: http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/tealaser/tealaser7.htm Nice! I think I have my next dorkbot project. I had to quit going to the meetings because I was so embarrassed that I hadn't done anything in so long. And my theramin project was a complete failure. Debugging is hard. 8^) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day. -- John A. Wheeler 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] WAS: DIY science IS: WHERE DOES GLEN GET HIS EPIGRAMS
Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/26/2013 11:46 AM: I notice that glen never repeats the epigram (?) with which he concludes his messages. Where is he getting them all? See highlighting below. I have a manually assembled database of them on my server. I only have 131 quotes in there. And my cron job only runs every minute, pseudo-randomly choosing the next one. So, if I send more than 1 e-mail in a single minute, then it repeats. Or, you should sporadically see a repeat. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. -- Bertrand Russell 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] Presented for FRIAMic Consideration
Douglas Roberts wrote at 04/23/2013 10:33 AM: BEFORE THE BIG BANG, OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE... [...] Another concept is that of a cyclic universe. Derived from string theory, the hypothesis postulates that our Universe is a four-dimensional brane in a higher-dimensional space. It repetitively collides with another such brane. The collisions result in tremendous release of energy and creation of matter which we'd observe as the Big Bang. Again, it turns out that these periodic collisions of branes also must have a beginning. And to be fair, there are other cyclic models like Penrose's CCC. On CCC-predicted concentric low-variance circles in the CMB sky http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5162 -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. -- C. S. Lewis 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] DIY science
Given the other discussion of the usability or testability of some scientific theories, I thought these might be interesting links: Build A Fusion Reactor http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/ Bringing particle physics to life: build your own cloud chamber http://www.scienceinschool.org/2010/issue14/cloud Detecting Exoplanets by Gravitational Microlensing using a Small Telescope http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609599 -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Know ten things. Say nine. -- unknown 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] Tautologies and other forms of circular reasoning.
Steve Smith wrote at 04/19/2013 11:55 AM: And circling back to circular reasoning, how do we classify the Great Yogi's many circular but dead-nuts-on aphorisms like the one above? # It ain't over till it's over. http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/12128 # You wouldn't have won if we had beaten you. http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/12129 # If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it. http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/12132 # Nobody goes there anymore...it's too crowded! http://www.quoteworld.org/quotes/12136 These aren't semantically circular, they're equivocations. The beauty of these aphorisms, perhaps akin to zen and unasking the question, is that they encourage you to reevaluate your preconceptions. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. -- Bertrand Russell 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] This is truly thinking outside the box
Douglas Roberts wrote at 04/18/2013 05:36 AM: Thinking along the lines of Moore's law, extrapolating it backwards. I love stories that are told across cosmological time scales: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ We have to give credit where it's due! ;-) Roger already posted this. Roger Critchlow wrote at 04/16/2013 08:44 AM: I don't know if retrodicting an exponential growth curve back to it's origin is technically an extrapolation, but aside from that quibble this is very cute. Plot Moore's Law, it hits the origin in the 1960's when there were zero transistors on chips. A similar process works with scientific publications. Between 1990 and 1960, they doubled in number every 15 years or so. Extrapolating this backwards gives the origin of scientific publication as 1710, about the time of Isaac Newton. Now make some assumptions about the time of origin of various genetic complexities evident in the history of life on earth, and plot the growth curve for that. When was its origin? http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381 -- rec -- -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. -- Milton Friedman 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] Tautologies and other forms of circular reasoning.
I'm not a good example of the computer community. But I can suggest that the concept is related, but not identical to yours. To me, referential opacity would imply a loss of control over what happened when a reference was used (accessed or modified). It's a kind of fire and forget operation. There are various computer context where the implications of such would mean something practical. In the context of concurrency, that would imply that you don't know whether the the reference had or still has the same value it had when you accessed it and you don't know when the value will percolate out to whoever else depends on it when you modify it. In the context of object orientation, it implies encapsulation, the separation of what you see on the outside from what actually goes on inside an object. In the context of our iteration vs. recursion discussion, it implies that there are (may be) hidden states that are modified by accessing or assigning values to the reference. I'm sure there are more. Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/17/2013 10:07 AM: In my (leetle) world, referential opacity refers to ambiguities that arise in intentional utterances ... utterances of the form, Jones believes (wants, thinks, hopes, etc.) that X is the case. They are opaque in that they tell us nothing about the truth of X. So, for instance, Jones believes that there are unicorns in central park tells us neither that such a thing as a horse with a horn in its forehead exists (because Jones may confuse unicorns with squirrels) or that there are any unicorns in central park, whatever Jones may conceive them to be (because Jones may be misinformed). What does the computer community think referential opacity means. Are there statements in computer code that take the form , from the point of view of circuit A, switch S has value V. And do have later to worry that somewhere, later in the program, some other circuit, circuit B will encounter switch S and take it to have the value V? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin 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
Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/11/2013 05:57 PM: The Village Pragmatist believes that in time, perhaps an extremely long time, that scientists will converge on the right method, just as they will converge on the final opinion and that, by definition, will be the Truth. (Glen – that would be a tautology) Hm. I think I disagree slightly. Since the scientists are free to wander outside the bounds set by the convergence, it is not tautological. Granted, even if, when a scientist crossed the boundary, they lose their credibility and are called fringe or whackos, they may be capable of wandering around for awhile outside the convergence boundary, then wander back in. They may even provide negative feedback for the convergence and widen it a bit. I'm thinking of people like Thomas Gold, Lima de Faria, Roger Penrose, David Deutsch ... hell, even people like Jack Parsons. When that happens, it's not pure deduction anymore. It's induction. On Peirce’s account, knowledge is about self control … really, about the control of the environment that is impinging on us. When we do */this/*, what comes back at us? If I want */that/* to happen, what do I do? So, scientists will converge on is a particular relation between how the environment will respond when we poke it in a particular way and any conception that stands for that relation ….. like the periodic table, for instance. For universal models (like the periodic table), this works fine. And as long as the environment changes very slowly, this works fine. But in highly volatile contexts, where the environment changes slowly enough to entrench us (a few generations? hundreds of years?), does this still work? Or do we prematurely converge on a set of laws that, later, are no longer laws? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. -- Henry David Thoreau 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
Roger Critchlow wrote at 04/11/2013 03:42 PM: The issue here is that we have a variety of ways of studying human behavior each of which claims to be good science done by good scientists. One philosopher of science (Kuhn) says the study of human behavior is immature, when it's really good science it will settle on the correct method. Another philosopher of science (Longino) says maybe there isn't a single correct method, maybe there are multiple correct methods. The scientist says my method is the correct method! Fund me! The popular science journalist writes it up as a horse race or prize fight or political campaign. So, have we converged on the idea that a philosopher of science is at least analogous to an anthropologist, one who specializes in scientists? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. -- H. L. Mencken 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
On 04/09/2013 11:13 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: But if you think I ought to have a look at it, I will. In general, I am a fan of Peirce's earlier usage, that seemed to give hope that we could work out in some detail the right thinking by which fruitful conjectures are arrived at. In short, I don't think that abduction is a post-modernist crap shoot. No, I don't think you should look at The Reach of Abduction. It's a good book and it helps me understand the subject, because it's a more formal/technical treatment without all the prosaic gymnastics others use to talk about it. It argues that a form of quasi-circular thinking, recursive theory, is useful in the development of a science so long is one is scrupulous in avoiding its pitfalls.[...] So, in the right hands, this quasi circular explanation would lead to a more precise description of the properties of morphine that put people to sleep. Peter died last year, despite being many years my junior, and since I cannot be trusted, on my own, to get these things right, I attach a link to the abstract http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/id33.html Thanks. I'll take a look at that. As you know, I'm a fan of circularity, especially when it can be formalized as in Aczel's non-well-founded sets. But I'm worried that a recursive rhetoric might come a bit too close to confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, which can be consequences of the type of long term consensus you're arguing for. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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
On 04/10/2013 09:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: I have yet to integrate my thinking about convergence (preferable to consensus, I think) with the stuff about recursion, which was near-30 years ago. It was the sort of thing that I though Peter Lipton and I might do when we were old. Not sure I am man enough to do it alone. I think Peirce would say ... particularly the later Peirce ... that in recursive explanations lurks a form of right-thinking that cannot be described in the terms of formal logic I actually distrust consensus and convergence, equally, I think. This is for the same reason I think the singularity concept is suspicious. It implies a closedness that I don't believe in. The universe seems open to me, which implies that any process (including explanation) _wanders_ significantly. I will admit constraints, though. Although any process may wander, it may do so within some hard boundaries ... like a sandwiched series that forever oscillates without actually converging. Anyway, re your paper: The concept of filter explanations may end up being quite useful to me for the same reason that abduction is useful to me. For most of my career, I've tried to explain to my fellow simulants that any particular snapshot of a modeling effort is not very useful. I.e. any particular _model_ is not very useful (with an anti-authoritarian prejudice against the much-abused all models are wrong, some are useful aphorism -- I actually think that aphorism has done more damage to the proper way to use simulation than any other concept). But the whole modeling and simulation (MS) effort (trajectory or bundle of trajectories, given model forking) _is_ useful. The distinction I would draw is that I don't think of these efforts or the filter explanations you describe in the paper as recursive so much as _iterative_. Recursion, to me, implies a kind of normalized data, just like your distinguishes X's that are Y from X's that are not-Y. Iteration doesn't usually take advantage of it's more general nature. But it's still there. You can perform the same process regardless of the type of the thing to which it's applied. Recursion implies that the result of applying the process will produce something that can be processed by the process. In other words, iteration is doing it again and recursion is doing it to the result of the last time you did it, making recursion more specific. Hence, recursion targets a more closed type chain. This is important to me because my work is multi-formalism, the model produced in one iteration can be wildly different from the model produced in prior or subsequent iterations, different in generating structure and dynamics as well as phenomenal attributes. Hence I like the concept of filter explanations better than that of recursive explanations, where the filter can co-evolve with the stuff being filtered. By the way, there is a truly excellent summary of Peirce's thought, called On Peirce ... just a hundred pages ... and expensive for all of that ... just a pamphlet, really, but worth every penny, by Cornelis DeWaal (Wadsworth). My Peirce mentor also approves of it. Thanks. I've added it to my Powell's wishlist. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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
Heh. Sorry. I don't think I misunderstood you (and Lipton) at all. 8^) When I use recursion, I don't mean it in specifically a computer sense. I mean it in the more general logical or perhaps mathematical sense. Your filter explanations do fit that definition. The part 2 There is a process which distinguishes X's that are Y from X's which are not Y and selects the former on page 221 argues that this is recursion, not iteration, quite clearly. The subsequent several paragraphs and sections talk directly about how these recursive explanations exclude causes. This also directly addresses how much more specific the operands for recursion are than for the more general iteration. But I _disagree_ with the paper in the sense that I think _explanations_, at least in the hands of normal people, including evolutionists, who don't think too much about this sort of thing, do not use recursive explanation so much as iterative explanation. If you allow for multiple or evolving filters, then you escape from the more specific recursion into the more general iteration. I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me why/how you think I've misunderstood. On 04/10/2013 03:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Wow. This is one of those wonderful cases where a body doesn't know what he means until he has learned all the ways in which he can be mis understood. When Peter and I wrote that, I don't think either of us had much of a notion of recursion in the computer sense. We just meant that the explanation refers back to the question that demands it. We wanted to distinguish that sort of explanation from explanations which were fully circular i.e., those that refer ONLY to that which they explain.You know, the kind of thing you say to a three year old after the 33rd why-question. Because that's how many horns unicorns have, Dear. Now go to sleep. -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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] Cloud storage
One more plug, then I'll crawl back into my hole. SparkleShare http://sparkleshare.org/ uses Git as its storage mechanism. You can revert to previous versions of files via the normal Git tools. It also consolidates several repositories on different hosts, allowing private clouds as well as more public ones like those on Github. Gary Schiltz wrote at 04/08/2013 08:28 PM: I can't imagine doing any kind of work that evolves over time (even a few days' time) without using some kind of revision control system. I don't know how much people use git for purposes other than software, but it seems like a reasonable means of backing up and tracking revisions of any type of file. Github offers private repositories starting at $7 per month. I investigated whether any of the cloud storage providers also offer any type of revision control. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com ... it is unfortunate that enthymeme resolution is treated as a kind of presumptive meaning determination. -- Gabbay Woods in The Reach of Abduction 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] Cloud storage
Douglas Roberts wrote at 04/08/2013 11:26 AM: Just curious why you Mac guys are buying backup systems, when there is a perfectly good way to use rsync. Here's my nightly backup script, which currently sends my nightly incrementals to a cheap 3TB USB3 external drive: The cloud solves the physical problem. For example, if the house or office burns down, the extra mountable disk isn't going to help (unless you've gone to some extraordinary extents involving drilling holes in fireproof boxes or burying your extra disks in your apocalypse shelter under your house ... or perhaps on a wifi-enabled drone that continually circles above you). But that doesn't stop you from using rsync to a remote machine, which is what I used to do before I found SparkleShare. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. -- Socrates 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] good news about apple
I'm sure you Apple fans have heard this news, already. Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/ -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. -- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 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] White House Maker Hangout
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xIx3PkvskI#t=3m00s -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.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
[FRIAM] the white male effect (was Re: beyond reductionism twice)
Victoria Hughes wrote at 03/26/2013 11:27 AM: 1. The discussion also references non-European, non-white-male models for awareness, reality, conceptual modeling, etc. I found this interesting: Is the culturally polarizing effect of science literacy on climate change risk perceptions related to the white male effect? Does the answer tell us anything about the asymmetry thesis?! http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/3/28/is-the-culturally-polarizing-effect-of-science-literacy-on-c.html 2. The white male effect -- the observed tendency of white males to perceive risk to be lower -- is actually a white male hierarch effect. If you look at the blue lines, you can see they are more or less at This is consistent with prior CCP research that suggests that the effect is driven by culturally motivated reasoning: white male hierarch individualists have a cultural stake in perceiving environmental and technological risks to be low; egalitarian communitarians -- among whom there are no meaningful gender or race differences--have a stake in viewing such risks to be high. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul -- George Bernard Shaw 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 white male effect (was Re: beyond reductionism twice)
Merle Lefkoff wrote at 03/28/2013 01:51 PM: Since research is compelling that levels of testosterone in males determine willingness to take risks, I wonder if it also affects perception of risk. I would think so. But you'd also have to fold in the extent to which someone was narcissistic or individualist. To some extent any mechanism by which one focuses tightly on a small region will affect/limit the ability to track effects beyond that region. So, perhaps it's more a function of a thinner corpus callosum? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them. -- Spinoza 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] beyond reductionism twice
Steve Smith wrote at 03/25/2013 03:42 PM: I prefer Pamela's description of him being *careless* with references as opposed to my own use of the *honest*. He does cite Rosen in this paper: Towards a Post Reductionist Science: The Open Universe http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.2492 which makes the absence of a citation in the later paper even more conspicuous. It reminds me of the answer Martin Davis gave me for not mentioning Tarski in his Engines of Logic. (Great book, by the way.) I can't find the exact quote, but it was something like He wasn't part of the story I was trying to tell. But it also reminds me of one of my favorite aphorisms: Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. -- attributed to Napolean Bonaparte -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. -- Mark Twain 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] beyond reductionism twice
Russ Abbott wrote at 03/26/2013 12:01 PM: _Causation and Explanation_ looks like a good book. Strangely, its Amazon paperback price http://www.amazon.com/Causation-Explanation-Topics-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/B008SLYJ4G/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_nC?ie=UTF8colid=QIM4OPN4IQSScoliid=I1V01X94UI8MFU is only $13.52 even though its Amazon Kindle price is $28.80. (I just ordered one of the 3 copies remaining in stock.) I have no problem with the manipulatist/Baysian/experimentalist/social-studies approach to causation. It's a way to establish a connection between A and B that's stronger than correlation. (More or less: if changing A changes B, then A is a cause of B.) But that doesn't explain how A causes B. It's in that sort of how-explanation that I don't see scientific talk of causation. This one's pretty good: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference by Judea Pearl http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/174276.Causality -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action. -- Bertrand Russell 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] beyond reductionism twice
Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/25/2013 07:55 AM: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5684 Stu Kauffman on the varieties of laws and entailments. Wow, seriously? A paper on the exact same subject as Robert Rosen's big works and not a single citation of Rosen, even to call him wrong? What am I missing? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com There is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. -- Milton Friedman 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] Re: You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
Russ Abbott wrote at 03/21/2013 04:45 PM: Every once in a while I hear about a survey where it is asked who you would like to have with you in case of a major catastrophe. Overwhelmingly the answer is an engineer. I wouldn't disagree. I've always preferred to answer that question with a craftsman or artisan. In principle, there shouldn't be much difference. But in practice, I find engineers talk and argue like lawyers whereas artisans talk very little but produce quite a lot. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you. -- Proverbs 9:8 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] Semiannual Time Change
Steve Smith wrote at 03/19/2013 11:36 AM: Is this arrogance (that we assume our immediate knee-jerk intuitive irritation and response-to-it is superior to more broadly considered solutions) or is it our general self-selection (as members of the list first and ones willing to speak up second) as optimizers and problems solvers? Some would suggest that the psuedonymity or asynchronousness of network communication supports this kind of brainstorming-as-problem-solving. Perhaps it is just that, what occurs here is really just brainstorming even if it often masquerades as problem solving? I think it's more a feature of the openness of thought (and, for the realists among us, the openness of the universe). People tend to run with their own thoughts, regardless of whether the foundations of those thoughts couple nicely with reality. That sort of behavior is necessary for skills from good chess playing to sculpture, much less invention. And it also results in phenomena like groups of (usually men) who merely wait for others to quit talking so they can begin talking about something totally unrelated. To me, this ability to run forward with a set of assumptions is critical to exploring what can be said (and done). The only thing that irritates me is our self-centeredness, our facility with running forward with our own thoughts and our disability with respect to playing out _others'_ thoughts. Communities where you see lots of extended, playful, futile bitching and/or philosophy are refreshing because it indicates, to me, that the participants are willing and perhaps good at running others' thoughts/assumptions forward and seeing how it turns out. It's much more interesting than the communities where every stray thought is shut down and ridiculed the instant it shows up. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com http://meat.org 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 nature of Discussion Fora
Steve Smith wrote at 03/19/2013 01:20 PM: I am glad that you *also* appreciate the list's freewheeling style and seek more engagement in a broader sense (if I read you correctly). Maybe this discussion will help encourage a broadening in the participation... I don't think of it so much as freewheeling. I think of it more as a compulsion. Owen's persistent attempts to find a homunculus inside Google is a better example than brain farts for a better definition of time. And it goes back to what I was trying to say in the last e-mail. We (humans, actors, initiators of causal chains of events) have only a SINGLE effector available to us: twitch. We spastically twitch about because that's the only thing we can do. The resulting patterns are NOT caused by any intelligence, plan, goal, objective, belief, intention, etc. within the actor. The resulting patterns are an artifact of the collection of actors twitching about in the open universe surrounding us. It's only in hindsight ... or with an epiphenomenal or finitely limited attention span that we recognize patterns and, post-hoc, impute intelligence, plans, objectives, etc. onto some arbitrarily sliced out kernel of the pattern. Given that, I explain running forward with our own reality-disconnected systems of assumptions as life's imperative: we twitch and we just keep twitching. We just wiggle and squirm about in our own juices until some other wiggling squirming process changes the juices in some happenstance way. So, when you're quaffing pints with that guy who just won't shut up about, say, football, then you can see him for what he is: a twitch with few degrees of freedom. He must twitch and football is all he has to twitch about! -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Shallow men believe in luck ... Strong men believe in cause and effect. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson 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
On 03/16/2013 02:25 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote: Although I must point out that our two ASCII emailers will never see this... Actually, I did click on Arlo's links because I could _infer_ the contents of the web pages by the URL, something I have trouble doing with your URLs. On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Arlo Barnes arlo.bar...@gmail.comwrote: fASCIIsm - Everything2.com http://everything2.com/title/fASCIIsm versus www.textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct -Arlo James Barnes -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 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
What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists, anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who think there is, should be, or have a plan. I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can grok the world. If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon me like a heat bath. Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM: Funny. Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially, that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and that keeping current is a very awkward problem both personally and institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the argument at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving the lectures, and it's still truer now. I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to work and do something really smart. So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if you can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it for you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted. And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off to make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into. So, why is progress supposed to make sense? -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -- Bertrand Russell 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: Mozilla to release Firefox phones - San Jose Mercury News
Definitely Mozilla, since I already have experience buying from Amazon, Apple, and Google. But it would have to be an open phone. Owen Densmore wrote at 03/01/2013 08:49 PM: So if you had to buy a phone from one of the following, which would you choose? - Amazon - Apple - Google - Mozilla - Facebook/Twitter (I'm serious) Note I'm breaking the unholy trinity: no carrier specified, only OS Handset provider. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. -- Mark Twain 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
