Posts by BenWilson
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I doubt decency is Banks' motivator. It's more likely to be votes. Very few cuttaxosauruses would stop voting ACT because they supported gay marriage, but quite a lot of gay people would.
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Hard News: Paying for what doesn't come…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Except of course, when one's roadtrip goes outside the coverage area.
Which also applies to FM. I don't think I've ever managed to hear BaseFM without the internet yet.
But yes, on road trips, I might have to resort to the 600 hours worth of music on my SD card. The humanity!
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Hard News: Paying for what doesn't come…, in reply to Yamis,
I sort of meant a portable device. A radio that you can cart around with you that can pick up stations and then be programmed to record them or whatever. It obviously wouldn't be cheap (at first anyway). And no, I don't mean one with a bloody tape deck in it to record on to. I mean something more sophisticated :)
Smartphones already do this. All of it. They pick up not only FM radio, but can stream internet radio, and there are apps to capture both kinds of streams. But once you're on the net on your smartphone, you will quickly see why this idea that seems brilliant is now almost anachronistic. To have to muck around pre-recording things when you can search the entire internet full of downloads and streams of stuff that's already in good nick doesn't really appeal. It's been done, but it's a small niche market.
I use mine in the car, btw, with a simple input cable. 32GB microSD card full of music etc, and the internet for everything else. My phone is worth about $400 now.
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Hard News: Paying for what doesn't come…, in reply to Yamis,
I'm pretty sure there are multiple programs available on Android that do this with internet radio stations. As Rich says, coding it wouldn't be hard at all, I would probably be able to get something functional in a week. I don't recall if they do it for all broadcasts, or just some subset with which they have arrangements, but the ones I looked at claimed to be able to do it for thousands of stations.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to tussock,
Mormons really do jump through a bunch of hoops in their life to avoid owning computers and phones so that God doesn't torture them for eternity in the afterlife like He will do to the rest of us sinners. For serious.
That's odd. I worked with a Utah based support company for 8 years recently. All Mormons, all working on computers, many from home, and all communication was via remote systems, including phones. Provo is the original base of Novell corporation, a massive employer in that city. Half of them played a lot of PlayStation. It was only when I actually asked that I found out any of them were Mormons. One of them was a rocket scientist, as in he had trained in it, and spent years designing rockets, before switching to software. I'm not sure the primitive tribal caricature fits so closely any more. I was disappointed that none of them were polygamists.
They did seem conservative, on the whole, but in a square way, rather than a religious one. Which ended up making them the most professional people I've ever dealt with. All about the business.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to andin,
And apologies to Emma I took up the challenge and derailed the thread , sorry
This digression was your fault? :-)
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
My pleasure. It's one way of looking at it, anyway, and I can't claim much originality. I do founder at attempting to even outline what the model would look like mathematically. It's hard enough to model one set of theories. To then show how we move to another set which has different predictions is a little beyond me - I think in the end a model never really makes sense in absence of people interpreting it. The basic inputs are human interpretations, and when science comes up with new theories, it very often involves changing the interpretations. To automate this might be impossible without fully automating human interpretation. Even then, the automated interpretation might simply be limited so that the new interpretation doesn't fit with it. Or the computer interpretation becomes incomprehensible to humans. I think this was what Feyerabend and Kuhn were getting at with the idea of incommensurability..
So the analogy is loose. I don't feel qualified to make any statements about what kind of pack the current sciences are, and whether that is a good thing. Presumably, as a pack nears an optimal point, the width of the hunt will drop and they'll be circling around that point looking for the next improvement that can be found. But unfortunately, this search is conducted in a dense fog, so there's no way to know that the point they're circling really is the optimal. I'd like to say that the best thing to do is to always spread out, but that presumes unlimited resources, and it's simply not as efficient if they are near the actual optimum (they might as well be all going straight at it together), so it's impossible to generalize. Unfortunately, there are also usually diminishing returns when converging on a final solution - a heuristic optimization algorithm is simply terminated at some point that is "good enough", even though further improvement can usually be squeezed out, it's not worth the time spent. But is this another failing of the analogy - is there really an end to the search for truth? Is there an upper bound at all, or could knowledge just keep growing forever? Is the "speed" of knowledge growth meaningful? I don't know.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Lilith __,
I think it's pretty hard to argue from "best-fit" pragmatic solutions to irrationality or extremism.
Yes, that was a very incomplete post I cranked out, there, having to rush to pick up kids, and not caring to lose the thought. Which is, ironically, analogous to what I'm talking about. The thought was there, cranked out, incomplete, and needs fleshing, for sure. To get there, it needs not to be subjected to too much scrutiny at this point, argued at like it's a case put forward by a doctor of science, who has staked their entire reputation on it.
I wasn't arguing from best fit to extremism, quite the opposite. The two are diametrically opposed approaches at the level of the individual. To go with average informed belief is very much the best fit, and what anyone who is terrified of looking like a fool will always do. But if you see the search for truth as a group activity, then it actually makes a lot of sense for the group to spread out. Not always, but sometimes. Then one can say the search has an epicenter, which is the state of the group, what the group has found. But actually nearly all of the actual discovery will be being done by people at the edges of the pack. Also, all of the time wasting blind alleys will be searched by them too, and the dangerous pitfalls.
That's the sense of extremism I was referring to, and the choice of which direction to strike out for the individual (considering that they could spend their entire lives on it), could be a matter of "faith" in a sense. It certainly takes courage, because it is dangerous.
Hence my point about being in two minds about extremism. One a personal level, centrism is a safe choice, rather like sticking to the middle of the herd is when there are predators around. You won't get any particularly good food to eat, but you probably won't get eaten. From an individual point of view, it's a good choice, and also the most popular choice for that reason. But from a pack point of view, there absolutely has to be a perimeter, and that is where nearly all the work of keeping the pack going comes from. The "extremists" are vital. They have to be brave because they could come a-cropper suddenly, but they also discover the new food sources.
Essentially, I'm talking about diversity. It's a powerful response to an uncertain search. Too much, and probably you don't even have a pack. Too little, and you could have an overspecialized pack, which misses out on obvious opportunities just because it doesn't even look. I don't think there's an a priori best mix, it totally depends on the environment. I'm just noting that the average, best fit position is the least contributor to the search, on the whole.
Also, my LP point was very hurried. Long time since I actually used one - from memory the search through infeasible space was actually built in to the most popular methods, because they have to be able to find an initial feasible solution in the first place. Infeasible means "a solution which won't do, because it violates the constraints". That's really what I meant in the analogy by "irrational". And there isn't any inviolable reason why the search can't spend a substantial time in infeasible space (although the most popular algorithms do go straight to the feasible space as the number one priority, and then proceed strictly inside that).
On extreme points, it's worth noting that the optimal solution is always at an extreme point in an LP. Non-linear search is similar - if you can even define the optimality, then the optimal is by definition an extreme, every other solution is equal to or worse than it.
I'm talking about search because it's deeply analogous to the search for truth, with the constraints being the impossible, the disproven (either logically or experimentally). Within those constraints, the searchable space is very large. There are an infinite number of possible ways of searching, and for any interesting problem, there is no general consensus on the best way (by definition of "interesting" :-)). There are, however, a lot of very good ways, although they almost all fall down on a pathological problem, where others will succeed.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Stewart,
Extremism is something I've been of two minds about for quite a long time. Whilst holding an unproven belief is not entirely logical, it may be the way to get to true belief - extensive forays into the irrational may be the path to the truth.
Another analogy from computer science (well OK, technically from Ops Research), is that in solving a linear program, a good approach is to first find a feasible solution, and to then work towards the optimal solution step by step from there. But it is entirely possible to work from a totally different direction, to move through the infeasible space towards the optimal solution, breaking back into feasibility only near the end. For some kinds of spaces (the space defined by an LP is not a good example, being convex), this could be a shortcut. This is analogous to a research program that has actually got some part of it's core that is strongly disputed. But so long as its still making discoveries, homing in on interesting truth, such contradiction is tolerated. The lengthy dispute over whether light is a particle or a wave is a good example of this - in the end it really doesn't matter too much, it gets treated in the way that is most useful for the problem at hand. The idea that it can't be both shouldn't really be stopping science making progress.
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Capture: Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, in reply to Emma Hart,
some person's dog had run through the front garden and broken all the daffodils
It's not just the beauty of roses that make them popular for front gardens.
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