Comment Kids these days... (Score 5, Interesting) 643
In fact I am very genuinely concerned that kids these days don't party as hard as we did. In fact it's been years since I've had to tell any to get off my lawn!
In 85 years we'll have flying cars, submersible habitats, colonies on the moon, we'll be terraforming Mars and flying around in spaceships.
Course, all that was supposed to have happened - well, now According to the "experts".
Even Ted Danson predicted that the Oceans would be dead in the 1990's (dead before 2000). https://answers.yahoo.com/ques...
Can the folks who predicted this latest disaster be held accountable?
Ted Danson the actor is an "expert"? Unless there is an actively researching and publishing climatologist or oceanographer that has the same name. We do have flying cars by the way. Technology has been there for a while. It was just the failure mode is unforgiving for a population that can't turn signals most the time. Experts tend to be right about predictable things such as technological progress and modelling of the natural world. Humanity though, not so much.
At 27km up, you're closer to ground than to the edge of space. Stop sensationalizing.
At 27km up your above 98% of the atmosphere if you go by density. It's not sensationalizing at all.
Baloney. What a stupid argument. Here is it, summarized: 1. Here is one mathematical model of a way that memories could work. 2. This method would be computable. 3. But that would mean memories degrade the more you remember them 4. But memories don't degrade the more you remember them. 5. Therefore memories are not computable.
Assignment for the student: find the flaw in this argument.
On point 3. is this not how pretty much any volatile memory in any computer biological or artificial works? Our brains are not exempt and seemingly have to re-inforce/re-write memories as accessing them probably does indeed cause them to degrade.
"Non-computable" does not mean "non-copy-able". In other words, consider the sort of consciousness associated with recognizing oneself in a mirror. Humans are not the only animals that can do that. Among those that can are quite a few other primates, dolphins, elephants, some species of birds (certain parrots), and even the octopus. So, think about that in terms of brain structure: Birds have a variant on the basic "reptilian brain", elephants and dolphins have the "mammalian brain" extension of the reptilian brain, chimps and gorillas have the "primate brain" extension of the mammalian brain, and the octopus brain is in an entirely different class altogether (the mollusk family includes clams and snails). Yet Nature found ways to give all of those types of data-processing equipment enough consciousness for self-recognition. And after you include however-many extraterrestrial intelligences there might be, all across the Universe, well, anyone who thinks "no variant of computer hardware will ever be able to do that" is just not thinking clearly.
Personally my guess is consciousness is an inevitable emergent property of any sufficiently complex information system that is highly integrated in a certain and special way. It's an advantageous property so evolution naturally selects for it. Ergo it pops up in multiple places in the evolutionary tree.
This research merely seems to be setting some bounds. You can't reduce human experience in to something convenient to compute, at least not without losing a lot of fidelity to be useful, you still need to build an equivalently complex brain.
Yes anyone thinking clearly sees it isn't ruled out computer hardware cannot achieve the same feat. It's just shortcuts have started to have been ruled out. It seems some people are interpreting this research as evidence against machine awareness, which I don't think as supportable, it stems from the faulty as assumption the human brain is somehow special and privileged with physical law that don't apply elsewhere in the universe.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
No one can predict the future.
I predict you will die eventually.
Cooking is more a test to your capability of organisation and laziness than having the time.Many meals are simple to cook, or then take your ipad or TV to the kitchen, and cook while you watch idols or Game of thrones. The problem with cooking real food is that many are lazy, and others the parents already didnt do that, and they dont really are not used to do it. The culture of buying everything already made is very pernicious when we are talking about what we eat.
Cooking itself can be a fun and rewarding task itself. I find it quite relaxing way to de-stress after a hard days work behind a glowing screen, to be able to throw stuff around a 3-dimensional space and engage senses of taste, feel and smell. I can crank out a tasty meal from fresh produce quite quickly. It's cheaper than anything out of packet, is going to extend mine and my families live and prevent debilitating disease suffering and death, and I feel pretty ace when I've nailed a new technique.
The major problem is people have become too accustomed to reward for no or little effort. Open a packet, push buttons microwave, ding ding and your done. I ponder if, partly, we over eat portion wise where the food is too accessible, simply because the reward factor of acquiring and preparing the food is missing.
Food just tastes better when you've put some effort and flare in your self. The whole process needn't be a chore at all.
(This perhaps explains why some useless cooks seem to think their own food tastes good to them, despite others not quite agreeing.)
I humbly present the solution: gamification of food.
No, highway speed limits, at least federal interstates, have speed limits for the purpose of generating revenue.
Reckless driving is a criminal offense, not something you're fined for. Speeding fines are there to provide some disincentive to doing stupid things prior to going to jail for it.
And revenue. As minor speeding isn't really much danger at all, but a lucrative cash cow authorities have become accustomed to suckling the milky teats of.
You'll find speed cameras and cops hitting motorists hard in places where people are likely to speed, and there for generate maximum revenue. But conspicuously absent at notorious deadly accident blackspots where there isn't a high volume of traffic.
If the primary goal was to save lives by slowing people down. Using first principals, where would you decide to put a speed camera?
When the Prius first got popular the same thing was said about it. Was soon proved false.
Indeed. The massive environmental impact of the battery pack was part of that criticism, but this is also where electric cars win, if one is being honest about the numbers and don't have a anti-electric car axe to grind: The NiMH battery pack of early hybrids is pretty much 100% recyclable. Li-ion and Li-po etc isn't properly 100% recycled at the moment but that's a infrastructure problem - theoretically 100% recyclable. (I would imagine some years down the track used battery packs would be quite valuable scrap). You just cannot say as much for the hydrocarbon fuel going through the tank of a regular automobile.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.