Comment Re:3D printers? (Score 1) 28
Umm,,, He said "3D" printer. These don't use card stock
"The pre-printed cardboard probably fits only one phone type"
- not necessarily. As far as I could tell it handles a range of sizes, though the info was less than clear about that.
"the response on most phones is not good enough to do head tracking very well"
- ah - but it does! It has a novel and innovative strapless design that forces you to hold this thing up to your head with booth hands. Then you cannot move your head around quickly, because you are now limited to trunk movements.
No matter what they do, they won't do anything that will save us anyhow. Our generation will be Ok, but the upcoming generations will have a challenge. Coastal areas as they are now will be uninhabitable, and a lot of people will suffer from a wide variety of things like droughts and inundations and cold or hot. A lot of people will suffer, because we won't do anything to change the situation, but they will get over it eventually. One door closes and another door opens. Places that are considered too cold today will have a moderate climate tomorrow. However, the world's standard of living may drop in the process. This in itself will reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, San Francisco will get the Big One one day not too long from now, and Mount Pinatubo will become a super volcano and cover a third of the USA with magma. Nothing much we can do about that, but USA was headed down hill anyhow.
You were right. I found the reference, but I don't understand why you were modded down to oblivion. Perhaps it was Bing shills, who objected to your use of the "Google is your friend" meme.
Also in my search, I found this reference to a video that went viral in China poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and I found it entertaining: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
I read the entire paper, thinking OMG, how much effort they went to building those toys! There is no way that would produce useful results, especially in just 10 generations. The model is simply too crude, and 10 generations is absurdly brief to expect useful results with this set up.
I have spent years playing with genetic algorithms, and I have learned a great deal from them. You can never underestimate the effects of chance, and I found it takes thousands of generations to continuously break out of local maxima and move forward to achieve some substantial and interesting result.
For example, for a long time I was obsessed with breading some "super being". I would run some population over tens of thousands of generations until one of my organsims achieved the highest score ever seen, and imagine I had achieved my dream of a super hero. Then later, the colony would start "de-evolving" (they always do, in the end), I would drop that organism back into the game with the same genes that scored so high, and find that its performance now was just mediocre. The problem is, that it seems half the time I am breeding for Luck, and that turns out not to be an inheritable trait
Let me clarify that a bit: My experiments always involved organisms that wander around my computer screen looking for bits of food. There may be predators in some experiments, but mostly not because predators add so much turbulence. The organisms are in competition with each other, and those who score best go on to bread the next generation. I always employed small populations of 20 to 60 organisms, and a great variety of schemes in the design of their world and for dropping food into their world. During any given generation, some will score highly, and some will score poorly. Turns out, quite often this is just as much due to chance as it is to skill, and evolution goes sideways. Certainly over time I have had many "successes", however you might describe that, where organisms have developed certain traits exactly as you would expect or even exceeding expectation. However, in none of my experiments did I ever expect or observe some result in just 10 generations.
I would suggest that an experiment in software could be developed that would shed more light on the evolution of vertebrate then your toys could ever show, and I suggest that it doesn't have to have a complex physics engine that takes many months to develop. Compared to how crude you little toy fish were, I would bet I could develop a useful simulation in a matter of days. It doesn't have to model the physics of water. In fact, the effectiveness of different numbers of vertebrae in your model could be measured empirically and the resulting data transferred to the program, etc... The feeding and prey avoidance can be far more simply and effectively modeled in software. In short, I just don't think building little toy fish is at all practical to answer the questions about evolution that you pose. However, it seems you have been well taught and have conducted very good work that will serve you well when you go on to research something more practical.
If you are interested here is one of my neural network simulations that evolves via a genetic algorithm. They develop social behaviour - specifically, they learn to take turns: http://www.tropicalcoder.com/N...
Experiments like this make me believe that "survival of the fittest" is an overly simplistic statement about the mechanisms of natural selection, and that you cannot isolate the individual from the group. More and more, I forget about my original dreams of creating super beings and think about evolution at the level of the species, rather than the individual.
I think I can defeat my own speculation even better...
What I was first thinking when all this began, was this: Imagine launching a space ship made of "unobtainium" from Earth towards our sun, such that it is intended to come so close it almost grazes the sun's corona. Then it will build up tremendous velocity during its journey and shoot off at an astonishing speed as it rounds the sun.
However, imagining that same space ship as it approaches a rogue star travelling at relativistic velocity does not mean my space ship will accelerate to relativistic velocity as it approaches the star, because I was missing a key ingredient - Time. Acceleration due to gravity involves a constant times T squared, ie: totally depends on how long a body is subjected to the influence of gravity. As my ship approaches that rogue start, the star has passed by in the blink of an eye, and my ship will have, in the end, experienced acceleration due to the star's gravity for only a brief moment - not long enough result in any appreciable acceleration.
As to my second conjecture, there is no doubt that the collision of two stars traveling at tremendous speeds would easily result at least in the formation of a Black Hole, but beyond that, and depending on their mass, who knows what else?
As far as capture goes, I think it depends how close to the star you come. Remember, a start has a massive gravity, independent of its speed. Its mass is also increased in some proportion to its velocity. Not sure how much that would contribute to its gravity.
"Two stars moving 0.3c in opposite directions relative to us are going to collide at about 0.6C. Again, we're not getting major relativistic effects" The products of the collision do not depend on "relativistic effects", rather, they depend on temperate/energy produced by the collision. I am sure that temperature would be high enough to produce many exotic particles.
In short, it wouldn't dismiss either of my conjectures, except to say my stated results of a collision are fanciful, but it think it would be far more dramatic than a normal collision. Think of all the energy that would be released!.
My own research... A Neural Network Exhibits Social Behaviour
Seems Intel was involved with it...
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