Hey apologies for the delay in responding .. but population models are a classic example of a two phase growth pattern (again only to a simple approximation). If I put an organism in a new environment (for it to exploit) it will initially obey exponential growth kinetics and then level off due to resource depletion / death rate balance.

In economics (and this is apropo to Kurzweil) innovation seems to follow sigmoidal kinetic, see
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Age as an example.

Our joke about Kurzweil was he was someone who didn't take his "series expansion" to enough terms.. What he does is look at emergent phenomena and notice the exponential growth curve .. (which occurs in a variety of phenomena from biology to physics to even economics) .. and from that draw the conclusion that everything (or particular aspects of technology really) will continue to grow exponentially ad infinitum .. to a "singularity" etc.. This is both intuitively not true and factually not true because of resource / energetic issues (however one wants to define it for your particular problem) .. The point is you can actually look at the same phenomenon that Kurzweil claims to and notice in fact actually new phenomena/technology/etc only initially look "exponential" and then for all the obvious reasons flatten out (again really only initially (but further down the time curve than the exponential growth phase)) so your curve in the end looks really like a sigmoidal function.. (given whatever metric you choose) The hard part is to figure out how quickly you'll hit the new pseudo steady state .. but its certainly absurd to assume it never happens.. which is what the absurd conclusions he draws are always based on..

The other version of that, that made no sense was collecting all the stupid feathers in Assassin's Creed.. random feathers.. scattered around a random world .. there was no point to them and other than obsessively running around a world with duplicates of the same buildings..

I played it to gran pulse back in april and then stopped (because you can't play gran pulse while exercising since you need a mission map to know where to walk to) This weekend I picked it back up and I finished gran pulse I played to 12 (thats the level after gran pulse) and its the same old grind to level CP and then move forward (actually to be fair at chapter 11 on I couldn't be bothered upgrading weapons (because its so arbitrary) so perhaps I'm forcing grinding)

As you said you can't really do autobattle after a point..

Part of me wants to finish it just for the sake of finishing it since I've gone so far .. On the other hand it really is boring

I agree with the paradigm shifting later on .. that said there really only so many combinations buff / debuff / heal / chain / hit / sent.. so its pretty easy to keep a few combos to try and a heal (with a ravager that keeps the chain thing up)..

I guess in honestly the game reminds me of a giant gold farming mission.. all grind and random cut scenes of a plot I no dont follow (lcie /falcie / orphan whatever)

I am curious did you buy FFXIII? When I read that article FF13 was exactly what came to mind. I've "played" that game up to something like chapter 12 and quite honestly i've never seen a game before that all you literally have to do is move forward hit X a lot and sometimes hit some other keys (aka change paradigm). Even the characters don't seem to be engaging (unlike for instance 7). Further its got a weapon upgrade system that seems unmatched to its CP thing (and not even very sensible without an online guide). Its not even figuratively mindnumbingly linear, its literally linear... move forward hit X move forward hit X.. "chain events" hit X "heal" hit X "buff/debuff" hit X

  this is literally only play while "riding the elliptical" game.. (hence i've gotten up to 12)

  in contrast uncharted/2 or even GTAIV for instance I thought was fantastic in terms of story telling ..

To reply to myself using something I found someone trying this with switchgrass (experimentally)

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=240378

I can't find the article but that is the meeting abstract. It looks like switchgrass gives them 1.430 metric tons CO2 / ha per year which is apparantly about $150 / acre so $360 per ha which is more than trees apparantly!

Kudzu yields 2-4 tons "matter" / (acre.year) so say half of that is carbon may give you better numbers..

Honestly it sounds like a pretty sound idea. I am curious if there are any obvious scientific flaws here that I am missing. I hunted around a bit and noticed someone a few years ago (in the dept of atmospheric sciences at UMD college park) ran the numbers on this using trees:

The article is readable here:

http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/3/1/1

His numbers are $14 / ton CO2 (or $50 per ton carbon) with an estimate of a total of 10 gigatons carbon / year .

Given the total fossil fuel emission is right now is apparantly only 8 gigatons C / year the numbers work out pretty well.

Some of the issues on methane emission are addressed in the article .. the natural extension of this article is using something fast growing and equivalent like fast growing vines like.. kudzu which is so fast growing its a bioinvasive plant in the south .. I'm looking around to see if anyone has run the numbers of using kudzu but I bet its cheaper (including land usage) than using trees.

The argument against fructose has to do with the way the GLUT transporters are regulated. Glucose uptake into the liver is regulated by insulin mediated GLUT4 translocation and GK etc preventing too much of it from going into the liver and getting converted to FA/VLDL and so forth. Fructose can only be metabolised in the liver (unlike glucose) and its uptake into the liver is not insulin mediated as it is transported in by GLUT2.

On the other hand, you could make the argument that sucrose is at least half as bad as fructose since it has about half amount of fructose by weight but fructose is sweeter than sucrose by weight so if one uses the proper proportion it isn't that much worse..

The problem is exacerbated by american academic institutions, institutions are wholly dependent on getting major grants (or really the overhead money) and have publishing requirements for tenure track faculty. When it is as blatant as publish 25 (or similar) number of publications in 4 years, the rational thing to do is exactly this. Reproduce research / do application work to make sure that arbitrary number is cleared within the alloted time frame.

If you ever get a chance take a look at some of Baggerly's (MD Anderson / bioinformatics/stats) analysis of the number of rather embarrassing mistakes were used in developing genomic biomarkers used for a clinical trial at Duke. He has been giving talks around at stats conferences (and pharma's about this), its one of the best talks i've heard in recent years. But what it boils down to is the analysis (and input) programs used by Duke had a series of fundamental mistakes in it causes the results to be incorrect leading to an incorrect conclusions which unfortunately lead to a series of clinical trials which certainly should not have happened. After Baggerly attempted to respond negatively to the original series of articles being posted he reposted in a stats journal and basically got the clinical trial shut down. For slashdot readers, one of the rather many egregious mistakes here was the analysis program used has in its instructions the need for a header line, the input the Duke researchers used did not include a header line causing a shift in the results with regards to their input. My understanding is nature medicine refused to publish baggerlies initial correspondence with full details as it was "too negative" so he published in a stats journal which then got the critical coverage to shut everything down..

Here are some random links

Here is the original Potti genomics article:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v12/n11/abs/nm1491.html

Here is one of the baggerly nature medicine letters describing what is wrong in summarized form:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n11/full/nm1107-1276b.html

here is the halt of the trials :

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy108_of_whats-going-on-with-nih

http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/copy111_of_whats-going-on-with-nih