I'm pretty sure that the neurons that are firing at 0 Hz don't contribute to the noise-saturation delimma (unless you are using some "sufficiently large values of zero"). ;-)
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I'm reminded of the dinosaur flocking animations of Jurrassic Park. The dino herds flock about here and there, respond to events such as predator attacks, and it all looks very realistic, but the computer models there can't be what nature really uses, because they work by having some parts of the herd respond to others faster than the individual elements could really sense what the others are doing. Yet it looks realistic, and if you use the same formulae to animate model birds or sheep or such things, even trained naturalists don't see anything odd about the results. What would you call a model that produces accurate seeming results for biology, but at the cost of the biologists claiming the physicists are all wrong about faster than light transmission of information? HORRIBLE doesn't begin to describe it. Fortunately, we haven't seen a bunch of bio-informatics specialists claiming they have just disproved General Relativity - maybe there really is some humility in science.
       

Except we are seeing many cases where it is counterintuitive even to working scientists in their own fields, just which explanation is simpler.

            For example, Guth's inflationary hypothesis in Cosmology has resulted in a prediction that certain constants must be random (because otherwise, there's the implication of something we might as well call God behind the non-random values). A hypothesis that invokes God is probably not the most simple - anything that might merit the name of God is likely to be more complex than the very universe it 'explains'. Fair enough, but random values seem to imply an infinity of parallel universes, which however will never be detected by real science, only in science fiction. An infinity of untestable phenomina as the outcome of a model hardly makes that the preferred model by Occam either. Last I looked, neither one of these interpretations of the inflationary hypothesis* has been mathematically shown to be the more simple of the two. If people who have had some real impact on the specific field (i.e. Hawking), can't really agree on what they mean by simple, Occam's Razor isn't working very well.

          This has shown up in several other areas of science, for example recent math proofs by computer that are so complex there's a real chance the computer made errors during the months it was crunching numbers for the millions of steps required. Once a proof is too complex for humans to even check, how can we possibly tell whether it is more complex than another proof or not? (Counting lines of code is not a very good measure there). And while I'm hardly up on all the issues in the "universe as a giant computer" debate, I've seen arguments from some of the pros in that field that seem to show there's problem with determining which explanations are the most simple there too, and I've heard at least one working scientist in the field of sexual selection pressure complain about the same thing.

* The recent Antarctic discovery might argualbly elevate Cosmic Inflation from hypothisis to full fledged theory if it wasn't there yet. For those who think it was a theory already, these observations would seem to place it on even more solid ground, in much the same way as Crick and Watson's work helped strengthen the claim of Evolution to be a well tested and heavily supported theory. But, not being able to predict whether the initial universal constants were random or non-random is a real problem when it comes to proclaiming Cosmic Inflation has the status of a solidly tested theory, no matter how much other evidence scientists gather.

Everybody on this site should know it takes a full pound of antimatter just to destroy a sweet smelling, funny looking cloud of fog with sparkley bits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Actually, they don't have to explain it, because science doesn't require everything have a time or point of origin or first cause, only things that proceed through time from a beginning to an end. It was a perfectly good scientific theory that the universe itself was Steady State. It had no beginning, just limitless forming of new stars as old ones died off, for eternity. Steady State didn't lose out in scientific circles because it was considered basically illogical or unscientific, but because evidece accumulated pointing to a moment of origin, the Big Bang. Science allowed for things which didn't need an origin or a cuae for that origin just fine. Ergo, an uncaused and eternal God is only unscientific if you believe that it's fundamental to science that all explanations be natural, but said God is not knocked out as a hypothesis just because it is causeless.
      You're offering an argument Carl Sagan made in the book version of Cosmos. It only works as seemingly logical because he treats something as a rhetorical question, even though he gave a factual answer to that question 20 pages earlier, and that's the real reason why it's not a good argument. Science didn't get to throw out the Steady State because it violated a fundamental rule of science itself, it had to amass evidence, and that's why science is worth admiring. That puts the ball in the Atheists court - It may be up to the religious to offere evidence for God, but it's also up to any person using science to support their position, to consider all hypothisi they know of that might contradict the one they favor, and not exclude them a priori. I don't have any particular evidence for God as a scientific hypothesis. If you have active evidence for Non-God as a hypothesis, go for it, but you should stop trying to take the shortcut of throwing the idea out before actually allowing weighing the evidence. That shortcut is an a priori assumption, it's not one that is standard to the scientific method, and using it means you just turned science into a religion. .

Yes, many people don't see these distinctions. But it's quite worthwhile to understand things anyway.
it's actually a Defense of Darwin's ideas to avoid thinking he wrote "The Origin of THE Species" or something like that. He was out to explain, in modern terms, why we see life organized into somewhat fuzzy sets that change with time, and personally, I think the man did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, I'd estimate that 60 - 70% of the people who thinkthey believe in Evolution either think Evolution proceeds towards abstract perfection, or that it explains the origin of life question. Slashdot is a lousy place to debate religion, because so many people have a religiously fanatical attachment to one or both of these bad translations of Evolutionary theory, and don't know the facts of the matter are the chief thing that disagrees with them, not the people they are criticising.

Literalists that are metaphorically speaking...
I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

The first amendment guarantees that my speech (c)an never (legally) be restricted, constrained, repressed, silenced, censored, etc. by the government. Never.
Slander someone? Libel them? Threaten immediate bodily harm? Extort? Divulge information during a trial despite court order? Reveal medical or financial information you become privy to in an official capacity? Speak against the authority of a judge or other court official in proceedings? Display contempt for said judge in open court? Swear at or otherwise intimidate a person being constrained to remain on the spot by law enforcement? ,Just interrupt or speak over the speech of a person being questioned by law enforcement at the time? Verbally challenge the policeman him or herself during his or her otherwise legitimate excercise of police powers? Give verbal aid or comfort to an enemy nation during time of war

Oh yeah, the First Amendment supports your right to do any or all of those, and a pig buzzed me at Mach 3 yesterday.
Hint - there is one social contract - the law.
Hint 2 - you obviously know nothing about that.

Right now, as the very end of the tax season looms, I have exactly 20 clients scheduled who I know are engineers. 10 of them are my usual clients, and 10 of them did their own taxes last year and assumed that they were smart enough to figure it out, and got an IRS letter for their trouble. I've already heard three rants about the stupid, stupid government designing forms that the smart engineer can't use, and have two clients who are swearing they will go to prison for life rather than yield an inch on their interpretation of the regulations. One of those last has the soon to be ex wife's lawyers to deal with over what he tried to do last year and they already have a court order restricting his filing times and methods so they can get copies in time to file their own cleint on time. He's actually argued with an IRS agent on the phone, telling him that being required to divulge to his wife whether he has taken itemized deductions or not is unconstitutional and he has half a mind to punch the agent in the snoot, and because of that, I have already gotten a formal letter requesting I disclose any information I have indicating if he poses an actual threat before he goes in for an in person hearing. This guy is the first to brag about how much smarter he is than these dummies who make up most of my customers, and of course, the IRS.
          I get these persons referred to me because they usually ask something along the lines of whether anybody at the firm has a science or engineering degree or experience. I usually work corporate, and only take a few individual clients a year outside my old regulars. This has been an unfortunate year where I've wasted many of the spare slots on people I don't partcularly want as regular customers.We will be refusing service in the future to some of these people before this is over (and the firm's only actual lawyer partner is strongly recommending we should refuse service to a certain one this year despite what will obviously be a lawsuit if he stays out of prison long enough to file it - we are not real big about one of our phone numbers being used to make a threating call).
          When you say "one of the huge problemss...", I don't think it's hyperbole. . .

What surprises some people is that 60 minutes has the same dedication to facts and accurate reporting as the Dukes of Hazzard. I've stopped being surprised by that.

In a tight economy, side cameras will only sell if they are a. manditory on all new models, or. b. not marked up at the same exorbitant rate as side mirrors. If the industry cintents itself with a replacement price that's not much more than for conventional mirrors, this could work, but what I expect is a scenario more like this.

1. Car companies decide that the lower profile possible means fewer side viewers will be hit in accidents, so they will see fewer replacements.
2. Since they won't see as much sales volume, the individual markup 'obviously needs' to be higher.
3. SUV makers, disappointed by low sales due to high gas costs, wiill lobby congress to except SUVs from the camera requirement (since they are sort of trucks - trucks need more mirrors and bigger ones, and you can't replace a bigger mirror with a little ole' camera, blah blah....).
4. The SUV exclusion will make initial purchase price look better to all those buyers who don't consider total cost of ownership.
5. Thus resulting in more fossil fuel consumption, AGW, and so on as America gets yet another reason not to adopt a superior technology.

Okay, maybe this is more in the "confuse future archaeologists" category....
They'll just put it down to religion. When an Archaeologist doesn't know what something's for, the answer's always relgion.

Even most people who treat money as their number one priority day to day would doubtless change if they recognized a threat to their physical existance. Einstein didn't particularly make a big deal out of money. That's actually on the record, as there are accounts of just how little he asked for a salary when he hired on at Princton. But, his day to day priorities definitely included support for doing physics, and hot babes. I'm pretty sure from the things he said about where he feared German antisemitism was leading, that he was willing to put both those things aside for the duration of getting out of Germany.

In the 1970's there was a book called "Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television", or something like that. One of the arguments was the limited image quality of the 512 line scan made even very poorly faked emotions very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and so children who got their learning examples of human expressions from TV would have a hard time telling who was really feeling emotions or just faking them. The author also claimed that emotions such as Rage, Fear, and Strong Suffering would come through better than subtler emotions such as Boredom, Fondness or Compassion, so TV scripts would come to emphasize those emotions which at least somewhat worked and ignore the rest. Perhaps there's something to these ideas.

While you are at it, what happens if they test specifially with medical personnel who have been told they need to spot people faking pain to get their opiate fix,and avoid at all costs encouraging their addiction?