So your response after making an outlandish claim is basically to tell me to buy a book?

If you don't have a library card, I can help you fill out the form.

Here is an idea, lets use Military to kill people and break things

Definitely. It's a critical part of our Judeo-Christian heritage to kill people and break things.

We don't have to worry about the Air Force making plans for global warming, because they're all convinced Jesus will come back and save us before that happens.

http://blogs.courant.com/susan...

Yes, I'm from the UK, not the US

I wasn't talking about civilized countries, I was talking about the US.

I gave the reference elsewhere in this discussion.

Searching and indexing information isn't a computer problem. We can already find information in massive databases--MongoDB and PostgreSQL handle that well.

It's tagging information that's difficult. Contextual full-text searches often fail to find relevant context. Google does an okay job until you're looking for something specific. General information like melting arctic ice sheets or the spread of Ebola find something relevant; but try finding the particular documents covering the timeline Wikipedia gave for Thomas Duncan's infection, and each of the things the nurse said. You'll find all kinds of shit repeated in the media, but not how they originated. Some of the things in there are notoriously hard to find at all.

I've thought about how to structure a Project Management Information System for searching and retrieving important data. Work performance information, lessons learned, projects related to a topic themselves. This steps beyond multi-criteria search to multi-dimensional search: I want to find all Lessons Learned about building bridges; I want to find all Programming projects which implemented MongoDB and pull all Work Performance Information and Lessons Learned about Schema Development; etc. I need to know about specific things, but only in specific contexts.

For this to work well, people need to tag and describe the project properly. The Project Overview must carry ample wording for full-text search; but should also be tagged for explicit keywords, such that I can eschew full-text search and say "find these keywords". It would help if project managers marked projects as similar to other projects, and tagged those similarities (why is it similar?). A human can highlight what particular attributes are strongly relevant, rather than allowing the computer to notice what's related.

With so much information, searching requires this human action to improve the results. It may also be enhanced by individualized human action: what humans produce what tags and relationship? What humans do you feel provide useful tagging and relationships? What particular relationships do *you* find important? What relationships do you want to add yourself? This will allow an individual human to tailor the search to his own experiences and needs.

On top of that, such things require memory: a human must remember certain things to know what to search for. I remember working on a project where... ...and so this becomes relevant to this search, and let me find similar things.

Computer searching is a crude form of human memory: human memory is associative, and computer searching is keyword-driven. Humans need to use their own memories, to tell the computer how they see things, and then to tell the computer how they think about what they want to know--what it's related to, what it's similar to, who they think knows best about it--and have the computer use all that information to retrieve a data set. To do that, humans must manually remember in the computer and in their brains.

The holy grail of searching is a strong AI that takes an abstract question, considers what you mean by its experience with you and its database of every other experience, pulls up everything relevant, decides what you would want to see, and discards the rest. Such a machine is largely doing your job: it's thinking for you, deciding what you'll remember, and making your decisions by occluding information which would affect your decisions. Anything less is a tool, and faulty, and requires your expertise to leverage properly.

I mean I can understand feeling violated about having sexual pictures of you shared with the world. Many people are very private and shy in their sexuality. That's fine, nothing wrong with that.

However that rather runs counter to having a very sultry picture on the cover of a popular magazine with international distribution. You can't really claim that you feel violated by people looking at sexy pictured of you if you then choose to distribute the same voluntarily.

Actually, a jeep would produce soil (sand) compaction and more destruction of habitat. Its high-torque tires would roll in a straight line, rather than stepping, increasing the likelihood of injury and death of small desert animals. Largely, rolling vehicles over non-developed land kills a whole bunch of animals in the process.

Edward Elrich would agree with you there.

It would not be awesome; it would be sacrilege!

This thing converts nickel into copper. Copper! Nickel is itself rare, and incredibly useful. Steel, the all-powerful metal used for everything which requires strength, the metal used for swords and shields and war machines, the metal used to stand up buildings and build great engines. Nickel, mixed with iron, strengthens steel: most strong steels and superalloys involve a not-insignificant quantity of nickel, between 0.2% and 8%.

If anything, we need more nickel, vanadium, and molybdenum! We already produce molybdenum by fusion reaction, though.

It doesn't make scientific sense because fusing nickel into copper would be easy for me to comment on if I had bothered to put the periodic table in my mind palace.

Nickel is heavier than Iron; fusing it requires input energy. Nuclear binding energy is highest at iron: fusing heavier elements takes energy, and fusing lighter elements releases energy. There is more energy in Copper's nuclear bindings than Nickel's; there's more energy in Carbon's nuclear bindings than Nitrogen's. Fusing Carbon to create Nitrogen would release energy; fusing Nickel to create Copper would consume energy.

It is, but that's not the point. The Internet is an additional vector, and one in which the perception of anonymity is largely available as a starting point. Children like anonymity: they don't want their teachers telling their parents about stuff.

Interaction with a teacher means the child has a direct, plausible link to the teacher, and everyone knows who the teacher is in relation to the child. Interaction with a stranger means the child doesn't expect the stranger to regularly talk to his parents (although may worry about the stranger coming to FIND his parents), and the stranger doesn't expect anyone to know who the hell he is if the child tattles (he may even be out of his local area, and picking up a target while 100 miles from home, thus the man-hunt will likely fail). People are too dull-minded to realize the child on the other end is not actually a child, but Chris Hansen, so rational arguments here are unimportant: sometimes it works, and often people are idiots.

And, still, the heavy crackdown creates all kinds of problems where a young adult (not a child) of high school age may wind up indicted and arrested for doing things teenagers do, like showing their dicks to other teenagers. E-mail your penis to a 14-year-old once, and involve the cops--you'll get arrested. The big secret is you'll get arrested EVEN IF YOU'RE 15. In some states, two 17-year-olds having sex would both be arrested and charged with rape (yes, they both raped each other). Imagine what this does.

The law at least needs reasonable exemptions. I'm a fan of age-exemptions and good faith: If you're 19, and you have a 17-year-old girlfriend or acquaintance or whatever, that's close enough. If you bone her and 18 is legal, well, look, you're like... either pre-existing romantic-sexual relationship, consideration of pre-existing non-sexual relationship (yeah, you've known this girl since you were 14, and now you've started to bone? Look, I can let that slide), or narrow gap (she's only 2 years younger than you--of course you can bone her). If she sends you pics of her boobs... you should probably delete them; but I would suggest jurisprudence provide leniency for a barely-out-of-high-school kid who has a collection of boob picks high school girls sent him, and hasn't shared them: this isn't a child pornography distribution ring, and you should probably just order the images destroyed and tell everyone to stop being idiots before they wind up on the sex offender registry.

We treat this kind of shit like we've just stumbled over 40-year-old teachers boning 7th grade girls and distributing MPEGs and live streaming video all over Vietnam and Canada. It's stupid that sexting a girl you share a class with can get you tried as an adult and branded a sex offender for life. Unless you're her teacher, of course; then you get the hammer, because lol u dum.

You're comparing failure rate (in mice, not rats) to data gathering.

If we have a drug that appears, statistically, to affect humans, and it also affects rats, we can use that drug on rats and then vivisect them to examine their mechanism of action. Do you know the last time we vivisected a human for medical science? I'll give you a hint: the human was a Jew.

The most important benchmark is this: if a thing gives advantage X with a great deal of knowledge, skill, care, or some combination; and advantage X is not significantly better than some other implementation which solves the same problem but isn't as easily screwed up and, thus, produces better results with less knowledge, skill, and care; then the other implementation is better, and will produce as-good or better results more often.

Basically, advantage of consistent suitability versus advantage of a powerful tool requiring an exquisitely trained and rigorously practiced specialist. Of course, we take this to an unfortunate extreme in our society, making things wholly unsuitable for all but the most narrow and inadequate cases, but usable by idiots with zero knowledge or understanding. The goal is for your simpler tool to produce the same value with almost exactly the same efficiency (if not better) when similarly skilled as to be able to use the more complex tool, not to cut away features and call it "better" because there are fewer things to do and, thus, fewer ways to fuck up.

As I said, the story is recounted in detail, and with references, in Steve Volk's book Fringeology.

The story is recounted in detail in Steve Volk's book Fringeology. With references.