Horowitz-Hill: Serious scholarly query

Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

ROFLOL (:>) That explains religions!

You can often find the most commonly used part by looking at the prices in the Digikey catalog. If they sell a lot of something, they keep the price low.

You take on the Herculean efforts to help create it, setting aside all that may be important in life to do some tiny good, and it hounds you until the day you die.

Might as well accept it, Win. You will be in your death bed with a newfangled brain attachment to a PC, updating "the darned book," yet again. I'd recommend you get the connectors installed now while you can still heal up better, and start helping some software folks develop the programs you'll be needing then.

;)

I want to be looking forward to the 4th edition, you know. :)

Jon

Well, as long as some people are airing complaints, I might as well chime in with a compliment. AoE was the first electronics book I ever read, and it is one of the things which inspired me to study electrical engineering in the first place. I don't think that a standard textbook could have inspired me this way. So, three cheers for AoE.

Also, I found that much of the material in AoE helped me tremendously when I started studying electrical engineering in a more rigorous fashion in school.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate the complaints others have about it. It may just be that the book is aimed, at least partly, at the novice. Certainly, it tries to give a qualitative feel for much of its subject matter, rather than a quantitative feel.

The circuit ideas and so on can be interesting and helpful, even for professional engineers. Although, obviously, the book is not aimed at teaching people how to design IC's, and is probably not much use to IC designers.

Just my $0.02.

--Mac

Just so I can claim to be the very first to say so...

The third edition sucks! The second edition was WAY better! I liked the black-on-white type better than the new maroon on fuschia color scheme, I hate the fact that the component values are all in octal, and I don't care how fond Winfield is of the Klingon language; he should have stuck with English.

Remember, you heard it here first.

It is, as is conservation of energy.

Yes. Experimentally:

1) Does the brain consist of traits that are subject to randam processes? 2) Is brain stucture copied to offspring? 3) Is brain structure selected by the enviorment.

All have been varified. The human race has babies!!!

*Anything* that satisfies the Dawinain axioms is subject to Dawinian evolution.

For referance

:

1 Traits of Replicators are randomly generated. 2 Traits of Replicators are inherited by "children" from "parents". 3 Traits of Replicators are selected by the environment.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

I disagree. Sure, in a strict sense the concept of absolute self-replication is difficult to justify, but to try and eliminate the distinction is not very useful in practise.

No. There is no realistic way that this can be argued. e.g.

1 Put DNA in a culture dish. Can it replicate itself or its genes?

2 Put a phrase in a dish. Can it replicate itself?

3 Put a gene in culture dish. Can it replicate itself?

Only 1 will replicate.

Yes.

There is not a complete entity called a gene or meme that can rationally be considered to self replicate. On has to distinguish between a Replicator and a Replicant. e.g

Without making the distinction, its difficult to actually do any numbers. e.g. A computer printer is a Replicator, and what it prints are Replicants. Of course a printer is also a Replicant, as it is usually one of many made by another Replicator.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Is it? Well then it should rather be within inverted commas! Buck up, Kev. ;-)

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

That's what I was wondering, too... :-|

--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

It's all a question of measure. Virii, genes and memes all self-replicate, and all need a certain physical environment in order to replicate. They only differ in the constitution of that environment.

"Well, we assume that mass-energy is conserved"

If you don't know enough physics to understand the universal acceptance by *all* of us scientists, of conservation of energy, you would be better off continuing to play with your dolls.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

If paved roads occurred naturally, there would be.

John

And a Merry Christmas to you, too!

John

That depends on your definition of axiom. The common ground appears to be "self-evidence". Otherwise known as: a circular argument. It ain't science. OK, you win that one.

That's an awful lot of text to describe something "self evident". So, is this what Darwin wrote? Or something new?

It's the scope of (1) that's the problem here.

Like a project gone bad, the timeline keeps going out. First it was millions, now billions of years. The whole thing's circular and you've an awful lot of missing links to find before it becomes linear.

You're describing selection, not evolution.

Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

Season's Greetings, Mike.

So I _can_ say Darwinism's "just an assumption" ? How reassuring. If the difference between a scientific law and a scientific theory is the burden of proof then I think Darwinism will always remain a matter of faith. Given the proposed timescales involved, positive proof would seem a virtual improbability, making it no more than a prophesy.

Season's Greetings, Mike.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Mike Page wrote (in ) about 'Horowitz-Hill: Serious scholarly query', on Sat, 25 Dec 2004:

No, any more than you can say that plane (geometry is 'just an assumption' because Euclid based it on five 'postulates' of axioms.

You don't need dinosaurs or humans to study evolution in action. It can easily be demonstrated in bacterial colonies and, for the slightly more patient, in fruit flies.

Water the south 40 with a 5% salt solution and you'll kill most of the vegetation. Do it for 10 years and you will get thriving colonies of salt-tolerant variants of the original plants. Note 'variants', not mutants; a mutation may not be necessary for survival by evolution, just a rearrangement of the activities of unchanged genes (which is how Lamarckian evolution *might* work).

Darwinian evolution **works**. Unresolved questions are whether it is the only type of evolution on Earth (or the only possible type anywhere) and how it worked in specific detailed cases. Or didn't work, e.g. why there are no animals with wheels.

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. 
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.
The bad news is that everything is prohibited.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk

Your are allowing yourself to be confused by those with an agenda.

"Physical Science" does not address Religious Beliefs!

Those fields are mutually exclusive!

Science does not deal with metaphysical events!

So is a 'Theory' just a 'Guess?'

No; a scientific theory is formed after observing natural phenomena or laboratory experiments applicable to the subject. A Postulate statement is formulated and published for a community of scientists to review. After review and discussion it's adopted as a valid Theory to describe Data observed. A theory is subjected to continual testing to find a flaw or inadequacy, the essence of scientific method.

Then if a theory is wrong, it simply vanishes?

If a theory lacks accuracy, or new data is found to place the theory in doubt, the process starts over, a new theory replaces the old. This has not happened in evolution, Unchanged since accepted.

Faith or 'Belief' has nothing to do with Science and the physical world.

The 'Theory of Evolution' is simply the best explanation we have at this time!

To date The "Theory of Evolution" has not been proven to be flawed in anyway.

Whiptail Lizards do form themselves into a "wheel" to race down hill to escape predators. But I have no Idea how many MPG they get!