Re: Do you condemn Hamas?

You have referred to quantum effects in the brain many times. In as far as the brain is a chemical machine, and that chemistry is basically a manifestation of quantum mechanics, I agree. In practice, QM is just a level too deep in the abstraction stack. Somehow I believe that that is not how you see it. Would you elaborate?

Much of technology, electronics in particular, is a miracle, though not in the mystical or religious sense.

Jeroen Belleman

DNA and RNA and other things aren't flat linear molecules as the cartoons suggest. They are twisted and tangled into writhing balls. So any sequence gets continuously and randomly rubbed against the rest of the string. That's a quantum cross-correlation machine.

I like the Barrie Gilbert essay, "Where do little circuits come from?"

They are all out there in the infinite solution space, and it's hard to explore an infinite space serially.

There's nothing mystical about a universe that obviously works.

The "RNA world" hypothesis is that RNA is a very special molecule, the "killer app" that bootstrapped life.

Turns out that while the ribosome both synthesizes proteins and is made of proteins, RNA does a lot of the heavy lifting. It can synthesize proteins on its own outside of the ribosome but it's just not as good. And it can function as an enzyme, though not as good as many other enzymes. It can store information but DNA is a better solution for eukaryotic cells.

It's a jack-of-all trades from the solution space that took 500 million years to hit on but once it was hit on life was off and running.

There are lots of people who want that to be true (never mind the details) because they don't want to admit that other things might be true.

Nature has a rude habit of doing things that scientists didn't approve of.

And then the Leftists come along and decide that although it works, it works badly and they can fix it - or at least improve it somehow - simply by implementing policies which defy nature in an act of ultimate 'magical thinking'.

Hmm. I see DNA as a template for making molecular machines, enzymes and such, that do useful things for living organisms. Useful things such as transforming nutrients into suitable energy-carrying chemicals or building blocks for cell components. Pumps to move stuff into or out of cell compartments, and many other functions needed to make a living cell thrive.

DNA doesn't do much by itself. It's the molecular machines that do the work.

Hmm. When I design a circuit, I don't randomly jump through solution space. I start with something simple, then identify limitations and add or change things to address them. I may add bootstraps or cascodes to reduce the effect of parasitic capacitance. Add buffers to reduce load or output impedance effects. Add symmetry to tackle thermal or offset issues. Change or add components to tweak phase/frequency responses. Move components around to reduce parasitics, or to profit from some fortuitous beneficial one. And so on.

Basically I'll choose some promising starting point and then try to move forward through the solution space, exploring interesting branches on the way. Rarely I'll throw everything out and start over.

It's still a serial process. I can't see much of the space at once. Maybe you can. So much the better for you.

Jeroen Belleman

That's incremental design, which is necessary, but it doesn't create entirely new circuits or products.

Some big companies stick to tweaking what they know, and get crushed by upstarts in dorm rooms.

Some big companies have futurists and fellows whose job is to consider possibilities. Somebody at Boeing is thinking about what airplanes (or whatever) might look like 30 years from now. I have friends at Raytheon and ASML whose job is to do that, think far away from where they are now.

I like to imagine planting a grenade inside my brain and blowing bits all over the possible solution space, to start a zillion parallel processors. Let that soak for a while.

There are think tanks like HRL that do just that.

Most engineers are uncomfortable with uncertainty and confusion so latch onto a design concept ASAP, preferably something already sanctioned somewhere, and buckle down to implementing.

It takes some practice to be willing to be confused for a while. It helps to be a bit autistic, to not much care what other people think.

I tend to be of the opinion that actionable scientific theories of either how to get life to bootstrap from non-life in a lab environment, or how to make a machine emulate the significantly human qualities of a mind, will remain frustratingly elusive for the foreseeable future.

I'm with Dijkstra: Asking if a computer can think makes as much sense as asking whether a submarine can swim.

Jeroen Belleman

You could substitute "Liberals" for "scientists" here and it would still make perfect sense.

But nothing happens to the DNA in the process.

It would be if the DNA came out different. It doesn't.

It's not difficult, just time consuming. You work outwards from the area you have already explored - you don't, but people like Barry Gilbert and Bob Widlar did. It's what science is about, but you don't anything about that either.

Our current model of the universe depends on lots of dark matter - though we don't what it is and have never seen anything that might qualify - small black holes might fill the gap, but we haven't identified any of them either. The first LIGO result showed us two unexpectedly small black holes fusing, but not small enough to fit the dark mater profile.

And aren't supported by any evidence at all.

Science is process of studying what exists, and making sense of it. "Approving" of what they find isn't part of the process.

"Soapy Sam" Wilberforce didn't approve of Darwin's theoryu of evolution, but he was theologian rather than a scientist.

Since it didn't make sense in the first place - science isn't about "approval" but about consistency with the rest of science, Cursitor Doom is just advertising his ignorance here.

That's Cursitor Doom being an ignorant rightist. The fundamental difference between leftist and rightist is that leftists think that society can be improved, and rightists think that the risk of changing society are too great to make it a practical proposition.

When twits like Cursitor Doom claim that some left wing proposal "defies nature" all they means is that they don't understand it, and aren't prepared to learn enough about it to understand why the leftist like the idea.

"Rarely I'll throw everything out and start over". That isn't incremental design. You don't do that - or if you have you haven't talked about it. I've commented on this before.

But the comapany superstructure means that it doesn't happen often.

ASML was a spin-off from Philips, and took their human factors department with them. I applied for one job at ASML and made it to interview, but didn't seem to fit the pattern that their personnel officers expected,

What a silly idea.

Not exactly. They sell expertise, and planting a grenade inside an expert's brain would destroy that expertise. Brainstorming is a rather different sort of activity.

If you know of a solution that will work, you'd be mad not to use it. I had a good idea in 1978 that a programmable logic device to make it practical. I got my hands on one in 1993 and it ended up in

Sloman A.W., Buggs P., Molloy J., and Stewart D. “A microcontroller-based driver to stabilise the temperature of an optical stage to 1mK in the range 4C to 38C, using a Peltier heat pump and a thermistor sensor” Measurement Science and Technology, 7 1653-64 (1996)

You seem to be confused most of the time.

And some people think that you confuse tinkering with a circuit with circuit design.

Somebody thinks that a two-transistor emitter-coupled monostable is a "horrendous mess" can expect to earn that kind of reputation.

Er, no. It's about the systematic study of nature and the pursuit of Truth. We're already seeing the damage that 'consistency with the rest of science' is having on our economic life thanks to all that climate claptrap that you and others falsely claim is settled science.

It's definitely settled science. You don't know enough about the subject to form a useful opinion.

The people who broadcast the propaganda that you are echoing aren't that silly, but they are making a lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fuel, and it's worth spending some of it on cheap propaganda that is good enough to fool suckers like you and John Larkin.

Nonsense. Fortunately, the truth is emerging from under all the lies. More and more people are realising climate change is a complete and utter scam. There is no cause for concern. There is no need for 'action' of any kind. It's just a complete, stinking, pile of crap.

Jeroen, this may be of interest to you....