the hot new programming language

Jul 01, 2015 196 Replies

Quantum mechanics is new age handwaving? I suppose it is, being formalized less than 100 years ago.

You define yourself by the things you declare to be impossible. The history of science is punctuated by amazing, shocking discoveries, which often have to wait for acceptance until the existing scientific establishment dies off.

That's admirable, but it is experimental tinkering with the mechanism.

You have a differential equation that explains visual memory? Show us!

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

The legal liabilities alone would end it. Kill a few pedestrians and see what happens.

That is probably why google wants self-driving cars, so people can be online 100% of their waking hours. Everybody will have their own version of the Google Bus.

I designed a color graphics generator board for the PDP-11 in the early 70's, for pipeline control systems. As soon as the hardware worked, I coded Life in assembly. Fun, but it's still just a machine.

Wrong. All I suggested is that neurons are not simple logic gates and may use quantum computing techniques internally. The conjecture is not unreasonable and, if it can work to advantage, would be naturally selected. It's interesting what hostility that suggestion invokes.

OK, post some. Show how a bunch of pulses in a nerve bundle convey sound and sight and sensation. Cover consciousness while you're at it.

DNA is a molecule. Enzymes are molecules. That's what we are made of, molecules.

There is no cellular aura

Orthodoxy which explains nothing is large in the history of science.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

You're wrong - cochlear implants _do_ drive the auditory nerve. The most common maladies that lead to these implants involve a loss of the inner hair cells, which ordinarily transduce the vibration at the basilar membrane into vesicular releases which trigger the auditory nerve. It is these hair cells that are so commonly damaged by drugs, loud sounds, certain diseases, and other physiological insults.

No, we don't _completely_ understand the coding of sound OR light in the auditory or optic nerves. Some researchers have only recently discovered some new cell types in the retina (which is turning out to be more complex than most of us thought). We have learned a lot, enough to have useful cochlear prostheses, and perhaps soon a vestibular prosthetic device (i.e. for balance e.g. for Meniere's patients) :)

It's a mixture. There's greater understanding of how and where a variety of visual features are handled - color, shape, continuity of visual forms, movement, and many other features. It's not a complete understanding, but it's exciting and new things are being discovered all the time!

There are a variety of coding strategies used in peripheral nerves. Since we don't have an absolutely complete understanding of the whole system, we can't assume we completely understand the encoding.

[snip]

In the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer drives the sensory nerves. Sticking electrodes into the cochlea requires no understanding of how hearing works; it's just fiddling.

The

I sure agree with that statement.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Just because

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

QM is magical thinking? Actually, it is, but that's the way this universe works.

Maybe you don't have consciousness or free will, but I do.

I haven't read Penrose's book, but now I'll have to. Sounds like good stuff.

Now THAT is new-age fuzzthink. If everything affects everything, scientific causality and high-end DVMs don't exist.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

You'd be half way down the M1 and the dash would display "Google has decided to discontinue Google Bus. Have a nice day! "[1]

[1] One of the things that makes me dubious about Google is what Google giveth, Google taketh away. Frequently.

San Francisco is now maybe the most expensive city in the world to live in. One reason is Google Busses, which have turned SF into a bedroom/playroom city for Big G in Mountain View.

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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Who care what would impress you? You are impressed by denialist propaganda.

Neurones know in which order they get their inputs, and react differently to A then B then C from C then B then A, which is to say they've got short term memory, and can do a lot more than "neural networks".

There's no need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain that - or anything else that anybody has seen. The idea gets carved away by Occam's Razor.

Most people appreciate that it can do all that's necessary without invoking magic. You don't know enough to understand this.

Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 21:19:00 +0100, Tim Watts Gave us:

They probably authored and gave the NSA their "easy" search engine.

Ockham's Razor.

evolution is lazy, it crawls, it doesn't jump, eg: thers no wheeled animals...

umop apisdn

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Given the ohserved absense of steam and elastomers inside working brains on what basis do you make that claim.

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence you seem to have forgotten that.

umop apisdn

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and imagines something simpler?

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com

eally

There's got to be an evolutionary trajectory connecting what exists (or has existed) with what exists now. Error-detecting -correcting codes are prett y simple, but we don't see them in nature. The DNA to amino-acid decoding s cheme is remarkably close to the one that is most insensitive to misreading - about four or five standard deviations away from the mean of all possibl e schemes - but DNA repair is rather clumsier.

Bill Sloman, Sydney

On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 02:14:25 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman Gave us:

Yeah... look at the failure that it had when it allowed him to be produced.

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 12:58:28 PM UTC+2, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno w rote:

We have about 20,000 genes, capable of being regulated to produce some 100,

000 proteins. We've all got individual differences (and get roughly one new one every generation). John Larkin is the price we pay for the constructiv e variations. Primates in general generate a lot more mutations than other species, and so far it seems to be working out okay - though a 30% rate of early miscarriage isn't nice when it happens to somebody you know.
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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