The HP Way

Of course, I'm dismissed as a lunatic or religious fanatic or worse when I suggest that the underlying force driving all of this creativity is Free Will, or that intelligence is only a tool.

Cheers! Rich

OK, I'll accept "worse."

John

No, they don't They simply point out the absolute lack of any evidence for such hypotheses.

No, it goes a lot deeper. If I say "that amp uses matched KT88's for minimum distortion" or "the '72 Alfa spider used machanical fuel injection" nobody notices. But if I say "DNA uses enzymes to copy itself" I get mightily jumped on for implying things about DNA that everybody seems to be sensitized against. Many people are so afraid of being called Intelligent Design fans or - horrors! - Believers, that they can't even consider a wealth of potentially very cool concepts.

Hell, there's no evidence for most of what DNA does; nobody has a clue about higher functions like how living structures are defined. "Synthesizing proteins" is the mumble mumble handwave that doesn't explain how your foot got put together. Yet so many people know how DNA is not allowed to work.

John

What? No smiley? ;-)

Thanks, Rich

Which mechanism were we talking about here? The one where simple compounds seem to spontaneously organize themselves into more complex compounds, which organize themselves into even more complex compounds, and so on, until, somehow, they spring to life?

Whatever hypothesis you have to explain _why_ that happens, the fact remains that the evidence that it _does_ happen is prima facie. (or, maybe, happened once, and life got a foothold, so we don't need to make any brand new....)

Personally, I have an excellent hypothesis as to the motivating force behind all this, but it terrifies the f*ck out of people. :-)

Thanks! Rich

I had an interesting thought - go read that website with an attitude like you would take to Science Fiction. Imagine an imaginary Universe, where the narrator is some character telling about creating this little imaginary universe - draw a box, and call it Mini-universe, and draw a circle in it, and call it "God", and read the story as if the whole thing is happening inside the mini-universe in your imagination. This page, of course, is

Hey, give it a shot! Who knows what Universes your Imagination can contain?

Cheers! Rich

Either you don't understand what you are talking about, or you are explaining it very badly (this being Usenet, it is obvious that it could not be *me* that is having trouble understanding...)

The Mandelbrot equation produces a very simple and limited set of patterns - they are just repeated indefinitely. It's like the set of numbers of the form "2n" for all integers "n". It's infinite, beautiful in a way, and contains lots of interesting numbers. Yet it is easily described, and despite being infinite it fails to include many other interesting numbers.

The Game of Life is an interesting example, as you make the same mistake here as you do with DNA. The Game of Life cannot build glider factory factories - it is simply a set of rules for describing a "board", and how one board "generation" changes into the next "generation". You can lay out a glider factory factory on the board if you want, but it is not the Game itself that produces them (unless you first lay out a glider factory factory factory...).

"Infinite complexity" does not mean being able to cover all possibilities.

It's one thing to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

(I don't know who said that - web searches for references were inconclusive.)

If it is not science, then perhaps you are talking about philosophy or religion. Both can be interesting subjects, but the rest of us are discussing science here, and I thought you were too.

So we are not talking science, but *real* science?

You're calling me a dud?- hah. And this just because I think most of your design work is really ugly, like that horrific ambient light detector using the LED display reverse leakage measurement. Sorry, no aesthetic dimension means no consideration. And I don't like any of the panel layouts on your VME stuff either, so there.

Here's an earlier one:

-- Joe Legris

Hey Fred! Come out of anonymity and show us what YOU have done in your lifetime.

...Jim Thompson

I was discussion a pseudoreligion, actually a branch of antiscience, that surrounds discussion of DNA and evolution; in particular the branch that adheres tenaceously to theories that were orthodox before DNA was discovered, and actively supresses new concepts.

Exactly.

John

The patterns are not simple (they are infinitely complex) and they are nowhere repeated. Show us two identical Mandelbrot patterns, please, with the exception of the obvious solid regions.

You are playing with words in a most inane way. The gliders are real, and are propagated by a few amazingly simple rules. Putting things in quotes doesn't change their reality. And, pretty obviously, randomly seeding a large Life array could produce all sorts of interesting dynamic structures.

Using your terminology, a "bagel machine" doesn't "make" bagels.

I'm missing your point here. Or maybe you're missing mine.

I see no danger that any measurable quantity of brains will be spilled hereabouts... what there are seem to be well constrained.

John

I didn't design that, I just made it up. But why is the idea ugly (he asks, rhetorically)? It could add adaptive brightness control to a display with zero added sensors and zero added IC pins.

No, I think you're a dud because you never seem to have any fun. Do you ever have fun?

Well, the guys with gigabucks to spend do like them. Have you seen our new style?

This uses [1] a laser-cut stick-on polycarb overlay, with the led windows backlit from some cool Osram right-angle surface-mount LEDs. All our stuff will look like this over time. I agree that past-generation VME modules, not just ours, tended to be ugly as sin.

John

Yeah, show us your links!

John

In message , dated Thu, 14 Sep 2006, John Larkin writes

.... or entirely absent.(;-)

I guess that fred has no idea that people buying VME are after function, not a pretty face. Most of it ends up in a rack, sometimes with a door to protect the front panel wiring. Some is used as embedded modules inside a piece of equipment like the custom VME backplane and boards Microdyne made for the DR/RCB 2000 series of DSP based dual channel diversity Telemetry receivers I worked to move from design to production. Fred would have s*it his pants at the simple silk screen printed front plate, and the stenciled serial numbers, but most customers would never see any of it, so we saw no need to spend money to dress them up.

The design dilemma, of course, is to have ideas that are just whacky enough.

John