this is how you write a rant: plover.net/~bonds/cultofb… (The Cult of Bayes' Theorem)
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Magnus Holm (@judofyr) June 06, 2013Like countless other gurus, Yudkowsky has the pose of someone trying to communicate his special insight, but the prose of someone trying to conceal his lack of it.
When stuck in a traffic jam, wouldn’t it be nice to push a button and have a mask drop down from the automobile roof as in an airplane safety video, place it firmly over your nose and mouth, and breathe in a stream of pure fresh air?
In some cities, you’d probably want that filter mask on the whole time you’re on the road.
Because you’d be filtering only the small amount of air you and your passengers actually breath, instead of all the air in the cabin, then it would be economically justifiable to use a fancy filtering system, and even to fortify it with a little extra oxygen.
Someday it will be common for senior citizens to compensate for lost strength and stability with an exoskeleton, or in other words, a wearable robot.
When people hear the word ‘exoskeleton’ they, unfortunately, think first of Iron Man, but instead our wearable robots will be inconspicuous, more like polio braces than a flying suit of armor.
I predict that these will also include electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to counter muscular atrophy. The more you use your exoskeleton, the stronger you’ll get, not the weaker you’ll get.
But for that to catch on, we’ll need to find a way to activate the muscles through clothing without directly contacting the skin with electrodes.
When the new Pope Francis announced he wouldn’t live in the papal residence but would instead live in the Vatican guesthouse and eat with everyone else in its canteen, the media assured us that his decision was motivated by a desire to live simply, not simply by a desire to live longer than 33 days.
According to Greg Kuperberg
it’s quite striking that real computers are very close to two-dimensional, and yet they are mostly used in a RAM machine mode with an emulation of complete circuit connectivity.
and here
On the other hand, transistors in real computers are not very far away from melting. Even though many computers look 3-dimensional, most of the geometry of a computer is within each chip of the computer, and that geometry is almost completely 2-dimensional. One reason for that is the photolithography used to make the chips. But another reason is that there is no way to carry away the heat from a 3-dimensional block of transistors. Without that problem you could sandwich many chips together in a sort-of 3-dimensional pile. The heat problem effectively limits real computers to the power of 2-dimensional cellular automata. However, this 2-dimensional geometry is mostly used to simulate a RAM machine. It cannot be an efficient simulation, but it is what happens in practice, since most higher-level languages create a RAM machine environment for software. It’s also a pain to design algorithms for a 2D computational grid rather than for a RAM machine.
According to Joe Fitzsimons
The rate at which a region of space can be cooled scales as the surface area, where as the heat produced scales as the number of irreversible gates. For a 2D array these scale in the same way, but for a 3D array the heating scales as the volume (R^3) where as the cooling scales as the surface area of a bounding box (R^2). Clearly you need to balance the rate at which heat is produced with the rate at which it is removed, and hence you have a scaling problem with 3D arrays. This is entirely independent of the cooling mechanism.
According to Alexandra Horowitz
The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.
According to Mary Beard
Cicero’s contemporary Gnaeus Pompeius has been eclipsed in the modern imagination by his rival Julius Caesar, but as a young man he had achieved even more decisive victories over even more glamorous enemies than Caesar ever did. After conquests in Africa in the 80s BC, he returned to Rome to be hailed “Magnus” (or “Pompey the Great,” as he is still known), in direct imitation of Alexander. And as if to drive the point home, in his most famous surviving portrait statue (now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen), Pompeius is shown aping Alexander’s distinctive hairstyle, with a rising “quiff” (or anastole as the Greeks called it) brushed back from the center of his forehead.
Julius Caesar was not to be entirely outdone. When he visited Alexandria, where Alexander’s body had finally ended up (hijacked in its hearse on the way back from Babylon to Macedon and claimed for Egypt by one of Alexander’s “successors”), he made sure to make a pilgrimage to the tomb: one demented despot paying homage to another, as the Roman poet Lucan derided the stunt.
and
Roman writers did not merely debate the character of Alexander, they did not merely take him as model, they more or less invented the “Alexander” that we now know — as Diana Spencer came close to arguing in her excellent book The Roman Alexander (2002). In fact, the first attested use of the title “Alexander the Great” is in a Roman comedy by Plautus, in the early second century BC, about 150 years after Alexander’s death. I very much doubt that Plautus himself dreamed up the term, but it may well have been a Roman coinage; there is certainly nothing whatever to suggest that Alexander’s contemporaries or immediate successors in Greece ever called him “Alexander ho Megas.” In a sense, “Alexander the Great” is as much a Roman creation as “Pompey the Great” was.
See also “Julius Caesar” and “The Roman conspiracy to invent Jesus“.
