@ChaosEngine

I'm not sure you understand what machine learning is. As I said, the trigger for your child.runsInFront() is based on numerical inputs from sensors that is fed into a formula with certain parameters and coefficients. This has been optimized from many hours of driving data but ultimately it's not able to predict novel events as it can only optimize off existing data. There is a base level of error from bias-variance tradeoff to this model that you cannot avoid. It's not simply a matter of logging enough hours of driving. If that base error level is not low enough, then autonomous cars may never be deemed reliable to be unsupervised.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias-variance_tradeoff
Or specifically: http://scott.fortmann-roe.com/docs/docs/BiasVariance/biasvariance.png

It's the same reason that a stock market simulator using the same method (but different inputs) is not accurate. The difference would be that while 55% correct for the stock market may be sufficiently accurate and useful to be profitable, a driving algorithm needs to be near perfect. It's true that a sensor reaction time to someone braking unexpectedly may be much better than a human's and prevent a crash, so yes in certain cases autonomous driving will be safer but because of exceptional cases, but it may never be truly hands-off and you may always need to be ready to intervene, just like how Tesla works today (and why on a regulatory level it passed muster).

The combination of Google hyping its project and poor understanding of math or machine learning is why news reports just parrot Google's reliability numbers. Tesla also, has managed to convince many people that it already offers autonomous driving, but the auto-steer / cruise and changing lanes tech has existed for around a decade. Volvo, Mercedes and Audi all have similar features. There is a tendency to treat this technology as magical or inevitable when there are some unavoidable limitations behind it that may never be surmounted.

@bobknight33 --

I continue to agree with you on a lot of what you're saying (but not all).

Trump and Sanders are both riding a wave of frustration in the people, as you say. Their current popularity, even if both only go downhill from here, has already partially sent that message to both parties. I don't think Trump would make a good president, but if he wins the election I think that really hammering home that message of frustration could be a significant positive outcome. Same goes for some hypothetical scenario resulting in Sanders getting elected, although I personally feel quite positive about the other stuff that I think Sanders would bring to the table, unlike how I feel about Trump.

If there's one area where I think the government could stand to get *bigger*, it's in oversight, evaluation, and accountability. Being under the microscope and heavily scrutinized perhaps isn't a recipe for optimal efficiency, but I think we desperately need more of it in government AND the private sector.

Early in my lifetime, a large corporation that had a relatively benign monopoly by today's standards was considered a big enough deal for the government to step in and break it up. AT&T / Bell got split into the "Baby Bells". Corporations now are vast juggernauts compared to that, but since they make gigantic profits I guess we collectively see them as bastions of Capitalism. But I think that in reality they are doing much more harm to Capitalism with their monopolies, collusion, and corruption.

I think Sanders is the candidate most likely to even *try* to do something to roll back that shift, and bring back oversight and accountability to government. Hillary sure as hell wouldn't do it. And I don't think Trump would either -- he is the literal face of a gigantic Corporation himself, after all.

I had high hopes for Obama. He didn't live up to them, but to be fair I think the lion's share of that is on the Legislative branch. That taught me to be careful about putting much of any stock into Presidential campaign promises, particularly about things outside the scope of what the Executive branch can actually do.

I think Trump and Clinton both put *themselves* first, ahead of all else. I don't think Clinton gives a flying fuck about any of us plebs, beyond attempting to pander to large demographic blocks of us just enough to secure our votes. Maybe Trump cares more for Joe Average than Clinton, but only incidentally -- as a Capitalist he needs Joe Averages to buy his products, and buy into his image.

I don't get the same read from Sanders. I think he actually does give a shit. A lot of his agenda would require a cooperative Legislature, which he wouldn't get -- just like Obama. So in terms of changing the status quo, perhaps his biggest impact would simply be in sending the establishment a loud and clear message that we are no longer content with business as usual in Washington. A message very similar to what electing Trump would send.

It would/ will take me some soul searching, but assuming that Hillary gets the Democrat nomination over Sanders, a desire to send that message might be enough to get me to vote for Trump. But voting for a reasonably tolerable option from a minor party might serve that end just as well. Say Jesse Ventura running as a Libertarian, or Jill Stein from the Green Party. Stein has the very distinct advantage (from my perspective) of being the only current candidate who has said that she would grant a Presidential pardon to Ed Snowden (although Ventura would too, IF he runs). Pardons are one of the few things that a President can actually *do* unilaterally -- and that makes that a pretty damn good "single issue" prompt for my vote, in my opinion.

@Asmo , @enoch , @Jinx --

I appreciate what you're saying and I know that I *should* feel the way(s) you suggest. ...But I have a hard time actually getting there.

At some point, we are all responsible for our own actions, and the consequences of our own actions. Even though these people may not have any of the sort of opportunities that I take for granted, even though circumstances well outside of their control might push them into the direction of addiction, at some point they made a choice to start up with this crap. And they make a choice to continue with the drugs, even if the physical and mental addiction makes it nearly impossible for them to choose anything else.

There's a lot of problems in the world. There's a lot of people who unjustly have to contend with major problems that are absolutely 100% in no way their fault. Addicts are at least partially at fault for getting themselves into the mess that they are in. That puts them way down the line on my empathy list, that's all I'm saying.

Asmo said "To fix a problem, you first have to understand it. That does not require sympathy or empathy." That in particular helps me look at the issue from a different angle. Just because addiction is not a problem on my personal priority list, I 100% agree that it *is* a problem, and it is a problem that affects *me* also, indirectly if not directly. I live in a society of people, and helping each individual person in the society can help *everyone* in the society.

The war on drugs and its approach of mass incarceration, etc. pretty clearly doesn't work well to alleviate the problem. The part of me that (mostly jokingly, but not entirely) would tag this as EIA might be happy to take the approach of letting these people all shoot themselves up with krokodil or whatever else until they kill themselves. But rationally, I know that wouldn't fix anything. I'm not convinced that it would be worse than the war on drugs, but it definitely wouldn't be ideal.

So rationally, I know that social systems to help people break those addictions and whatever situations or psychological problems contributed to them are probably the optimal solution, from a society-wide sort of view. But I don't want to be at the front lines of any of that myself, because I think that it *does* require some empathy to the situation to be an effective contributor there, and I simply recognize that I personally can't scrounge any up.

So by all means, STOP taking my tax dollars and spending them on the war on drugs, and START spending them on social programs that experts and scientists who study addiction believe will do a better job of actually fixing the problem. But that's the extent of the personal involvement that I want to have.

There are a LOT of similarities. It definitely blurs the line between "reboot" and "homage", but I'd argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I think it will take a few years for me to digest and figure out where I think it ranks in my personal assessment of the Star Wars movies.

That being said, I'm excited about the future of Star Wars again -- the prequels came very close to destroying any optimism that I had in that regard.

For the moment, consider Episode VII but ignore the plot and parallels / homage / blatant copying between it and A New Hope. In all three prequels combined, there wasn't a single character that was interesting; that we could identify with. Anakin was annoying -- in kid form and adult form. Ewan McGregor did OK with the material and directing he was given, but the script and writing in general did NOTHING to connect prequels Obi-Wan with the original trilogy. Padme, Jar-Jar (ha!), Palpatine, Dooku, etc. -- not a single memorable, interesting character that made me want to learn more about them. Sam Jackson's Mace Windu was probably the closest, but didn't get enough screen time or depth to really establish interest.

Already I feel confident in saying that in terms of characters, Episode VII is massively, overwhelmingly better than the prequels. Rey, Finn, and Poe are each individually far more interesting than every character from the prequels combined. AND, I want to see how those new faces interact with the old stars also. Luke, Leia, even Chewbacca (my personal favorite of the OT) all seem like they will continue to be very important to the story moving forward -- and continue to develop their own story arcs in addition to the new cast.

The Force Awakens wasn't *perfect* -- I tend to think it leaned a bit too much on revamping A New Hope also -- but it was very good and very entertaining. And I am definitely excited about the future of Star Wars again.

+1 for youthful optimism. He is bright enough and still young enough to change peoples minds on the status quo of police protection. This has to be the most encouraging video since that one of the brave policeman who didn't shoot, despite the person ignoring orders of "show you hands" .

Good question. I think that the entire device is unstable no matter what, its impossible to keep it straight no matter where the point of gravity as long as it needs to balance on a single tip. So zero speed would mean tip over in all cases unless you make a more stable tip (square) which would mean it cant spin very well which means you havent made a spinning top.

You can find more about the physics of the spinning top here:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/top.html
and here:
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/271/why-dont-spinning-tops-fall-over

So what is the optimal distance of the center of gravity to the tip?

There are several things working at the same time. Most importantly is the energy. You need to store as much energy as possible so that the top can spin for as long as possible. When the top slows spinning the friction at the tip becomes larger (the precession becomes bigger) so it starts to lose more energy and slows the spinning even more. You store energy by adding weight with a center of mass that is further away from the tip. When the top then "falls" the center of gravity moves down and reduces potential energy. Due to energy conservation kinetic energy goes up meaning speed of precession or of spinning goes up and creates a force pushing the top back up.

Off course, more mass means more friction at the tip, so there is for sure an optimal here, most likely depending on mass, size and shape of spinning top, etc.

Last but not least, more rotation speed I assume also means more friction, so its a trade-off.

If you move the center of mass down below the tip, well, if you move it as far off as you would above, the energy you can save is about the same, but the entire thing would be harder to build and you would need to make sure the sides fit around the ground plateau. Also, when the precessions become bigger the sides will hit the plateau, meaning game over.

In the end you are better of keeping the center of gravity above the tip point.

@ChaosEngine

if you are referring to the established political class,the pundit class and those with relative power and influence i would agree with your assertions.

which is pretty much what i am talking about.

if you look how ron paul was being treated by his own party and compare that treatment to sanders by the DNC,there are some glaring similarities.

while both paul and sanders have differing politics,they did align in a few areas i.e: audit the fed,citizens united,money in politics and restructuring the military to name a few.

they both had/have immensely popular grassroots support.ron paul garnering 20 million in small donations and sanders broke that record with 30 million.

they both held large rallies with high attendance.

they both had a populist flavor that appealed to their own political base.challenging the current corrupt power structures.

and they both have/had experienced a weird media blackout,even though they were/are incredibly popular with the voters.

now we can question WHY that is,but i don't think it too much a stretch to come to the conclusion that both candidates challenged the current power structures that dictate this countries dysfunctional and corrupt political system.add to that mix a paid propaganda pundit class that never challenges the current narrative,all put on display on corporate media which is owned by what? 5-6 entities? who just happen to be the biggest lobbyists in this country?

nader experienced pretty much the exact same treatment from the DNC in regards to media exposure and it went even further in his case with him being outright denied to some debates,or made to jump through almost insurmountable dictates to even get ON the debates.

so when i assert this is a well crafted and intentional practice by the parties,i do so with precedent.

because all three,nader,paul and sanders all had/have massive public support from the voters,but not their respective parties.

so when ron paul started to become a real thorn in the RNC,who did not want him anywhere near the nomination.they changed the tactic from ignoring or downplaying pauls message..to creating the "kook" myth.this was from his own party!!

nader received similar treatment,though in a different context.the establishment as a whole came out against him.

so what can we assume,based on previous tactics from these political parties in regards to sanders?when they can no longer ignore his popularity? his grassroots campaign donations? his rally attendances?

there will soon come a time when they can no longer ignore sanders and his grassroots success,and they will respond the exact same way they did with nader and paul.they will concoct a narrative that plays on peoples fears and biases and begin to portray sanders as an anti-capitalist "kook".that somehow him being a democratic socialist means the end of our civilization.just the word "socialist' makes many a republican wet their panties.

could i be wrong?
oh please god let me be wrong.
i happen to like much of what sanders is promoting,not everything,i have issues with some of what he proposes,but over-all i dig not only what he is saying but how he is going about conveying his message.

there is one huge problem if sanders gets the nod,and that is the support you mentioned.he has almost none in the legislature.which will make much of what he is trying to change in washington damn near impossible.

which will create it own political mess and just create fodder for the pundit class to ineffectually pontificate on,just so they can have a job.

i think it would be such a great thing for this country if sanders got the nomination,but the establishment has already made its intentions clear:they dont want sanders,they want hillary.the establishment does not play by the rules nor do they play nice.

playing by the rules and being decent is for the peasant class.

hope i am wrong.
i hope that every single point i made will never occur.
i hope that sanders gets the nod and things may change,because this country needs a fucking enema.
but my cynicism really struggles with that kind of hopeful optimism.

Many self professed feminists believe it is about hating men too, but I assume "no true feminist" would ever do that right?

I wasn't trying to wilfully misunderstand you, but rather to pursue my whole contention about any political/social argument:

Individual People and specific arguments over ideologies always.

When the reverse is true and ideology is placed before people or the specific merits of an argument, the result is dehumanising and anti-intellectual (even if by the slimmest margins sometimes).

That's not to say that, where mutual understanding already exists, ideological terms are completely useless. But the moment individuals disagree, those ideological assumptions are going to get in the way of a productive dialogue.

My whole point I guess is that this seems rather anti-humanist if you will pardon the irony of taking an ideological position.
If as a humanist one believes that the optimal way is for everyone to be judged only on the merits of their individual words, deeds and capacity.

Rather than by culture, race, gender or some other involuntary and/or irrelevant factors.

Assuming you agree in principle with that definition of humanism in terms of goals, then what we are arguing here really is collectivism vs individualism.

You are suggesting we can get better results by pushing the "right" version of said ideology and suppressing the "wrong", correct?

I am arguing ultimately that we seem to get better results in the long term, by encouraging free and critical thought and allowing all ideas (no matter how egregious) a fair fight.

This puts me contrary to many tenets of the various feminist ideologies and concordant with others. Sometimes wildly so.

If I want to try to be a good humanist, I have no choice but to try and understand each on their own terms.

When someone describes themselves as a "Feminist", that could mean anything from "kill all men" to "women should have fundamental legal equality".

It seems almost as redundant as racial and cultural epithets, it tells me very little really important about you or how you really think, to know you are Black, or White or Asian or Polish, Spanish etc. etc. It's just another excuse to put an idea above the person in front of you or to not have to think too much about ones own.

i.e. Collectivist thinking.

I think this may represent the very antithesis of intellectual progress.

However I am a Hegelian and I just defined a Thesis-antithesis relationship............ That means the next great breakthrough should lie in the synthesis of the two.......

................

Collective individualism! All we should need is a mass movement of free critical thought and.....bollocks.

It's over people, we have officially peaked as a species! I'm calling it

The survival rate for cats falling from 2 stories or higher is 90%. The peak death rate is actually at 2 stories, then goes down to about the 5th and flattens off because they're at terminal velocity and have achieved optimal landing position by that point.

Squirrels should do even better, as the smaller a creature is, the less momentum it has and the higher the drag-mass ratio (thus lowering the speed of terminal velocity). Pretty easy to believe it survived, whether it hit a tree or not on the way down.

Interesting but it bugs me that the first example, the square, she does sub-optimally. Make the first fold corner to corner, then the second fold in half in line with the other corner then cut. Two folds, one cut. She does three folds one cut.

Agreed on most points. This one is pretty variable though.

For the next decade or two, prosthetics will continue to be sub-optimal replacements for human limbs and only used in cases of extreme trauma. I think these will continue to be the preserve of the rich (they pretty much already are in terms of 1st vs 3rd world).

Eventually, we will get to a point where prosthetics are actually better than the equivalent human limb. That's several decades away IMO (accurate control is doable, but getting to the point of have a prosthetic that relay sensory information is a Really Hard Problem).

At that point, I think we'll very quickly see adoption of prosthetics become mainstream, but it will still be geared towards the relatively wealthy (see present day adoption of smartphones).

But once you get to that point, even the most basic model prosthetic will outperform a human limb. I believe it's almost certain that these kinds of limbs will be "smart", i.e. instead of accepting simple commands from the brain of "contract tricep", "grip fingers", etc, you'll see an arm that draw a perfect circle. And they'll be stronger than a human arm almost by default (not picking up cars strong, support structures aren't there for that, but certainly stronger than an olympic athlete)

So either way, I still don't think we'll see a "prosthetic underclass".

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

In the field of artificial intelligence, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural selection. This heuristic (also sometimes called a metaheuristic) is routinely used to generate useful solutions to optimization and search problems.[1] Genetic algorithms belong to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA), which generate solutions to optimization problems using techniques inspired by natural evolution, such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover.

I direct your attention to the first sentence. In the field of AI, in other words, an artificially created intelligence. Now even if you go to the the idea Turing had that a computer could learn and adapt itself to the point of AI, it is a device that had to be created by an outside designer at some point. It didn't just manifest, it was created and reached AI level, then it could at that point begin to try to 'imitate' natural selection.

It has become clear to me over our last couple of discussions that you are incredibly reluctant to think outside of the box YOU have created for yourself. You believe what you believe and damn the torpedoes with the rest.

Did you read it? I bet not, because it describes systems of laws and rules that can allow programs/problem solutions to create themselves based on evolutionary models, starting from a randomly generated population of possible solutions, not the programming of an AI.
Yes, someone must 'program' those rules into a computer, but there's no need to program an AI (nor is there a need for someone to program those laws into reality, they simply are... the universe did not start out as an empty hard drive), this programs and re-programs itself based on the rules to find the optimal solution to the problem given. That's solution evolution, not AI.
The methodology comes from the field of AI, as it's a good way for an AI to find the best solution to a problem, it is not, however, an AI itself, nor is it relegated only to the field of AI.

I   puppy, said James staring out over the endless void. He didn't notice the hiccups but something was stirring in the dark recesses of memory despite the void of all eternity and what it knew while lurking in his soul.

He was still able to register the faint recollection that puppies provide stimulus. Whether or not it was positive or negative is a matter of debate, for he had been drained of all human emotion. I   puppy. Like? I like puppy? No, too much heart, too much optimism. All actions void. Language meaningless. I ALT255 puppy.