http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=size+of+wolves

Copper isn't all that reactive actually, it has similar properties to gold and silver. The similarity there is due to having a single electron in the "outer shell". That single electron is also why it does some interesting stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactivity_series

The song is Sail by AWOLNATION

I'm going with BEST too.

I don't know that he is giving enough credit to non-human animals on that either.

I reckon a good part of the evolution of language in humans and human ancestors would have been well before we had complex tools. It's not such a big jump from a wolf "saying" "Hey guys! Look! The rabbit's over here!!" to a bipedal ape being able to say "see Ugg? hit rock with rock". There's no way in hell that the early humans who could make those near-perfect arrow heads would go visit another tribe and give them a lecture about flint-knapping techniques.

He said that chimpanzees cannot learn from each other, which is not true.

http://www.janegoodall.org/media/news/difference-learning-sexes

RepRap-A-Desktop-Factory-That-Can-Make-More-DT-Factories>> ^messenger:

Better hope you don't need a spare printer is all.>> ^Jinx:
So wait, instead of taking spares you take a 3dprinter+the print materials. hmmm.

"Natural selections doesn't conjure up something from nothing : there has to be a germ of something for it to act upon" - funny that he used the word "germ". Bacteria can move towards food, and that has simple chemical explanations. Critters with more complex means of moving towards food have brains or at least a nervous system.

Is there some point where it makes sense to say that a critter "feels hungry"? Yes, when it has a brain.

The idea of "you cant have X without Y" might be right in a way, but all you have to do to come up with "oooh, spooky! There's an X without Y!!" is to not look too hard and to avoid seeing Y when it's not convenient for "spooky".

I just posted a relevant video on computational neuroscience, which might answer some questions.

It's a bit hard to argue with "we think it works this way" when you have a machine that also works "this way".

How a Theory of the Neocortex May Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines

I had no idea who Dane Cook was, but now that I do, extreme prejudice please.

It's an airplane contrail.

http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/

OMG, what a pack of lies.

That would be decreasing terrestrial biomass Psychologic. (2004 figures though)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle


That diagram also shows the deception behind their misleading low percentage for human contribution to atmospheric CO2.

5.5 from fossil fuels vs 60 from forests, 60 from soils, 92 from the oceans.

Looks tiny if you pretend the 121.3 back into forests and soils and the 92 back into the ocean doesn't count.

The 1.3 difference for terrestrial forests and soils covers the CO2 fertilisation effect.

Obviously there is a limit to the number of points you can have in memory, but that's a limitation of memory, not the rendering process. I imagine that animation would be done by having two rendering passes, one for fixed background or terrain, and another for moving/animated objects. It may be that "moving" a point cloud is just as simple as moving a polygon model: set its location to somewhere else, then let the rendering system decide how to draw it there.

Given a triangle and an arbitrary point, it takes many operations to see if that point lies on the plane of the triangle. With a point cloud that would come down to asking "is there a point at location x,y,z?"

In the video they seemed to say that they had duplicated the whole point cloud below the reflective water, which does seem like a nasty hack. That may have just been the easiest thing to do though.

You are right Stormsinger, you could use exactly the same tricks to save memory with polygons, and everyone does. A polygon model + textures certainly could be smaller in memory than a very detailed coloured point cloud, but what we should be comparing is the computational power needed to render polygon vs point-cloud models of similar complexity.

That this method could give the point-cloud method an advantage in that case seems plausible to me.

I don't think zoom is an issue. Take the case where there is just one single point in the cloud. If you zoomed in to the point where that one point filled your screen, all that would happen is that the point cloud search performed for each screen pixel would return the exact same point each time, and therefore be coloured the same.

It sounds pretty reasonable to me. Google does actually use some fairly advanced algorithms, not so much brute force computing power. The huge server farms are there because they have a huge user base.

And the issue of "unlimited" detail = "unlimited" memory requirements isn't quite right, have a look at some of the 64K demos from the PC demo scene. The example of the billions of animals stacked in pyramids is the answer to that one, it might be a few meg for the first animal, the rest are just extra entries in an index pointing back to the first one.