Geoff said about 4 hours later

I know one, prominent, loud scientist who would disagree with you on that.... :)

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Steve said 4 days later

I can't disagree nor agree. Fact is, I, and I seriously doubt anyone here, knows all that NASA has learned with the space shuttle program. Easy to look back on it now and call it a waste of money, but obviously no one had better ideas about how to continue to explore space.

Personally, I think we need some very smart scientists to put a rock solid plan together explaining exactly what it is we want to learn/do, and go do it. Changing space exploration's mission with the changes in politics is no good. There already is separation of church and state, there should also be separation of science and state. And yes, to complete the loop, there is already separation of church and science.... That one's for GJ and Geoff....

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GJ said 4 days later

Science is supported by the state, thus the two cannot be separated. Science funded wholly by business will never amount to much. Blue sky science is where the big finds are.

That said, manned space travel is foolish, at least until we figure out a way to circumvent our current understanding of the laws of physics. Weight is king in space travel, and humans are way too heavy. Let's work on making our robots smarter and more capable of exploration, and continue sending them to the stars. It's far cheaper (though still not cheap), and the return on investment will far outstrip what we got for the shuttle's ROI--we're talking orders of magnitude of difference here.

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Steve said 5 days later

yea, true, without the gov't, we wouldn't have had a space program.

But, back in the 1960's, when the space shuttle was being designed, computers were HUGE - it was much easier to send humans up to do the work, me thinks. Obviously not the case now - I think my new cell phone is smarter than me....actually, it proved itself to be smarter than me when I locked it and couldn't figure out how to unlock it for a couple frustrating hours.

But but but, manned space travel is sooo cool! That said, after staring at pictures of the universe, I want to learn more about the universe more than I care about humans landing on Mars.

Question though - the hubble space telescope is probably one of the best tools we've put into space. First, could we have gotten it up there at that time without the shuttle? Second, when we needed to service it, how would that have been accomplished without humans in space? Sure, I guess now we could build a robot to do it for us, but why is that any easier than just sending a human up?

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Marc said 5 days later

I'm keeping my eye on http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/

If our government isn't going to do it, I'm perfectly happy with the commercial sector taking the next steps.

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GJ said 6 days later

You can get humans in space far more cheaply than the shuttle. Ask the Russians how they do it. Their rate of fatalities is no higher than our shuttle programs--in fact, it's lower.

So yeah, Hubble is awesome, but wasn't made possible by the shuttle. The shuttle was used simply because basic plain rocket tech was largely abandoned by NASA in favor of the shuttle, whose horrendous cost overruns they were trying to justify by doing mundane stuff the Russians were doing with much lower tech gear.

That said, I do like the Lunar X Prize competition--that's not really business as much as it is philanthropy. Still, it will be awesome and I look forward to seeing what comes of that competition. In the meantime, the Japanese, Chinese, Indians, and others will continue to press the boundaries of space, and likely with mostly robots. We'd be foolish to keep wasting money trying to put people in space for romantic reasons.

GJ said about 1 hour later

Here's an example of a good science article. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/02/why_cant_we_cure_cancer.php#more

I will acknowledge that it will make Joe Q. Public's head spin, to a degree. Still doesn't mean we should be spreading false fairy tales in our common newspapers about scientific work.

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Marc said about 2 hours later

I've given up on reading studies from newspapers. For two reasons:

1.) They usually have shotty or no data.
2.) They are always followed up by a study that completely negates it and follows both of these rules. (Enjoy that recursion :))

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GJ said about 23 hours later

So..get your medical news from JAMA, not from USA Today. Might prove a bit harder to digest, but at least it's not a freaking opinion piece.

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GJ said 1 day later

Oh, shock of shocks, my favorite NYT blogger Tara Parker Pope has taken this ball and run blindly with it. Shocking.

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Marc said 1 day later

I saw this on Yahoo's front page today too.

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Geoff said 1 day later

Nice 2nd Article GJ...was this posted by the scientist from The Entabulator?

"For instance, the breast cancer that killed my mother-in-law was a rare spindle cell variant, which is quite different from the much more common invasive ductal carcinoma that is estrogen and progesterone receptor positive."

I'm not sure what he said there really, but it didn't sound good. :)

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GJ said 2 days later

No, Geoff, it was posted by a cancer doctor. A real, honest to goodness cancer doctor.

The gist of the article: cancer is not a singular disease--it is a wide ranging collection of diseases, which have very little in common beyond what they do to cell growth. Curing parts of cancer is doable--curing cancer as the whole collection of disease will likely never happen.

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GJ said 2 days later

Btw, the Entabulator was a great satire....say enough science-sounding words and the general public will buy it hook, line and sinker.

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Geoff said 2 days later

yeah...this cancer doctor started to sound like him lol. Invasive ductal carcinoma progesterone receptor positive...yikes!

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GJ said 3 days later

Some of us know what each of those words mean. :)

Geoff said about 4 hours later

It's the Libertarian Party, GJ. ;)

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GJ said about 5 hours later

No, it's not. The Libertarians are basically anarchists. They don't want government. They say they do--they want government to protect the rights of the individual, period. However, government must step on individual rights occasionally, because government is of a *group* of people by a *group* of people. There is a concept of the "greater good" that does indeed involve infringing the rights of some individuals.

The government does indeed go overboard with this. The Patriot Act is a good example--as was Prohibition. There are plenty of other examples. There are also plenty of examples where most people would agree that the government does have a right to intervene. Licensing and regulation of motor vehicles and drivers is something most of us support, I would think. That includes forcing us to obtain car insurance--not that different than forcing us to obtain health insurance, depending on how you look at it.

Anyhow, unless my reading comprehension skills have dropped, the libertarians have such a generic anti-government platform that technically they oppose things like auto regulation. They definitely have a beef with health care reform. :)

So, no thanks, no Libertarian Party for me.

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Steve said 12 days later

agreed, most public school teachers make a lot of money. Some are certainly worth it. Others are not.

Don't get me started on unions.....their time has past. Well, their location has past. They should be moving to Asia, where unions are needed for what they were good at - fighting for the safety and proper treatment of their industrial working members.

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GJ said 12 days later

Good point on location, Steve--they are certainly needed in parts of the world. Here in the US, I think not.

Geoff said about 8 hours later

My bet is on Watson. Seeing as they specifically designed it for Jeopardy...though I agree, I wish they spent their money on a machine that could balance our budget or something actually useful. I'm sure they've learned a few useful things from this process though. Interesting to say the least.

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Geoff said about 8 hours later

Just caught the last 15 minutes of the first episode tonight. While Watson had a quirk with repeating the same wrong answer as the first contestant, I gotta say it's pretty cool to see a machine up there answering questions like a regular person. I don't think machine takeover is coming anytime soon, but I think I'd like a Watson upgrade sometime. Cyborg here we come!

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Geoff said 1 day later

Watson wins...big

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Marc said 1 day later

Yea, I don't suspect the humans will recover from that loss. Even if one of them gets on a huge winning streak, Watson isn't gonna stop playing well.

To me it seemed like the humans had a tough time beating Watson to the buzzer and I'm still not convinced that whatever they rigged up to make that portion more fair, was not fair enough. Ken Jennings seemed to be pretty upset every question cause he couldn't beat Watson on the buzzer. It seemed like the only way they beat him was if Watson decided to not buzz in for that question.

I did like Watson's one response: "What is leg?" That's gonna be my go-to answer during any game where I don't know the answer. :)

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Geoff said 2 days later

hahaha. Yeah the reflex thing is a tough thing to overcome when competing against machines. They don't have a finger to press the trigger button. Not sure how that whole parts works to be honest...I assume you can't ring in until Alex finishes the question? Does seem unfair if the machine is sent a signal to indicate it can answer a question...even if they do put some form of random delay to compensate...dunno. In any case, chock one up for the mean machine team.

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Marc said 2 days later

According to IBM and Jeopardy, there's no advantage: http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-hears-and-speaks-to.html

Interestingly enough, Ken Jennings disagrees and even said so on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/#!/KenJennings/status/37504762047897601

"@PatKiernan IBM says: no buzzer advantage for the computer. In practice, the humans tend to disagree."

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GJ said 2 days later

I watched. Wasn't too impressed. The "answers" Watson was coming up with looked one heck of a lot like what I would have gotten with a GIS. I'm betting this is simply a highly optimized search tool that specializes in the type of trivia seen in Jeopardy.

Meh, I think I respect Deep Blue a whole lot more after this. :)

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Geoff said 4 days later

I disagree...these aren't simple questions that are asked. They use slang, metaphors, etc. Though, it is a bit ridiculous that it required an entire building to ascertain the answer...though nothing out of the ordinary since our first computers were the size of buildings practically. In due time this will be seen as a stepping stone to intelligent computer systems. I imagine the Curator from the Movie "The Time Machine"

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GJ said 4 days later

You disagree with what, exactly?

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Steve said 8 days later

Sorry, a bit late on this, but as avid Jeopardy watchers, Parsla and I caught both episodes. The first show, Watson blew the guys away. The second show, I have to believe, something was changed, as Ken was able to buzz in a LOT more, and Watson seemed to get a lot more questions wrong. I'm betting two things - after the first show, a change was made to Watson's response time, allowing the humans more time to ring in. Second, I bet the people writing the answers for the show made saw how the computer worked the first time, and rewrote the answers to make it harder for the computer to get the questions right.

They did talk about a potential use in the medical industry to help diagnose diseases, but based on the performance the second night, it seems like it could easily be screwed up by human input.

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Marc said 8 days later

Obviously we can't know for sure, but one of the reasons Watson faltered a bit more on the second game was that some of the answers were a lot shorter, which left Watson little to work with and, more importantly, less time to figure out what the correct response is. That short period of time gave Ken more time to buzz in. You also probably noticed Watson just wasn't as sure about the answers this time around, so in some cases it didn't even buzz in since it never hit the confidence threshold.

According to everybody involved (Jeopardy, IBM, and the humans), the answers were actually taken from their normal database of potentials. They only removed video and audio clues since Watson was deaf and blind, and even dumb at times!

I definitely think that it unfortunately came down to a buzzer game which Ken even said that most Jeopardy games do. Obviously the computer has a major advantage here and no matter how you cut it, there's not a decent solution to this problem.

I do think there's some decent technology behind this, but I'm with GJ, Deep Blue was much more impressive computer feat at the time. I think this technology could easily be used to replace a lot of customer support lines if combined with decent voice recognition software.

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Steve said 8 days later

Wait, Watson was deaf? So he was fed the answers electronically? That's no fair. We know computers can read text way faster than humans. No wonder he always beat the humans to the buzzer, he knew the question before the Alex had even finished reading the answer.

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Marc said 8 days later

Watson was fed the answers via a direct connection in plain text at the same time it would become visible to the humans retina. Which on the surface seems unfair, but in reality this may actually be pretty fair.

Most humans playing Jeopardy quickly scan the text looking for keywords and decide whether their confidence is pretty high they'll know the answer. Then they prepare to buzz in and take the 5 seconds after buzzing (and any other extra time they may have after scanning) to figure out the answer.

Since Watson is a ridiculous computer, his time to process is often much faster than a human, however he doesn't have that ability to intuitively know what words may be important just by looking at its structure. This is the part of Jeopardy that determines if your a champion vs. a chump. Watson on the other hand has to try to take the whole answer and make some sense of it. Most humans probably can scan, pick a couple words and be pretty confident of an answer.

I would expect a v2.0 version of Watson to act more like a typical contestant, but I don't think this gave him a big advantage if any, and certainly nothing compared to the advantage he had on the buzzer.

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Geoff said 9 days later

well I guess I'm alone in being impressed. Maybe it was the cool brain animation, or maybe deep down, I really envy the machines. I thought it was pretty freaking cool to see the machine up there competing. This will surely make it to the "Mechanica Bible" 300 years from now and will server as inspiration to all machinelings.

Marc said 1 day later

The fly over was just ridiculous. I'd like the $2 back that they likely used from my taxes.

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Abby said 1 day later

.... last I checked, it was spelled "über", ja?

in other news, I don't like football to begin with, so anything involving it is automatically uninteresting and not worth any money whatsoever in my book.

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GJ said 1 day later

Mein Computer hat nicht einen Umlautschlüssel.

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Geoff said 1 day later

ded sox.

GJ said about 6 hours later

And all too often, we forget how insignificant all that this world represents truly is. :)

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Geoff said about 22 hours later

that is incredible...what's more incredible is the notion you are actually looking back in time when you look to the sky. How many of those stars no longer exist? What does that tiny area of view actually look like at present time. Truly remarkable. It really makes our views on life seem utterly pathetic.

Here is a hi-rez image of the hubble pic:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Hubble_ultra_deep_field.jpg

Marc said 1 day later

My roommate and I figured this out in college as well for one of the scratch off games we used to play sometimes (Lucky 7's if I recall). It wasn't a terribly interesting find in our minds and made perfect sense being computer programmers and understanding pseudo-random very well :).

The reason we didn't think it was too mind blowing is because I've never seen a case where you are in control of which scratch off tickets you get. Typically you get them from a machine or from a person behind the counter at a gas station who just grabs the next one off the big roll. So you're still up against the randomness of the distribution of the tickets on a per roll basis, which I'm sure is fixed and evenly distributed by some statistical means as well.

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Geoff said 1 day later

Yup, unless you are the store clerk....or you bribe them. As the article indicated, this fella bought a roll of tickets and asked if he could return any of the unused tickets. You could do that.

Either way, it likely isn't worth the time, though it appears a few must have cracked the system and make a fair share off of it. I'm sure they illegally acquire these tickets anyhow. Interesting read none the less.

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Marc said 1 day later

The part I found the most interesting are the ones where the pattern matched, but it was still a loser. I assume they are the result of needing more tickets to give out, but hitting the limit on number of winners.

The fix for this seems so simple though: Make the unique identifier which determines whether it's a winner be covered by the scratch off material too. If that number is scratched off the lottery ticket is considered used.

On a related note for scratch off tickets, I think it's pretty ridiculous they allow you to "win" the amount of money the ticket cost. It's obviously in the system to fuel addictions without losses. But hey, if any of these lottos use the $70 billion for some good, I guess we can let the suckers keep coming.

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GJ said 1 day later

Geoff, organized crime finds this very worthwhile. So does a certain "lucky" woman in Texas.

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Geoff said 2 days later

Yes, but the means by which they cheat the system, aka acquiring those tickets by bribes or what have you is also illegal. I doubt these mobsters are walking into 7-11 and buying rolls of scratch off tickets. They are likely in cahoots with someone to get these tickets I imagine.

What I meant was it's not worth you or I legally purchasing these tickets and trying to crack it. If you want to break other laws to get those tickets, then sure it could be worth it.

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GJ said 2 days later

No, they're not "cheating" the system per se. Not necessarily, anyhow. Here's how it can work:

1. Buy lottery tickets in bulk (most states allow this), for the purpose of "office gifting."
2. Filter out the winning tickets (assuming you have successfully cracked the game, that is) and return the non-winners as "non-gifted" for full refund (again, most states allow this).
3. Profit.

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GJ said 2 days later

One could argue that simply cracking the game and using it to increase your odds is illegal, per se.

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Marc said 2 days later

You could always say you have mental abilities beyond normal humans to be able to pick winners with your ability to see into the future. Which is probably somewhere along the lines of pleading insanity, but a smart person just calls it probability and statistics. :)

The office gifting is an interesting thought though... that would likely work well.

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Steve said 3 days later

I never bothered with scratch off's. What's the point? If you're going to go, go big. Megamillions baby!

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Geoff said 3 days later

I didn't realize you could return tickets...i would think with the number of tickets you'd have to buy to make millions, someone would catch on

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GJ said 4 days later

Texas has some Texas-sized scratch games. You know where that lucky woman lives, right? :)

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Geoff said 4 days later

I am living in the wrong state....

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GJ said 4 days later

Most of the ex-New Yorkers would agree with you. :)

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Geoff said 4 days later

:)

Marc said 2 minutes later

In case you haven't heard, this was supposed to be video of Chinese military training, but the Democratic Republic of the Interwebs noticed a striking similarity to Top Gun in the climactic scene near the end. Big thanks to the Wall Street Journal for calling them out.

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Marc said 8 minutes later

And I apologize in advance for anyone who was really excited that a Top Gun 2 was actually coming out. I assume if there were to be a second Top Gun it would include Tom Cruise fighting Xenu in space.

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GJ said about 3 hours later

Thanks for the laugh! Saw the video, but now I have an image of Tom Cruise flying a Tomcat fitted for space travel going all Pew Pew Pew on Xenu.