jimmydasaint

AAArgh! I wanted to post this Topic! Nevertheless, IMO, there is no way to tell if the Universe is a simulation or not. Is the double slit experiment telling us something? I don't know but I suspect that coincidence may be an illusion as well.

 

 

So you have your certificate in Cherry Picking. Well done.

Why do you think it is acceptable to be such a vile bigot?

You need to remove this line from your sig: "Lets keep it friendly and polite!"

 

Or add one saying that you are a hypocrite as well as a bigot.

I agree with Strange. By all means hate religion; I have no relation to organised religion because all three mainstream religions have fallen into the same trap - formalism and dogmatic adherence. The God I believe in is an intellectual and a forgiving entity who has kindness as Its core value.

Alan, you do come across as a man who believes all the bull**** that the media broadcast as truth but the great book "Manufacturing Consent" should enlighten you to the true nature of the press.

Mass media play an especially important role in democratic societies.

They are presupposed to act as intermediary vehicles that reflect public

opinion, respond to public concerns and make the electorate cognizant of

state policies, important events and viewpoints. The fundamental

principles of democracy depend upon the notion of a reasonably informed

electorate. The ‘propaganda model’ of media operations laid out and

applied by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in

Manufacturing Consent:

The Political Economy of the Mass Media

postulates that elite media interlock

with other institutional sectors in ownership, management and social

circles, effectively circumscribing their ability to remain analytically

detached from other dominant institutional sectors. The model argues that

the net result of this is self-censorship without any significant coercion.

Media, according to this framework, do not have to be controlled nor does

their behaviour have to be patterned, as it is assumed that they are integral

actors in class warfare, fully integrated into the institutional framework of society, and act in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy,to establish, enforce, reinforce and ‘police’ corporate hegemony

http://web4.uwindsor.ca/users/w/winter/40-328.nsf/0/10ff8b04ff3a317885256d88005720f6/$FILE/Klaehn.critical.review.pdf

Try this video as a starter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbmt-6o-Bp0

It's helpful to realize that emotions are not irrational or imperfections but fairly straightforward shortcuts to making decisions in situations where either speed is paramount or where game theory means that everyone making optimal, rational decisions is liable to result in an equilibrium state that is less beneficial to you than may be possible if things are mixed up with a disruptive behavior or where the threat of disruptive behavior is reasonably expected and can therefore be used as leverage in negotiations.

 

There's a meme of humans being illogical/irrational and computers being superior in logic and unemotional, but that ignores the constraints of the problems that need to be dealt with and the reasons why emotions exist in the first place, which are things that computers attempting to operate in a similar environment cannot completely ignore.

Thank you for that clear and compelling insight into the use of computers and neural networks. The insight about use of emotion is superb and worth some thought. so it is possible that emotions give humans the edge during conflict, or survival-type situations. Great post Delta.

It's Fronkensteen!

Computers don't make "logical decisions" in the way that people mean when they say that. They follow a mathematical logic that runs through the steps they should take according to how they have been programmed or, in the case of something like a neural network, how they have been trained to perform.

 

The ultimate decisions that they come to may or may not be considered logical decisions, and computer very, very frequently make very illogical decisions if the people who program them aren't careful in properly setting it up.

 

You could absolute program a simulated fear response analog into a computer and there is no reason it would decide that response wasn't logical and deviate from it. That's not how computers in general or AIs specifically work.

I am not being flippant but do computers fear the darkness if they are left for years in the darkness of a computer room? Do they have a history of "self?" It is exactly as you mentioned - they are logical machines.My question involved the possibility that logical machines are better at survival than an illogical and emotional machine if you could program it to behave that way.

I scanned the published paper rapidly and found the following in the Discussion section:

 

In an interesting recent article, Kramer and Jones (2015) re-

ported results that may seem to contradict ours. Specifically, in one

study they found evidence that American women were able to

identify American faces from names at significantly above-chance

levels of accuracy. However, in a second study they failed to

replicate this result with a new set of British faces and participants,

leading the authors to conclude that they found no overall evidence

suggesting an association between names and faces. Notably, they

used a different methodology, presenting participants with two

faces that appeared with one name and asking, “Which of these individuals is named X?”

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspa0000076.pdf

As a 54 yr-old middle-aged man, I have a number of things which really grind my gears. However, after reading another thread on how to pronounce De Broglie, I have to let off some steam.

You Yanks are lovely people and I have an American colleague who is a good friend BUT...

What really grinds my gears is the way you guys pronounce the name of the artist Van Gogh. It is not "Van go" - that sounds like an advert for a bloody delivery van. The pronunciation is "Van Hoch" like coughing out a half eaten kebab.

Please get that right. IIRC, they don't pronounce the letter "G" so Greggs the bakers are not likely to be found in Holland.

Now your turn. What really grinds your gears?

I can program my computer to do recursive thinking. In fact, if I compile a piece of code, my computer is going to think about the optimal way to compile it so it has to think less while executing the program afterwards.

 

My thermostat prefers a specific room temperature, so by your definition, it is self-aware.

 

If you define fear for me, I can program my computer to experience it. I can e.g. set it up to run regular virus scans to avoid a hard drive crash and take automatic backups to reduce the consequences, if you want to define "fear" as "taking precautions to avoid something undesirable" or as "reducing risk".

I have just returned to this thread after endless late nights at school. However, can you program a computer to think about the past, reflect on it and consider the best past of action for the future? Can you program a computer to have a sense of being on a historical timeline as a unique individual? If you can, then the computer ceases being a computer and you have created a humanoid robot. You chose the definition for fear in quite a clever way. What about fear as a rational or irrational response to past experience which creates the feeling of fear? If the choice is logical or illogical, which one will the robot choose?

 

 

We put phrases within phrases because we hold thoughts in memory; thus we have language and a sense of a past self. We are aware that we are thinking about what someone else is thinking; on this awareness we build a sense of self and the ability to be deceptive or to act on shared belief. Recursion gives us the ability to mentally travel in time. It is fundamental to the evolution of technology: Human beings are the only animals that have been observed to use a tool to make a tool. Looking at human language and thought, psychologist Corballis finds recursion within recursion.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/page2/the-uniqueness-of-human-recursive-thinking

 

 

I don't understand your assertion, in my experience other living creatures have some part of the extraneous stuff you talk about. Humans might have more of it but it is just a matter of degree and not one of type. I would expect a self aware robot to have them as well...

I agree that there might be a spectrum of extraneous "stuff" but we seem to experience it as a part of our Facebook-style timeline that runs through our brains. Animals do learn from past mistakes but I don't recall, in my limited reading, of any animal that considered its place in its unique timeline in the same way as humans. IIRC, a chimpanzee which was asked, by sign language, what it was thinking answered in sign language :"food".

A priori, nothing had to develop.

A posteriori, everything has had to develop, otherwise it would not be here today.

It may be a mystery to you, but that doesn't make it a mystery to scientists. There are plenty of animals that employ language with different levels of complexity. The "consciousness" part is fuzzy without proper definition. My computer knows its own serial number, name and IP-address and is able to perform self-diagnostics, so who's to say it is not conscious?

I won't debate First Cause argument. However, something capable of creating matter is not made of matter. By consciousness, I mean recursive thinking. I take it your computer does not pause to think about its thoughts. I would also hypothesise that few animals are able to access recursive thinking in a conscious human way. Btw, it is still a mystery how consciousness evolved:

 

The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking

The ability to think about thinking may be the critical attribute that distinguishes us from all other species

Michael Corballis

A dog chasing his tail has nothing on the human race. Recursion—a process that calls itself, or calls a similar process—may be a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. In the human mind, recursion is actually much more complex than the notion of returning to the same place over and over. We put phrases within phrases because we hold thoughts in memory; thus we have language and a sense of a past self. We are aware that we are thinking about what someone else is thinking; on this awareness we build a sense of self and the ability to be deceptive or to act on shared belief. Recursion gives us the ability to mentally travel in time. It is fundamental to the evolution of technology: Human beings are the only animals that have been observed to use a tool to make a tool. Looking at human language and thought, psychologist Corballis finds recursion within recursion.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/3/3/300/

 

For centuries philosophers, scientists, and lay people alike have assumed consciousness to be the most distinctive feature of human nature. Despite the power of that assumption the workings of consciousness continue to elude understanding. In recent years a number of influential scientists and philosophers have challenged the primacy of consciousness, dismissing it as a superficial byproduct of evolution, or even an entirely irrelevant factor in human cognition. The author draws on his own theory of the origins of the modern mind and presents the cultural and neuronal forces that power human modes of awareness. The author proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a supercomplex form of matter (the brain) with the symbolic web of culture to form a distributed cognitive network. Using evidence from brain and behavioral studies the author further explains how an expansion of conscious capacity was the key to the revolutionary development of consciousness. Additionally, the cognitive foundations of self-evaluation and self-reflection are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record © 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2001-06841-000

 

Rules of TaxonomyEvery known living organism on Earth is classified and named by a set of rules. Those rules are used by all scientists around the planet. The names are called scientific names, not common names. Common names are the ones you might use when talking with your friends. You call your pet a dog or a cat (the common name). Scientists call those animals by a set of several names like Canis familiarus. That's a dog.

 

Scientific NamesScientific names follow a specific set of rules. Scientists use a two-name system called a Binomial Naming System. Scientists name animals and plants using the system that describes the genus and species of the organism. The first word is the genus and the second is the species. The first word is capitalized and the second is not. A binomial name means that it's made up of two words (bi-nomial). Humans are scientifically named Homo sapiens. You may also see an abbreviation of this name as H. sapiens where the genus is only represented by the first letter.

 

TaxonomyThe taxonometric way of classifying organisms is based on similarities between different organisms. A biologist named Carolus Linnaeus started this naming system. He also chose to use Latin words.

 

Taxonomy used to be called Systematics. That system grouped animals and plants by characteristics and relationships. Scientists looked at the characteristics (traits) that each organism had in common. They used the shared derived characteristics of organisms. Scientists were then able to find the common ancestry of the organisms. So if you had a nose, scientists would trace back all creatures that had a nose. Then they thought that you were related to them (because you all had noses). Organisms are now organized by a combination of observable traits and genetics, not one superficial trait (like a nose).

http://www.biology4kids.com/files/studies_taxonomy.html

Let me absolutely clear on my stance here so there is no doubt. I believe in a Creator who created and then allowed his Creation to develop by putting onto place Laws of the Universe (known and unknown). I do not believe that this Creative Energy/Intelligence is a man. There is no "human" emotion involved, nor is there permanent meddling in human affairs. This is my own particular worldview which takes into account my present level of ignorance. However, there are several aspect of the Creation which I wanted to question because, inevitably, consciousness and language HAD to develop. Emotions and the sheer bloody irrationality of humans (witness behaviour at a roundabout in the UK) also had to arrive but where is the hard evidence? Now my cards are on the table, I can respond to the answers that were given by you guys.

You are putting the cart before the horse. It is obvious that consciousness developed first. Consciousness must have some evolutionary advantage. Even my cat shows what this advantage is: he knows that when he scratches the door I will let him in. So he knows what the consequences of his behaviour is. It makes no sense to ask why we are not robots: we are further developments of conscious animals.

 

Not necessarily Eise. You offered no links or papers but my first search yielded the following hypothesis:

 

Co-Evolution of Human Consciousness and Language

Abstract: This article recalls Cajal's brief mention of consciousness in the Textura as a function of the human brain quite distinct from reflex action, and discusses the view that human consciousness may share aspects of “animal awareness” with other species, but has its unique form because humans possess language. Three ingredients of a theory of the evolution of human consciousness are offered: the view that a précis of intended activity is necessarily formed in the brain of a human that communicates in a human way; the notion that such a précis constitutes consciousness; and a new theory of the evolution of human language based on the mirror system of monkeys and the role of communication by means of hand gestures as a stepping-stone to speech.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2001.tb05717.x/full

 

Maybe there are none. Where are the building blocks for text processing in your PC? The capability for certain behaviour does not mean that the behaviour itself lies in the genes.

I do not agree with you here. There has to be, IMO, a genetic predisposition to human behaviours and emotions that are then shaped and selected by the environment.

Another link for you to think about:

 

The other main way in which the effects of genes and the environment collide is via so-called gene-environment interaction. This describes the situation whereby genes influence a person's susceptibility to environmental risk. For example, there is an accumulating body of evidence that variation in the gene encoding the serotonin transporter might modulate the extent to which depression occurs as a consequence of exposure to adverse experiences such as stressful life events and childhood maltreatment. Rutter argues persuasively that gene-environment interactions of this sort are likely to be common and that we must take this into account in our research.

Thus, genes are not deterministic and they do not `cause' behaviours or psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia in any direct way. Rather their effects on behaviour are indirect and mediated to a considerable extent via the environment. The challenge now is to delineate gene-environment interplay more widely and to begin to determine the causal pathways - biochemical, cellular and cognitive - that mediate psychiatric and behavioural phenotypes. There seems little doubt that this is the most promising approach to developing a scientific understanding of psychiatric disorders, but it will require increasing multidisciplinary collaboration and, particularly for geneticists and psychosocial researchers, not only to talk the same language, but also to work together. Fortunately, there are signs that this is happening.

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/189/2/192.short

I will admit that this is a complicated matter where scientific knowledge is rather incomplete.

Reducing? I am not aware of that. And what evidence do you want? If some trait of an animal exists now, there must at least have been some evolutionary advantage for it. So consciousness must have been such an advantageous trait. I know it is more complicated than this, but at least conscious animals exist for such a long time, that it must have some advantage.

Maybe I did not express my point clearly, but are there genes for empathy? I don't know but psycopaths seem to survive quite well without empathy. and have a huge survival advantage certainly in developed society and maybe in the battlefield but these are my opinions from what I have read.

You are asking for reason, for a rationale of not being a robot. Your original formulation:

So I introduced Mother Nature as exaggeration of your 'why' question.

Newton:

Newton explained according to which laws of nature works. Not why it works as it does.

I suspect that you are dodging the issue by referring to the hypothetico deductive model. So you say that Newton described how an apple fell to the ground in a rectilinear path but not why? Semantic obfuscation Eise - semantic obfuscation!

 

The above two (2) statements got my attention ......... and I'se just had to respond to them, to wit:

 

Now the reason for the evolving of the physical attributes of "consciousness and language" in most every one of the higher animal species ....... just might be claimed or considered by some people to be "two of the greatest mysteries in the world" ...... but not by me because I do not consider either one to be "mysterious" in the why or how of their origin ........ simply because me thinks both of them are rooted in "survival of the fittest" and/or "survival of the species".

 

I stand by my original statement in the absence of any scientific evidence to the contrary. Consciousness to a human level and also evolution of language present a mystery to scientists.

 

And who is Mother Nature? Well "DUH", ...... "Mother Nature" is simply nothing more than a "catch-all" name that defines, describes and/or denotes the functioning of "the science of the natural world".

 

And I will be happy to tell you who ....... "Old Man Winter" ..... and "Jack Frost" is, ..... iffen you ask.

 

Sam, give me one paper on Mother Nature and how Mother Nature has performed experiments to reach one objective truth. Call it what you want, it is a whimsical notion. Why not just call it Santa Clause?

No offence meant against the OP. However, I do worry at the crap we are given under the guise of journalism. This is not news and not worthy of being called news. This is as gossipy as saying that JayZ is a member of OTO. Who cares either way. My main worry is that agencies such as Sky news are reporting on events as news before they happen and decide, in an editorial fashion, to shape our opinions through a biased worldview. This is the hidden danger beneath the 90% of gossip bulls**t broadcast as news in this country, and probably in America.

To the title of your thread: we are robots. We are also bodies that behave exactly the same when forces act on us: e.g. we fall just the same as stones. So what?

 

The point was to say that purely rational behaviour (as exemplified by the Gradgrind character in Dicken's novel) could not achieve survival advantage by consciously utilising rationality. It was to say that we had extraneous human "stuff" that gives us an advantage in survival and that the basis of that behaviour must have a genetic origin. Where are the genes for empathy, compassion, higher emotions, altruism? Surely these factors are just as important as rationality. The genetic basis of factors other than rationality made me post in this thread.

 

 

But we are very complex robots. It turns out that this complexity leads to phenomena like consciousness, language, science, and free will. The 'why-question' is silly. It obviously once was evolutionary advantageous to develop consciousness and the capability to anticipate the consequences of ones actions. The rest is history.

Where is your evidence? Show me some papers and some links. You are dismissing humanity to the complexity argument. Remember, phenotype selects genotype.

 

Why do you think evolution would lead to a rational 'end product'?

Bacteria and archaebacteria have survived superbly well without feelings. Insects abound throughout the Earth. Avian species seem to do well without the need to cry when they see injustice and they are complex individuals. Rationally, we did not need the humaneness - we could have reproduced, produced children with superb survival and hunting skills, like lions on two legs,and lived in small tribes like the lions but we did not. Why not?

 

We developed from 'lower' animals, and evolution has to work with the material it has. Mother nature is not just sitting and thinking what the best design for a survival machine would be. So our ancestors already had consciousness (they can picture their environment, see their place in it, and anticipate the consequences of their actions), and so we have. We added just language and culture to it.

 

Two of the greatest mysteries in the world, consciousness and language dismissed by some throw away lines. Who is Mother Nature by the way? There is no Mother Nature according to your argument. It should be survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw. Ruthless and blind. Completely random and selecting by predation, disease, starvation and natural events. You cannot add Mother Nature to this argument. We are discussing cold, hard science here.

 

The 'why question' is not a scientific one. (So this topic should be moved to philosophy.) The 'how question' would be, but I am wondering if you are interested in that question?

I think the "why?" and "how?" questions are both salient here. Millions saw the apple fall from the tree but Newton questioned "why?".

jimmydasaint asked these 3 questions:

 

The simple answer is, the word “robot” refers to a person (or a machine) that behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner ……. which is contrary to your stated “reasoned self interest” requirement. Robots are “programmable” mechanical devices with limited information storage capacity …….. whereas the human brain/mind is a biological “self-programming” super computer with pretty much unlimited information storage capacity (brain neurons and synaptic connections).

 

Hi Sam. AFAIK, Artificial Intelligence exponents claim that machines could achieve self-consciousness but have not offered a final date. Nevertheless my point was not literal but to emphasise that, IMHO, reasoning alone cannot provide enough phenotypic advantage to the survival of the species. Are we justified in thinking that genes for emotion and nurturing are also selected for by Natural Selection events? Most contributors who answered the OP see tribal behaviour and community formations to be favoured as a survival mechanism. Are there genes selected for these particular behaviours? I don't know but would love to see some evidence of survival success as a direct result of the genetically driven phenotypes of love, compassion and empathy. I am sure there must be some modelling or other evidence somewhere.

 

 

The literal fact is, ……. “We are what our environment nurtured us to be”. It is also a literal fact that a newly birthed human does not possess any of your afore stated feelings (emotions) simply because they are nurtured (learned) via environmental stimuli the child is subjected to. Monotheism religious believers are NOT “born” religious believers, ……… they are “nurtured” to be religious believers who were nurtured to believe by their parent(s) and/or guardians.

 

If this is true, then there is no genetic basis for feelings, belief and emotions. I think you may have contradicted yourself.

”Yes”, several other priorities which are referred to as “inherited survival instincts” which are of higher priority than the environmentally nurtured traits and attributes. But, depending on the environmental nurturing one is subjected to, ……. the priority status of said inherited instincts can be altered to suit the person’s lifestyle.

 

I have been trained (as a former scientist) to appreciate the theory that the phenotype (feature characteristic, instincts) is selected by the environment and then the success of the genome is transmitted via reproduction until it becomes more widespread and ubiquitous - I am not trying to teach my granny to suck eggs here, I just wanted to foster debate. Any links to evidence would be most welcome.

Are you assuming that a robot that achieves consciousness ( self- aware and able to reason/learn ) would not have this extraneous human stuff ?

Yes I am. I am looking at the present and only in the present at the moment. To be honest I do prescribe to Prof Penrose's theory about the limitations of AI. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/schneider20160322

What you refer to as extraneous human stuff is simply an expression of the instinctive drives utilising the human skill set.

And where do instincts evolve from? Why do they evolve? I don't know, but I hope you can help me out here.

 

Why do you think that feelings of love, empathy, compassion, distress, despair, and happiness have nothing to do with survival?

Would it not make sense to be a Terminator-like machine which senses its environment and acts accordingly to ensure its own survival at all costs? Showing philanthropic behaviour seems to be a waste of time at an individual level.

 

 

These are the things that make us human. They are some of the most important things we evolved to make us so successful. I'm sure many other animals have them to some degree, but it's our advance in these areas that's one of the most important reasons for our survival. One theory suggests that it's our more advanced use of culture that caused the extinction of neanderthals.

All these things give rise to greater social bonding which is one of our greatest survival tactics.

You only need to look at other apes and elephants for example to realise that we're not alone in having all these emotions.

Emotions are the primary drivers for actions in a social context.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social bonding and social interactions require emotional empathy etc...The question is, do we need emotions to survive? If we meet people who are high performing autistic, the skillful among them mimic empathy. People who are psychopaths mimic love and empathy but don't feel it. Psychopaths seem to be expert survivors with a superb self interest. Why did we not all become supreme psychopaths? Conscience and guilt seem to be unusual add-ons as emotions and seem unnecessary to survival. http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.ht

This is not a literary discussion but a question that arises in my mind about the extra "stuff" that makes us humans.

Having just read "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/786

one of the major characters is a man of reason called Gradgrind, who believes that facts and figures are solely what is required to turn out a well-rounded individual who has reasoning capacities.

One of his quotes is as follows:

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6751955-hard-times-for-these-times

 

Towards the end of this proto-Socialist exposition, Gradgrind gets a tough reminder that humans cannot live on facts alone by his own daughter whose life has been ruined by parental insistence on pure reason:

“How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said Louisa as she touched her heart.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6751955-hard-times-for-these-times

Don't species have other priorities, for example, survival, rather than wasting time with all this other extraneous human stuff?

The question is, why did Natural Selection (and Genetic Drift) not cause humans just to function in a reasoned self interest in the same way as a robot?

Why do we have feelings of love, of empathy, of compassion of being upset, being happy, being blue?

Don't species have other priorities, for example, survival, rather than wasting time with all this other extraneous human stuff?

Without giving the answer away, see if you understand the following and think what is meant by an allele in terms of gene sequence:

Rev Immunogenet. 1999;1(2):157-76.

Molecular typing for the MHC with PCR-SSP.

Welsh K¹, Bunce M.

Abstract

Sequence-specific amplification (SSP) is simply a form of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which involves designing one or both primers so that they will or will not allow amplification (the 3'-mismatch principle). Its origins are probably legion, i.e. many people probably thought of it at the same time. For example, in 1988 a group from Guy's Hospital, London, described a form of SSP for HLA-DR4 detection and in the same year a group from Upjohn described its use at the American Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI). Both are published in abstract form (British Society of Rheumatology and ASHI). The 3'-mismatch principle can be used to identify virtually any single nucleotide point mutation (SNP) within one or two PCR-SSP reactions and the first peer-reviewed statements of this came in 1989 (1, 2). Thus, although the use of SSP probably began around 1990, it was 5 years before its popularity erupted, mainly due to the work of Olerup & Zetterquist (3, 4), who defined its potential for solid organ transplantation. It is now the method of choice for high resolution HLA typing in many laboratories. In addition, over a thousand applications for genes outside the MHC are in the literature.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11253945

Ed, this philanthropic work is certainly a superb addition to field tools for, IMO, one of the biggest problems in developing nations, which is diagnosis of communicable disease. I love the cheap and easy solution. The problems I can see with the device are twofold. Firstly, what is the maximum acceptable fluid volume which can be centrifuged on one disc?. Also, there is the problem of stability as it spins and how samples can be attached to the disc. I suppose these are not insuperable problems and can be solved with a bit of trial and error. Great find!

Who said there was no room for instrumental music? Probably no-one. Nevertheless, this kicks ass!

What caused the temperature dip between 2013-14 (if I have read it correctly)? Can we influence the dip by replicating conditions in a model system?

Growing up in Glasgow, as a young schoolboy I was told about shoplifting tricks from a friend who was part of a shoplifting group in the school, who would attend until lunch time, take orders for trousers, jackets etc... and steal them in the afternoon for delivery next morning at school, to be sold at discount prices. Quite good customer service really. I cannot tell you any of the tricks as I would be encouraging the breaking of laws.

Nevertheless, I take the point that mistakes could be made and that the implicit honesty of the shopper is relied upon.

Pure coincidence I am sure....

Precise language minimizes confusion among those who speak it, but often magnifies confusion among those new to the topic.

 

It's a bit like math. Symbols mean very specific things. If you don't understand the symbols, it feels impenetrable and foggy, but when you do understand the symbols then their use allows the content to be clear, crisp, and quickly comprehended.

 

It paradoxically takes more words to explain things to people with more limited vocabularies.

Are there concepts which are too difficult to explain to a layman (except for mathematical concepts)? I don't know the answer. However, I would say that there are situations where there are two levels of explanations. For example, most people on this forum could probably write a manual for a car, a fridge-freezer or a computer without the understanding of how any of them works in detail. IMO,

I would posit that most phenomena are explicable, although some need words and others need a diagram. Think of explaining an electromagnetic wave to someone as opposed to drawing a representation of an EM wave on a piece of paper.

It is a skill to recognise which mode to use and when. My ethos is to speak in the language of the listener, otherwise you might as well stay slilent. If a subject can't be expressed in layman's language I think it's better to just say that it can't be expressed in such terms without losing something important.

 

I can go along with these comments. It does get difficult when we speak to children though, especially when their heads are so full of questions.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/design/electronics/calculationsrev1.shtml