Your message was perhaps one of the strangest pieces of email I have ever received. Although it is flattering to have a ``fan club'', in fact, it is a very bad idea. Unlike most of human society, science and engineering are based on the idea that each of us is capable of evaluating evidence and thinking on our own. Each of us can do experiments, work out the reasoning, and determine the truth for ourselves. There is no room in science or engineering for ``fans'' representing group approval over individual thought. One of my heros, Galileo, put it very well:
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
I am pleased to talk with people about matters of science or engineering, so you and your colleagues may certainly send me mail. I hope to learn as much from your experiences as you may learn for me. But please get rid of the ``cult of personality'' way of thinking. It is unscientific and ultimately destructive.
>>184
When internet communities are formed, nearly the first thing that is implemented is to remove anonymity, to make truthful registration as mandatory as possible. This is because of the aptly named Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which observes that rude behavior normally unacceptable in polite society is inversely related to how non-anonymous users are. Not surprisingly, most people assume this means anonymity is a bad thing, and take every step they can to punish users who do not adhere their personal conversation etiquette.
A few people question this conclusion. A very few try out the alternative. So what happens when all censorship, including self-censorship, is removed? Chaos? Jackassery? Well, yeah.
I think I like non-anonymous boards better. All that anonymity and free speech brought 4chan is endless conspiracy theories, (too much) porn, spam and hatred.
>>192
I just sent him an e-mail asking him how I could achieve happiness, he has not yet responded and I don't expect him to.
Name:
Anonymous2011-08-23 12:26
Send him an erotic fanfic with main chars replaced by Julie and the snake.
Name:
Anonymous2011-08-23 12:32
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. In questions of sex, the force of a thousand suns is worth the powerful cumshot of a single individual
Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface.
A mammalian neuron takes about ten milliseconds to respond to a stimulus. A driver can respond to a visual stimulus in a few hundred milliseconds, and decide an action, such as making a turn. So the computational depth of this behavior is only a few tens of steps. We don’t know how to make such a machine, and we wouldn’t know how to program it.
The human genome — the information required to build a human from a single, undifferentiated eukariotic cell — is about 1GB. The instructions to build a mammal are written in very dense code, and the program is extremely flexible. Only small patches to the human genome are required to build a cow or a dog rather than a human. Bigger patches result in a frog or a snake. We don’t have any idea how to make a description of such a complex machine that is both dense and flexible.
New design principles and new linguistic support are needed. I will address this issue and show some ideas that can perhaps get us to the next phase of engineering design.
Name:
Anonymous2011-08-23 12:55
Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Richard Stallman are the only founding directors still active on the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).