X-Message-Number: 15292
References: <>
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 17:06:43 +0000
From: "Joseph Kehoe" <>
Subject: various

An interesting if off-topic story

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_gear.html

A robot developed at the University of South Florida has broken the
silicon-carbon barrier in a novel and, for some, a frightening way
  it eats organic material.


Also.

On Turing machines:

A Parallel Turing machine is provably no more powerful than a standard turing 
machine. i.e. A turing machine is as powerful as any parallel processor.

Also Neural nets that make and break connections and also add new neurons have 
been run in software  so s/ware NN can do all of that stuff.  So given that 
modelling individual neurons is within reach (5 years tops) and that making and 
breaking connections is also possible then - IN THEORY - we should be able to 
model then human brain soon-ish (decades)

I am unaware of any scientific theory that would disallow a complete modelling 
of a brain (even the hormonal interaction can be modelled easily enough).


On speed.  Silicon is already faster than neurons (which rely on chemical 
reactions and slowed down electrical connections).  Like all things evolved the 
brain is not the most efficient design possible (just the best we have seen) and
there is little reason to believe that we could not surpass it. On the whole it
would appear that there is much more reason to believe we can do it than we 
cannot.

Also of note from the list
They are in no particular order:

>Reading claims like this makes me wonder whether people who worry about
>"environmental damage" much harbor some misanthropic aesthetic prejudice.
>Although it may be presumptuous of me, living in California, to judge the
>quality of the _human_ environment in Australia, let's just see what the
>facts are, pulled from the entry about Australia on pp. 763-4 of the 2001
>edition of _The World Almanac and Book of Facts_:
>
>Population: 19 million (versus just a few thousand aborigines a couple
>centuries ago).
>
>Per capita GDP: US$21,200.
>
>Life Expectancy: 77.49 male, 83.48 female.
>
>Infant mortality: 4.97 per 1,000 live births (compared to 6.67 in the
>U.S.!).
>
>Sounds like a healthy, life-sustaining environment to me, especially since
>infant mortality is a good measure of the overall state of public health.
>The rest of the world should be so environmentally damaged.


yes but only if you are white.  The aborigines don't fare quite so well but I 
guess they don't really count.



>So I don't see why you take such a negative view of the bourgeois lifestyle
>the Europeans have introduced into Australia since the 18th Century CE.
>Okay, the original lumpen-Brits deported to Australia for their criminality
>might not have been all that efficient at wealth-creation.  But the better
>quality immigrants seem to have performed an economic and
>human-environmental miracle in what at one time by European standards looked
>like an unpromising wasteland.


Whats a lumpen-Brit? Hope you are not referring to the many Irish, Welsh, 
Scotish and English poor who were
deported by a corrupt system to somewhere it was hoped they would disappear.

They were as respoinsible for the wealth creation in Australia, they did the 
work as much
as the "better quality" (?) immigrants.


>You are of course aware that all over Europe, the number of children per
>female lifetime has fallen well below replacement level (as low as 1.2 in
>some nations). No centralized system was required to enforce this. People
>have chosen freely to have fewer children as their economic situation has
>improved in conjunction with lower child mortality rates--often enabled by
>capitalist regimes. Third-world nations also have seen sudden reductions
>in birth rates, as they pass through the "demographic transition" toward
>smaller families.


As the standard of living goes up the birth rate goes down.  High birth rates 
are due to
1. lack of education
2. lack of money (your children are your pension)
3. Certain cults, er I mean religions ;-)


>The United States produces a higher ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide than
>the global average, largely because its managed forests are a more
>efficient generator of oxygen than rain forests--known as "jungles" before
>they were romanticized--where decay processes cause oxidation. The US is
>in fact doing more than most nations to reduce global warming, purely as a
>result of its topography.

I am speechless.

>I submit that we should regard each human
>life as quite valuable, and praise those (who we call parents)
>who rescue people from non-existence.  In other words, abortion
>is bad because someone doesn't get to live---but it's not quite
>as bad as failing to conceive in the first place, for which a
>lot of us are guilty.

err...

I met some women at work today. Was it wrong of me not to have children with 
them (even if my wife- and they- would disapprove).
Should I have children by everyone I meet?....

My parents had six children - was that selfish of them? Should they not have 
stopped?


At the risk of being labeled a "hairy legged feminist" I think that the above 
ideas wouild appeal to us men more than women who actually have to bear the 
children!

Joseph.

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