Profile for Student of Trinity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Student of Trinity |
| Member number | 3431 |
| Title | Electric Sheep One |
| Postcount | 3335 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| G3 Dialog options and plot line in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 11:33
Profile
Hmm, I could certainly buy that Lankan found that he actually had a lot more to rebel over than just the latest batch of rogues. He could well argue that a jumped-up apprentice clearing out the spawners was a fluke, and that the unworthiness of the Shapers to rule remained proven. I don't remember the dialog exactly now, and the files are on another machine, but I think they must not have made these kinds of points explicitly, or even hinted at them, or I wouldn't have felt disappointed. As to spawners being terrorist: how much do we actually see of their rogues killing serviles? I don't remember finding any big heaps of servile corpses around. Some servile casualties would of course be inevitable, since the Shapers surround themselves with serviles. And serviles are frightened of rogues, so the rogue incursions do traumatize them. But it never occurred to me that the Rebels' spawners were targeting serviles. I assumed that the serviles fled when rogues took over a zone. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 11:11
Profile
To some extent I'm a professional entropist, meaning that I'm doing research on it. It would be funny stuff, if it were stuff. A lot of confusion has been created by interpretations for lay people that call entropy a measure of disorder, remark about how bedrooms accumulate clutter spontaneously, and leave it at that. Entropy is indeed a measure of disorder, but disorder doesn't have a unique definition any more than order does, and there are many possible measures of it. Thus entropy is not just anything that strikes our common sense as disorder. Entropy is also something that can be quite unambiguously measured, in a way that has nothing to do with deciding how to define disorder. Or at least, changes in entropy can be measured, which are all that matter. Monitor something's temperature while it changes from one state to another; at the same time measure its heat output (counting intake as negative output). "Changing state" here could mean melting, or burning, or dissolving, or cooling down, or crumbling, or whatever. The time integral of the rate of heat output divided by temperature is the change in entropy. Entropies of formation for zillions of chemical compounds have been established empirically in this way, for example. We know pretty well how much entropy is created when you eat a hamburger. This definition of entropy is not obviously related to disorder or information, is it? The theory that the information-and-disorder entropy is the same as the heat-and-temperature entropy is part of the branch of physics called statistical mechanics. It was invented by Ludwig Boltzmann in the late 19th century. Thermodynamics really refers to the heat-and-temperature entropy, but it isn't very intuitive, so books for lay people tend to mention the disorder concept as if it were the only definition of entropy. This is unfortunate, because although it is absolutely clear that Boltzmann was onto something, and calculations based on his assumptions generally work, the role of information theory in physics is still uncertain as a matter of fundamental principle; while thermodynamics, a purely empirical subject, is in no doubt. Rightly emphasizing the solidity of thermodynamics can thus give a false impression of how clear everything is about information in physics. Intelligent Design advocates seem to be invoking information these days, with varying degrees of expertise in so doing. Some of them are definitely just confused enough to think that thermodynamics is a heavy club with which to clobber evolution. While I naturally applaud their assumption that physics trumps biology, this is quite wrong. Others do seem to be asking good questions about information and nature; unfortunately, as far as I can tell, even these have a sad tendency to believe they have answered those questions, when in fact they have at best done no more than raise them. I am interested in the physics of information, for reasons having nothing to do with evolution, so I would be delighted to learn some new perspectives on information. So far I haven't seen them in Intelligent Design. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 09:57
Profile
Ah, I see about Spetner. Thanks for the correction. I remain puzzled by the role information plays in his argument. If his point is only that macro-evolution has not been observed in nature, I don't see why he should bring up enzymes and information. He can surely just observe that nobody has seen a giraffe evolve. It seems to be the same point, if all he's saying is the observations haven't been made; the whole deal about information would be an irrelevant digression. And if he's saying more than that, if he's trying to find an information theoretic theorem against macro-evolution, then I don't see how his case can be sound, because whatever has actually been observed, there is no known natural law against the spontaneous appearance of new enzymes having abitrarily high Spetner information. Certainly the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not about that. I don't remotely have the time to read Spetner's book; but I bet I don't need to. His book probably spends most of its time explaining stuff with which I am quite familiar. I would be interested in a succinct summary of his argument. These links seem to be commentaries, rather than expositions. As to the other: observations are not theorems; if you call something a theorem, you should be proving it by logic. The only arguments provided in the article linked were observations about human communication. The claim that the "theorems" apply to forms of information relevant to biology was unsupported, as far as I could see. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 05:03
Profile
I'm afraid the first link starts well, but when it reaches my point about the inadequacy of Shannon information to measure biological complexity, it tries to defy my assertion that nobody has done anything useful to provide the relevant substitute. I think it fails, in that it goes on for some pages, but none of this further content is any good. The article pulls a dozen "theorems" out of the air, without proving them. They are all based on using the term "information" in the context of human communication. But as the article has just noted in criticizing the Shannon formula, the term "information" can mean many things, ranging from mere length of a random signal, to conscious intent. When everyone agrees that life forms are full of information, they do mean something more sophisticated than Shannon information, but they do not necessarily mean anything as anthropomorphic as the "information" that is discussed in this article. The only link this article provides between the "information" referred to in its "theorems" and the "information" in biology is the fact that the same word can be used for both. But this is mixing up codes, in a way that the article's author ought to know enough to avoid. The second article also uses "information" in a funny way. There is an assertion that random mutations could not produce an enzyme that never existed before on Earth. My reaction is, Why the hell not? There is no reason at all to say this; a brand new enzyme would be perfectly possible. And if you use a definition of information, whereby the appearance of a new enzyme constitutes new information, then information can certainly increase. The error here seems to me to be like one a gambler might make. The gambler reads a theorem that random shuffling can never increase the information content in the order of a deck of cards. But the gambler also knows that, if he does get dealt a full house, the chance of an opposing hand beating his goes down dramatically. And he knows enough information theory to quantify this advantage; it can be expressed precisely as an increase in information, and this is a reasonable thing to do if you are technically sophisticated gambler. So the gambler concludes that it must be impossible to get dealt a full house, no matter how many bazillions of hands you play. But this is ridiculous. The gambler's error is that the information content of the full house hand, as a product of dealing, is a completely different concept from its information content as a basis for poker strategy. Both are reasonable, but confusing them is not. Spetner makes the same kind of confusion when he estimates, reasonably enough, the information value of the specificity of an enzyme, but then concludes that random production of the enzyme would be impossible. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Belisarius Is The World's Biggest Noob in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 03:00
Profile
Given the size of the noob demographic, the world's biggest noob would get rich from endorsements. Imagine the mugshot above your favorite marketing slogan ... "Think DIFRINT!!! :eek: :mad: :P " -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Playing on Torment in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 02:04
Profile
Just his subconscious trying to tell him, in the most emphatic way it can think of, that choosing an evil monkey to be his dentist might have been a mistake. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Why is this? in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 02:01
Profile
Hey, could we get a stat for "total number of posts in topics started by member"? This would be at least a rough measure of how well people do at entertaining the masses by initiating popular discussions. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Thursday, June 1 2006 01:52
Profile
What is this argument about information and evolution? There's probably something very interesting to be said (which probably has already been said by lots of people and I just haven't heard yet). But what I have heard so far elsewhere, in the way of arguments against evolution from information, has been based on gross ignorance of both information theory and thermodynamics, and hasn't been interesting at all. The basic problem is, that "information" as it was quantified by Claude Shannon, and as it is related to thermodynamic entropy via statistical mechanics, has nothing whatever to do with meanings of signals, or with causal consequences of signals. It is simply a measure of how long the string of symbols would be, if it were efficiently compressed. The human genome is a fraction of the size of the onion genome, so if evolution with information loss is okay, then humans can evolve from onions. The point of course is that genome size is not the point. It is obvious that in some important sense humans are vastly more complicated than onions. The trouble is that nobody has ever succeeded in saying much more than that. Whatever this crucial kind of complexity may be, we know of no natural laws that forbid it to increase spontaneously. The difference between humans and onions does not seem to be a matter of entropy, and it is only entropy that tends to increase. And, of course, it is only the total entropy of a closed system that is forbidden to decrease by thermodynamics. There is no trouble whatever, from thermodynamics, in having a subsystem lose entropy by expelling it into its environment. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| My God can beat up your God! in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, May 31 2006 12:26
Profile
I believe that Muhammed being "the seal of the prophets" means that there can be no more prophets in Islam. But among the sayings attributed to Muhammed outside the Quran are prophecies of a messiah-like figure, the Mahdi ("guided"), who is to fill the Earth with peace and justice before the day of judgement. [ Wednesday, May 31, 2006 12:27: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Tweaking G3 in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, May 31 2006 11:57
Profile
That Icy Touch attack that drops you to 2 AP every other round, that's deadly. I think it's too deadly for a Thahd Shade or the Frozen Blade. Otherwise, an interesting idea. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| G3 Dialog options and plot line in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Wednesday, May 31 2006 11:43
Profile
Yeah, Lankan is frustrating. That situation is one that it looks as though you should be able to resolve peacefully, after killing all the rogues. But the dialogue options never let you do so, nor do they ever provide a good reason for things not working out even after the rogues are gone. It could be plausible that Lankan is power-mad or that Litalia put some longer-lasting charm on him. But somebody should mention this, at some point. One difference between the Shapers and the Rebels is that the Rebel leaders are all either canister-mad or inhuman. So it might make sense that your conversations with them are more limited. But I agree that you should at least be able to state your case, even if this then brought irrational responses. On the other hand, what is so wrong with the Rebel means? They make spawners to attack Shaper settlements, but Shaper settlements do seem to support the Shaper regime fairly directly. What should they be doing instead? -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, May 30 2006 21:56
Profile
I think Alec is right to point out that this story of Colonel Whittlesey and Psalm 91 is awfully bad theology. I'm tempted to call it 'voodoo religion', but that would be smearing voodoo (and I don't want to have to give good rum to Baron Samedi). But I'd bet a beer that the story is sheer hooey. It's probably outright fiction, but it might be that Whittlesey commanded a rear echelon unit that would only need moderate luck to avoid casualties. Googling turns up only a few references with no more detail, on sites that are less than impressive as historical sources. Whereas other stories of supernatural intervention in WWI once circulated widely, and their spread has been studied by historians. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, May 30 2006 12:09
Profile
Kurt Gödel, of Incompleteness fame, made some sophisticated variant of Anselm's Ontological Proof. I have discovered a marvelous exposition of this theorem, but unfortunately this post is too small to contain it. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Peer Review Process (was Evolution Stuff (was What is Religion, exactly?)) in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, May 30 2006 11:30
Profile
I'm not sure what Alec means by 'gnosis' or 'received truth'. I interpret his 'gnosis (received truth)' as belief on authority of a source, the way many people believe what they read in the New York Times because they trust the Times. If this is the sort of thing he means, I concede that it's frequently absurd, but I suggest that sometimes respect for a source can be wisdom based on experience. I'm also not sure what he means by "wisdom - gained through experience". But I very much like the appearance of "wisdom" in a discussion like this, precisely because to me it is imprecise. Invoking wisdom seems to me to be claiming that some decision-making processes can still be good ones even though explaining why they are good is extremely hard. For instance, I count scientific empiricism as this kind of wisdom. Strictly speaking, as Hume pointed out, past performance is no guarantee of future results: the fact that an experiment has been replicated a million times simply does not prove logically that it won't fail the next time, or the next million times. Nevertheless, if you aren't convinced that a millionfold replicated experiment has established a fact of nature, then in my book you're a fool. But if one insists on asking why I take this attitude, I think you'd have to say I have a prior belief in the regularity of the universe ... a belief which would seem to be 'gnostic' in Alec's scheme. I have a suspicion bordering on conviction (I can't say whether gnosis or logos) that the foundations of a rational outlook are themselves necessarily non-rational. In my kind of jargon: Bayes' Rule never tells you the priors. And to me one of the wisest pre-rational priors is a realistic doubt of one's own power and understanding. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Broken Vlish: a too long analysis in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Tuesday, May 30 2006 10:33
Profile
I too have been a Vlish fan from the git go. I was keen on them in G1 just because they were unique, and discovered it paid off well. In G2 and G3 my Shapers always eventually trade up to Gazers, but in the third tier they only add a pair of Glaahks to a team of Vlish. The only complaint I've ever had with Vlish is that when you first get them they often run out of energy before they run out of enemies. Their tentacle-to-tentacle attack is not bad, but it takes time for them to run up and engage, and once in close quarters they are vulnerable. Once they level a bit their energy rises until this isn't a problem. But perhaps it would be another way to rein in Vlish, to limit their energy more. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ghosts of Stalin in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Monday, May 29 2006 14:33
Profile
TM, please define "solvency". The way you use it seems to be jargon. I was a post-doc in theoretical physics at Los Alamos National Lab, Universitaet Innsbruck, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and MIT, in that order over ten years. LANL and Innsbruck wouldn't count as the top of the pyramid except in some narrow fields, but I was there working in those. Everybody circulates around, giving seminars and going to conferences, so you gradually visit all of the major centers or get to know the people from them; academia was globalized long ago. After the three years at MIT I finally landed a faculty job, but if that hadn't come through I was looking at law school. Ten years as a post-doc is unusually long, and definitely too long. On the other hand in physics the pay is decent and no-one ever tells you what to do. [ Monday, May 29, 2006 14:34: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ghosts of Stalin in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 14:11
Profile
TM, will you ever get the self-confidence to discuss anything without trying to frighten people into leaving you alone? I'm not trying to pin anything on you, and I'd be very surprised if your ideas fell apart without their props of jargon and abuse. They might not be unchallengable, but nobody's are. I do not in fact gather what your viewpoint is, except that it is extremely anti-capitalist. That leaves a wide range of possibilities. I do not, for example, know what you mean by "the issue of solvency". I will readily confess to horrible ignorance; would you mind explaining yourself more simply? You see, I've spent a good ten to fifteen years, depending on how you count it, at the very top of the world's academic pyramid. It is clear that my own long-term niche is a notch or two down from there. But if you're not making yourself clear to me, I'm afraid you're not making yourself clear. I say this with quite the opposite intent than to intimidate or condescend. Quite a few people on these boards can say as much, or will be able to in time, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if you were among them. What I am saying is that the intellectual big leagues are much friendlier places than the schoolyard scrum you seem to fear, and you can well afford to unbend, let your guard down, and lighten up. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| U CAN Touch This in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 13:01
Profile
Ya know, I have always felt that those displayed percentage chances were unreliable. Things that say they should be very rare nevertheless happen a lot, and conversely too. My observations were always anecdotal and emotionally biased, but maybe this one is finally a clear proof, since the chance of a real 1% chance coming off 11 times in a hundred is one in a few million, I believe. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Missile Conclusions. in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 12:45
Profile
Well, that at least means that the rule of attacking the last attacker isn't universal. It might not even be so dumb, since if the Drayk gave up chasing you to squish a Cryoa, he'd get another Searer. Smartest would just be to run away and try to ambush, but that would take a really hard AI, and you could argue the Drayk was too megalomaniacal to retreat. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Missile Conclusions. in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 12:04
Profile
Can you do it with two enemies, and get them to keep criss-crossing? It shouldn't be so hard to stop that sort of thing, but I guess it might be hard to do so without introducing other problems. I guess with Thahds it might be realistic, and the smart monsters generally all have ranged attacks, so it shouldn't be that bad. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Ghosts of Stalin in General | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 11:57
Profile
TM certainly doesn't have to defend Leninism, but maybe it would help if he said what he is defending. The elimination of private property? It's hard to make a good discussion out of kicking capitalism, because capitalism is generally defended the way Churchill defended democracy, as being the very worst possible system, except for all the others. So kicking it without an explicit alternative is sort of moot. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Missile Conclusions. in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 11:21
Profile
If that's true, it's lame. It should be fixed in G4 if at all possible, and if it's not possible, then herding Thahds into the arms of the Rotghroths would still be an unworthy engine abuse. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Missile Conclusions. in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 11:04
Profile
This is what I have been trying with my missile Guardian squad leader. As I reported, he's doing much better at keeping his creations alive than my previous attempts at squad leaders, which were based on melee Guardians. I don't think it's all about ancillary effects, because I haven't used that many, and I've still had a dramatic difference. I think it's that missile specialization makes you a lot more flexible in reacting when your creations get hurt. You can fling some crystals to clear out a mob, and when your missile skill is high they do the job. And you can help out any creation within range, instead of having to run across the battlefield. And if your creations are all missile launchers, then your also being a missile launcher means that you stay with them, where you can heal them easily, instead of charging ahead all the time. I used to think a forward melee Guardian would draw the enemies away from the creations, but that just doesn't seem to work, probably because getting your Guardian four or more AP ahead usually means charging without attacking. This not only wastes a round, it often makes enemies ignore your seemingly passive Guardian and attack your creations after all. A missile Guardian helps keep enemies away from creations by helping kill them before they get close, and this works better. The fact that missile attacks do generally do less damage than melee ones also helps creations, in a funny way: it gives them a use, to finish off things your Guardian can't quite kill. With a melee Guardian I seemed to be doing all the killing in person, so I kept putting skill points in Strength and Endurance instead of Intelligence or Shaping, and this made the comparative uselessness of my creations get steadily worse, until I abandoned them in disgust. BTW, I disavow credit for the disposable creations model. What I want and am trying is the opposite, a Guardian who looks after a few creations and keeps them so they get strong enough to keep pulling their weight -- just never nearly as strong as the Guardian himself. If you don't do this, I think freshly made Guardian creations will be so weak, as the game goes on, that they will do nothing but soak up one attack before dying. I admit that that might sometimes be handy, but even if it weren't distasteful, I think it would get boring quickly. And is the AI really dumb enough to pound harmless Thahds while a Guardian is pumping in Reapers from a few steps away? [ Sunday, May 28, 2006 11:18: Message edited by: Student of Trinity ] -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Strategy Central in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 06:01
Profile
Another fine service to the community. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |
| Shaping Item in Geneforge Series | |
|
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
|
written Sunday, May 28 2006 05:58
Profile
This post would have interested many people here if it had appeared in late March, 2005. I'm afraid you're a bit late. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00 |