AE Public Forum

Post by NoName
Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 05 2014,08:09)...
I thought there was no way they would miss the brainfacts.org link right under the illustration and in the text flow. Looks like I overestimated them, should have used bold type with arrows pointing to it with flashing graphic above and below to help them find the link.

If the illustration was from me then just like in school my name would be on it somewhere. I make sure to include that using a small fontsize to help indicate which ones came from me.
Now if you could only engage with matters of actual intellectual content in the same fashion, we might actually make some progress other than merely increasing the page count.

So how about it, Gary?  Are you prepared to clarify and justify 'molecular intelligence'?
Are you prepared to account for your misuse of the term 'learning' from Cognitive Science and Psychology?
Are you prepared to discuss whether or not a hippocampus is a sine qua non of "intelligent cause"?  What about antennae and sensillia?
Are you prepared to discuss the obvious difficulties for any biological entity that would store 'all possible paths' at each moment of time?
Are you prepared to justify your claim that your software in any way, shape, or form models anything from biology?  What are the properties that emerge from your software?  Where and how are your "three levels" represented in your code?
Etc.

Your "theory" and the alleged significance of your software have both been beaten into a fine pink mist long since dispersed by the breeze.  It's going to take a lot of effort to gather up the fractured bits and reassemble them into anything useful or interesting, but hey, it's your life, waste it as you please.  Just don't insist that we have to have to present something better or adopt your effluent.  Insofar as that is necessary, we merely present current Biology, Cognitive Science, and their related disciplines and sub-disciplines, none of which can benefit from anything you are up to.
As was once said about a co-worker in the "say something positive about the person" portion of an annual review:
'Well, he emits carbon dioxide, so he must be good for the trees'.
That's the sum total of the benefit you provide.
Well, that and the lulz.

Post by GaryGaulin
Quote (k.e.. @ April 04 2014,09:19)   Quote (NoName @ April 04 2014,16:22)     Quote (Jim_Wynne @ April 04 2014,09:12)       Quote (NoName @ April 03 2014,12:54)       Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,13:40)...
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
Gee, could it be the complete lack of attribution to some other source?  You know, one of those things that actual researchers, actual scientists, even people in the humanities, are expected to do when they use material they did not produce and that is not already in the public domain?
Even in those cases, attribution is usually given just to make completely clear who did what.
Oh, silly me -- that's why there's no attribution.  Making things clear is against your standard policies and behaviors.
Never mind.
In fairness to GG, and I missed it too, he does provide a link to the site where the image came from.
Fair enough, although that doesn't exactly meet any standard of adequate professionalism of which I am aware.
Certainly any of my professors would have punted a paper that included a link to a source without proper footnoting/referencing.  Links, especially from repetitive-link-posting-disorder victims such as Gary, are just not good enough.  IMNSHO ;-)
Gary has no ethical standards that provoke concern to him. The whole idea is more foreign than science to him. He's on a one man  mission to draw attention to his misery.
It looks to me like The Three Stooges arrived, to fix our science problem, nyuk nyuk nyuk.

I thought there was no way they would miss the brainfacts.org link right under the illustration and in the text flow. Looks like I overestimated them, should have used bold type with arrows pointing to it with flashing graphic above and below to help them find the link.

If the illustration was from me then just like in school my name would be on it somewhere. I make sure to include that using a small fontsize to help indicate which ones came from me.

Post by k.e..
Quote (NoName @ April 04 2014,16:22) Quote (Jim_Wynne @ April 04 2014,09:12)   Quote (NoName @ April 03 2014,12:54)   Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,13:40)...
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
Gee, could it be the complete lack of attribution to some other source?  You know, one of those things that actual researchers, actual scientists, even people in the humanities, are expected to do when they use material they did not produce and that is not already in the public domain?
Even in those cases, attribution is usually given just to make completely clear who did what.
Oh, silly me -- that's why there's no attribution.  Making things clear is against your standard policies and behaviors.
Never mind.
In fairness to GG, and I missed it too, he does provide a link to the site where the image came from.
Fair enough, although that doesn't exactly meet any standard of adequate professionalism of which I am aware.
Certainly any of my professors would have punted a paper that included a link to a source without proper footnoting/referencing.  Links, especially from repetitive-link-posting-disorder victims such as Gary, are just not good enough.  IMNSHO ;-)
Gary has no ethical standards that provoke concern to him. The whole idea is more foreign than science to him. He's on a one man  mission to draw attention to his misery.

Post by NoName
Quote (Jim_Wynne @ April 04 2014,09:12) Quote (NoName @ April 03 2014,12:54) Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,13:40)...
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
Gee, could it be the complete lack of attribution to some other source?  You know, one of those things that actual researchers, actual scientists, even people in the humanities, are expected to do when they use material they did not produce and that is not already in the public domain?
Even in those cases, attribution is usually given just to make completely clear who did what.
Oh, silly me -- that's why there's no attribution.  Making things clear is against your standard policies and behaviors.
Never mind.
In fairness to GG, and I missed it too, he does provide a link to the site where the image came from.
Fair enough, although that doesn't exactly meet any standard of adequate professionalism of which I am aware.
Certainly any of my professors would have punted a paper that included a link to a source without proper footnoting/referencing.  Links, especially from repetitive-link-posting-disorder victims such as Gary, are just not good enough.  IMNSHO ;-)

Post by Jim_Wynne
Quote (NoName @ April 03 2014,12:54) Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,13:40)...
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
Gee, could it be the complete lack of attribution to some other source?  You know, one of those things that actual researchers, actual scientists, even people in the humanities, are expected to do when they use material they did not produce and that is not already in the public domain?
Even in those cases, attribution is usually given just to make completely clear who did what.
Oh, silly me -- that's why there's no attribution.  Making things clear is against your standard policies and behaviors.
Never mind.
In fairness to GG, and I missed it too, he does provide a link to the site where the image came from.

Post by Driver
I posted that Byers comment to fstdt.com yesterday. It is not his first entry.

Post by Henry J
So, just tell him that other people don't have to stoop to his pathetic level of excuses...

Post by J-Dog
Quote (Driver @ April 02 2014,17:16) Quote (J-Dog @ April 02 2014,21:45) Quote (Driver @ April 01 2014,12:08)More from punchy writer and serial science article poster, Denyse O'Leary:

    Quote The wonderful thing about science is the way it promotes somnolent faith that the System is somehow churning out … what is that stuff it’s churning out just now anyway?

Clearly she is planning to embed the famous Monty Python sketch from "Life Of Brian" in a later post.

Well played indeed.

ETA: link
EWWWWW!

Driver - Dude!  How about a little warning - NSFB!!! (Not Safe For Brain).  I clicked on your link - expected to go to Life of Brian clip = Good.  

What I got was a link to UD = BAD!

EWWWW!
Sorry. Hope this is better:

Monty Python

Bonus
AHHHHHH YES!  Much better.  Gratias!

Post by keiths
At ENV, Denyse inadvertently comments on her "journalistic" career:
Quote Well, continuing failure can undermine funding too.

Post by NoName
Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,13:40)...
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
Gee, could it be the complete lack of attribution to some other source?  You know, one of those things that actual researchers, actual scientists, even people in the humanities, are expected to do when they use material they did not produce and that is not already in the public domain?
Even in those cases, attribution is usually given just to make completely clear who did what.
Oh, silly me -- that's why there's no attribution.  Making things clear is against your standard policies and behaviors.
Never mind.

Post by Jim_Wynne
Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,12:40) Quote (Jim_Wynne @ April 03 2014,12:01)   Quote (GaryGaulin @ April 03 2014,11:42)FYI

Forgive my not having time to feed thine pee contest trolls but I'm right in the middle of the IDLab version of
Spock's Brain. I must get back to work on him. So many neurons to account for! Or sort of anyway.

I successfully transplanted the new Grid Network into the IDLab4 critter. It's Attract and Repel location behavior is now excellent. The tan color circle+dot (showing where it's internal world model location is at) heads straight for the attractor/feeder like it did in the demo program. In its internal world model is already able to get from place to place. But there is no motor controller coded into it yet, so it just slowly wanders like a zombie that loves bumping into walls.

This is where in the coding project there is no longer a center angle vector as before, which was a problem with some combinations that summed to zero degrees. There is now just its moving through the grid, where something like this (from an earlier link) is very needed:


http://blog.brainfacts.org/2013.......d_k7v0u

There is “distance”:

Distance = Sqr((X ^ 2) + (Y^ 2))

and a “direction” from Trigonometry function:

Direction = Atan2(Y/X)

The “2” indicates function code is included in Math routines to return full radian matching computer screen axis, angle 0 points right.

The illustration does not show all else the grid network could be doing besides providing distance and direction of its physical movements. But we don't have to worry about that, the computer model makes the rest of the controller transplant child's play, I think..
The folly of you mapping two-dimensional space and completely ignoring the third dimension has already been pointed out, but you outdo yourself when you describe movement as heading "SW" (presumably for southwest).
What makes you so sure that I was the one who drew the illustration?
My apologies if it wasn't you, but if it wasn't, you're still obviously using it to represent your own feeble ideas, and your "animal" can still only move in two dimensions.

Post by sparc
Talking about the movies: Granville Sewel has yet another movie on his struggle with the 2LOT.

Post by Henry J
Quote they even make movies about it and movies are true
Has that guy seen History of the World, Part 1?

Henry

Post by N.Wells
Quote (GaryGaulin @ Mar. 28 2014,19:48) Quote (Jim_Wynne @ Mar. 28 2014,19:32)   Quote (NoName @ Mar. 28 2014,19:24)Still waiting for evidence.
Still waiting for something even remotely relevant to biology.
Or maybe even something not already known to be incorrect?
Something based in the real, natural world?

Free hint for the hard-of-thinking:
How well do you suppose your grid-based, all possible paths 'stored in memory', model will work in 3 dimensions?  Say, when a fly is avoiding the swatter you keep futilely waving around.  Hmmm?
Well, the "critter" in the program can virtually perceive all possible 2-D paths, so how hard could a virtual z-axis be? This is real-science, don't forget.  GG's critter can probably walk though walls if one is block its path.
I would say grid "modules".

But that's for another model with this sort of thing in it.

http://www.nature.com/nature.....-s2.pdf
Congratulations, after a gazillion pages you finally cited some evidence that grids and grid-based navigation are genuinely  relevant to something biological (albeit not quite in the way you claimed).  Was that so difficult?

More of that sort of thing and you might run the risk of doing some useful science.

Note that Stensola's paper got into Nature and will deservedly win plaudits for the authors, because in a concise and clear paper they have made significant advances to scientific knowledge.  They've done this by going out of their way to document everything, to support and explain their reasoning, to ground-truth their ideas in as many ways as possible, to make claims that are based only on evidence at hand, and to avoid stepping very far ahead of their data, even though they clearly have larger questions in mind and suspicions about where future experiments are likely to lead them.  They have a beautiful and logical sequence of experiments.  Among their other virtues, they also write English very well, despite it not being their native language, they use "self-organizing" correctly, and they avoid blathering about fractals.  

In contrast, your approach to knowledge has been more like Giordano Bruno's: mysticism, invention (not the good kind), and bald assertion based on the way you think things ought to be.

The contributions of Stensola et al. (and their immediate predecessors) now legitimize discussion about the obvious advantages of a self-location system that is based on a processing array that patterns or mimics reality, and how such a system might have developed.

Post by NoName
In other words, you're as bad at history and historiography as you are at everything else.
No one here will be surprised.

Post by GaryGaulin
I was hoping that this one from the DI EN&V thread would be the post of the week, by now.

Quote (Bob O'H @ Mar. 23 2014,16:52)   Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ Mar. 22 2014,14:38)There seems to be quite a number of people who joined the DI in criticizing how "Cosmos" included Giordano Bruno in their script.
Including several historians of science. Thorny C. has a guest post up about the problems with the cartoon, which makes the point that the Bruno story (like a lot of stories take from history) is being re-interpreted to fit into a
This betrays a mis-understanding of what the historians (at least) are complaining about:
    Quote And that is an unseemly outcome of this entire flap. A man who was imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately executed for disagreeing with authority is being vilified all over again by people who appear to be desperate to excuse a particular instance of action of the Inquisition, all the while also stating their general rejection of the methods of the Inquisition. Unsatisfied with the physical demise of Bruno, they persist in attempting an intellectual assassination at this late date. Others who think that there is something worth telling about this bit of history are reviled for a lack of nuance, or that they are necessarily adopting an extreme stance that religion is always and everywhere in conflict with science. It seems to me that an obstinate refusal to acknowledge an episode of religious interference in the matters of scientific inquiry does no favors to those who would like to see some comity between religion and science.
If you want to actually know why historians of science are criticising Cosmos, Becky Higgett summarises the issues: turning history into parable "it doesn’t exactly sit well with claims to champion evidence-based knowledge". The historians of science I'm reading (the ones who actually study the period) are saying that what was done to Bruno wasn't "religious interference in the matters of scientific inquiry", for example
    Quote But the truth is that Bruno's scientific theories weren't what got him killed. Sure, his refusal to recant his belief in a plurality of worlds contributed to his sentence. But it's important to note that the Catholic Church didn't even have an official position on the heliocentric universe in 1600, and support for it was not considered heresy during Bruno's trial.

On top of that, his support for Copernican cosmology was the least heretical position he propagated. His opinions on theology were far more pyrotechnic. For example, Bruno had the balls to suggest that Satan was destined to be saved and redeemed by God. He didn't think Jesus was the son of God, but rather “an unusually skilled magician.” He even publicly disputed Mary's virginity. The Church could let astronomical theories slide, but calling the Mother of God out on her sex life? There's no doubt that these were the ideas that landed Bruno on the stake.

From my research of the topic: Bruno was on a suicidal mission to use religion/philosophy to (what we now call) overthrow the government. He got Galileo involved in his personal feud by making it appear that their scientific work was part of a conspiracy to start a civil war. Hidebound university academics who hated Galileo (for such things as disagreeing with their Aristotelian curriculum) and wanted the pope to punish him did not help either.

If the pseudohistory/pseudoscience is good enough for an Atheist Convention then it's good enough for teaching to the US citizenry. But thankfully PBS did not get involved in this latest attempt to rewrite science history, to benefit a religion, and academics who benefit from the general public not knowing all that really happened.

Post by NoName
Quote (GaryGaulin @ Mar. 28 2014,20:48)...
But that's for another model with this sort of thing in it.
...
A turd in a punchbowl is another 'model' with this sort of thing in it.
It's 'bowl' Gary, not 'bowel'.  While you may be comfortable throwing any old thing into the former, as you do your "model", your "model" nonetheless resembles the output of the latter.

Your "model" is entirely a fantasy -- is it a coincidence that games from the Avalon Hill battle games up through D&D and its many cousins and offspring all use a hex grid for mapping and movement?  Or is it a tragedy that you floundered for months before 'discovering' the utility of hex grids for certain kinds of movement-based representations?

Yet in real life, Napoleon is not limited to one of six directions in which he can move either himself or his troops.  Neither is the Lich of Haunted Hollow.

The stumbling block in both cases is that they do not map well onto 3D situations nor do they readily model 'grasp' or 'extended reach' scenarios.  Nor do the persons or players have 'all possible paths' stored in memory.  There would be huge performance problems with that -- an area you are doubtlessly familiar with, albeit in a slightly different context.

Post by NoName
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner in the Denser than Neutronium department.

Post by Schroedinger's Dog
Ed Kagin, co-founder of Camp Quest, passed away on March 27. :(

Post by Schroedinger's Dog
I will say absolutely nothing about all this!