Before the Bitcoin protocol was invented, most computer scientists thought a system like Bitcoin was impossible because of a famous problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem. The problem, in a nutshell, is how to coordinate among distributed nodes to come up with a consensus that is resistant to attackers who are trying to undermine that consensus. A significant component of the solution is the proof-of-work algorithm, which is the main purpose of so-called Bitcoin miners. The mainstream press has completely ignored the importance of this computer science breakthrough.
cdixon tumblr, Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals Problem December 16, 2013
These plain facts provide ample argument that basic income will be a pragmatic necessity to avoid mass poverty following mass automation, but here I would like to make an argument that is equally important as such practical considerations. Freedom in the 21st century should mean freedom from having to engage in productive work simply to meet your basic needs for comfort and dignity. At one time, the ready availability of jobs amply filled the need for a basic access to a comfortable and dignified life, but precipitous technological and economic changes erode this dynamic further each day. The function of the economy has never been to provide gainful employment to people, but simply to provide material goods to people.
Basic Income Means Basic Freedom | Thought Infection December 16, 2013
آیا ازدواج فرد با هر جنس، طبقه، ملیت، قومیت و نژادی مجاز است؟ اینجا جواب پیچیده‌تر می‌شود. قانون مدنی ایران ازدواج شما را با هر جنس مخالفِ مسلمانِ ایرانی مجاز می‌داند. اما فرهنگ عموما دایره را تنگ‌تر می‌کند: هر جنس مخالفِ مسلمانِ هم مذهبِ (شیعه یا سنی) ایرانیِ هم‌طبقه که سن مرد از زن بالاتر باشد و از نظر اقتصادی و اجتماعی متناسب باشد، را برای ازدواج بهتر می‌داند. آیا اگر در همین دایره‌ی محدود شده ازدواج کردید، بچه داشتن یا نداشتن امری شخصی است؟ پاسخ در وهله اول مثبت است. اما اگر دقیق‌تر نگاه کنیم، شرط فرزند نداشتن در جاری شدن عقد دائم به عنوان "شرط ضمن عقد" از نظر مذهبی و قانونی در ایران ممنوع است
چرا بایست به سکسوالیته پرداخت؟ | عشق، سکسوالیته، زندگی مشترک | DW.DE | 10.12.2013 December 16, 2013
او از چند و چون سالن این تئاترها می‌نویسد؛ راهروهای خاکی؛ انبوه درهای فلزی نوشابه‌ها؛ ته سیگارها؛ صندلی‌های فلزی و چوبی لق و لوق؛ چراغ زنبوری؛ و بالای همه اینها، تابلوی شخص اول حکومت. نمایش اصلی پس از برنامه رقص و آواز اجرا می‌شده است. با رقصنده‌هایی که اغلب از تن‌فروشان محله شهرنو بوده‌اند. آنها از همان آغاز فاصله بین مخاطب و خود را می‌شکنند و ما را وارد چند و چون رابطه خصوصی خود به عنوان رقصنده تماشاخانه‌ای در محله شهرنو با تماشاچی می‌کنند. ژیلا پیش از اینکه ترانه "عمو سبزی‌فروش" را برای جمعیت بخواند، گفت‌وگو با تماشاچیان را آغاز می‌کند: - حسن‌آقا سه کله! چیه؟ ورچسوندی؟ سیبیلات آویزونه؟ - شب، خوابتو دیدیم...
فرهنگ و هنر - BBC فارسی - شهر نو؛ روایتی دیگر از زنان تن‌فروش December 16, 2013
شهر نو، زندان زنان تن‌فروش بوده است. آنها تنها زمانی احساس رهایی می‌کردند که ماه محرم برسد. شهر نو در ماه رمضان و محرم تعطیل بوده است و آنها در این ایام اجازه می‌یافتند تا در مراسم عزاداری شرکت کنند. زن پاانداز با لحنی حسرت‌بار درباره این ایام به نویسنده می‌گوید: "می‌رفتیم با خانوم رئیسمون ازین خیابون به اون خیابون، تعزیه تموشا می‌کردیم... شام غریبونم یه دسه راه می‌افتاد تو قله... یه شم می‌گرفتیم دسمون، می‌رفتیم تا همون میدونی... می‌خوندیم: شام غریبون حسین امشبه..."
فرهنگ و هنر - BBC فارسی - شهر نو؛ روایتی دیگر از زنان تن‌فروش December 16, 2013
دروازه آهنی قلعه، صف مشتری‌ها، مامور جلوی در، جوی‌های پرلجن، پاسگاه قلعه، بوهای لخت تن‌های متعفن، پیرزنی که در گوشه‌ای افتاده و اینکه: "سربالاکنی، تصویرها، گُله به گُله، گَله‌های پراکنده خانم‌ها، جلوِ درهای چهارطاق، دودو چشم‌ها، بوی خفه بزک‌ها، ماتیک لب‌ها، جگر روی آتش: جلز و ولز." به روایت محمود زند مقدم، شهرنو دو خیابان اصلی داشته است. هر دو بن‌بست و به موازات یکدیگر: خیابان حاج عبدالمحمود و خیابان قوام دفتر. هر دو خاکی و پیله پیله و پرچروک. با چندین و چند خانه و دکان: جگرکی، تصنیف‌فروشی، کافه و آرایشگاه؛ و هم چندین کوچه بن‌بست. محله شهرنو، مرکز تجمع تن‌فروشان، قاچاقچیان، معتادان، دله‌دزدها و بچه‌دزد‌ها بوده و در عین حال در اطراف آن ده‌ها کافه و سینما و کاباره و تماشاخانه ازجمله کاباره شکوفه نو وجود داشته است.
فرهنگ و هنر - BBC فارسی - شهر نو؛ روایتی دیگر از زنان تن‌فروش December 16, 2013
سیمین بی ام و، پری بلنده، اشرف چهارچشم، شهلا آبادانی و پری سیاه از جمله سردسته‌های روسپی خانه‌ها بودند که پس از انقلاب ۱۳۵۷ ایران اعدام شدند.[۱۱] طبق گزارش روزنامهٔ کیهان چهار متهم از جمله سکینه قاسمی (پری بلنده) در ساعت یک بامداد ۲۱ تیر ۱۳۵۸ اعدام شده‌اند. در گزارش خبرنگار روزنامهٔ کیهان محل و نحوهٔ اعدام ذکر نشده‌است. در تیتر خبر نوع اعدام تیرباران ذکر شده‌است اما از محل اعدام هیچ خبری ارائه نشده‌است. طبق بعضی گزارش‌های غیر رسمی که درست تر به نظر می‌رسد او جلوی کافهٔ شکوفه‌نو (پایین بیمارستان فارابی و نبش خیابان امیرآباد جنوبی) به دار آویخته شده‌است.
شهر نو - ویکی‌پدیا، دانشنامهٔ آزاد December 16, 2013
If you cannot feel the haunting beauty of this recitation, if it is inexplicable to you that people can be moved to tears by the mere sound of these verses, then you are not in contact with the data. Indeed, if you don’t understand how someone could be willing to die to defend the legitimacy of such an experience, you are very poorly placed to understand the problem of Islam. This video has everything: the power of ritual and the power of the crowd; tears of devotion and a lust for vengeance. How many of the people in that mosque are jihadists? I have no idea—perhaps none. But their spiritual aspirations and deepest positive emotions—love, devotion, compassion, bliss, awe—are being focused through the lens of sectarian hatred and humiliation. Read every word of the translation so that you understand what these devout people are weeping over. Their ecstasy is inseparable from the desire to see nonbelievers punished in hellfire.
Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy : : Sam Harris December 16, 2013
I think there is a great difference between attacking religion and attacking people, using supposedly academic religious critique as a bludgeon to push forward other agendas. Atheism has traditionally been seen as a leftist cause, in large part because it was identified with people such as Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky and concepts such as anti-imperialism and socialism. Their criticisms were borne in large part out of compassion for the downtrodden and outrage at the role they saw that religious authorities played in perpetuating oppression, and this was admirable. This “New Atheist” movement comes across as quite different. In stark contrast to the atheism of Russell or Chomsky, it seems to be based in large part out of hatred and contempt for religious people themselves. There is little attempt to understand the role that religion plays for people who make up the oppressed and poor around the world, or to understand the humanistic arguments made by actual theologians. It is an atheism for the elite, a new way to sneer down at lesser peoples.
Richard Dawkins and the "New Atheists" Represent the Dark Side of Atheism - PolicyMic December 16, 2013
Often, the key to research is figuring out how to redefine failure as success. Some stories: when Alan Turing published his epochal 1936 paper on Turing machines, he did so with great disappointment: he had recently learned that Alonzo Church had independently arrived at similar results using lambda calculus, and he didn’t know whether anyone would still be interested in his alternative, machine-based approach. In the early 1970s, Leonid Levin delayed publishing about NP-completeness for several years: apparently, his “real” goal was to prove graph isomorphism was NP-complete (something we now know is almost certainly false), and in his mind, he had failed. Instead, he merely had a few “trivialities,” like the definitions of P, NP, and NP-completeness, and the proof that satisfiability was NP-complete. And Levin’s experience is far from unique: again and again in mathematical research, you’ll find yourself saying something like: “goddammit, I’ve been trying for six months to prove Y, but I can only prove the different/weaker statement X!
Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress | Machine Intelligence Research Institute December 16, 2013
the question of how we can ever know for sure that something is “random.” I.e., even if a string of bits passes every statistical test for randomness that we throw it at, how could we ever rule out that there’s some complicated regularity that we simply failed to find? In the 1960s, the theory of Kolmogorov complexity offered one possible answer to that question, but a rather abstract and inapplicable one: roughly speaking, it said we can consider a string “random enough for our universe” if it has no computable regularities, if there’s no program to output the string shorter than the string itself. More recently, a much more practical answer has come from the Bell inequality — and in particular, from the realization that the experimental violation of that inequality can be used to produce so-called “Einstein-certified random numbers.” These are numbers that are provably random, assuming only (a) that they were produced by two separated devices that produced such-and-such outputs in response to challenges, and (b) there was no faster-than-light communication between the devices. But it’s only within the last few years that computer scientists figured out how to implement this striking idea, in such a way that you get out more randomness than you put in. (Recently, two MIT grad students proved that, starting from a fixed “seed” of, let’s say, 100 random bits, you can produce unlimited additional random bits in this Einstein-certified way
Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress | Machine Intelligence Research Institute December 15, 2013
One of the biggest, oldest questions in the philosophy of science could be paraphrased as: “why is Occam’s Razor justified? when we find simple descriptions of past events, why do we have any grounds whatsoever to expect those descriptions to predict future events?” This, I think, is the core of Hume’s “problem of induction.” Now, I think theoretical computer science has contributed large insights to this question — including Leslie Valiant’s Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning model, for which he recently won the Turing Award; the notion of Vapnik-Chernonenkis (VC) dimension; and the notion of the universal prior from algorithmic information theory. In essence, these ideas all give you various formal models where Occam’s Razor provably works — where you can give “simplicity” a precise definition, and then see exactly why simple hypotheses are more likely to predict the future than complicated ones. Of course, a skeptic about induction could still ask: OK, but why are the assumptions behind these formal models justified? But to me, this represents progress! The whole discussion can now start from a more sophisticated place than before.
Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress | Machine Intelligence Research Institute December 15, 2013
Truth be told, the Iranian "threat" has been more about spread of Iran's popular revolutionary ideology to overthrow kings and US clients than it was about "Shi'ism," or even a bomb. The Gulf states fear their own Shi'ite minorities and prefer repression to accommodation. US rapprochement with Iran leaves the Gulf more isolated, without an all-purpose Iranian enemy to justify their resistance to political change.
Iran Marks a Watershed in the Middle East | Graham E. Fuller December 14, 2013
The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking.It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research. What is more, citation is sometimes, but not always, linked to quality. A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative or wrong. Luxury-journal editors know this, so they accept papers that will make waves because they explore sexy subjects or make challenging claims. This influences the science that scientists do. It builds bubbles in fashionable fields where researchers can make the bold claims these journals want, while discouraging other important work, such as replication studies.
How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science | Randy Schekman | Comment is free | The Guardian December 14, 2013
MEN and women do not think in the same ways. Few would disagree with that. And science has quantified some of those differences. Men, it is pretty well established, have better motor and spatial abilities than women, and more monomaniacal patterns of thought. Women have better memories, are more socially adept, and are better at dealing with several things at once. There is a lot of overlap, obviously. But on average these observations are true.
Sex and brains: Vive la différence! | The Economist December 14, 2013
Off put from the engine testing. NASA just happens to use Liquid Hydrogen as the fuel for some of their rockets with Liquid Oxygen as an oxidizer to make it burn. Hydrogen is a fantastic rocket fuel. This fuel combination of course means that its exhaust is H2O. There's also some rockets that use kerosene, and rockets that use solid fuel, but the hydrogen based fuel is really efficient compared to other rocket fuels. It really is just a chemical coincidence that the best rocket fuel also makes rain.
Watch this amazing video of artificial rain created by NASA. : videos December 14, 2013
WIRED: How do you explain the difference between deep learning and ordinary machine learning? A lot of people are familiar with the sort of machine learning that Google did over the first tens of its life, where it would analyze large amounts of data in an effort to, say, automatically identify web-spam. LeCun: That’s relatively simple machine learning. There’s a lot of effort that goes into creating those machine learning systems, in the sense that the system is not able to really process raw data. The data has to be turned into a form that the system can digest. That’s called a feature abstractor. Take an image, for example. You can’t feed the raw pixels into a traditional system. You have to turn the data into a form that a classifier can digest. This is what a lot of the computer vision community has been trying to do for the last twenty or thirty years — trying to represent images in the proper way. But what deep learning allows us to do is learn this representation process as well, instead of having to build the system by hand for each new problem.
Facebook's 'Deep Learning' Guru Reveals the Future of AI | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com December 14, 2013
WIRED: The science at the heart of this is actually quite old, isn’t it? People like you and Geoff Hinton, who’s now at Google, first developed these deep learning methods — known as “back-propogation” algorithms — in the mid-1980s. LeCun: That’s the root of it. But we’ve gone way beyond that. Back-propagation allows us do what’s called “supervised running.” So, you have a collection of images, together with labels, and you can train the system to map new images to labels. This is what Google and Baidu are currently using for tagging images in user photo collections. That we know works. But then you have things like video and natural language, for which we have very little label data.
Facebook's 'Deep Learning' Guru Reveals the Future of AI | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com December 14, 2013
In order to better understand the role a father's diet plays in the health of their offspring, the researchers examined mice. They compared the offspring of fathers with insufficient folate in their diets with the offspring of fathers whose diets contained sufficient levels of the vitamin. In the end, they found that paternal folate deficiency was associated with an increased level of birth defects of various kinds in the offspring.
You Are What Your Father Eats: Dad's Diet Impacts Unborn Children December 13, 2013
I enjoy House of Cards as entertainment and the acting is wonderful. It doesn't approach the brilliance of the British original, but that would be an impossible task. On its own terms, it's loads of fun to watch.
Chris Jancelewicz: House Of Cards Season 1, Episode 6 Recap: The Brick December 11, 2013
But here's my problem: You'd think the writers could create plot lines that are at least semi-plausible in the real world. But they don't. For example: Teachers cannot and do not strike because they don't like a piece of legislation being considered by Congress. And they don't strike nationally. Teachers only go on strike when they cannot reach agreement on a contract in their local school district -- and the strike is limited to that school district. It's patently absurd that the writers made this part of the story.
His first foray into entrepreneurship, he says, was reselling iPad 2s in Paris the day after their US release. He hired homeless people to wait in line with him for seventeen hours so he could get past the rule of only 4 iPads per customer. Then he divvied up $20,000 in cash to finalize the transactions. He recounts how frantic he was inside New York’s SoHo Apple store, overseeing his collection of bums, constantly eyeing the only exit while finalizing his own transaction. Our gray market entrepreneur even paid off a German family behind him to purchase extras. Four hours later, he hopped a plane to Paris to unload his bounty, pocketing nearly $25,000 in profit.
Airbnb says this man does not exist. So I had coffee with him | PandoDaily December 8, 2013
I specialize in debugging, fixing, maintaining, and extending legacy software systems. My typical client has a web site or internal application that works, more or less, but the original developer isn’t available. Business requirements have changed and the software hasn’t kept up. Or my client has something that is “almost finished” but they parted ways with the developer after using up their budget and schedule. Usually there’s a list of missing features and bugs.
Typical Programmer - How to develop unmaintainable software December 8, 2013
Sources confirmed that, unfortunately, such cases are actually quite common, with roughly one in every two babies afflicted with the lifelong disfigurement.
Deformed Freak Born Without Penis | The Onion - America's Finest News Source December 8, 2013
study found that the kind of parenting a child receives in the first 3.5 years is a better predictor of high school graduation than I.Q. All this helps explain why one of the strongest determinants of ending up poor is being born poor. As Warren Buffett puts it, our life outcomes often depend on the “ovarian lottery.” Sure, some people transcend their circumstances, but it’s callous for those born on second or third base to denounce the poor for failing to hit home runs. John Rawls, the brilliant 20th-century philosopher, argued for a society that seems fair if we consider it from behind a “veil of ignorance” — meaning we don’t know whether we’ll be born to an investment banker or a teenage mom, in a leafy suburb or a gang-ridden inner city, healthy or disabled, smart or struggling, privileged or disadvantaged. That’s a shrewd analytical tool — and who among us would argue for food stamp cuts if we thought we might be among the hungry children?
Where Is the Love? - NYTimes.com December 7, 2013
he lavished praise on Fidel Castro and called Cuba "a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people". (Then again, to be fair to Madiba, Gaddafi-led Libya and Castro-led Cuba backed the ANC's struggle against apartheid in the 1980s while the US and UK governments, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, dismissed the ANC as "terrorists" and Israel, as Chris McGreal has revealed, "provided expertise and technology that was central to [apartheid] South Africa's development of its nuclear bombs".
Lest We Forget, on Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Mandela Was a Radical | Mehdi Hasan December 6, 2013
Take, perhaps above all else, Israel and its treatment of the occupied Palestinian people. Mandela referred to Yasser Arafat as a "comrade in arms"; in February 1990, just 16 days after being released from prison, Mandela embraced Arafat in Lusaka, Zambia, comparing the Palestinian struggle against Israel to the black struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the same year, on a trip to Australia in October 1990, he angered the country's Jewish community by referring to Israel as a "terrorist state" which was "slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied territories, and we don't regard that as acceptable". Does anyone dare smear Mandela as an anti-Semite for making such comments? He would of course later moderate his rhetoric, upon becoming president of South Africa, and confirm his support for Israeli security - "I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognize Israel within secure borders," he once said - but he never dropped his unconditional support for the Palestinians.
Lest We Forget, on Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel, Mandela Was a Radical | Mehdi Hasan December 6, 2013
there is still a part of the new atheists’ brief against religion that is troubling: What do they want? If it is to persuade the religious that they are deluded and would be better off without delusion, the mocking tone and disdain that some of these writers show for the needs religion meets and the joys it provides are ill-suited for the task. If it is to persuade their fellow atheists, like myself, to do public battle for their ideology, then their project is reactionary, for a cornerstone of political liberalism is public religious toleration.
Jewish Currents March 2008 - The Case Against God by Mitchell Silver December 5, 2013
The pull of religion, at least as far as Bush himself is concerned, comes not from the traditional God that the new atheists attack; he is almost as impatient as Dawkins with that God, and believes that it is rarely that God who vies for the devotions of Woodstockers. Instead, it is the God that Mark Lilla thought stillborn that Bush finds attractive: the God that the new atheists mock as atheism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, the God they dismiss as weak tea whose main function is to provide drinking with the respectability that allows fundamentalists to get drunk on stronger stuff — the less definable, more human-friendly but less human-like, more immanent God of liberal, sophisticated religion. Bush is entranced by its siren song and inspired by its possibilities.
Jewish Currents March 2008 - The Case Against God by Mitchell Silver December 5, 2013
Stenger argues convincingly that science not only does perfectly well without supposing God but actually takes us a long way towards refuting divine existence. The “God hypothesis” of traditional theism has been scientifically falsified, and the liberal God, who is unfalsifiable because it doesn’t do anything, is of no interest to Stenger — because it doesn’t do anything.
Jewish Currents March 2008 - The Case Against God by Mitchell Silver December 5, 2013
As God pined away, with little sympathy and even a ‘good riddance’ attitude from some intellectuals, another section of the intelligentsia fretted over God’s demise. They thought religious belief brought something valuable to our social and emotional lives. While they neither could nor wanted to revive the traditional concept of God, which fomented civil strife and impeded science, they sought a refurbished God concept, one that managed to inspire morality, stimulate creativity, stay despair, and provide solace, yet without being culturally specific, irrationally demanding, or empirically meddling (except, perhaps in the initial set-up). Lilla traces the career of this refurbished God and judges that it hardly ever came to significant life — hence the “stillborn” God. Whether or not that refurbished God really did die at its nativity is a question we shall return to later; but the one thing today’s new atheists hold in common with traditional believers is the opinion that this refurbished God — the God of sophisticated, liberal theologians (Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Kaplan) and abstruse philosophers (Spinoza, Hegel, Whitehead) — doesn’t deserve to live.
Jewish Currents March 2008 - The Case Against God by Mitchell Silver December 5, 2013
