The important context is that life is short, just seventy years, and has stages, your early twenties are a magical time. Losing your ambition and wasting your early twenties are a subtle danger, but nevertheless a serious danger.
One of the more ridiculous assertions I have seen, as if cannabis causes people to lose ambitions, any more than a million other things that can happen in society.
You know, like wage stagnation in the face of skyrocketing real estate costs.
Is there any data to show population wide issues being caused by this “not your dad’s weed”?
And even if there were, how is it any different than being able to buy 80 proof vodka versus 4.5% beer.
I reject any argument for cannabis regulation as long as alcohol is less restricted. I don’t even use cannabis, or ever have. I just know from lots of experience that people high on cannabis have caused me zero problems, compared to an innumerable problems from people high on alcohol.
My analysis it that it is a plot by a company that makes "child proofing" gadgets. People are having fewer children, so sales of child-proofing gadgets are falling. People are keeping dogs and cats as pets instead, but neither dogs nor cats have the dexterity to make child-proofing gadgets a must-have pet accessory. Pet Raccoons could save the child-proofing gadget industry, with only a minor pivot to tougher, gnaw resistant gadgets.
A basic exercise in mathematical logic involves looking for minimal sets of connectives. You can base logic on just NAND. But you get NOT by joining two inputs together, so you might refuse to count that and say it is NOT and AND. Another possibility for binary logic is implication, =>, and NOT. Because (NOT A) => B is equivalent to A OR B and obviously (OR and NOT) work just as well as (AND and NOT). What though are minimal sets for ternary?
The familiar 74181 has control inputs to let the circuit summon any of the 16 operations on two bits. (A two bit operation has four possible inputs, and two possible outputs for each input so 2 ^ 4 = 16 possible operations). A similar ALU part for ternary would have two trits as input so nine possible inputs. Each would have three possible values, so 3 ^ 9 = 19683. It would need nine control inputs, each a trit. But 19683 is so much more than 16. How many gates do you need to be able to combine them to produce all possible (trit,trit)->trit gates?
Here are three gates that get you a long way mathematically. First a swap gate
-1 -> 0
0 -> -1
1 -> 1
Then a permute gate
-1 -> 0
0 -> 1
1 -> -1
This lets your generate all permutations
Then you need a "spot" gate that spots one input, say (0 0) and output 1, and 0 otherwise. Since you have all permutations you have all spot gates. And inverse spot gates. Does that solve the problem? It is late and I'm tired. And I can see that the mathematically minimal set is impractical.
has six operations. There are three for doing arithmetic, the units from multiplication, the units from addition, and the carry from addition (it is part of the attraction of balanced ternary that there is no carry out from multiplying digits). There are also three for doing logic, based on -1 is false, +1 is true, and basically degenerating into binary logic.
Is that how this is done? The Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has two kinds of words, numbers in balanced ternary, and bit-rows in degenerate binary. The hardware is built with a pragmatic mixture of binary and ternary logic gates, with the ternary gates heavily used in the Arithmetic Unit, barely at all in the Logic unit, and only opportunistically in the rest of the hardware, that is mostly binary gates as usual?
I have a bizarre mad science interest in this because I see how to build AND gates with mechanical linkages, http://alan.sdf-eu.org/linkage-logic/now-with-labels.html and wonder if the same technique works for ternary gates. But what are the operation tables for ternary gates? I should attempt the specialized ones for arithmetic first.
The 74181 has four signals to select the operation (S0 to S3) but also two modifiers. M=1 selects logic functions and M=0 selects math functions (which will be slightly different depending on the value of carry in). So there are 3x16 = 48 possible operations, though they are not all distinct.
Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years. His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some truly spectacular successes, quite a lot of knowledge that hints weakly, and a rather empty middle ground.
Think about gyroscopes. Newton invents classical mechanics, with no specific rules for rotating objects. You get a top mathematician, Euler, to work out the implications for rotating objects. The implications are weird and implausible. But it turns out that they are spot on. People invent gyroscopes and exploit the truly spectacular success of the experimental-deductive method.
Another example could be James Clerk-Maxwell building on the work of Faraday and Ampere to come up with Maxwell's Equations. The equations predict electro-magnetic radiation, so Hertz goes looking and, yes, it is really there!
I want a name for this kind of truly spectacular success. I'll build on the gyroscope example and call it Gyro-gnosis.
But think instead of Hook's law. Spring force is proportional to extension. Kind of. It is useful enough if you don't pull too hard on your spring, but it is not fundamental. Or think of animal testing in medicine. There is some theory. All life on Earth today is based on DNA. We know the branching of the tree of life; mice are mammals, so mouse research should link up with human health, sometimes, a little bit. But theory and experiment combine to give us hints rather than wisdom.
I want a name for this kind of weak knowledge that so often leads to disappointment. Stealing the T from Theory, taking the whole of hint, and the end of wisdom, I'm going to write Thintdom.
By page six, Grothendieck is on to his manifesto "Fighting Scientism". We are certainly in trouble, due to thintdom being granted the prestige of gyrognosis. But if you want to push back, you have to drive a wedge between thintdom and gyrognosis. Since gyrognosis is truly spectacularly successful, fighting against it is just banging your head against a brick wall. One needs to separate out the weaker forms of knowledge so that one can criticize thintdom without its proponent being able to use gyrognosis as a shield. If you let thintdom and gyrognosis be joined together as empiricism, your criticism cannot be made to stick because the parts of empiricism that work well, work far to well to be criticized.
It is now commonplace to notice the depth of the technology stack, from applications, down through compilers, assemblers, the block diagram level of hardware, the register level, the logic gate level, the transistor level, circuits with parasitic inductance and capacitance, doping and migration, statistical effects,... When you build up the way, some of the lower level features are preserved, such as conservation of momentum. And some of the lower level features help with understanding the higher levels. But medicine offers a clear warning that Nature's stack is too deep. Four hundred years of "success" have taught us what that leads to. Sometimes you get gyrognosis. Sometimes you get thintdom.
By the end of his piece Grothendieck is pining his hopes on "inner class contradiction" within the scientific caste. Maybe. I think the most promising starting point is to push back against linguist poverty. We have only one word, empiricism for, err, empiricism, so the four hundred year old empirical lesson that the successes of empiricism are bimodal goes unnoticed.
All life contains DNA only if you consider anything that lacks it to not be alive. There are viruses which only contain RNA for example. DNA-less organisms are an active topic of research.
Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics Youtuber, recently departed from her usual content to discuss sorbitol giving her digestive problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4
I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on Boeing and Airbus to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Qatar. NPR give accurate reports on Angola and Bangladesh to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of the USA.
One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.
Encouraging conspiracy theories against one of the largest components of the US military industrial complex is precisely something Al Jazeera would be willing to risk losing credibility over. Not that they actually would, because there could never be sufficient evidence to disprove such a conspiracy.
It is clear that the weight attached to LOC will decline as management acquires more directly relevant information. The difficult issue is whether there is a zero lower bound.
Imagine buying in software, against a specification. A fully detailed specification with tests both for logical correctness and performance. If there is a choice of vendors, at similar prices, one naturally chooses the package with fewer lines of code. The weight attached to LOC is negative.
The anecdote is interesting because it invites the following speculation. Question: How many extra data points, beyond LOC, does one need to manage a software project? Answer: Enough that the weight attached to LOC, given optimal use of the other information available, is negative.
"Professor-General Norden" might be a dig at the Norden Bomb Sight, an American high-tech wonder weapon that under-performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6D5rXbMBKo tells the tale.
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