jk4930

Or a tank (Ada). Seriously, Ada is alive and in version 2012 pretty okay. It depends on your application domain, of course, but if you care about safety and reliability, Ada is battle-proven.

"if being called bossy is causing girls to lose leadership skills"

... then they aren't leaders anyway.

"a computer proof of a theorem can run in to the thousands."

For those interested in a small example, look at http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#trivia

Why not "Simple C++: Featuring Robodog and the Profound Object-Oriented Programming Method (Poop)"

http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Featuring-Profound-Object-Orien...

Do you have your own approach to AGI or are you implementing another concept?

"But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever."

I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3].

[1] http://agi-conf.org/

[2] http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project

[3] http://linas.org/agi.html

Cost of living (comparing London to Berlin): http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

Cost of living (as of Jan2014): http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/berlin

Map of rent prices: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/wohnen/mietspiegel/de/...

He is: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=typpo

Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...

The idea is usually to approach several paths (e.g., regenerative or rejuvenative medicine, mind uploading) in parallel, because we have only so much time and there's no guarantee that the one we'd prefer will work.

As we'll find ways to extend life, we'll find ways to enhance cognitive flexibility. I'm pretty sure about that.

Here's a 5 min video of AIXI playing Pacman (the description provides details): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhQTWidQQ8U

Look for YT videos with Marcus Hutter, they're excellent. He explains very good, very systematic. Great stuff.

The meaning of a backed currency is that it's backed by the issuer with a specific commodity (or service). You can go to the issuer and exchange the money ("symbol of value") into the real thing ("value").

With BTC you can't go to some miner (=issuer) and exchange it back into the electricity that was used to produce it.

The costs of producing BTC or USD are not their backings. You can't exchange your BTC back into electricity.

The USD (and usually most other currencies) aims to be indirectly backed by the corresponding amount of goods they represent within the currency zone and their legal status.

BTC isn't even indirectly backed. It just exists. And that's okay for its purpose.

Regarding IFLS: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd

>sort of modern Sail power

http://www.skysails.info/english/

I assume your post got killed for the more explicit words you used. There were some of them. Anyway, I enjoy your writings. :)

Ancient world: fertility rates are positively correlated with prosperity. (E.g., the Roman Empire's decline of fertility rate at the end is caused by the economic troubles of the dying empire.)

Industrial Age: fertility rates (of the middle classes) are negatively correlated with prosperity.

>natural human behavior, that the wealthy people have only few children

It's a socioeconomic phenomenon of the Industrial Age's middle class, the upper class continue to multiply like in the good old times, having 3 to 6 kids is not uncommon.

I'm not an experienced C programmer but I assume there's missing some '*' somewhere?

Berlin. :)

To make your comparison more useful (and on-topic), you should compare this to a Pascal or an Ada program. You won't find such a syntax massacre there. In fact some verbosity is a design feature that actually helps programers maintaining large, long-living sytems.

We can run controlled experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_economics especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_computational_econ...

Too sad.

Just want to say that the mentioned book "The Right Stuff" exists also as a 3 hours movie from 1983. You'll find it on youtube, too (two parts). I really recommend this movie to everyone who's into spaceflight. Full with details and beauty, a true homage.

It's not wasted. I've seen the design concepts of HURD as an inspiration for other projects and people experimented with them. Even I got some (dumbed down) ideas that I didn't limit to software. Sometimes I think there's some similarity to the SOA approach (pretty everything's a server/service), just that HURD had the ideas earlier. But that might be a too high-level view now.

Just to give my view: Because it's an engineering approach. We don't have to completely understand a highly complex system before we can make some fixes. Intervening before it breaks frees us from the work of repairing what we can't manage. This resonated with me the first time I read about it.

There's another term from the mentioned "Selfish Gene" (which is a book by the same title): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

It's a view on how ideas spread and use hosts (e.g., human brains) as carriers. They mutate, they're selected, they compete for "brain space". One funny perspective is that we're the slaves to genes and memes, both using us to survive. We're just carrying out their orders. :)

(In the end it's just a way to look at information diffusion with focus on the way how ideas replicate and the condition of their success or failure over time, abstracting away from social/cultural context and other hard to grasp things.)

Pretty much related text: "NASA’S SUCCESSFUL QUANTIFYING OF COMEDY TIMING"

http://symftr.tumblr.com/post/5987695109/nasas-successful-qu...

Principia Cybernetica's entry http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HAPPINES.html

World Database of Happiness http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/

Ada (Pascal-inspired) was designed to be a language that's safe against (mediocre) programmers. And it's case-insensitive. Note that Ada is especially made for reliable systems and they really look for error sources. Case sensitivity didn't show up as a problem, so they didn't have to change it in any later version (Ada 2012 now).