Principia Discordia

Principia Discordia => Techmology and Scientism => Topic started by: P3nT4gR4m on May 31, 2014, 11:15:42 AM

Title: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on May 31, 2014, 11:15:42 AM
This is not an argument. I'm not stating a position. This is a quarter baked thought that's begun materialising in my head and I'm writing it down to explore the development of a seed of an idea that I'm not too clear on yet, in the hope that highly intelligent random internet people might provide some input.

The reason I'm stating this, is because (knowing me) I'll forget to e-prime or whatever the fuck and say things like "It's like this" or "that's the reason", as my train of thought goes barrelling down the track and I want to get it straight from the git-go that I'm not assuming any of this bullshit, I'm merely examining it as an alternative to current models.

I will not defend it if challenged, because it's random crap that my brain is coming up with. I'm not even sure what the hell it is yet but it's piqued my interest so here goes...

I'm a software engineer. I'm a hacker. I work with software. My job is to communicate massively complex sets of instructions and conditional logic to machines which carry out these instructions on datasets and then communicate the results back to me or to the end user.

Something that I've always been vaguely aware of but never given much thought to, is what it must be like for the people (a significant percentage?) who don't actually understand exactly what software is, how it behaves, and what it represents as a manifest phenomena at the granular levels which all software engineers encounter and interact with it.

So in general software geek parlance these individuals are commonly termed "users" with a small -u- (we're an elitist bunch us code nerds) and these are the people who don't think of what they're doing as software, rather as the abstractions the designers expose them to. They're using a spreadsheet. They're sending an email. They're playing Angry Birds.

Then there's people who understand a fair bit more about the mechanics of the stuff we're dealing with but their knowledge rarely extends very far below the abstract interfaces of the users. They might kinda grok what a config file does or be able to apply some basic conditional logic into their XL formulae. We call them "Superusers", by way of differentiating.

Superusers get a capital letter at the start of their name and some of them, the chosen few, will be elevated to the exalted status of "Admin". Unlike the user and the Superuser, the admin is someone who we can leave in a room full of sharp objects and reasonably expect nothing too bad to happen as a result.

The admin may be someone who has absolute command of the system he administrates and yet, at the same time, from the engineers point of view, he's just another user. He may have a perfect understanding of the operations of the system, at the interface level but he's still dealing with a construct, an emergent property, an abstract representation of the software itself.

So what is this software? What is it made of? How does it work? In a sense I could describe it as a language, of syntax and semantics which we use to describe existent systems, existent materially or in abstract, in a way which effectively mimics or parallels the operations of the systems they describe.

That old cliché about language being "alive", referring allegorically to poetry and prose? No, I mean these "languages" are alive in the "Frankenstein" sense. The words and the sentences, speak themselves and they grow and sprout and branch in direct correlation to any existent system they represent and, as a result, fluency in these languages grants the hacker something that's akin to a new sense, a new way of interpreting external information - the sense of code.

A coder develops an intrinsic sense of code which, once developed, isn't something that you just turn off when you step away from the computer, any more than you'd turn your sense of sound off when you stopped listening to the radio. Everything a coder observes, using the traditional, biological senses, can also be observed and filtered via the sense of code.

If all existent phenomena can be considered as a system, then all existent phenomena can be expressed, examined and extrapolated in code. If this is the case, then it follows that we can examine the efficiency, the accuracy and the performance of these systems, simply by analysing the resulting code descriptions.

Software has advanced rapidly, over the last couple of decades, the systems that software represents, refined and shaped and moulded, by way of the software itself, which was quickly able to figure out increasingly efficient ways of carrying out the end goals which any given system was required to achieve.

However, not all systems have been described in code. Many human systems, especially in the interpersonal and up to the societal sphere of interaction still remain clunky and old and inefficient when observed with a sense of code. What a sense of code is, in the context of this framework is a method of describing, objectively, the system being observed. This objectivity is the kicker. By the same token that it could be argued that objectivity is one of the fundamental strengths of scientific investigation, so too does code benefit from having objectivity built in.

As I said earlier, code can be used to describe all systems, biological, neurological, sociological, psychological and, by declaring these systems in code and examining their operations through the lense of a well developed sense of code, maybe these systems can be analysed objectively, in a way that allows us to develop and evolve them through the iterative process of refinement which is a coder's stock in trade.

What I'm getting at here is not necessarily simulation, rather it's simply a description of a system of operations, described in a language that mirrors the operations of the system analogously. I find it difficult, at this stage, to further elaborate and communicate my idea in terms which a user, someone with little or no sense of code, would understand. How do you describe the colour blue to a blind person is the sound of rain to someone who's deaf? Perhaps there's a coder reading this now, who gets the drift of where I'm going and can think of a way to explain this? Maybe, like me, you've never given much thought to this "sense of code" idea but, now that you have it seems to hold some merit?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞ on June 01, 2014, 07:15:13 PM
It makes me think of this:

(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/physicists.png)

And this article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/how-can-i-make-sure-that-im-actually-learning-how-to-program/

QuoteThe key to this question is to transcend the language and think in not the language you are coding in.

WAT?

Experienced polyglot programmers think in the abstract syntax tree (AST) of their own mental model of the language. One doesn't think "I need a for loop here," but rather "I need to loop over something" and translates to that to the appropriate for, or while, or iterator, or recursion for that language.

This is similar to what one sees in learning a spoken language. People who speak many languages fluently think the meaning, and it comes out in a given language.

One can see some clue of this AST in the pair of eyetracking videos Code Comprehension with Eye Tracking and Eye-Tracking Code Experiment (Novice) where the movements of the eye of a beginner and experienced programmer are watched. One can see the experienced programer "compile" the code into their mental model and "run" it in their head, while the beginner has to iterate over the code keyword by keyword.

I'm interested to see where you go with this.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 01:51:47 PM
You should write a book about your findings:
The universe in C++
or perhaps,
All the world's indeed a kernel.

I'd read that.  In all seriousness though, interesting ideas.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 02, 2014, 02:41:57 PM
I'm most certainly a user, so I have to admit I'm not quite sure what your goal is, here.  To objectively evaluate the system of Life?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Cramulus on June 02, 2014, 02:54:21 PM
I've had that experience of dreaming in code. Very hard to describe -- just concepts and their mechanical relationships to each other.


reminds me of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 03:04:43 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 02, 2014, 02:41:57 PM
I'm most certainly a user, so I have to admit I'm not quite sure what your goal is, here.  To objectively evaluate the system of Life?

I think the first part is to objectively evaluate the various subsystems of life but it's the process of refinement that would potentially provide tangible benefits. Any subsystem can be optimised and bugfixed.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Cramulus on June 02, 2014, 03:11:57 PM
I think problem solving heuristics get into your head

I've heard security people say similar stuff about how when you start approaching problems with a security mindset, you suddenly become aware of this universe of exploits. And once you've seen it, you can't UNSEE those problems. You'll always be imagining how a criminal would approach things.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 03:18:58 PM
That's it, in a nutshell! It's what I was getting a with this "Sense of Code" idea. I find it hard to look at a flower or an animal or a political negotiation, without a part of me trying to figure out how to code it.

What I'm not sure about is how this Sense of code might be used to provide a beneficial effect but my gut is telling me it could.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Junkenstein on June 02, 2014, 03:22:13 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on June 02, 2014, 03:11:57 PM
I think problem solving heuristics get into your head

I've heard security people say similar stuff about how when you start approaching problems with a security mindset, you suddenly become aware of this universe of exploits. And once you've seen it, you can't UNSEE those problems. You'll always be imagining how a criminal would approach things.

Personally, I try and approach most problems in the same way they would be approached by the smartest criminal I can imagine. I call this "Business".
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 02, 2014, 03:23:26 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 03:04:43 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 02, 2014, 02:41:57 PM
I'm most certainly a user, so I have to admit I'm not quite sure what your goal is, here.  To objectively evaluate the system of Life?

I think the first part is to objectively evaluate the various subsystems of life but it's the process of refinement that would potentially provide tangible benefits. Any subsystem can be optimised and bugfixed.

Your set of variables will be immense.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 04:30:18 PM
I don't mean coding everything. At least not in the immediate future. Just tackling bite-sized chunks. As we solve related chunks, we can then group-organise everything at increasingly higher levels so eventually (a couple of millenia in the future) we'd have the lot.

Imagine how the different investigative branches of science could be extrapolated as coming up with an encyclopedia of all the things and forces and whatever that compose the universe. If the universe contains infinite complexity then maybe not but even then, we will probably develop a pretty big, much more rounded picture than we have now, within given limits of infinity.

So what we get is complete or near complete understanding of a huge big complex system in it's entirety. What is missing is the sense of code. Without the sense of code it can't be improved, only looked at. It's the engineering part of science. Something I'm hearing a lot of, with regards science in general is the idea of information. Years ago, what science was looking at was things and effects you could see. Tangibles.

Then there was engineering. Engineering with tangibles is shit like building bridges and putting dudes on nearby astronomical landmasses, but, as more and more tangibles are sussed out the number of tangibles left unknown becomes smaller til it's easy to imagine a position where all the tangibles we have down pat. I'm not saying physical engineering will stop or anything, engineering is god's work. What engineering does is figures out new ways to arrange the tangibles.

As more and more tangibles are understood more and more intangible things are being investigated. The understanding of these intangibles is information. What science is increasingly working on understanding is information. When the thing is understood, as always it's handed over to the engineers. Software engineers. What we do is bring to bear our newly developed code faculty. Only now we're not programming little boxes, we're programming reality. :ECH:

Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 04:51:46 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 04:30:18 PM
I don't mean coding everything. At least not in the immediate future. Just tackling bite-sized chunks. As we solve related chunks, we can then group-organise everything at increasingly higher levels so eventually (a couple of millenia in the future) we'd have the lot.

Imagine how the different investigative branches of science could be extrapolated as coming up with an encyclopedia of all the things and forces and whatever that compose the universe. If the universe contains infinite complexity then maybe not but even then, we will probably develop a pretty big, much more rounded picture than we have now, within given limits of infinity.

So what we get is complete or near complete understanding of a huge big complex system in it's entirety. What is missing is the sense of code. Without the sense of code it can't be improved, only looked at. It's the engineering part of science. Something I'm hearing a lot of, with regards science in general is the idea of information. Years ago, what science was looking at was things and effects you could see. Tangibles.

Then there was engineering. Engineering with tangibles is shit like building bridges and putting dudes on nearby astronomical landmasses, but, as more and more tangibles are sussed out the number of tangibles left unknown becomes smaller til it's easy to imagine a position where all the tangibles we have down pat. I'm not saying physical engineering will stop or anything, engineering is god's work. What engineering does is figures out new ways to arrange the tangibles.

As more and more tangibles are understood more and more intangible things are being investigated. The understanding of these intangibles is information. What science is increasingly working on understanding is information. When the thing is understood, as always it's handed over to the engineers. Software engineers. What we do is bring to bear our newly developed code faculty. Only now we're not programming little boxes, we're programming reality. :ECH:

I think I kinda see where you're going with this.  I believe it would have to start on a very small level, cellular at the very least, and even then there's an incredible number of variables to take into consideration.  Single celled organisms are simple enough to predict, however there would have to be a great amount of room made for external stimuli, e.g. temperature and environment, which would also have to be coded, or at least somewhat simplified to suit the code level of the organism itself.  It would certainly be a monumental undertaking, and almost insurmountable when you start to codify human behavior, where a near-countless number of individual cells are working together to react to external and internal stimulus.  It would be most interesting though.
Until you try to come up with a code for the guy who's trying to code the guy who's trying to code...to infinity and break the universe.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Cramulus on June 02, 2014, 05:21:26 PM
very relevant --- http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Pt3
The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey

QuoteThis episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.


part 2 is also relevant, as it shows the origins of us mistakenly treating ecosystems like machine networks.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 04:51:46 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 04:30:18 PM
I don't mean coding everything. At least not in the immediate future. Just tackling bite-sized chunks. As we solve related chunks, we can then group-organise everything at increasingly higher levels so eventually (a couple of millenia in the future) we'd have the lot.

Imagine how the different investigative branches of science could be extrapolated as coming up with an encyclopedia of all the things and forces and whatever that compose the universe. If the universe contains infinite complexity then maybe not but even then, we will probably develop a pretty big, much more rounded picture than we have now, within given limits of infinity.

So what we get is complete or near complete understanding of a huge big complex system in it's entirety. What is missing is the sense of code. Without the sense of code it can't be improved, only looked at. It's the engineering part of science. Something I'm hearing a lot of, with regards science in general is the idea of information. Years ago, what science was looking at was things and effects you could see. Tangibles.

Then there was engineering. Engineering with tangibles is shit like building bridges and putting dudes on nearby astronomical landmasses, but, as more and more tangibles are sussed out the number of tangibles left unknown becomes smaller til it's easy to imagine a position where all the tangibles we have down pat. I'm not saying physical engineering will stop or anything, engineering is god's work. What engineering does is figures out new ways to arrange the tangibles.

As more and more tangibles are understood more and more intangible things are being investigated. The understanding of these intangibles is information. What science is increasingly working on understanding is information. When the thing is understood, as always it's handed over to the engineers. Software engineers. What we do is bring to bear our newly developed code faculty. Only now we're not programming little boxes, we're programming reality. :ECH:

I think I kinda see where you're going with this.  I believe it would have to start on a very small level, cellular at the very least, and even then there's an incredible number of variables to take into consideration.  Single celled organisms are simple enough to predict, however there would have to be a great amount of room made for external stimuli, e.g. temperature and environment, which would also have to be coded, or at least somewhat simplified to suit the code level of the organism itself.  It would certainly be a monumental undertaking, and almost insurmountable when you start to codify human behavior, where a near-countless number of individual cells are working together to react to external and internal stimulus.  It would be most interesting though.
Until you try to come up with a code for the guy who's trying to code the guy who's trying to code...to infinity and break the universe.

Buffer overrun? 

Thing is I'm not extrapolating this out to the year 50,000 or whenever we have the whole thing. This can begin to happen right now. In fact it's already started. In a sense, the first phase is almost complete. Information engineering has been going for years. It's already had a massive impact on a wide range of real world systems.

Right this minute if your bio-vehicular manifestation apparatus develops a fatal malfunction, statistically speaking, you're more likely to survive now than you were back before a metric fuckton of software systems were put in place to stage-manage all the people and machinery required to diagnose the pathology and perform a rectification procedure.

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 07:38:25 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM

Buffer overrun? 

Thing is I'm not extrapolating this out to the year 50,000 or whenever we have the whole thing. This can begin to happen right now. In fact it's already started. In a sense, the first phase is almost complete. Information engineering has been going for years. It's already had a massive impact on a wide range of real world systems.

Right this minute if your bio-vehicular manifestation apparatus develops a fatal malfunction, statistically speaking, you're more likely to survive now than you were back before a metric fuckton of software systems were put in place to stage-manage all the people and machinery required to diagnose the pathology and perform a rectification procedure.

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

This sounds both terrifying and amazing.  It would be terrific for everyone to understand everything they wanted to, but where do you stop?  Does the planet just suddenly become a hyper-inteligent utopia? Or does a more sinister element take over?

Perhaps this is just the cynical, paranoid part of my brain talking, but it seems to me that something so incredible as understanding the "code of life" and it's application would be subject to an incredible amount of ethical problems.  I picture it leading to some kind of dystopia, where everyone is born beautiful and inteligent, yet the upper class can be easily seperated from the lower class.  Born to a family that was poor when the technology to alter brain-states was created? That's too bad.  You're going to be a janitor.  And you know what? We're even going to code you to fucking love being a janitor.  And when you go in for your checkups, we'll make sure that we keep you that way if any nature/nurture stuff started to change your worldview.  And they won't stop until everyone's "beautiful".

Pay no attention to anything I just said, because I was rambling for no good reason again.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 07:55:32 PM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 07:38:25 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM

Buffer overrun? 

Thing is I'm not extrapolating this out to the year 50,000 or whenever we have the whole thing. This can begin to happen right now. In fact it's already started. In a sense, the first phase is almost complete. Information engineering has been going for years. It's already had a massive impact on a wide range of real world systems.

Right this minute if your bio-vehicular manifestation apparatus develops a fatal malfunction, statistically speaking, you're more likely to survive now than you were back before a metric fuckton of software systems were put in place to stage-manage all the people and machinery required to diagnose the pathology and perform a rectification procedure.

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

This sounds both terrifying and amazing.  It would be terrific for everyone to understand everything they wanted to, but where do you stop?  Does the planet just suddenly become a hyper-inteligent utopia? Or does a more sinister element take over?

Perhaps this is just the cynical, paranoid part of my brain talking, but it seems to me that something so incredible as understanding the "code of life" and it's application would be subject to an incredible amount of ethical problems.  I picture it leading to some kind of dystopia, where everyone is born beautiful and inteligent, yet the upper class can be easily seperated from the lower class.  Born to a family that was poor when the technology to alter brain-states was created? That's too bad.  You're going to be a janitor.  And you know what? We're even going to code you to fucking love being a janitor.  And when you go in for your checkups, we'll make sure that we keep you that way if any nature/nurture stuff started to change your worldview.  And they won't stop until everyone's "beautiful".

Pay no attention to anything I just said, because I was rambling for no good reason again.

Naw, man, all these things are legitimate concerns. Fair enough you're framing them in terms that an early 21st century unaugmented primate is capable of understanding, whereas I'm expecting a whole bunch of new conflictory scenarios, which I'm currently unable to even conceptualise, will emerge. I can only hope that these are less innately destructive than their currently existent counterparts.

Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

Biologists mapped DNA, and then realized that the complexity of how it actually works is so huge that we maybe, kind of, sort of, understand approximately 2% of it, and it's the simplest 2%.

Neuroscience hasn't even gotten that far.

I know you want to believe, but you are vastly overestimating the current state of the research. What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.

It's just not that simple.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 10:06:08 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.


That's what has always amazed me about the universe.  We know we haven't studied the universe fully on a large scale, and at the same time, we're not sure we have it down to the smallest level.  I seem to remember that school taught me the world is protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Now there's quarks, but they aren't just quarks, they're up quarks and down quarks, and a few others I can't remember.  And eventually we may figure out that something smaller makes up quarks.  Or maybe we already have, and I don't know.t  They could be proving string theory as we speak, and then what?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 02, 2014, 10:28:33 PM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 10:06:08 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.


That's what has always amazed me about the universe.  We know we haven't studied the universe fully on a large scale, and at the same time, we're not sure we have it down to the smallest level.  I seem to remember that school taught me the world is protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Now there's quarks, but they aren't just quarks, they're up quarks and down quarks, and a few others I can't remember.  And eventually we may figure out that something smaller makes up quarks.  Or maybe we already have, and I don't know.t  They could be proving string theory as we speak, and then what?

I like how quarks are named; up, down, bottom, top, charm, and strange. It reminds me of how in Cherokee there are five ways to conjugate nouns depending on whether they're long, rigid, flexible, liquid, or alive.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:06:23 AM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 10:28:33 PM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 10:06:08 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.


That's what has always amazed me about the universe.  We know we haven't studied the universe fully on a large scale, and at the same time, we're not sure we have it down to the smallest level.  I seem to remember that school taught me the world is protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Now there's quarks, but they aren't just quarks, they're up quarks and down quarks, and a few others I can't remember.  And eventually we may figure out that something smaller makes up quarks.  Or maybe we already have, and I don't know.t  They could be proving string theory as we speak, and then what?

I like how quarks are named; up, down, bottom, top, charm, and strange. It reminds me of how in Cherokee there are five ways to conjugate nouns depending on whether they're long, rigid, flexible, liquid, or alive.

Who gets to name these things anyways? Proton and electron at least make sense.  I think they're called quark just so that when somebody studies them, if they happen to say "that's quirky" another scientist can say "don't you mean that's quarky?" hurhurhur hilarity ensues.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 12:27:29 AM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:06:23 AM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 10:28:33 PM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 02, 2014, 10:06:08 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.


That's what has always amazed me about the universe.  We know we haven't studied the universe fully on a large scale, and at the same time, we're not sure we have it down to the smallest level.  I seem to remember that school taught me the world is protons, neutrons, and electrons.  Now there's quarks, but they aren't just quarks, they're up quarks and down quarks, and a few others I can't remember.  And eventually we may figure out that something smaller makes up quarks.  Or maybe we already have, and I don't know.t  They could be proving string theory as we speak, and then what?

I like how quarks are named; up, down, bottom, top, charm, and strange. It reminds me of how in Cherokee there are five ways to conjugate nouns depending on whether they're long, rigid, flexible, liquid, or alive.

Who gets to name these things anyways? Proton and electron at least make sense.  I think they're called quark just so that when somebody studies them, if they happen to say "that's quirky" another scientist can say "don't you mean that's quarky?" hurhurhur hilarity ensues.

And they aren't types of quarks, they're flavors! charm flavor quarks!

It's because scientists are assholes.

Actually, it's because only three flavors were known at the time they were named, and they were so strange that they were named for a nonsense word in a line by James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!". I don't even know what that means.

Fun fact: Bottom and Top flavors used to be called "Truth" and "Beauty", but it turns out that scientists aren't THAT big of assholes so it got changed.

I don't even really know what the fuck a quark is. I mean, I know that two up quarks and a down quark make up a proton, and that two down quarks and an up quark make up a neutron, and that positrons and electrons are flavors of lepton, and that protons and neutrons can combine/decombine with positrons and electrons in such a way that may change a neutron to a proton and vice versa, but that's pretty much it. Probably all I'll ever really know, in fact, since I'm not planning on taking nuclear chemistry.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:37:50 AM
Yeah I was just reading about that.  I guess they can have some points back for the Finnegan's Wake reference.  I was surprised to see they were discovered in the 60's and I clearly don't remember learning about them in school 30 years later.  Guess I should have gone to college if I wanted that kind of education.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 12:41:00 AM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:37:50 AM
Yeah I was just reading about that.  I guess they can have some points back for the Finnegan's Wake reference.  I was surprised to see they were discovered in the 60's and I clearly don't remember learning about them in school 30 years later.  Guess I should have gone to college if I wanted that kind of education.

I didn't go to high school, but from what I gather they only go so deep into sciency stuff. It's a shame.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: The Good Reverend Roger on June 03, 2014, 03:02:23 AM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:37:50 AM
Yeah I was just reading about that.  I guess they can have some points back for the Finnegan's Wake reference.  I was surprised to see they were discovered in the 60's and I clearly don't remember learning about them in school 30 years later.  Guess I should have gone to college if I wanted that kind of education.

Scientists are all drug addicts.  It's why they spend so much time reading crappy Irish novelists.

Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 07:09:07 AM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

Biologists mapped DNA, and then realized that the complexity of how it actually works is so huge that we maybe, kind of, sort of, understand approximately 2% of it, and it's the simplest 2%.

Neuroscience hasn't even gotten that far.

I know you want to believe, but you are vastly overestimating the current state of the research. What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.

It's just not that simple.

I never said it was simple, however 2% suggests we're about half way done if you extrapolate along similar lines to the genome project - 4 years in they had mapped 1%. The machines that are used to decipher the code will be considerably more powerful four or five years from now. If we were relying on human cognition to work it out then, yeah, it'd take forever but we're not relying on human cognition so I'm a bit more optimistic than you about this.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 12:40:15 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 03, 2014, 12:27:29 AM
I don't even really know what the fuck a quark is. I mean, I know that two up quarks and a down quark make up a proton, and that two down quarks and an up quark make up a neutron, and that positrons and electrons are flavors of lepton, and that protons and neutrons can combine/decombine with positrons and electrons in such a way that may change a neutron to a proton and vice versa, but that's pretty much it. Probably all I'll ever really know, in fact, since I'm not planning on taking nuclear chemistry.

If you're really curious, I can try to explain it.  But it looks like you've got a lot of other stuff on your plate, and they all have midterms coming up.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Junkenstein on June 03, 2014, 01:01:37 PM
I've been reading about Quarks and such on and off for years and I still haven't a fucking clue.

If you want to type it, I for one, will read it.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 01:37:53 PM
Quote from: Junkenstein on June 03, 2014, 01:01:37 PM
I've been reading about Quarks and such on and off for years and I still haven't a fucking clue.

If you want to type it, I for one, will read it.

Ok, so, keep in mind that none of this is intuitive.

The equations of the Standard Model make no references to particles.   And yet, we have atoms, and somewhat useful stick and ball models of molecules, and so on.  What's happening is that the nuclei is made up of stuff that reacts with a force law that when excited give it an intrinsic size.  So, they're sizeless quantum energies, but they make things that (mostly) behave like particles when they react to forces.

Ok, so those behaviors can be grouped in to Leptons and Hadrons, based upon their mass.  Hadrons are made up of Quarks, which are described by four-component wave functions obeying Dirac's equation. They come in three "generations" of families with two members each.  The three pairs of quarks in order of increasing mass are called (and the corresponding flavors are labeled) up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom (or u, d; c, s; t, b; with primes to distinguish anti-quarks: u', d', etc.)

The quarks carry all three kinds of charges – electromagnetic, weak, and strong, and they can clump together to make long-lived objects with definite size and mass, the most stable of which are the nuclei of atoms. The first member of each quark pair, often called the "up"-type partner, carries a positive electric charge two-thirds that of the electron. The other "down"-type partner in each pair has a charge one unit less, or negative one-third.

The strong force, which acts only among quarks – thus distinguishing them from leptons – is generated by a new kind of charge that differs from electricity in having six rather than two states. Three of these are the so-called color charges found on the quarks (call them red, blue, and green), and the other three are the charges found on the anti-quarks (call them anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green). Since each quark comes in three colors, it would be more accurate to count 3×6 = 18 different kinds of quarks. The colored versions are all so similar it is easier to think of them as just different states of the same underlying object so we usually speak of only six quarks and their anti-quarks.

TL;DR – Quarks are energies that interact with forces and have mass, which clump together to form Hadrons.




I may have over-generalized some bits.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Junkenstein on June 03, 2014, 01:53:41 PM
Appreciated and makes marginally more sense than what I thought. That said, I'm still pretty fucking clueless. I'll try and stick "quarks for dummies" or similar on the reading list as I do feel that I should be making more of an effort to understand this shit.

Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 02:17:19 PM
Electricity has two states?  :?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 02:23:22 PM
The biggest problem I find is that you can't just start with "What's a quark?"  A lot of this stuff came about because the math demanded it exist.  Like, you have to start with Maxwell, who's work pretty much destroyed Atomism.  In a sense, the Standard Model started there, because in order to explain the implications of Maxwell, you need Dirac fucking around with Schrodinger's model in order to reletavize it, which means instead of a single ampletude/phase pair, you needed a four component array, which led to "spin", but also that an additional particle was needed, the positron. 

So, they didn't say, "hey, what's this thing over here?" they were all, "the only way this equation works is if there's something out there."  And the implications of the positron meant there are other anti-particles.  And in order to describe this, they needed to use another dimension (mathematically.  This ain't Dr Who).  That led to the idea of Isospin, and some new kinds of forces acting upon it.  And all of That implied smaller things that made up the proton and neutron.  And so on.

In a way, none of the Standard Model makes any sense until you can answer the question of "What is the Standard Model trying to solve?" 

Quote from: Constructing Reality, JHMIIIThe Standard Model is a conceptual structure, a set of ideas, in which a small number of fundamental things appears in terms of which all else may be accounted for. But those fundamental things are not related simply to objects we can weigh or deflect in the laboratory. Each "elementary particle" we actually observe is a combination of all the pieces of the Standard Model, just as the observable bits of matter in Maxwell's the-ory are part charged matter and part electromagnetic field.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 02:41:36 PM
I dunno how accurate my impression is but, when I listen to people trying to explain these particle/quantum things I tend to see what they're doing as something that doesn't describe what's necessarily happening down there but it's more like they're saying "we don't know what the fuck the mechanics of it are but, if we use these mathematical models, whatever it is that's really going on becomes predictable."

Is that a fair assessment?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 02:56:30 PM
It's more, "we can't explain what's going on in any sort of metaphor that would make sense, because that level of reality doesn't work that way, here's the math that explains it."

Would you feel that saying "a barstool with a 5Kg mass with a density of 20ρ is traveling at a velocity of 50m/s" doesn't explain the mechanics, but is only a predictable model?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 03:16:37 PM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on June 03, 2014, 03:02:23 AM
Quote from: Raz Tech on June 03, 2014, 12:37:50 AM
Yeah I was just reading about that.  I guess they can have some points back for the Finnegan's Wake reference.  I was surprised to see they were discovered in the 60's and I clearly don't remember learning about them in school 30 years later.  Guess I should have gone to college if I wanted that kind of education.

Scientists are all drug addicts.  It's why they spend so much time reading crappy Irish novelists.

:lulz:
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 03:17:07 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 07:09:07 AM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 02, 2014, 09:45:59 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 02, 2014, 05:38:16 PM

The deeper these lab-coat guys seem to dig them more they're coming across information. Code. Biology just did it with DNA - a bunch of serial code written on a strip of self replicating tape. So we're currently at the - room full of lightbulbs - stage of this technology but another decade or two and we'll have SDK's and IDE's and Lifeform modelling paradigms all up the wazzoo. Kids'll be running around with apps embedded in their smart clothes that can hack the brainwaves of a wasp over bluetooth and make it not want to sting them.

Human behaviour can be coded. Hell, we already have a good handle on how they work. I see neuroscience, at some point, producing the kind of hard data an engineer can code. All human systems from street crossings to individual personalities themselves will be coded for. You don't like being scared of spiders? Fine - we'll code that for you. Want an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. Sorted. Upgraded arithmetic and logic capability? There you go.

Biologists mapped DNA, and then realized that the complexity of how it actually works is so huge that we maybe, kind of, sort of, understand approximately 2% of it, and it's the simplest 2%.

Neuroscience hasn't even gotten that far.

I know you want to believe, but you are vastly overestimating the current state of the research. What we HAVE done is pretty amazing, but the one thing it's showing us more vividly with each new advance is that the depth of what we don't know is far more immense than we anticipated.

It's just not that simple.

I never said it was simple, however 2% suggests we're about half way done if you extrapolate along similar lines to the genome project - 4 years in they had mapped 1%. The machines that are used to decipher the code will be considerably more powerful four or five years from now. If we were relying on human cognition to work it out then, yeah, it'd take forever but we're not relying on human cognition so I'm a bit more optimistic than you about this.

:lulz: :lulz: :lulz: :lulz: :lulz: :lulz:
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 03:20:05 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2014, 12:40:15 PM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on June 03, 2014, 12:27:29 AM
I don't even really know what the fuck a quark is. I mean, I know that two up quarks and a down quark make up a proton, and that two down quarks and an up quark make up a neutron, and that positrons and electrons are flavors of lepton, and that protons and neutrons can combine/decombine with positrons and electrons in such a way that may change a neutron to a proton and vice versa, but that's pretty much it. Probably all I'll ever really know, in fact, since I'm not planning on taking nuclear chemistry.

If you're really curious, I can try to explain it.  But it looks like you've got a lot of other stuff on your plate, and they all have midterms coming up.

This is one of those things where I am, actually, really interested. I might have to postpone actually understanding it until after finals (which start today and extend, inexplicably, to the 16th, which is three days after commencement) but since I won't be taking any other chemistry classes beyond organic and nutrition, and the only physics class I'm taking is 201, this might be my only chance to hear it from someone who really gets it

All this is a means by which of saying, yes, please!
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 03:20:28 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 02:17:19 PM
Electricity has two states?  :?

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 03:21:31 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2014, 02:56:30 PM
It's more, "we can't explain what's going on in any sort of metaphor that would make sense, because that level of reality doesn't work that way, here's the math that explains it."

Would you feel that saying "a barstool with a 5Kg mass with a density of 20ρ is traveling at a velocity of 50m/s" doesn't explain the mechanics, but is only a predictable model?

Yeah but we can see the barstool and weigh it and measure it and stuff. If all we had to go on was this mysterious phenomenon that some people were coming out of bars with stool shaped dents in their heads, we might end up with all manner of spooky maths to explain it?
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 03:23:33 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2014, 03:20:28 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 02:17:19 PM
Electricity has two states?  :?

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

My entire life is powered by electricity and, try as I might, I can't get my head around it  :cry:
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: Mesozoic Mister Nigel on June 03, 2014, 03:23:45 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2014, 01:37:53 PM
Quote from: Junkenstein on June 03, 2014, 01:01:37 PM
I've been reading about Quarks and such on and off for years and I still haven't a fucking clue.

If you want to type it, I for one, will read it.

Ok, so, keep in mind that none of this is intuitive.

The equations of the Standard Model make no references to particles.   And yet, we have atoms, and somewhat useful stick and ball models of molecules, and so on.  What's happening is that the nuclei is made up of stuff that reacts with a force law that when excited give it an intrinsic size.  So, they're sizeless quantum energies, but they make things that (mostly) behave like particles when they react to forces.

Ok, so those behaviors can be grouped in to Leptons and Hadrons, based upon their mass.  Hadrons are made up of Quarks, which are described by four-component wave functions obeying Dirac's equation. They come in three "generations" of families with two members each.  The three pairs of quarks in order of increasing mass are called (and the corresponding flavors are labeled) up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom (or u, d; c, s; t, b; with primes to distinguish anti-quarks: u', d', etc.)

The quarks carry all three kinds of charges – electromagnetic, weak, and strong, and they can clump together to make long-lived objects with definite size and mass, the most stable of which are the nuclei of atoms. The first member of each quark pair, often called the "up"-type partner, carries a positive electric charge two-thirds that of the electron. The other "down"-type partner in each pair has a charge one unit less, or negative one-third.

The strong force, which acts only among quarks – thus distinguishing them from leptons – is generated by a new kind of charge that differs from electricity in having six rather than two states. Three of these are the so-called color charges found on the quarks (call them red, blue, and green), and the other three are the charges found on the anti-quarks (call them anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green). Since each quark comes in three colors, it would be more accurate to count 3×6 = 18 different kinds of quarks. The colored versions are all so similar it is easier to think of them as just different states of the same underlying object so we usually speak of only six quarks and their anti-quarks.

TL;DR – Quarks are energies that interact with forces and have mass, which clump together to form Hadrons.




I may have over-generalized some bits.

That was mildly elucidating, thank you.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: LMNO on June 03, 2014, 03:58:46 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 03:23:33 PM
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on June 03, 2014, 03:20:28 PM
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 02:17:19 PM
Electricity has two states?  :?

There are three types of charge:

Electromagnetic
Weak
Strong

My entire life is powered by electricity and, try as I might, I can't get my head around it  :cry:

There are four fields, known as "forces", that are so far irreducible.
Electromagnetic
Gravitation
Weak ("weak isospin" is the historical, if somewhat incorrect, name for it)
Strong ("strong nuclear force")

These are the forces holding the universe together.
Title: Re: Objectivity - a software development approach
Post by: P3nT4gR4m on June 03, 2014, 04:05:49 PM
I've heard of all of these but that's it - I know the words are something to do with forces. I even recall something about the weak force and the strong one. Might have been your Dad's book, which I tried quite hard to get to grips with, making it about half way though on a couple of attempts. If you imagine a little brain, sprouting arms and putting them over it's frontal lobes so as to shield them from the scary info, that's an exact scientific description of what actually happens inside my skull for a given level of physics. :oops:

I honestly turn into a drooling retard. I wish it was different but I generally manage to bumble along okay without it.