oilywater

Downvotes were clear enough that it was off-topic.

People downvote you but there's definitely some truth there to find.

Thing about these projects is long-term gain. Maybe these toilets will pay off in 20-30 years, they have to, if they want to be sustainable.

But yes, a single plane flight would negate all of the savings. It definitely negates all of the energy you save by showering with cold water, by recycling, by turning of the light.

It is definitely a gigantic problem when India, China, Africa turn into energy hungry giants that already are Germany, USA, UK etc.

We'll see how it all will turn out to be, business seems as usual, hope that's going to change fast.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

A great book that describes how simple and easy it is to analyse sustainability - purely by numbers.

That's first world country mentality.

Energy footprint of an average African is minuscule. They probably use and reuse quite a lot of stuff, efficiently without disposing it and requiring more energy for novelty production. One of the reasons for it is poverty, you really can't act like stuff is in abundance when it's not.

It wasn't meant as a counter-argument, just filling in a stance and expanding on it.

I do it sometimes, I apologize if it confused, probably should have replied to myself.

To put "humane" slaughter in a good perspective.

"My life experience has given me a better understanding of what is happening, and what a mistake it is to believe there is anything called "humane" slaughter. Animals have families and feelings, and to think that kindness before killing them is an answer is totally wrong. ...

There is always fear in their eyes. They know exactly what is going to happen. So for anyone to claim there is such a thing as humane slaughter, well, that's the greatest oxymoron in the world." - Howard Lyman, former rancher

I also like this story:

I meet a woman in a club, buy her drinks, make her laugh, dance with her, she's having the time of her life, we go to my place, I make her favorite dish, she drinks the best wine, music is playing, she feels absolutely great, sitting on couch, watching her favorite movie, meanwhile, she's sipping that drink, that has date rape drug in it. She passes out, I rape her. Humanely. Next morning she feels a bit drowsy, she thinks it's the alcholol, she smiles, says she felt perfect although she can't remember the rest of the evening. I was gentle, she doesn't feel raped. John Doe, humane rapist

It is absolutely irrational to call slaughter humane. This rationalizing to make things morally right is the common mistake people make. It is a mistake in deduction and reasoning.

Some philosophers would probably say I'm a deontologist, and they would say that consequences of a deed make a deed wrong not that the deed itself is wrong - which is my opinion. Are there no consequences to massive animal slaughter and flesh consumption? Is waste of tax-payer's money a consequence big enough, maybe climate change, massive pollution?

Any rational process, any non-laughable branch of philosophy will say that slaughter is immoral and that there's nothing humane about it - and that humane is an adjective that cannot stand by it.

I have no problem with people eating meat, but people who rationalize it through appeal to nature, through skewing morals, that's what I have a problem with.

As I've stated in my comment there are more than enough examples where that definition of species is lacking - it's not a line/plane/SVM-hyperplane.

Evolution is gradual, there are no big species jumps.

What was there between sapiens and erectus, X? What was between sapiens and X, and X and erectus, Y and Z?

What was then between sapiens and Y, Y and X, X and Z, Z and erectus?

This can go on forever, evolution is by nature gradual, lets say it in your terms, a regression is more suitable than classification.

What point in this finely continous line do we pick for discrimination? Speciesism discovered!

Yeah, I'm adding paragraphs because I'm trying to anticipate the arguments people put forth to rationalize appeal to nature - and draw their moral (rational) conclusions from it. Especially when they don't know that nature is defined with subjective and somewhat arbitrary definitions that have extreme amounts of exceptions. Same thing is done with religion, where there are plenty of definitions but hundreds of exceptions because definitions are not precise enough, and can't be.

As my third paragraph states, there are enough exceptions to see that species isn't always that definition, and that it is somewhat arbitrary.

Fourth paragraph is also an additional information for those who want to rank horses as lesser beings because we are obviously capable of reigning the planet thus our evolutionary path is more worth - without noticing that the evolution and natural selection don't have a goal set in stone.

If you don't have an argument, then why laugh at me with that horse joke? It's entirely irrelevant and, given my following comment, incorrect.

Same way humans were differentiated by using races - ranking us lower/higher better/worse than others, that's what people do with species.

If you find the theory of evolution a fact, then you wouldn't laugh at me. Any rational evolutionary biologist will agree that species are here to simplify the conversations, they cannot be used for ranking which species are better - they are also not the main theme of research.

Do you know how species are defined? Sane definition? - members of the same species can produce a fertile offspring. But there are hundreds if not thousand of exceptions where this happens even across the species boundary - the reason why it happens is that our labeling is in its core subjective and somewhat arbitrary, there's no dividng line/plane/svm-hyperplane.

In the parallel lines of time in evolution and natural selection we've been as long as all the living beings.

You wouldn't find homo erectus (neanderthalensis, habilis, rudolfensis, ergaster, floresiensis, even some australopithecae) attractive but you could procreate. There's a biological reason why you can't have children with a horse, it's not a species reason, it's not even ingrained in our species labeling as can be seen from the above definition.

What, you would rank the being as irrelevant (or less relevant) if you can't have children with it? Comedy of irrationality.

Go try finding your rationality and get back to us on that.

Exactly, these laws and actions are failed (or maybe successful) attempts at trying to rationalize immoral behaviour. They convince themselves - believing they are kind and compassionate - that there are humane ways to end a life, humane rape, humane slaughter, humane immoral acts. It's a comedy.

Especially eating it, which is in the natural order of things.

Yeah, those claws that you use to hunt your food down are pretty natural.

Appeal to nature is an argument flaw and if you are rational you shouldn't use it.

Humans ate meat because they saved their energy. Do you know how they saved it? The non-human animals were walking around collecting nutrients so humans didn't have to waste that time. These non-human animals were nutrient packed and it allowed humans to save time, have more offsprings and survive.

Today, there's no energy savings. Today we bring the food to the animals, filtering millions of tons of nutrient filled grains through inefficient bodies that waste almost everything on keeping their temperature - their body warm. It is as far from nature as it gets.

You can't say there's something special about flesh that you need to survive, and there's nothing else that has it.

You like the luxury of eating meat, you like the taste, you like the texture. It is a luxurious activity that you allow yourself to have, ignoring the effects on the environment, ignoring the suffering (and yes there is no such thing as humane murder, rape or slaughter), doing it just for your pleasure. And it recently turned out to be almost an equivalent to cigarette smoking - so it's entirely irrational from a health perspective but that is the case for most of the luxuries.

That's fine with me but don't try to rationalize it, it is in its complete entirety - irrational.

It is also ironic that you pointed out a perfect example of speciesism (humans preferring one species over another) and you couldn't label yourself as a speciesist. It is also ironic how you pointed out the irrationality in other people, not seeing your own when it was right in front of you.

Human is a label we gave to ourselves. Would you discriminate over homo erectus, homo habilis - would you call them non-human animals, would it be okay to use them for medical testing, maybe for food since their flesh doesn't have Neu5Gc?

The only reason why your statements are this speciesist is that no living ancestor of ours that was labeled a different species is alive today.

Otherwise you'd realize that species are a human construct, that there's no better/worse. Yes, that does mean that human as a fully moral being (morality comes from rationality) should try to minimize pain and suffering and destruction of life.

Animal holocaust is happening for thousands of years. Even the holocaust survivors have made comparisons and a lot of them have plant-based diets.

Well, in 2025 it will be exactly at the computational capability of a brain.

Yeah, and sentience is a completely made up human thing by which we differentiate betweem ourselves and other non-human animals.

What people want to see is artificial general intelligence, currently that is not possible.

Does running human software on biological hardware make it sentient, or would the same be true on other forms of hardware?

That hardware is just doing what it's been told to.

I believe it is called problem solving, not math.

Mathematics is a framework for problem solving which requires problem solving skills and knowledge of mathematics.

I believe anyone using a piece of paper and writing down their thinking is doing problem solving on problems that are presented in the game. Yes, it is probably equivalent to some algorithms present in computer science but they are (if not familiar) discovering everything by themselves.

The game provides the framework for problem solving, so instead of having knowledge of math/algorithms, you build that knowledge yourself and improve your problem solving skills as you go.

The way math is commonly taught seems to be knowledge oriented - which leaves a lot of people completely stuck when it comes to problem solving.

That's why I'm interested if you could, playing these games, improve your general problem solving skills, so that only thing you have to do, when you start with a different framework, is to get the knowledge - but your thinking previously trained without it and it should work now when you're familiar with the framework.

At least that is what I would expect form a general problem solver that got one's skills by solving problems in maths, or physics. I would assume that they could solve problems in other areas if they knew the terminology, if they acquired knowledge.

This game is the perfect tool for testing your problem solving skills. It puts you in a new framework and tests your cognition.

Portal, The Talos Principle, all have the same goal.

I wonder if people could become excellent problem solver by playing these games instead of honing the skills in the mathematics, physics or similar frameworks.

Looks closer to support vector machine and its regression capabilities.

Although, linear regression, logistic regression, svm regression, are all almost the same thing, the loss function is different, all can be trained with gradient descent.

But we are doing a brand new diet. About 2000-10000 years ago human diet consisted of around 80% animal flesh.

I never mentioned dairy. You mentioned a half-assed parallel, and it is, and I pointed out every single bit that stinks in it, I do not give a damn about slaughter. I wasn't sure if aphids shit honeydew, or if they vomit it out through mouth. So, pick an analogy you know that makes sense to you, because you've obviously capable of equating an ant with a human and raise a silly ethical question.

I asked you what about 75% herbivores, you cherry picked.

yet indigenous peoples all over the world independently developed diets with dairy, from central Africa to Mongolia to neolithic Britain to Sinai to Mesopotamia and India.

Yeah, people are known to be very smart and very natural. Lets cherry pick again, people have developed weapons to hunt animals with, but then used them to kill humans. People developed technology to kill animal efficiently with it, then they used the same techniques on humans. I guess we are so smart and natural and it makes sense to do it because everyone did it. We all know what they did when they did that, they raised their utility function. At some point it was a rational decision, at another it stopped being.

Sorry, but this discussion is over, if you aren't kind and compassionate, if you do not value human life, if you do not think that values of the theory of evolution matter, then go keep raising that utility function, I entirely understand your viewpoint and with that there's nothing to discuss.

Oh, so you are talking about change of the species without evolution?

1000 years isn't long enough for evolution.

Honeydew isn't tit secretion, it's vomit/shit. And how can a symbiosis of ants and aphids be a parallel for humans and cows. We do not protect cows from their predators, we slit their throats and they know that that's coming. We also do not eat cow's shit. Hilarious parallel.

When did we ever in history of our evolution have a need for another mammal's milk? From an evolutionary perspective, from a perspective of natural parallels, it makes no sense.

The milk you need is the milk your mother gives you. If you seek calcium there's more of it in parsley, basil, origano per mass than is in milk. If you want iron it's also there, more than there is in some of the available animal flesh.

There are also many parallels in the diets of other mammals, 75% of species are herbivore on this planet. If we are seeking parallels in nature to mirror, why are we cherrypicking?

75% herbivores means that genes for plant-based diets are all over the place.

Our ancestors at one point in time had a diet consisting 60-80% of animal flesh. Do you think that this is what nature solved? I mean, technology has given us a way to rise above the evolution.

We do not have claws, or teeth that could pierce an elephant, lion, gazelle. It doesn't seem that nature solved anything. Or us, drinking cows milk? Did nature solve the digestion of human to consume milk of another mammal? Was this a thing in past. I do not think so.

If one wants to embark on a moral argument present in the theory of evolution, where no organism is more special than the other, then you'd probably avoid consumption of food coming from animals, or you'd be setting yourself up to some contradiction in the brain. :D

Or, if one wants to embark on a moral argument that humans are special and that life is worth conserving. Then, you'd probably also want to not include animal products, due to high pollution implicitly killing off humans, and animal agriculture being one of the causes of global warming.

Or, if one feels he's compassionate, good, then murder is not the way, or maybe humane murder is? Is there such a thing as humane murder?

Or, one wants to embark on a moral argument that in this universe that is so vast, it's entirely meaningless to ponder over ethics, and morality, and that you just want to maximize your utility function, which includes enjoying the flavor of baked flesh, cooked embryos and sweet vomit. Then, it doesn't matter at all what you eat, if you feel great.

Yep, since November 2014 all of the versions of Soylent are vegan. So, we'll see how that turns out. It would be really interesting if some results are reported.

Doing this kind of science is so easy. Do the experiment, film the whole thing, leave the footage untouched, point to the timestamp where stuff happens, and voila, repeat the experiment and everyone will try to reproduce it.

Instead of providing anecdotal evidence, fabricated data, and being a scientist that spends time on saying that radiation from mobile technologies is harmful, despite microwaves you use to heat up your food irradiating you more in that frequency range, or sun, blasting you with even more radiation.

It's so easy to be a scientist, especially if you have government funding like the authors do. But for some reason, they decide to spend their entire lives doing nothing of quality, doing nothing meaningful.

Yes, we people invented terms like consciousness, self-awareness, intelligent behavior. Yes, these things are used to put stuff on a scale when they shouldn't be (if we agree that the evidence for theory of evolution is convincing), and that is not good, and yes I do understand the motivation of the authors. But really, doing good science, especially for these types of things is not really hard.

http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/

Great blog with examples where something linear turns quadratic! :D

Most of the examples show that being this high at the abstraction level disallows you to properly evaluate the complexity of the code you are writing. Something that might look simple and linear can in fact have a quadratic behavior.

I remember reading about this game on a private music torrent tracker what.cd and was working on the solution for a couple of hours. I believe there was a whole thread dedicated to these kinds of problems.

Quite an entertaining problem, skip the result and try it out yourself, the sense of accomplishment is fulfilling, especially if your mood is shaky.

I'm not pulling these numbers out of my butt.

There's absolutely no way that there's one million gallium reserves economically viable for extraction. If there was, the price wouldn't be that high.

Hafnium and indium too. 2017-2020.

https://scholar.google.hr/scholar?q=indium+hafnium+reserves&...

Mostly that. But realistically there's no education on any of this stuff.

For example 2017 is the year when some of the most used rare earth elements will be depleted and should be retrieved through recycling in the next years (gallium for the LCD displays is disappearing, so either we figure out the displays or massively recycle). This is not a surprise because the demand for rare earth elements has been rising exponentially, with the number of electronic devices produced :D

Although, food production is definitely getting more and more efficient. But biology of living beings on Earth is too inefficient for the current production to be sustainable. Just compare the vast amounts of food (energy) a single duck, chicken or cow needs to maintain body heat, with the weight (energy value) of meat. This coupled with growing consumption in developing countries won't really work.

Without Hot Air is an excellent book written by a problem solving pragmatist and excellent machine learning researcher David MacKay exposing the pure numbers and limits and extrapolating them carefully, to get the same conclusions. http://www.withouthotair.com/Electronic.html

Tooling is getting better, CMake is awesome. Modules would reduce compile times significantly but it seems C++17 won't include them, so we'd have to wait a bit longer.