April Fool's Day in July?
July 27th 2009 09:29
If Webitz seems a little obsessed of late with weight loss pills, don't worry - it's nothing untoward. The obsession with such things is a worldwide phenomenon (well, when I say worldwide, of course, I mean the Western world - the Western world thinks it isworldwide, most of the time).
Even here in New Zealand we have the All Blacks, our most important rugby team, being charged with being overweight and obese. Something is awry. It's that ridiculous Body Mass Index, which somehow seems to think we should all look the same, and fails to take into account the possibility that some of us are just big-boned, or have large heads, or feet, or lots of actual real muscles.
Either that or the BMI is just one big long-lasting April Fool's joke. In fact, in another area, science is becoming so peculiar that it's hard to tell the real stories from the April Fool's one. The date on which they're published is about the only indication that they're not hoaxes.
For starters there's one about Artificial Intelligence becoming so clever that some scientists are worried that it might take over from humans. Of course, this is the stuff of fiction and movies (I, Robot, in both cases, for instance, or Hal in 2001), but scientists seem to think that it's going to become a reality.
Unfortunately, they're not helped by the likes of this kind of statement to the media: “Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” Technologists are replacing religion? With what? Ideas resonating with the Rapture? Sounds good, but does it actually mean anything? Methinks not.
And as if it wasn't bad enough having scientists worrying about the Rapture (I thought, according to some of the atheist sites on Orble, that scientists were all atheists too, so why would they even consider the Rapture?), then we have another bunch of scientists - synthetic biologists in this case - telling us that bacteria can compute faster than anything made from silicon.
I read this last statement more than once, and then read through the article, and it still sounds like an April Fool's joke to me, even though it was published in July. (It could be that the scientists have been buried away with their bacteria so long they're lost track of the calendar, of course.)
Apparently the bacteria can solve the Hamiltonian path problem in a very short time (the link attached to that phrase will lead you to a piece of Wikipedia which makes almost no English sense to me). Why the bacteria would want to do this is anyone's guess. Why synthetic biologists thought this was the sort of puzzle bacteria would thrive on is also anyone's guess.
Here's an extract from the article: The researchers coded a simplified version of the problem, using just three cities, by modifying the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green, and the possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. Bacteria producing the correct answer glowed both colours, turning them yellow.
Does that make any sense? Do we really want a bunch of bacteria in our computers sorting out what I'm typing, or drawing pictures of my grandchildren, or thinking their a real live form of artificial intelligence, and telling us what we should be using our computers for?
I think not. April Fool's in July, I suspect.
Even here in New Zealand we have the All Blacks, our most important rugby team, being charged with being overweight and obese. Something is awry. It's that ridiculous Body Mass Index, which somehow seems to think we should all look the same, and fails to take into account the possibility that some of us are just big-boned, or have large heads, or feet, or lots of actual real muscles.
Either that or the BMI is just one big long-lasting April Fool's joke. In fact, in another area, science is becoming so peculiar that it's hard to tell the real stories from the April Fool's one. The date on which they're published is about the only indication that they're not hoaxes.
For starters there's one about Artificial Intelligence becoming so clever that some scientists are worried that it might take over from humans. Of course, this is the stuff of fiction and movies (I, Robot, in both cases, for instance, or Hal in 2001), but scientists seem to think that it's going to become a reality.
Unfortunately, they're not helped by the likes of this kind of statement to the media: “Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.” Technologists are replacing religion? With what? Ideas resonating with the Rapture? Sounds good, but does it actually mean anything? Methinks not.
And as if it wasn't bad enough having scientists worrying about the Rapture (I thought, according to some of the atheist sites on Orble, that scientists were all atheists too, so why would they even consider the Rapture?), then we have another bunch of scientists - synthetic biologists in this case - telling us that bacteria can compute faster than anything made from silicon.
I read this last statement more than once, and then read through the article, and it still sounds like an April Fool's joke to me, even though it was published in July. (It could be that the scientists have been buried away with their bacteria so long they're lost track of the calendar, of course.)
Apparently the bacteria can solve the Hamiltonian path problem in a very short time (the link attached to that phrase will lead you to a piece of Wikipedia which makes almost no English sense to me). Why the bacteria would want to do this is anyone's guess. Why synthetic biologists thought this was the sort of puzzle bacteria would thrive on is also anyone's guess.
Here's an extract from the article: The researchers coded a simplified version of the problem, using just three cities, by modifying the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green, and the possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. Bacteria producing the correct answer glowed both colours, turning them yellow.
Does that make any sense? Do we really want a bunch of bacteria in our computers sorting out what I'm typing, or drawing pictures of my grandchildren, or thinking their a real live form of artificial intelligence, and telling us what we should be using our computers for?
I think not. April Fool's in July, I suspect.
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