Posts by BenWilson
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Actually, it's "hard-working taxpayers".
Even better. That could be anyone.
But it's notable in the sense that he's the annointed Prime Minister.
Yes I guess NZers have come to expect leaders who know what they're talking about. They also seem to be 'over' them.
I don't think there's any real strategy that will work for Labour. But the strategy they most assuredly should run for the good of the country will be to keep working on good policy and demanding the same from National. This year will actually be one where good governance is vital.
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I still have Netscape and sometimes use it if other browsers don't work. But that's almost never these days.
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I don't know why everyone's putting such emphasis on a throwaway line by Key. He probably just hadn't done the numbers, and was making shit up. He needs to make a mental note not to use actual numbers when making feel-good lolly promises. Instead of saying "the average worker" he should have said "a lot of workers". Or even better "the average worker in this room".
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Another thing that depresses me is the way National have (with utter complicity of the media) totally owned the phrase "social engineering" and attached a negative connotation to it.
It's true. Engineering of all kinds is 'playing God' you see. Cause God was an engineer. He worked out the fastest way to create intelligent life to worship him was to create an enormous explosion 20 billion years ago, and then wait. That's God's engineering, and we daren't tinker with it.
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But....I've trodden on my cat's tail accidentally before, are you telling me Henry was big enough to forgive and forget? Oh, hang on, I see, so you cut his claws and teeth off?
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Russell Brown & others have probably never known what its like to be dealing with a child who has severe behavioural problems. After all , Russell exactly what would you have done if your own teenage son came swinging at you with a baseball bat?It's all very well for people on these columns to sit & judge situations from a comfortable armchair while quaffing on wine totally divorced from another world of reality.
How silly. Do you know anything about Russell's children? If they come at you with a bat you don't need s59 defense any more. And do you know anything about any of the other writers here? Your comment sounds like there's more than a little alcohol involved.
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Jeez, no way would I keep a leopard as a pet. I've just read a bit too much Jim Corbett. Cohabiting with a creature that could tear your limbs off if you forgot to feed it on time would put a lot of scary flatmates in perspective.
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81st
From my POV I'm curious about what you mean when you say "getting dynamic systems to implement digital style thinking processing" the concept seems to turn my brain to fudge.
OK, by digital I mean as in not-analog. If you think humans are dynamic systems, then clearly there's one system capable of digital thought. Most of our mental processes are probably not digital, but a lot are - reading for instance. When you see a letter, most of the time you know what letter it is beyond all doubt. There is no continuum of possibilities - it's a T or it's not a T. It's well understood and well defined what that symbol stands for, and our ability to recognize it is digital in it's clarity. There's still plenty of writing where you're not sure, just as bits are lost in digital signals all the time. But those are considered just as 'bad' in a TCP/IP packet as they are when you are reading - when you can't tell what letter it is it's not 'half T and half F' or something like that. You just accept that data is lost, and try to find a way to compensate - request it again, pick it up from context, etc.
Flipping a coin is another example. It will almost always end up in one state or the other. And if by chance it ends up in some other state like on-it's-side, or fell-down-the-drain, you discard the outcome and try again. That's a digital signal, with nothing the least bit electronic about it.
In general, the universe is analog. A computer is made up entirely of analog components, which create digital outcomes. My take on dynamical systems is that they are saying the fixation on digital can be misleading, that it is only one method of data representation, leading to a view of all knowledge as facts and rules, where that is not really that useful a way of thinking about a lot of things we do with our brains. We don't necessarily flip to anger in presence of x stimulus, and all other emotions flip to off. Maybe our emotions are related in a complex and not rule-driven way, a continuous movement of chemical levels, pushing each other one way or another constantly, rather than in discrete steps.
But as I'm sure you know, if you make discrete steps small enough, they look continuous. Digital systems can model analog ones, often better than any other way of doing it, since your level of granularity can be controlled. We model weather digitally, even though it's not much of a digital system, something that frustrates everyone. "Is it going to rain tomorrow?". The answer is not yes or no, unless you are very, very clear what is meant by raining. As in, exactly how much and exactly where and for how long.
Did that clarify at all? I'm basically saying that it's a striking and powerful feature of human brains that we can go digital on so much stuff. Surely everything I've typed here to you will enter your mind in a digital way at some level - all of the correctly spelled words will be identified as words you know. A great deal of what I've said you could say back to me, and I'd know for sure you've got it. But then there's also a lot that's not digital, like how you 'understand the meaning' of what I'm saying. I'm sure your internal representation will be entirely different to mine in many ways, which will lead in to different conclusions when applied than what I might think of.
We can mislead ourselves into thinking that rules and facts, because they are such a powerful tools, are the only ways of thinking. They're actually quite late inventions biologically, and they are completely swaddled in all of our prior means of thought, which handled a great deal of the most difficult aspects of survival, like seeing, hearing, moving, remembering, wanting. The proportion of our thinking used in that rules-and-facts step-by-step way is probably tiny. It's very useful, particularly for communication, but not on it's own. It takes up a lot of energy, too, where the more automatic processes just seem to run themselves.
How the two different ways of thought intermarry is beyond me. It seems clear that the logical functions of the brain must be implemented directly in the non-logical parts through training. We can clearly learn rules and abstract them and as we do it, it becomes more and more effortless, until they seem to just fall into the backdrop of our minds. They seem to push their way right back to our perceptual boundaries, so that our very perceptions are molded by the rules we have learned. After a certain age, it is extremely hard for people to even hear the really different sounds in a foreign language, for instance. Our ears have learned to filter those sounds as irrelevances. They also push towards our physical control systems too - I don't think about individual letters when I touch type, I think of the whole word or even sentence, and the fingers seem to just dance it out themselves. It seems like some of the processing has actually been offloaded to nerve centers which are physically closer to the fingers, maybe even in the muscles themselves for certain movements that are simple and very frequent.
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81st, the nice thing about dynamical systems is that they can implement digital style thinking/processing, but they don't have to. OTOH, I'm betting they're all implemented on digital machines, which of course can simulate dynamical systems. Funny huh? Reminds me of a course I studied in which they created the basis of all maths from logic. Then they created the basis of all logic from maths. I realized the only distinction is in what people tend to use them for.
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My very first computer program was self aware. It said "Hello world". I felt like God.
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