From: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org (eda-thoughts-digest) To: eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Subject: eda-thoughts-digest V1 #150 Reply-To: eda-thoughts@smoe.org Sender: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk eda-thoughts-digest Tuesday, August 25 1998 Volume 01 : Number 150 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: ET: Re: and now for something completely different ["Kevin Pease" ] Re: ET: Re: haiku/80s ["Kevin Pease" ] Re: ET: Re: eda-thoughts-digest V1 #130 ["Seth D. Fulmer" Subject: Re: ET: Re: and now for something completely different >> Jamie writes: >DAMMIT!!! BASTARD!!! Mine...was....late =( Well... sorry. You can have the prize, if you want. :) Kevin - ---------- Kevin Pease kbpease@boston.crosswinds.net (ICQ UIN: 3106063) (AOL Instant Messenger: kbpease) http://www.crosswinds.net/boston/~kbpease ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 22:28:15 -0400 From: "Seth D. Fulmer" Subject: Re: ET: A friend's poem At 08:04 PM 8/24/98 -0500, Maggie wrote: >My best friend's poem (I'm doing this without her knowledge [she's way >too self-concious about her incessant writings], but I'm telling her ALL >your comments, so gimmme alot!!) I like the bird imagery :) Just tell your friend that she should continue writing. If someone complains about the writings, then tell her to write more(if not to annoy the complainer, to appease her ability). The poem was excellent :) Seth Fulmer A.K.A. "The Angel that thinks too much" mailto:kaosking@voicenet.com Cool Quote of the Day/week/timeperiod of your choice: "And I'm sorry I didn't always have a match That could start a fire big enough for your heart to catch." - Jewel Kilcher ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 23:01:37 -0400 From: "Kevin Pease" Subject: Re: ET: Re: haiku/80s >> Jamie writes: >*grabs at heart* KEVIN!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME?!?!?! Go >out righ now and rent that movie. It's the best =) Yes ma'am! If I had only known that not watching the movie would be hazardous to your health - I would've watched it a long time ago. After all, as we all know, my motto is "Anything to make Jamie happy." :) Kevin - ---------- Kevin Pease kbpease@boston.crosswinds.net (ICQ UIN: 3106063) (AOL Instant Messenger: kbpease) http://www.crosswinds.net/boston/~kbpease "For what it's worth now, William, I know you could've had a heart of gold, But I don't think you ever knew that you had one, I don't think you were ever told..." -----(Chris Knight)----- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 23:32:33 -0400 From: "Seth D. Fulmer" Subject: Re: ET: Re: eda-thoughts-digest V1 #130 At 03:20 PM 8/24/98 -0400, Kevin Pease wrote: > If you compare it to, say, curing cancer, then yeah, it's no big deal. >But when your own flesh & blood gets up, starts walking around... that's >pretty amazing, and pretty wonderful. Shit, man, I don't have any kids, but >I do have a couple of little cousins I've watched grow up over the past few >years... they're not even mine, and I get excited when I watch them do >things... If you ever have kids, I really really hope that you'll change >your attitude. Otherwise, your kids will *never* be good enough to please >you, and they're going to grow up resenting you and hating you. At some Well, I used to be the type of person that if you told me "Good Job Seth"...I hated it because it actually prevented me from doing the real good job again. I told my parents and grandparents not to tell me that crap any more. Now, I'd give anything to get that from someone(even myself). >do, but you gave it your best effort, good job," whether "you" is yourself, >or somebody else. As I said before, If you keep upping the bar on yourself Well, that's a psychological tactic for training someone to do something(or changing behavior). You use positive reinforcement for behavior that even remotely resembles the desired behavior. If you want a dog to bark 5 times exactly upon the knock on the door...you give the dog a biscuit upon a small action like ears perking up. Then you reward it for barking once, twice, 3x, 4x, 5x and if it does 6 times, punish it(not harshly) and it's supposed to learn to do it 5 times. It works great on humans too and it's somewhat what behavioral therapists do for patients. > You can crusade all you want to give a computer emotions, but you're >going to fail. A machine cannot "feel" emotions. You can program it to You are soooo very correct. They can't feel emotions...but neither can humans. Emotions are in the very basic neurochemical state chemical reactions that are based on the exchange of RNA sequences. As I had started to do with myself, you can make the computer produce the output of emotions. For example...If someone introduces themself to you, the common human reaction is to introduce yourself to them out of an instinctive need for human companionship. Soon, after a few other actions, the emotion of friendship occurs. After a while of friendship and that you have accumulated a lot of data on a person, the emotion of love occurs if the data proves valuable according to your system of values. You can reproduce behavior in a computer as well...if you can create behavior spontaneously, you can create behavior based on previous stimuli :) >with feelings. It will never feel anything, and can respond to no more than >it's programmer can code it to respond to... if you have to program The program that it would have would be only how to learn, how to collect data, how to evaluate that data based on a system of values, and how to "feel" about that data. What do parents do to their kids but teach them a system of values. The programmer would create in the robot/computer a system of values and like a human, it could change them based on other stimuli :) > But wait, up above you just said that taking a first step is no big >deal, and that accomplishing that is not worthy of notice. If it's not a >simple task, shouldn't accomplishing that first step be newsworthy? :) Ok, in this case, those low level operations are a necessity for the larger operation to take place. The operation of walking can't take place without the knee muscles moving in the correct directions the proper distances. However the goal is the process of walking which takes multiple steps...To give praise to any one step is to demean the other steps so you give no praise to any of the steps. > WHAT? That's a remarkably defeatist attitude. Ever hear the sayings, >"Practice makes perfect?", or "If at first you don't succeed, try, try >again?" What a ridiculous cop-out it is to say, "I didn't make it the first >time, so I'm not worthy to try again." You learn from your mistakes, you >grow as a person, and you keep on trying if the goal is that important to >you. But I don't learn from my mistakes. I am an incredibly stubborn person and if I'm given a chance to redo an experience I messed up, I'll deliberately retrace my actions so that I mess up again. My parents always made me redo my things if I messed up...and I'd deliberately mess up over and over. Their goal was to make me learn from my mistakes but I was determined to never learn from my mistakes so I resisted the intake of knowledge and just had fun redoing the events over and over wrongly. If I stand up only to be tripped again, I will continue to stand up and trip over and over until I either stop tripping or I can't stand up anymore. > Yeah, if I only knew back then what I know now, my life would be totally >different, too. But, you can't live your life over - what's done is done. >The only thing you can change in your life is *right now* - you can't go >back to kindergarten and make new friends, but you can make new friends >right now. You can't go back and take back something you said to someone 10 >years ago, but you can stop yourself from saying it to someone else now, or >in the future. But in my eyes, every situation is different. Deja vu has never happened to me even though I've encountered the same event several times already. It's all a different event. So, even if I see a mistake I did now, when I go through Graduate school for Computer Science there's no way I'll be able to correct it because I'll never be a freshman undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science ever again...nor will I be a sophomore ever again either. :) > You know, I find this more than a little insulting. Don't apply your >belief system to me, thank you very much. If you want to think that a >less-than-perfect record is useless, that's your deal. I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by it insulting. I was showing how I look at that. In my mind, it's for nil. I would never tell others what to believe...unless of course I could enforce it but even then I don't care what they believe. > My work was most certainly not for nothing... I have a good job as a >result of that degree, and I have a firm foundation to build on when I go >back to graduate school in a year or two. Your analogy, quite frankly, >sucks, because I wasn't paying a carpenter to build a deck, I was paying the >school & the teachers to educate me, and allow me to educate myself. If I >didn't make it that little extra, that doesn't mean all my time was wasted, >and all my money was wasted. It means I didn't make it that little extra, >period. I consider college to be time well spent, and money well spent. If >you want to beat yourself up over not being perfect, feel free. But don't >beat me up, or expect me to beat myself up, because I didn't live up to your >expectations. I consider college a time for social expansion. I could easily have gone to college as a commuter, or not even gone to college at all and gotten a job just as easily in my field. However, then I wouldn't have had the large numbers of friends I have through the National Service Fraternity I belong to. I wouldn't have found the Jewel list, this list. I would have been very musically inarticulate, still hating music because I have cable(MTV/VH1) at college and not at home. If I want to learn, I can easily pick up a book and read it. I haven't learned a thing yet in college that I haven't already known from books I've read in my field. So, because the goal with college is to learn something, and I didn't learn squat yet, I consider college to be a waste of $85 grand of my life earnings. >>But if I accept what I did as acceptable, then the next time I do it, I >>will do it exactly the same way I did it the first time. However I don't do things a next time. Once I do things once I consider the experience done and over with. The one weekend I was home I started to get depressed because my friend Andy always tells me stories about how he gets all these women to sleep with him and I'm thinking that if I did have sex with someone, that one experience would be sufficient and I would no longer have any desire to do it again, even with a different woman. >Don't beat yourself up over what's already been done, and don't use one >failure as an excuse to not try ever again. I don't beat myself up...I just won't ever try it ever again. > This, again, is extremely flawed. When I took my SATs, I was pleased >with my first result, but they certainly weren't perfect. I decided to take >them again, and did a lot better... why? Because I knew what to expect, to >some degree, and I wanted to do better the second time around. I wouldn't >be surprised if most people who take any sort of test do better the second >time around, for the same reasons. When I took my SAT's, for one thing they have no value to me because the scores are extremely culture oriented. If you're a "city slicker" you're going to get a different score than someone who's from the country, and age and gender also plays a part. My only reason for taking the test was to get into colleges. :=) > Or, it's entirely possible that Psychology 101 just wasn't your subject. Actually, the first time I studied my butt off....The 2nd time I studied for like 5 minutes and because I practice it every day by looking into people's personalities and I took it the term before I thought I knew it but the prof had a different style of test this time. So, I guess I should have studied more this time and I would have gotten an A. For the most part, if I have to put any effort into a school subject, it's too much effort. All of my programming courses I can and have breezed through without so much as a tear in the process. My math on the other hand and sciences I have had to put more effort into it. High School I could breeze through any subject without trying. > Obviously, they can be. Should they be? No. They should be >interpreted the way the customer wants them to be interpreted. If I'm a Right...so you make it interpret them so that it shows the customer what the customer wants to see...If the # in the file is 84 and the correct answer is 37, then the program should show 37....basically what a politician does to get elected...tells the people what they want to hear. > Um, yeah, it really is hard to create software from scratch if you >basically imitate the behavior. Try working as a software engineer for a >while before you decide how easy it is. Yeah, Making a mockup of the >Windows 95 front end is real simple, provided you have Visual C++ or Visual >Basic, and already have Windows 95 or NT running on your computer. Windows It was created using a DOS interface and Assembly graphics routines. If I was doing it in Visual C++, Visual Basic, or Borland C++ Builder, I could probably do it in no more than an hour :) >Windows 95. To imitate something in detail, you still have to design, code, >test, and revise your software, which takes a LONG time. Proper start to >finish engineering of any piece of software is measured in months & >financial quarters... not hours. My project for my last coop was to take a program from dBase 3.3(DOS) and create a program to do the same thing in Visual dBase 5.5. It took me 3 months to do it, but only because I had to learn dBase/Visual dBase(it has OOP) to do it, and read the other guy's code as well which had no comments. It took me yet another month to perfect it with the manager that was going to use it. >machines. Ever try to get an ATM to give you money when you've exceeded >your daily withdrawal limit? I can get around that limit at least one way Oh, you give up too easily :) *just kidding* >tyrannies that add up... Do I think we're going to someday be ruled by >computers? No. Do I think that we're becoming more and more reliant on If we were to create a robot that looked, and sounded like a human then we might be able to get away with letting a robot run the government. It might be quite easy to do it because the American people are so easily fooled :) > No, those laws are useless... that's not the same as not doing anything. >They do something: spend tax money, primarily. Your point was that the >"hardware" of government makes it very difficult to change any of the >"software" of the laws. My counterpoint is that frivolous laws like these >are passed every day. We have a National week, month, or day for just about >everything. Do we really want to make it easier to change the "software" in >government? I don't think so. Not so much change the software as change the Net(overall) behavior of the system...software + hardware. I personally don't care what holidays the government wants to declare. I'll observe them if I want to but that's me :) They already spend money on other things I can't control so what's it matter if they make a holiday or frivolous law to waste money? :) > Thanks for the Database lesson, but my point still stands. Back when You're quite very welcome :) >reasoning that led to the emergence of the Y2K problem. (By the way, what's >the release date on Visual dBase 5.6? I'm guessing it's not 1968. They nope...I believe it was just this past year because I downloaded it off of Borland's website when they hadn't had it up there for a while. Take care and Have a Great Day!! :) Seth D. Fulmer mailto:kaosking@voicenet.com ------------------------------ End of eda-thoughts-digest V1 #150 **********************************