In the sample program he provided, I find the middle section (the bulk of the code) to be impressively readable even at a quick glance.

I've never heard of you but I just reviewed your posts from the entire year. Essentially, I didn't see a single post greater than a sentence long, nor did I see anything resembling intelligent discourse.

Being a successful business man means nothing with regard to being President.

Grasp this fact: businesses are small entities within a much larger context. The United States is, essentially, the context.

Let me say it in a different way. Businesses operate within an interior space, and can always find more in the much larger exterior space outside. A large nation is the exterior space, and can't necessarily find an even larger exterior space to draw from. Granted, you might analogize other nations to being the even larger exterior space, and even outer space, but these boundaries and walls are much more difficult to scale.

I can honestly say that Romney doesn't know all that he should. Nor does Obama, but at least he knows how to tap into the resources of intelligent people. I don't believe Romney would choose intelligent people, except for the way he sees things from his narrow vision of how things work.

It is interesting, but it isn't really new. This project has been underway for over two years.

What I find most annoying in the quoted article is the following statement:


Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are so irrelevant to this subject. I think Alan Turing and John von Neumann would have been better persons to credit. As an aside, consider the bombe, developed by Alan Turing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe

Video of bombe in operation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlzooYzhzJo

There is a difference between a weighted coin and a two headed coin though, which the Wikipedia article uses as an example.

Regarding coins in general, and infinite flips, I believe the important thing to note (and you alluded to it in your prior post about how informational content only changes, but still contains information) is the fact that one picture may be more compressible than another, but its capacity for information storage does not change. A 500 x 500 pixel image, whether an even blue sky, or a detailed still life, still has the same capacity for information storage. I think it's important to distinguish between capacity and content.

Whatever your domain is, there is indeed a best compression algorithm. If the Universe is deterministic, then I suspect the best compression algorithm starts with the seed of its beginnings.

The best compression algorithms will produce a stream of data that is indistinguishable form white noise. That means it cannot be compressed any further, because white noise is not compressible. The size of your file, after perfect compression, is a good indicator of how much information lies within.

An egg on the table has structure and pattern. Assuming all eggs are exactly alike, I can convey the structure of it to you with the term 'egg'. A broken egg on the floor cannot be conveyed as precisely. I might have to use words like this: "There is a fragment of a shell 1/4" in size over here, a splattering of yoke over there, and so on."

Each broken egg is different.

From the Wikipedia entry:

Read it very carefully (emphasis is mine).


Zero entropy is not encoding more information.

Fair coins produce greater entropy in their sequence of tosses. Unfair coins produce less entropy. Imagine a coin so unfair, all it produces is heads. That's zero entropy. It takes more bits to encode a sequence of fair coin tosses.

A fair coin will produce an image of white noise. A picture of a perfectly blue sky will only be one color, the opposite of white noise. Thus white noise has greater entropy. A picture of a single color has next to no entropy.

Which has more information? A picture of pure white noise? A picture of a pure clear blue sky where all pixels are one color? A picture of an interior with many diverse objects?

I would be disinclined to claim that the inverse of entropy is information.

Maybe I'm wrong. I suggest you read The Library of Babel, which is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

And the storage used to record that something changed is now not available to store what it was storing before. Just because you attribute no significance to the prior stored information does not mean there was necessarily a net gain in information.

There is a major fallacy within this whole argument.

The Universe is information itself. When you store information somewhere, you haven't created new information. Instead, all you've done is change the information which already existed, plus change the existing information within your brain to interpret it as being meaningful to you.

No new quantity of information is created.

All good and well, but most assuredly the most absurd title for the content. A better title might have been: Egypt, it's surrounding regions, Paris, Argentina, a smattering of the Eastern Seaboard, a few other random locations, and more of Egypt.

I don't see how a tautology is a defensible argument for letting the condition of the world deteriorate.

The stakeholders interest is purely profit. Profit amongst a small group of individuals is not a metric by which the condition of the world should be defined.


No. I didn't say that. I think suburban sprawl is the real problem here.


You just restated what I just said.

Really? Why don't you start a thread entitled "Myrkul's thoughts on what threads are about and where posts should be routed"? That's where your posts belong. You're being the ultimate hypocrite.

I think the real issue here is suburban sprawl. It rarely goes the other way - i.e. suburban retraction. It only takes one interval of time in which those who defend against suburban sprawl let their defenses down for suburban sprawl to move further out. Thus you essentially have a never ending growth outwards, which destroys the existing infrastructure of wilderness and the ecosystem services it provides.

Do existing landowners benefit? Yes and no. If the preexisting community was rather small, then they likely will benefit, because as the population around them grows, new infrastructure is built, which can both cause home values to rise, while the availability of services rises. On the other hand, if it's already a well developed community, an oversupply of housing might occur, traffic congestion occurs where there is little room for increases of traffic flow, and the inevitable suburban sprawl continues.

Ultimately, it's the developer that wins. This is their business. They are a business whose interest is to make money. They don't live in the community. The environment is not a concern, except for where lawsuits might occur.

I know exactly where to discuss the topic of this thread which I started. Others are welcome too. You sound like a bitter person.

Everyone should have an opinion on this, one way or another. Which of these are improvements, and which are "improvements"?

- A developer builds a housing tract at the boundary between a preexisting suburban town and wilderness
- A house is built on a vacant lot amidst a fully developed neighborhood
- A preexisting dam is removed
- A landowner increases the value of his land by ten-fold by building infrastructure on his parcel bordering a wilderness zone
- An old growth forest is converted to a tree farm
- A dam is built to provide electricity
- ANWR is opened up for drilling
- A toll road is built which cuts through wilderness to alleviate traffic jams in an 'L' shaped set of cities
- A huge wall is built along the border of Mexico and the U.S.
- Ranchers begin to use fencing heavily in a rural area between two wilderness zones

It's not an either/or. Your science fiction dream of abusing here and heading out there is not trumped by the science fiction dream of preserving here and going out there: Here you go!