Richard C. Hoagland

[Charles Daniels]

It's only apparent chaos, underlying the universe are very basic, very logical laws and that's that. Everything complies to those laws. Computers are going to realize that.

Actually I think they can predict us. We are really just an illogical amalgam of emotional reactions that can probably be predicted on the level of the neuron. On that level we're just chemicals and electrical impulses and a superintelligent computer could probably predict us individually. All that's needed is nano-tech to probe how our brains think.

I think there is a fundamental limitation that comes into play.
In order to have full knowledge of all the variables, you need to be able to make complete observations of everything.
Without totally comprehensive observations of everything -- the best you can develop are incredibly good models.
Maybe models strong enough to predict 99.9999999% of the observations.
Which is probably more than good enough, admittedly.
But I still think that any gaps in, or lack of depth in, observations, will leave ever increasing holes in the model.

[PB the Deplorable]

Richard's new show was announced only a week ago and hasn't even started yet, people seem to have lost interest in talking about it already

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

I'm very interested in your ideas on that neural net. Do elaborate. I'm fascinated.

Well, first thing to note is I don't know what I'm doing.  I once tried to chart it out and quickly realized I didn't really know how I was going to organize the elements in the net or make them work, or if there was even any advantage to doing it that way rather than just doing a statistical analysis.  So mostly I have just thought about how to organize the information it would 'read.'  I also spent several weeks downloading nearly 30 years worth of New York Times archived print and online articles only to lose the hard drive.  Still hoping to recover the information on it.

But my idea was to take news articles, or maybe just headlines, along with things like housing starts, interest rates, the price of milk, and anything I could think of, and then cycle through them, each time picking a few random things to look at over, say, a thirty year period.  I planed to make data objects to represent neural nodes, with pointers as the axons.  At the top level I might have, say, a number of nodes that represented various words or a phrases.  On one pass I might add the word 'war' as one of the nodes, and then link it with other nodes that test for the frequency a word occurs.  So, I might have a set of nodes 'rare', 'medium' and 'frequent' and I'll end up with a node that will 'fire' if the occurrence of the word 'war' in a particular week is frequent.  Then I would have secondary and tertiary layers of nodes that would 'fire' if 'war, frequent' was found in combination with any of my other search terms.  Or it would link it to the article's geographic location, or a political figure in the article, or whatever.  I'm probably going to come up against memory limits on this pretty quickly with all the possible combinations but am not at that point yet.

I wanted to look at other things such the lengths of words or the frequency of verbs -- perhaps such things represent the general economic mood.  The thought is to have it pick a few random things, link it to some other random things, and ultimately link that to the price of a stock or index or sector. 

I then imagined having neurons that represent predictions for different time periods, such as 'stock goes up in the first week' or 'stock goes down in the first year.'  Every time the program made a successful prediction, it would activate a reward center.  The reward center would cause the link between every node that had fired recently to 'strengthen.'  If the comparison failed, a punishment center would weaken the links.  After a full scan cycle, any weak links would be removed and space allocated for new search terms.  Hopefully eventually it would come up with a fairly complex set of key factors and their relative importance in determining where the market is going to go.

It's probably all pretty naive of me, and perhaps my vision is far too simple and my brute force method requires far too much computer power, but I think it would be fun to play with.

[pate]

Haha.  Actually for me it's chocolate but I thought beer might be more relatable.  Also, I apologize for any liberties I took in presuming you spend your time searching out acorns in the park.

Properly, it is spelt: "Chock-Oh_Late"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOv1Bleom-M

Jus' sayin'...

Seen it on the Moon while y'all were watching the latest astrological conjunction...

ediot: Sabotage corrected...

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

Properly, it is spelt: "Chock-Oh_Late"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOv1Bleom-M

Jus' sayin'...

Seen it on the Moon while y'all were watching the latest astrological conjunction...

ediot: Sabotage corrected...

How did you sneak that camera into my house?

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

I'm sorry, I've come to realize my last post was incredibly boring and geeky.  Rereading it, I don't even hear my own voice, but rather the voice of a terribly, excruciatingly dull person.  As compensation, please enjoy this .gif of a cat attempting to sink its rear claws into a tennis ball.

[pate]

I'm sorry, I've come to realize my last post was incredibly boring and geeky.  Rereading it, I don't even hear my own voice, but rather the voice of a terribly, excruciatingly dull person.  As compensation, please enjoy this .gif of a cat attempting to sink its rear claws into a tennis ball.

Aw!

[SredniVashtar]

They refuse to read the data! Not ONE scientist has refuted RCH's findings. When asked about RCH, Prof Jayne Foulkes Phd of MIT said "Who". Conclusive proof as if any were needed there's world wide conspiracy against him being known by pretty much anyone.

That reminds me a bit of David Icke, who says all sorts of things about world leaders and how they are all blood-drinking, reptilian pederasts. He says he is correct and that they are too frightened to sue him. The fact is that they have almost certainly not heard of him, and if they have are hardly likely to give a nutcase any encouragement by doing the one thing that would give them any sort of legitimacy, however spurious.

[Yorkshire pud]

That reminds me a bit of David Icke, who says all sorts of things about world leaders and how they are all blood-drinking, reptilian pederasts. He says he is correct and that they are too frightened to sue him. The fact is that they have almost certainly not heard of him, and if they have are hardly likely to give a nutcase any encouragement by doing the one thing that would give them any sort of legitimacy, however spurious.

Ahh yes. David Icke, exponent of the eight hour paranoid fest at a village hall near you. He says some think he's mentally ill; cynical attitude to take if that's true.

[SredniVashtar]

Ahh yes. David Icke, exponent of the eight hour paranoid fest at a village hall near you. He says some think he's mentally ill; cynical attitude to take if that's true.

It was all those years in BBC Sport presenting the snooker in comfy knitwear that got to him and made him turn to turquoise. I think even the stoutest mind would be likely to crack under those conditions.

[albrecht]

That reminds me a bit of David Icke, who says all sorts of things about world leaders and how they are all blood-drinking, reptilian pederasts. He says he is correct and that they are too frightened to sue him. The fact is that they have almost certainly not heard of him, and if they have are hardly likely to give a nutcase any encouragement by doing the one thing that would give them any sort of legitimacy, however spurious.

I'm pretty sure many, if not most, have heard of him due to his previous life as a football player and announcer. And spokesman for the Green Party. And some of his big events after he went off the deep end with his Reptilian, and other, theories.

ps: he has been sued. Look up Richard Warman, a Canadian lawyer who specializes in going after free speech. He has got a settlement out of Icke. I doubt others want to bother suing him. They are already rich and it would just bring more attention to Icke's wild theories. And they would especially less likely to sue over pedophilia allegations considering some of the stuff coming out of the closet the past few years in that regard to some high profile celebrities, churches, government officials, and Epstein friends and associates.

[SredniVashtar]

I'm pretty sure many, if not most, have heard of him due to his previous life as a football player and announcer. And spokesman for the Green Party. And some of his big events after he went off the deep end with his Reptilian, and other, theories.

ps: he has been sued. Look up Richard Warman, a Canadian lawyer who specializes in going after free speech. He has got a settlement out of Icke. I doubt others want to bother suing him. They are already rich and it would just bring more attention to Icke's wild theories. And they would especially less likely to sue over pedophilia allegations considering some of the stuff coming out of the closet the past few years in that regard to some high profile celebrities, churches, government officials, and Epstein friends and associates.

Was that connected to those people who starting throwing custard pies at him? I remember that was going on in Canada. My point really, though, was that famous people are unlikely to sue an obscure conspiracy theorist. That is, if they are smart, because it just gives the one being sued all the publicity they desire.

[SciFiAuthor]

Ah!  So you have a sort of "Brave New World" model where you try to control people with pleasure?

That's been an interesting idea which science fiction has explored, but I don't see any evidence of humans actually trying to deploy that in a mass scale.

My guess is that its easier to keep people scared than to keep them happy.

I think people can be controlled any number of ways. You can do it with religion, pleasure, political ideology, etc. Basically anything where the individual person is compelled to say "I'm right and you're not!" will do the trick.

That said I think in the future that the human brain will prove to be programmable through nano-tech. Brains can be rewired, it's just a matter of figuring out how. And that opens us up to any number of frightening possibilities, imagine a politician that hacks the nano-tech and turns us all into supporters.

[SciFiAuthor]

I think there is a fundamental limitation that comes into play.
In order to have full knowledge of all the variables, you need to be able to make complete observations of everything.
Without totally comprehensive observations of everything -- the best you can develop are incredibly good models.
Maybe models strong enough to predict 99.9999999% of the observations.
Which is probably more than good enough, admittedly.
But I still think that any gaps in, or lack of depth in, observations, will leave ever increasing holes in the model.

Well, it's impossible to observe the entire universe from the outset, but it's not impossible to reliably predict it. A star on the other side of the universe works like the star next to you, it's a reasonable assumption to make. On a quantum level you can never know the exact position of a particle, but you can get close enough to make use of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in electronics. I think computers will know and understand that.

[zeebo]

Richard's new show was announced only a week ago and hasn't even started yet, people seem to have lost interest in talking about it already

The last couple pages of this thread are much more interesting.  This should be the new DMRN show instead of one about pipe-shaped rocks on Mars.

[SciFiAuthor]

Well, first thing to note is I don't know what I'm doing.  I once tried to chart it out and quickly realized I didn't really know how I was going to organize the elements in the net or make them work, or if there was even any advantage to doing it that way rather than just doing a statistical analysis.  So mostly I have just thought about how to organize the information it would 'read.'  I also spent several weeks downloading nearly 30 years worth of New York Times archived print and online articles only to lose the hard drive.  Still hoping to recover the information on it.

But my idea was to take news articles, or maybe just headlines, along with things like housing starts, interest rates, the price of milk, and anything I could think of, and then cycle through them, each time picking a few random things to look at over, say, a thirty year period.  I planed to make data objects to represent neural nodes, with pointers as the axons.  At the top level I might have, say, a number of nodes that represented various words or a phrases.  On one pass I might add the word 'war' as one of the nodes, and then link it with other nodes that test for the frequency a word occurs.  So, I might have a set of nodes 'rare', 'medium' and 'frequent' and I'll end up with a node that will 'fire' if the occurrence of the word 'war' in a particular week is frequent.  Then I would have secondary and tertiary layers of nodes that would 'fire' if 'war, frequent' was found in combination with any of my other search terms.  Or it would link it to the article's geographic location, or a political figure in the article, or whatever.  I'm probably going to come up against memory limits on this pretty quickly with all the possible combinations but am not at that point yet.

I wanted to look at other things such the lengths of words or the frequency of verbs -- perhaps such things represent the general economic mood.  The thought is to have it pick a few random things, link it to some other random things, and ultimately link that to the price of a stock or index or sector. 

I then imagined having neurons that represent predictions for different time periods, such as 'stock goes up in the first week' or 'stock goes down in the first year.'  Every time the program made a successful prediction, it would activate a reward center.  The reward center would cause the link between every node that had fired recently to 'strengthen.'  If the comparison failed, a punishment center would weaken the links.  After a full scan cycle, any weak links would be removed and space allocated for new search terms.  Hopefully eventually it would come up with a fairly complex set of key factors and their relative importance in determining where the market is going to go.

It's probably all pretty naive of me, and perhaps my vision is far too simple and my brute force method requires far too much computer power, but I think it would be fun to play with.

I'm absolutely blown away. I'd totally love to see the results of what you'd get.

[SciFiAuthor]

I'm sorry, I've come to realize my last post was incredibly boring and geeky.  Rereading it, I don't even hear my own voice, but rather the voice of a terribly, excruciatingly dull person.  As compensation, please enjoy this .gif of a cat attempting to sink its rear claws into a tennis ball.

Would have been better if you'd have pasted Hoagland's face on the cat.

[ziznak]

I'm sorry, I've come to realize my last post was incredibly boring and geeky.  Rereading it, I don't even hear my own voice, but rather the voice of a terribly, excruciatingly dull person.  As compensation, please enjoy this .gif of a cat attempting to sink its rear claws into a tennis ball.

awww hell no... that kitteh is way too cute to get all muddled up with a Hoagland photoshop.... jeeez

[Jackstar]

You know nothing, David Icke!

Richard's new show was announced only a week ago and hasn't even started yet, people seem to have lost interest in talking about it already

Those posts have all been deleted.

[Radio Activity]

I think Richard will do just fine. He has a lot of broadcasting experience and surely recognizes this golden opportunity. With age comes wisdom and patience. Give him a chance. I expect great things once he gets comfortable with the format.

[Charles Daniels]

I think Richard will do just fine. He has a lot of broadcasting experience and surely recognizes this golden opportunity. With age comes wisdom and patience. Give him a chance. I expect great things once he gets comfortable with the format.

Yes, he's worked on CBS as a science advisor to God. People, he'll be fine.
He'll step us all through a long winded slide show, only instead of pictures of his children at the beach, it will be of robot heads on the moon only he can see.

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

Yes, he's worked on CBS as a science advisor to God. People, he'll be fine.
He'll step us all through a long winded slide show, only instead of pictures of his children at the beach, it will be of robot heads on the moon only he can see.

He could spend a month of shows just going through one of  his old presentations.

[General Johnson Jameson]

He could spend a month of shows just going through one of  his old presentations.

I wonder where he keeps that whatever medal that isn't even the right medal at. A humidor, a hermetically sealed case...up his ass. These are the things that keep me up at night.

[Yorkshire pud]

I wonder where he keeps that whatever medal that isn't even the right medal at. A humidor, a hermetically sealed case...up his ass. These are the things that keep me up at night.

And so they should; the great man deserves nothing less.

[paladin1991]

I wonder where he keeps that whatever medal that isn't even the right medal at. A humidor, a hermetically sealed case...up his ass. These are the things that keep me up at night.

I'm not sure how you mean that.

[expat]

Well, our questions are answered. The sched for next week is up, and Hoagland is nowhere. I think they've totally dumped him.

[Jackstar]

I think they've totally dumped him.

I fully expect them to take lengthy steps to ensure that the very name of RCH is never mentioned on the show again.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aN0Ui_hIQw

- .... . / ... -.-. --- .-. .--. .. --- -. / .- .-. -- -.-- / .... .- ... / .. - ... / --- .-. -.. . .-. ...

[astroguy]

Well, our questions are answered. The sched for next week is up, and Hoagland is nowhere. I think they've totally dumped him.

I'm 20% surprised they dumped him.  I'm 90% surprised they didn't replace him with someone else to at least mention the mission.

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

I'm 20% surprised they dumped him.  I'm 90% surprised they didn't replace him with someone else to at least mention the mission.

I think Hoagland likely dumped them after they tried to screw him over on his guest hosting spot.  For anyone who missed it, he will be doing his Pluto fly-by show on the Dark Matter Radio Network Monday night (or more accurately Tuesday morning).

[Morgus]

I'm 90% surprised they didn't replace him with someone else to at least mention the mission.

Date:Thursday - July  9, 2015
Host:George Noory
In the first half, space historian and science journalist Robert Zimmerman discussed the many events happening in space right now including Rosetta and Philae at Comet 67P (pictured), Dawn at Ceres, New Horizons approaching Pluto, the rovers and orbiters at Mars, and what beckons for the future. After the Pluto flyby, "all the major asteroids, comets...and every planet and their moons will have been looked at up close by the human race, and that is a remarkable thing to think about," as it's only been around 60 years since we began the Space Age, he remarked. And every one of these objects has unique attributes, he added.
The so-called "whale" feature seen on Plutoâ€"a large dark area on the equator that covers most of one hemisphere, and a series of large, black spots resemble the dark areas on asteroids, which Pluto may have more in common with than a typical planet, he surmised. The Dawn probe is the first craft to visit two different asteroids-- orbiting Vesta for a year, before using its ion engine to travel on to Ceres, which seems to have a kind of volcanic ice that may function like lava, he detailed. Zimmerman named Saturn's giant moon Titan as one of the most fascinating objects in our solar system. It has lakes of methane, and intense storms, with seasons that last around seven years.