TheCartographer's comments

The struggle comes in reading the data from storage, where several minutes can be spent loading in a single high resolution raster for analysis/display. When I built my own PC this year, I splurged on an M.2 SSD for the OS and my main data store. Best decision I ever made for my workflow - huge 3D scenes that formerly took minutes to load on a spinning platter now pop up in seconds.

This thing would probably be the bees knees for what I do. Shame it starts at $10k (and that it's AMD so no CUDA, so no way to justify it at work for "data science" :-/).

Well, not in the US. Many other countries take a dim view towards citizens owning anything that even remotely resembles the accruements of official power and authority.

Regarding the lack of interest in Bergson during 70s and 80s, I think you are precisely right, and the untestable nature of the time-like ramifications of relativity weren't something I had previously considered. Of course, by that time Einstein was so obviously right, and Bergson so obviously wrong, I think those physicists can be forgiven for not knowing, or for not giving a shit if they did know.

One of Bergson's chief objections to the Twin's Paradox was the idea of time slowing down for the twin sent on the relativistic journey. Such a thing made no sense to him, giving how he framed time: as an unrolling now that could not be subdivided into metric units.

Bergson's objections to time-like relativity are certainly understandable, I think, given the historical context. As you pointed out, the notion of a physics without a background of absolute space - the concept of the ether or an absolute background metric against which space time is measured - were the 'standard' model of the time. I would go even further, and say that many physicists at the time either had severe difficult in coming to terms with physics based on frames of reference, or they rejected it outright. So I don't think Bergson's objections to a relative experience of time are unreasonable, nor do I think you can fault him for his objections, given the difficulties physicists themselves had coming to terms with the implications of relativity. Something I hadn't really considered, however, is that we didn't have the laboratory apparati to test the hypothesis that time passes differently under acceleration until decades after Bergson himself was dead.

Regarding clocks, I certainly understand that a 'clock' in physics is a shorthand for a physical system undergoing periodicity: whether it is an actual clock, a cesium atom, or a gas, etc. For Bergson, however, it was the act of reducing the dimension of time to a countable metric itself that was problematic. For him, the idea that time can be subdivided like space was simply a trick of memory, not actual experience. If we focus only on the unfolding 'now' - something difficult enough to do Bergson wrote whole books on it - we only see one moment elide seamlessly and smoothly into the next.

Bergson had no problem with pointing out that metric time worked quite well in modeling physical systems; his objections were to using this approach to model human experience (particularly with regards to free will and the implications of determinism inherent in relativity). Bergson was a proto-postmodernist, and was trying to get at the idea that the 'map is not the territory.' Hence Bergson's focus on the Twins Paradox. Relativity allows for a space-like time that can be 'run in reverse,' but actual time isn't space-like, in the sense that it can be traversed in one direction only. So despite what Einstein's equations predicted, Bergson objected that the notion of the Twins experiencing time differently was non-sensical.

What I hadn't realized prior to reading your comment is the similarity of Bergson's objections to the objections/difficulties physicists themselves had in abandoning the idea of a fixed, background metric space. He is essentially arguing for a fixed background of indivisible non-metric time that everyone experiences universally and that unrolls at a fixed rate for all observers.

On a side note, I've always thought Bergson (and pretty much the entire history of the philosophy prior to Einstein) had it precisely backward. Thousands of works have focused on and prioritized time as a cornerstone philosophical concept. Bergson was not alone is his obsessive focus on it. And yet, time is the most ephemeral and intangible concept of them all. You can't see it, you can't hold it, there is nothing there. 'Time' as we know it is merely the periodic spatial change repetition of some physical phenomenon: the vibration of an atom; the periodic steps of a watch hand; the filling of a fixed volume of space with water (as in a water clock).

Perhaps it's only the fact that I take living in a post-Einsteinian space-time for granted, but I always found it strange that people -including Bergson - so obsessively abstract 'time' as something distinct from itself, when what they are really seeing is space itself unfolding into... well, more space I suppose.

Thanks again for the thoughts, it was a great read with my morning coffee!

Or perhaps it is a lack of imagination: Bergson was certainly a large part of the intellectual milieu in which Einstein was working. His thoughts pushed Einstein in certain directions Einstein might not have gone otherwise. Even if Bergson is unremarkable for his own work, surely he is important for no other reason than his impact on the thought of the remarkable and memorable theories of Einstein?

Taking 'I haven't hear of them' as your starting point of historical importance seems like an intellectually lazy argument to me. Each to their own, however, and you are certainly entitled to your opinion.

The common train of thought post-Einstein but pre-quantum mechanics was that physics was close to a theory of everything: that the universe could be described with a set of deterministic equations and everything, including human behavior, could be successfully predicted from the beginning of time to the end of time.

Bergson's objections to Einstein are rooted in the concept of free will. They centered on Einstein's handling of time as another spatial concept. Physics would never be able to quantify human behavior, according to Bergson, because Einstein used the wrong model of time. Time (again, according to Bergson) isn't a countable and finite dimension like space is - and thus Einstein was wrong.

Bergson was also had no small amount of mathematical understanding, although he certainly wasn't at Einstein's level. Prior to this debate, he wrote an entire book about Einstein's Twins Paradox, and why it the premise it started from - that of a countable, space-like time, was wrong.

One reason that the Bergson-Einstein debate impacted the Nobel committee to such a degree was academic politics. At the time, many thought that physics had everything figured out and it wasn't long until everything, including human behavior, could be predicted using the scientific methods of physics and relativity.

Not unsurprisingly, a LOT of non-physicists had a problem with this idea.

Now off to read to the article, so I can see what was actually discussed there....

Hence Bergson's framing of time as duration: for Bergson the essence of experiential time is that our consciousness is always experiencing the latest moment sliding smoothly into the next. Time, he says, cannot be spatialization and counted as can space. Bergson railed against the idea of time being extrapolated to just another metric dimension like the 3 dimensions of space. The spatial dimensions, to him, were static, fixed, dead. It is only duration that gives our existential experience of the lived experience that we know. Spatialization, to Bergson, was a dirty word; it was the spatialization of our lived experiences that rendered industrial life dead, static, mechanistic and uninteresting. Bergson was railing against the idea of a physics that could predict everything, a popular thought in the early 20th century.

After WWII, Bergson was largely forgotten until Deleuze & Guatarri ressurected him. Deleuze in particular was an enormous fan of Bergson and promoted his ideas heavily.

But what was revolutionary about Deleuze's handling of Bergson was his incorporation of post-war complexity/chaos theory and quantum mechanics to recover space as a dynamic and mutable. Influenced by such concepts as Reimman mana olds and fractal theory, Deleuze recognized that space wasn't a static and mechanistic concept at all, but instead, like Bergson's duration, can give rise to all types of unpredictable behaviors, experiences, and mathematics.

Rather than focus on one concept of "space" - the abstracted Euclidean grid - they classified space in two broad classes, the smooth and striated. Smooth spaces are spaces that are analogous to Bergson's duration: the experienced space of the journey, nomadic spaces, spaces that unfold rather than increment, that are uncountable and unexpected. Striated spaces are the class of spaces Bergson focused on exclusively: coordinate spaces, the countable spaces of the Euclidean grid and the map, or that of the timeline.

Essentially, D&G 'recovered' mathematical space as an exciting and unpredictable philosophical concept. All spaces arise from continuously recapitualtion of smoothing and striation, and counting spaces always give rise to the uncountable and to emergent behavior.

A good example is Conway's Game of Life: a simple set of rules played out on a metric space in countable time (striation) gives rise to emergent organizational patterns and a higher level of emergent behavior that simply cannot be predicted or quantified using the original simple set of rules alone (smoothing). Or, to take another case, the Mandlebrot set: a simple pattern gives rise to a recursive, self-similar-yet-never-identical structure that persists to infinity. For D&G it the uncountable always arises out of the act of counting.

This comment is somewhat outside the normal domain of HN, I know, so I hope you will excuse it. I rarely get to show off the hundreds of hours I dumped into D&G and Bergson in gradschool in my day job. :-D

But I don't go there for the community. All I want are the best of the funny, amusing and interesting images the Internet can generate, served up in a never ending stream. After a long day of reading, coding, emailing, and everything else, the last thing I want to do is navigate yet another wall of grey on white text.

Imgur is pure brain candy in that sense. No thinking, no real discussion, no need to look at comments or interact with the users. Just flip awww, kitty flip hey boobs flip neat!

One of the reason I like imgur: it's Reddit without the Reddit UI or redditors.

You seem to be hung up on Moore's law as well. And while Moore's law has lost some of its teeth in recent years(and tricks like cluster computing and specialized designs are staving off some of its effects), hardware still grows old quickly. (And bitching about your 5 year old $1k hardware is hilarious to those of us who remember paying $5-8k or more for "all the computer you will ever need" only to see it become almost entirely obsolete in less than a year.

But the fact is this: your 5 year old etch-a-sketch only has 256mb ram on which to run its OS and apps. Considering what people expect out of a tablet these days by way of web browsing, multitasking, etc, your iPad 1.0 actually IS obsolete, or quickly will be.

As to open sourcing the design - why in the world would Apple open source the trade secret that literally makes it Apple? The fact that Apple built it and no one else does is literally what makes Apple all of those earnings.

Not because it is a sacred cow, but because I believe the benefits to free speech far outweigh any drawbacks. (For largely the same reasons, I support open data in government to an much further extent than I think most people would.)

Out of curiostity, Mr Throwaway, what -ism do you use to identity your personal ideology?

Who needs theory? Practicality tells all.

Extreme ideologies don't value free speech, because free speech allows the unwashed masses to communicate to each other just how ridiculous they think your ideology is. This is true regardless of where an ideology falls on the oversimplistic "right-left" spectrum: North Korea, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Oligarchical-Capitalist Russia, Cambodia, North Vietnam, Burma, Communist China, pretty much the entire Middle East, etc. The list goes on and on and on.

Suppress free speech and criminalize dissident thoughts, and you establish a social basis for staying in power - for the good of the people, of course.

It's unsurprising that extreme ideological adherents are always united in at least one common idea, regardless of the actual content of the ideology they are espousing: the belief that people themselves don't know what is best for their own interests and must be closely watched and shepherded (and culled) if they fall into an annoying habit of thinking on their own.