Rebel Science

Hey, I remember that guy from posting crazy comments on ESRs blog. He has got stome great stoff on "Artificial Intelligence From The Bible": http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html

Does it also pay to think Revelations contains secret truths about biology/physics and that almost all the great physicists of the 20th century were crackpots? http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm

Sounded familiar, reminds me of: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm https://github.com/gocircuit/escher

blah blah blah. there's a troll blog spouting the same content-less bullshit. http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/ there you go. unless there's some substance behind this, it's basically FUD. he can lament the state of affairs all he wants. making software parallel is still not trivial, and i didn't see how he addressed that. he's merely pushing his business. i get that. he's trying to sell energy efficiency, because that's what computing centers look for. the monthly power bill often is the limiting factor. so he's peddling his stuff, hoping that nobody would ask him how to use it properly!

The author is a crackpot. See for instance http://www.rebelscience.org/Seraphim/Physics.htm ("Abstract: Most people never think of the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge. In these pages, I argue that the Bible contains powerful secrets regarding the fundamental structure and composition of the physical universe.")

And I'm not allowed to call this guy a kook... Oh I think you're not only allowed but encouraged to. Click around his site for some gems like "I will argue that the messages to the seven churches of Asia are a detailed metaphorical description of the organization and operation of the brain. I will further argue that the golden lampstand (Jewish menorah) symbolizes a seven-node sequence in brain memory." and the page where he calls a bunch of important physicists (and Goedel) crackpots. http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm Moving right along...

More enlightened reading: http://www.rebelscience.org/discussion/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3

http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/nasty.htm Do I need to spell out the similarities with Time Cube, or enumerate John Baez's Crackpot Index in an oddly self-referential strange loop? It is indeed not rocket science. Or much of any science. edit: "We are all accustomed to believe that everything is made of something. We are taught that matter consists of molecules and that molecules are made of atoms which are themselves made of even smaller components. This line of reasoning makes sense initially but, as seen below, it cannot be sustained." if you think I am merely being obtuse.

Still doesn't really help. What's the while loop actually doing? Where's the data being stored, and how do you get it out? Similarly for his quicksort example (http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm) - from what I can see, there's no means to input or output whatever you're sorting - that part is all internal, and the only accessible parts are 'start' and 'done'.

Wow, if you start reading the rest of this guy's writings the crackpot indicators start lighting up. http://www.rebelscience.org/Seven/bible.html http://www.rebelscience.org/Crackpots/notorious.htm He has a good sense of humor about it though and even links to this Google search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22louis+savain%22+crackpot&a…

The blog post is full of hand-waving and the mindset that "if you think this you must be stupid". I'm extremely wary of anyone promoting the next silver bullet for writing software. The Project COSA, http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm, that the author mentions sounds very complex, and I have no idea how using such a system would simplify writing code.

He has a parallel quicksort example on his "relevant links" section. He seems to be saying that software should work pretty much like hardware. http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm

A less troll-y overview: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/COSA.htm I don't buy the argument that textual code is a remnant of our mathematical past and visual programming is the future. Surely our writing systems are just as text-based and yet, I don't see anyone proposing we supplant them with pictograms. Aside from that, many problems are simply not suited to an event-based model, just as many problems are not suited to functional models and others are not suited to imperative models. There is not, and will never be, a one size fits all approach to development. The reason software is so susceptible to errors is nothing to do with the model of its development, but rather that bugs can be "hidden" until the program is running, and commonly much longer after that. This is why you rarely get bugs in CSS, HTML or PNGs - the full results of modifications can be seen in near real time. When you do get bugs in HTML or CSS, they are browser issues or issues with resizing - things that are not immediately apparent. Importantly, any programming environment sufficiently well equipped to be useful, will always have places to hide bugs. Event-based programming does nothing to address this, in fact I think it provide more bugs.