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Ruminant depression is a different order of magnitude from end-of-universe major depression. Which do they mean?

Sherwin Nuland on electroshock therapy

At the other end of the spectrum, it's just a mood disorder (and working title of Annie Hall).

Anhedonia

Years ago I read an article about stress and the immune system. The claim was that under stress, the immune cells leave the blood stream and enter into the skin cells. Hence the collapse of immune levels in the blood stream. Stress is often associated with physical confrontation. Perhaps under this circumstance the body is more concerning about fighting off infection from skin trauma than whether the last meal was a mite tainted, or some child has picked up a sneeze.

I haven't seen this followed up, but does it really make sense that body's response to stress is to shut down the immune system? Never to me, it didn't.

Another great one is the doctors instructing you that "whatever your itch system conveys, ignore it".

'Itchy' neurons tell mice when to scratch

So we have an entire nervous subsystem devoted to itch, and our only response is to not listen?

I read an article that the appendix is now believed to act as a pocket of gut bacteria to restart the gut after a core dump.

And then there was the whole thing about "junk DNA" where junk is apparently a scientific word meaning "you can't write a successful grant to study this". From another perspective, at the original sequencing cost of $1 per base pair, I can feel their pain.

I get mighty tired of the scientific meme "functionless until proved grantable". Were the scientists originally responsible for this, or the surgeons?

How many doctors does it take to change a light bulb? Three, but while they're at it, they'll change the socket too.

Some collected thoughts on building meaning and happiness in life.

People are like trees that need roots to keep from falling over in the storms of life. Those roots come from all sorts of relationships to people, places, ideas, causes, experiences, and so on. When we lose a root (a relationship), sometimes we can grow another. People with shallow roots are more likely to fall over from a storm of life -- but some storms are worse than others, and sometimes trees fall over for no obvious reason.

The book "Descartes' Error" is about how emotions underlie all "logical" thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

Happiness (and meaning) in life comes from various directions:
* sensuality
* helping others
* a sense of "Flow" in what we do, even if it is "hard fun"
* human relationships, including parenting
* humor
* creating things we love, and maybe even destroying things we hate (a tricky thing)
* preserving a pattern important to us
* probably many others?
The first three are from this guy's book "Aging Well":
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eman_Vaillant

But watch out for progressive desensitization and "The Pleasure Trap":
    http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508

Addictive-looking behavior otherwise often has more to do with the environment than the person:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_park

How we look at time has a lot to do with happiness, too:
    http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html

It is often better to build on strengths than try to eliminate weaknesses:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

Alfie Kohn has a lot to say about eliminating competition and grading from our lives:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_Kohn

Good sleep, pleasurable exercise, a relationship to nature, education-on-demand instead of education-just-in-case, and eating right help a lot:
    http://www.mayoclinic.org/feature-articles/levine-office-of-future.html
    http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.honestfoodguide.org/

Solar panels and a basic income are ways forward towards a happier global society:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosolar
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

After a long career in the tourism and non-for-profit sector, my brother became fond of the statement "the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers". When this happens, the contrast ratio tends to increase, leaving a dysfunctional organization ever more dysfunctional. If the best and brightest of rural America are heading into the cities, the same applies. Averaged across America as a whole, nothing has changed, but you do have a slightly smaller, more woeful bucket.

Arthur Benjamin suggests we have the wrong focus in our math education. We should be teaching statistics, not calculus.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

A typical person, after learning some calculus in high school, applies this skill precisely zero times in the rest of their adult life.

Statistics, however, is something we encounter on a daily basis, such as this article, with its potentially bamboozled statistical claim (did it properly account for a selective migration effect? Impossible to say from the story summary.)

People tend to have a relatively poor intuitive grasp on statistics, yet it impacts many of our daily decisions. Worse, even among those who have a reasonable grasp of statistics, few have a solid handle on robust statistics, which can be surprisingly subtle.

Bart Kosko (Edge.org is link challenged.)

Does everyone know the old joke that you can take the dumbest guy from a room of 50 pound foreheads and move him into a room of evolution deniers, and the average IQ in both rooms increases (really). This is just to point out that it matters how you draw the lines, as every corrupt politician knows instinctively. It doesn't mean that a single additional person voted in favour of the corrupt politico, yet moving the line can still result in victory.

On another front, urban migration is a fact of the modern world.

Stewart Brand on squatter cities

I have a friend who paddles at an elite level. As the club where she presently rows, the coach recently decided to split the top six athletes three each in an A and B boat. Two things happened: A) the race time averaged across the two crews improved, B) neither boat medalled. The six elite athletes were not impressed.

In Canada, we're inclined toward this kind of social experimentation. I deliberately live on the edge of a slightly seedy area of town, because I oppose further polarization (seedy by Canadian standards is no great hazard to life and limb).

In America, the balance is tipping so that one more year of life for some rich old white fart is procured at great expense, while a far cheaper intervention for an inner city black kid, who might live another twenty years with the benefit of treatment, is often neglected.

Here's an interesting question for debate: how does our widespread statistical ignorance bias social policy? If schools taught statistics instead of calculus, would the coefficient on power-law wealth distribution change one way or the other?

After a long career in the tourism and non-for-profit sector, my brother became fond of the statement "the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers". When this happens, the contrast ratio tends to increase, leaving a dysfunctional organization ever more dysfunctional. If the best and brightest of rural America are heading into the cities, the same applies. Averaged across America as a whole, nothing has changed, but you do have a slightly smaller, more woeful bucket.

Arthur Benjamin suggests we have the wrong focus in our math education. We should be teaching statistics, not calculus.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

A typical person, after learning some calculus in high school, applies this skill precisely zero times in the rest of their adult life.

Statistics, however, is something we encounter on a daily basis, such as this article, with its potentially bamboozled statistical claim (did it properly account for a selective migration effect? Impossible to say from the story summary.)

People tend to have a relatively poor intuitive grasp on statistics, yet it impacts many of our daily decisions. Worse, even among those who have a reasonable grasp of statistics, few have a solid handle on robust statistics, which can be surprisingly subtle.

Bart Kosko (Edge.org is link challenged.)

Does everyone know the old joke that you can take the dumbest guy from a room of 50 pound foreheads and move him into a room of evolution deniers, and the average IQ in both rooms increases (really). This is just to point out that it matters how you draw the lines, as every corrupt politician knows instinctively. It doesn't mean that a single additional person voted in favour of the corrupt politico, yet moving the line can still result in victory.

On another front, urban migration is a fact of the modern world.

Stewart Brand on squatter cities

I have a friend who paddles at an elite level. As the club where she presently rows, the coach recently decided to split the top six athletes three each in an A and B boat. Two things happened: A) the race time averaged across the two crews improved, B) neither boat medalled. The six elite athletes were not impressed.

In Canada, we're inclined toward this kind of social experimentation. I deliberately live on the edge of a slightly seedy area of town, because I oppose further polarization (seedy by Canadian standards is no great hazard to life and limb).

In America, the balance is tipping so that one more year of life for some rich old white fart is procured at great expense, while a far cheaper intervention for an inner city black kid, who might live another twenty years with the benefit of treatment, is often neglected.

Here's an interesting question for debate: how does our widespread statistical ignorance bias social policy? If schools taught statistics instead of calculus, would the coefficient on power-law wealth distribution change one way or the other?

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, you might want to check out Gordon Brown's TED Talk on using technology to drive social change.

don't give your children administrator privleges on your 'puter!!!!!!! I mean come on, you might aswell entrust them with your carkeys and credit information, and stikk them in a room full of strangers. give it they might still be able to install some programs, and not all of them that good but from what I remember this is not the case with limewire. and while your at it why not put up a firewall and restrict the internet access for all users. Maybe even turn of the port that limewire runs on, if the kid is smart enough to jump through all the hops to get limewire installed and running, he also knows how to restrict the sharing. Don't get me wrong I am all for letting kids to dangerous things ( http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html) but teach them why it's dangerous, lay down some rules and do it with them.

Check out this video. It is closer than you think, and using off the shelf products. http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

There are a lot of comments here suggesting that the victims should take most of the blame.

As food for thought, I'd recommend those commenters watch this fascinating TED talk.

He gives a number of examples where we feel that we're in control of our decisions, but the designer of the systems/situations have measurably a greater influence in what you'll do than you yourself may. His point at the end is (paraphrased):

When it comes to the physical world, we're acutely aware of our limitations, and we build systems to overcome them (e.g. stairs to climb vertically, wheels for easy transport, etc). When it comes to the mental world, we have this unreasonable view of ourselves as supermen. We think we are always in control, and that we are always responsible. We need to understand our mental limitations so that we can design systems (e.g. public/company policy, transportation systems, etc) to overcome them (and make the world a better place).

"Personally, I hope Opera doesn't gain any further market share, because it is not open source. It is becoming less and less relevant."

And there you have it. Open source has now been elevated from a cult to a full blown religion.

"I don't care if it's the best, it doesn't mesh with my personal belief system, and must die".

Choices are good. I'd choose Opera even if I had to pay for it. It's good that poeple have choices.

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html

Memes could explain some of them. Some could be pure cultural (i.e. kissing, superstition, altruism) and others could had helped that we evolved this way (your odds of mating could had been increased if you had the ability to do some of those things).

This awesome TED talks talks about phantom limbs, and one way to truly remove them! http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html Grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy! :)

10 meters to 100 feet in depth, depending which source of the story you a reading.
Considering that the article I read earlier (that I can't find right now) reported it being up to 40-80 meters deep - I'd go with the higher number.

Thing is, about 90%+ of the garbage is smaller than a bottle cap, and most of it floats just couple of feet bellow the water surface.
So, just skimming it would do about diddly point squat as Capt. Moore had put it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html Interesting stuff in here. Also good to show people who think that humans can't possibly have an "impact" on the biosphere. I can't add much to what's already in this talk...go take a peek.

Many of the issues of EV's limited ranges can be solved by adding charge points at work, charge points at the shops, and charge points at home. But the REAL breakthrough is an integrated renewable energy and battery swap program being marketed in various countries by "Better Place". Israel and Australia, among others, are due to have this program rolled out. Got an unexpected trip that you're not charged for? Then program your trip into the SatNav/GPS, and it will tell you where the closest automated battery-swap program is.

Also, electricity is so cheap to sell as a "fuel" that the company owns the battery, not you! (Shai Agassi makes a huge song and dance about forcing consumers to buy the battery is like forcing regular car owners to buy not just a little oil, but the whole oil-well that the car will ever drink from in its life.) So THEY wear the "risk" of the battery being overused and needing replacement... they test the batteries at the recharge station and wear the cost of recycling the lithium at the end of the batteries lifespan.

So my question is, will this car manufacturer be complying with the battery swap standards being developed by "Better Place" and Renault, or will they be forcing us to operate under the old car model of owning the battery! It's not just a new car, but a whole new business model for the car and totally changes the economics and feasibility of electric cars.(Eewww...)

http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

1. An individual who desires to pay cash and wants to pick up the chemical(s).
2. An established customer who deviates from previous orders or ordering methods.
3. A new customer or unfamiliar representative of an established customer who orders listed chemicals.
4. A customer who has difficulty in pronouncing chemical names.
5. A customer who is vague about its firm's address, telephone number, and reason for desiring a listed chemical.
6. A customer who wants a listed chemical shipped to a post office box or address other than the usual business address.
7. A customer who prefers to pay by cashier's check, postal money order, etc.
8. A customer who will not furnish references or who is vague about furnishing references for credit purposes.
9. A customer who desires listed chemicals for reasons at variance with accepted legitimate industry practice.
10. A customer who is not a member of a trade, professional, or business association.
11. A customer who furnishes false or suspicious addresses, telephone numbers, or references.
12. A customer who refuses or is reluctant to establish a credit account or provide purchase order information.
13. A customer whose communication either by telephone, mail, or other means is not conducted or prepared in a professional business manner.
14. A customer who requests unusual methods or routes of shipment or who provides unusual shipping, labeling or packaging instructions.
15. A customer who purchases unusual quantities or combinations of chemicals or glassware in contrast with customary practice and usage.
16. A customer whose stated use of listed chemicals is incompatible with destination country's commercial activities or consignee's line of business.
17. A customer with little or no business background information available.
18. A customer using a freight forwarder as ultimate consignee.
19. The use of intermediate consignee(s) whose location or business is incompatible with the purported end user's nature of business or location.]
20. Evasive responses to any questions, or responses that indicate a lack of basic knowledge of the industry, or inability to supply information on whether listed chemicals are for domestic use or export.

Then, there is Bill "we must disempower the individual" Joy.

Who, exactly, is being paranoid of whom?

See, this is the thing. I love the idea of electric cars. I want that to be the norm. But right now I don't see how it would work.

Shai Agassi presented a good idea at TED, though, that I don't understand why we haven't heard more about:

Why do you need to own the battery pack? When you go to the gas station now, you're not "charging;" you're replacing the power source. Why can't EVs work like that? You drive up, a machine lifts your battery pack out of the car and moves it to a charging bay, and inserts a charged one into your car. Off you go. Like what we do with BBQ propane tanks now. I haven't actually refilled one of those for years; you just switch them out.

His model is more like the cellphone industry. You get the car cheap for a monthly fee; it's yours at the end of the contract. Or you buy it at the outset and only deal with the "service" (batteries in this case). I thought it was a head-slappingly great idea when I heard it.

Here's the video.

Have you ever seen J J Abram's talk on the Mystery Box at Ted.com? Apple is one big mystery box and so long as the box is kept closed, everyone wants a peek inside. But, if we ever did see inside... I'd suspect we'd find that it's not so mind-blowing as we once supposed.

Government exists for one reason: To deprive individuals of the freedom of choice.

Quick, call the doctor, we've got a galloping case of polarization disorder.

Actually, governments exist because societies without governments are ungovernable.

Paul Collier on the "bottom billion"

Paul Collier argues that most nations which experience a natural resource windfall experience a few great years, then end up worse off than before.

The countries where this doesn't happen are countries like Canada, which has a complex system of checks and balances. The "instant democracies" which have the vote, but none of the other trappings of effective government, aren't so lucky.

One of the reasons this works in Canada is that we accept what the government is there to accomplish, even if we grumble as much as any other nation about the obvious inefficiency in how this transpires.

The growing problems in rich nations with health care delivery runs much deeper than government. Our medical technology has reached the state where the last five years of our life expectancy (in failing health) is capable of consuming most of the wealth generated in our working years.

Most people wish to live as long as possible. Without checks and balances, the logical outcome is that 100% of the GDP is ultimately devoted to life expectancy and medical intervention. We're far from running out of ways to make health care more expensive for incrementally less return.

The way it works in America, as I understand it, is that a lower-middle income wage-slave works their ass off for 40 years, saves up enough money for a modest retirement, soon breaks a hip or experiences some other common medical ailment of the golden years, and is then hustled back to work at Wal-Mart for another decade to pay it off.

Politics in America has always cultivated a large pool of docile and desperate workers. I don't know if this has its root in the slave trade or not. I do know that it remains easy in America to end up out in the cold.

Washington Mutual

How many of the workers spoke up about the clearly ludicrous lending practises? At risk of losing their health coverage? Or some form of power against peon litigation? Not likely.

Historically, a productive economy was seen as a fragile thing, as if the economic miracle might just as easily evaporate. Hence we structure society with many have-nots, on the ground that it keeps the haves hard at the grindstone. We tend to regard innovation as some kind of fleeting accident to be carefully protected. And we create complex systems of law and property around the flowers of human creativity, lest we enjoy ourselves too much, and wind up in coffins we haven't paid for.

It's not clear that the world works this way any more. Innovation might become a surfeit, rather than a paucity, if our mechanisms to protect innovation were less obstreperous. We could have millions of artists rather than thousands of celebrities. The economics of distribution have changed, but our system of thinking hasn't.

One thing is certain, though. We're living on a crowded planet, and we're going to need more cooperation rather than less. This will mean more government rather than less, especially if the people who oppose government fritter their energies banging around in their ideological tin shacks.

My number one wish for better government would be a less bewildering and capricious legal system. My particular nightmare is that the environmental calamity arrives on schedule (fat chance), the technology is there to do something about it, but the lawyers can't work out how to divide the royalties, so the technology is not fully deployed, or too late to matter.

hmm .. let's take Carlin's speech point by point, by slightly paraphrasing what he says :

• "politicians are puppets controlled by corporations and rich lobbies" . I'd say that is true for the most part, even if it doesn't happen in a direct way. Corporations can threaten to cut jobs, close down factories or offices, relocate in another state or country or even just disproportionally increase the price of their product if the CEOs think that new legislations might decrease the profit for their shareholders. That would result in, at least, jobs being lost in the area and might (and probably would) prove a big enough incentive to stop certain laws or regulations to be passed. Everybody is just doing their job : politicians have to evaluate whether the law or regulation is worth the corporation's reaction, and corporation's need to maximise the profit for the shareholders. (I'll pass the cases where hands have to be greased or forced, or when a politician only thinks of his career)"
• "Corporations, etc ... don't want the common folks to be capable of critical thinking", Although it would make sense (read "1984"), there is no direct evidence of it ... only circumstantial : the rise of Fox Network for example, or the way newspapers will rather tell you that Lindsay Lohan broke her toe nail, or that the giants won the superball rather than that, again, X american soldiers were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan one day earlier. Incidentally repeatedly pounding on how great your nation is and making kids repeat that over and over is a great way to hammer obedience in the mind of the people you want to govern
• "Society has a class system, and most people are not in the ruling/rich class". well ... that there is a widening gap between rich and poor (yes, I know ... 2 years old. But I don't believe this has changed much. Prove me wrong). So ... nothing to see. He is right. And before you reply "The poor deserved it. Everybody can be rich", check this very nice and interesting TED talk about (along other things) Meritocracies
• "Politicians don't care about the people who elect them". I'm not completely as nihilistic as Carlin. I honestly think many politicians start their career because they actually genuinely care. Sadly, as should be obvious to anybody who switched from his productive job to Management and was full of hope to be able to make a change, the higher you are the thinner the air is and the more you just struggle to survive. Even if some politicians do still care about the people after they've been elected to a position of power, helping people is probably more of an afterthought while juggling with more important issues (what those can be is probably not even something the politicians can decide themselves)

so ... 'the paranoid ramblings of a deluded old man shouting at hippies' ? perhaps, but at least he actually knows what he is talking about.

Forget government, let NASA play it's space game and retire the shuttle, government will never do space right.

Space needs to be done by the public, companies, individuals, etc need to be permitted to go into space without fighting NASA for each flight.

Burt Rutan discusses this issue fairly well, I'm with him, private industry and people will be the viable plan for future spaceflight, forget the government.

Be sure to watch http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html too.
It's rather amazing :)

I think they totally forget that there is ALSO a 10% possibility that you _don't_ detect the terrorist...

Watch this TED : http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html

I think that creativity is the ability to make associations/connections in unusual or unexpected ways.

It could be related to synesthesia. Here is a video with a few references to it: http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

The problem with Vonnegut's "Man Without a Country" is that you can't tell when he's kidding.

He says "The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. ... Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

The problem which arises when we attempt to turn the arts into a way of making a living, is that the larger social context breaks down. We make art out of our experiences. If your experiences are effectively owned by another party, you can make art out of your experiences, but then you won't entirely own the end result. Not even enough to give it away.

The soul-growing aspect of art is not its consumption, but the creative synthesis which art inspires. Art consumed is popcorn and butter. Nourishing in a caloric sense, but not nutritious.

At the risk of quoting a spoiler, Vonnegut recites the wisdom of his friend Saul at the end of the book, "what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

Thus, I suppose, breaking DRM is a form of art, and our response is to the plight of the artist's prison term.

But seriously, if you view the creative works of others as fuel for your own soul-growing endeavours, it's not sensible to become emotionally invested in creative works which are militantly encumbered.

Somewhere I encountered an anecdote about children given an amazing toy, but what they end up playing with most at the end of the day is the packaging the toy came in. I don't know anyone who was inspired to a life of artistic expression by the Mona Lisa. For that matter, it's debatable whether sex is improved with skill. Isn't skill mostly a compensation for the fact that the sequel rarely lives up to the original?

We're actually pretty bad at predicting our happiness states. Gilbert says the same thing in his videos at TED.

Why We Suck at Predicting the Future.

What I'm saying is that we too often talk ourselves into needing the latest and greatest (and most encumbered) media, but we don't, and it often defeats the greater purpose.

Lessig has figured out that this quandary is harming our children. Part of his motivation here is that we're making an ass of the law. I guess I have less to lose if RIAA succeeds, as seems likely.

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

The deeper problem here is that many of us believe that we garner status through what we've experienced, rather than what we've created, a sentiment which Twain noted when he observed that "A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read."

How much of this stuff are we hurtling through so that we can sit around at the bar or the coffee shop and go "yeah, I've seen that; yeah, I've read that; yeah, I've seen that, too"?

I've been to Holland. I spent two hours in Schiphol. I've been to Tokyo. I spent 12 hours in the Narita complex. We had long enough to take a train into the city and drink one beer.

Sometimes we get a bit carried away with the belief that a gadget from Amazon or an air terminal is the gateway to a life well lived. If you don't stick around and engage emotionally, it's all meaningless. The Kindle model is a form of literary tourism. Hey, if you love airport security, here's a chance to carry it around on your person.

Flash forward to Kubrick's AI when the love of our life disappears in an electronic instant (with full refund) due to a minor copyright glitch on the charming dimple module. I've love to read the verse Shakespeare might have penned concerning that scenario, but as things are shaping up, I'd have to live another 600 years to legally post it here on slashdot.

Worth mentioning a TED talk that's spot-on. Cliff Stoll (well known to older Slashdot readers) teaches physics to 8th graders, and his students used an old oscilloscope to measure the speed of sound.

Check out the talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

Wish I'd had a teacher like that.

Eccentric, but engrossing none the less

Browse www.ted.com. Personally I think everything about selfassembling nanomachines is fascinating.

Here's a man who bought a basketball team to indulge his anger management issues. Part of a Nowiztki quote in Wikipedia:

The game starts, and he's already yelling at [the referees]. So he needs to know how to control himself a little.

Maybe he gets himself warmed up driving to the arena in the latest Veyron coup. Just what a man with a short fuse needs to pump his fast twitch into adrenaline shock.

Out of the red tinged mental miasma of throbbing carotids, a word condenses: blackswan. (No particularly close relationship to black death.) "Hey, I can really push a lot of buttons swinging around this scabid corpse." With the economy in its current condition, we're all pretty hopped up on lemming pheromones and ready to jump. We're primed for the primal message.

This is a man who was energized by Ayn Rand. I was never able to read this chick, although I have read some excruciatingly long retrospectives about her via AL Daily. Whatever her virtues (views on this are extremely polar), she wielded a world-class stupid-dozer. Not the kind that pushes stupid out of the way, but the kind that backfills with dirt something she otherwise couldn't deal with. IIRC (more than twenty years later) in the early going of "For the New Intellectual", she tosses the work of Heisenberg and Gödel into the brink as the "philosophy of depression". Having thus dispatched with the facts, she then proceeds to unfold the truth. I didn't continue reading.

There's a funny moment in this TED video where Hawkins lampoons the old "maybe the brain can't understand the brain" mysticism. (And IMO, he's largely right about the role of the cortex in memory and prediction.)
Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing

Gödel was one of the first to demonstrate that for math this voodoo sentiment is in fact true, if your math is sufficiently powerful (i.e. with blades sharper than a Fischer Price lawn mower). Gödel's theorem is what makes mathematics a limitless frontier of new discovery.

Likewise, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is intimately linked with almost every accomplishment of the high tech industry over the last 50 years. The statistical properties of bosons and fermions are not an obstacle to technology, but in fact enable the greatest feats of human creativity and magic we've managed to pull off. Rand, perched high atop her stupid dozer, didn't have time for subtlety, hence her great appeal to business minds. She implicitly believed that a simpleton universe would provide greater outlets for human creativity and triumph. What a ninny. But this was long before the clue stick was widely distributed, and a lot of people fell for it on an emotional level.

I think Rand deserves an honorary doctorate in media studies. She would be best regarded as a Marshall McLuhan figure, minus the self-insight part. If you needed to know what Fox news was going to be like in the 21st century, the author you needed to study fifty years ago was Ayn Rand.

Enter Mark Cuban with his media empire based on sports, entertainment, and ego, pumped around the globe over satellites and optical fibre made possible by the philosopher's of depression, now jamming open the elevator door with his elbow firmly planted on the fear button, prominently labelled black swan.

Did someone once remark that ego is the thin layer that demarcates fear from greed? Someone should have. The most powerful egos are found in the people where fear and greed press hardest together. I once sat in a room where a petty venture capitalist (with anger management issues) wrote onto our white board (in foot tall letters) two words: fear and greed; he then left this great wisdom behind for our continued edification. The implication, of course, was that if our inner emotional world had room for anything else, we would be regarded as insufficiently focused, and that wealth,

If it's a dumb idea Symantec invented it.

Well then, that explains Trepanation, which had a remarkably high short-term survival rate.

Catherine Mohr: Surgery's past, present and robotic future

Run this video in reverse and substitute Symantec for surgery. Note: includes illustrations which Symantec does not normally release.

What I love about slashdot is its scalability. The discussion ranges anywhere from the design of a Google data center in 2015 to some guy's psychological stance toward his next netbook purchase in 2009. Sometimes it's unclear which end of the spectrum is under debate, but the discussion happily progresses in a state of astral superposition. When this gets too confusing, even for slashdot, the moderation system helps to sort things out. For example, if the comment

Flash memory is set to replace rotational media.

is moderated +1 insightful, then we know we're talking about some guy's future netbook purchase. Or if the same comment is moderated -1 troll, then we know we're talking about Google data centers in 2015.

Flash memory begins to fade - ZDNet.co.uk from 2005

"The scaling laws are not favourable to flash," said Tom Lee, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and a founder of Matrix Semiconductor, which makes a 3D memory chip that performs flash-like functions. "The noises are getting louder now, so it looks like manufacturers are already in that new age of diminished gains."

Numonyx Breakthrough Delivers First 45nm NOR Flash Memory Chips from Jan 2009

"Numonyx engineers overcame major scaling limitations by developing new process techniques to produce the 7th generation MLC NOR flash on the industry's most advanced 45nm technology, and to be the first to bring the cost and performance benefits to our customers."
...
"At a time when the entire industry grapples with the scalability of all flash memory technologies, ..."

Brewster Kahle

I think Brewster Kahle is going to jump off a bridge when he learns that Seagate is exiting the disk drive business in 2010. If you think CERN or EOS cost a lot of money, try updating the budget with SSD specified as the primary storage layer.

A useful way to view this transition is the long tail on steroids. 99% of the world's stored information will be held by a few hundred mega-scale institutions (NASA, Google, CERN, GenBank) on rotating hard drives, while 99% of the world's gadgets have no hard drive at all.

The same thing happened in software. The C language represents a tiny sliver of source code written over the last ten years, but if you could measure the number of machine instructions executed by language of origin, C would continue to represent a very large slice of the pie. A major factor in the success of scripting languages is that the problems these languages don't handle well can be off-loaded to a well established compiled language. If you cherry pick your niche, it's amazing how much more convenient it looks compared to the ancestral technology which didn't.

I thought the paper was quite good, and more relevant than 99% of what I read these days. I'm always interested in analysis of hybrid solutions. In the engineering world, there is a de facto allergy to hybrid solutions. We tend to achieve the best result by scaling a single virtue to the max, rather than engaging in the jello-like trade-offs involved in balancing complementary virtues. I first began to think about this when ethernet trounced ATM by the simple measure of vastly over-provisioning bandwidth.

The exception to this is on the large scale where operational costs exceed all other costs, such as major data centers.

This is one of the reasons why progress in ecology is so painfully achieved: ecological systems almost always demand hybrid solutions, and we're not terribly comfortable with this. Engineers prefer monarchy. In ecological systems, life is complicated, and you can't just sit there and

I'm not sure that this has failed yet. Wikipedia doesn't really claim to be a textbook replacement. Projects like Connexions seem to be the place where open source textbooks will succeed or fail.

Wrong. There is no better or worse in evolution. What is good one day sucks when the environment changes. Evolution is not directed towards anything, it can not progress or retreat.

The philosopher of science Daniel Dennet argues quite persuasively that evolution does indeed result in real progress, beyond fleeting temporary advantage. His arguments are best articulated in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his talks (e.g. TED2009, TED2006, TED2003, and TED2002).

The jury is still out on whether Dennet is right on this point, but it has support from some evolutionary biologists, and the debates continue...

Wrong. There is no better or worse in evolution. What is good one day sucks when the environment changes. Evolution is not directed towards anything, it can not progress or retreat.

The philosopher of science Daniel Dennet argues quite persuasively that evolution does indeed result in real progress, beyond fleeting temporary advantage. His arguments are best articulated in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his talks (e.g. TED2009, TED2006, TED2003, and TED2002).

The jury is still out on whether Dennet is right on this point, but it has support from some evolutionary biologists, and the debates continue...

Wrong. There is no better or worse in evolution. What is good one day sucks when the environment changes. Evolution is not directed towards anything, it can not progress or retreat.

The philosopher of science Daniel Dennet argues quite persuasively that evolution does indeed result in real progress, beyond fleeting temporary advantage. His arguments are best articulated in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his talks (e.g. TED2009, TED2006, TED2003, and TED2002).

The jury is still out on whether Dennet is right on this point, but it has support from some evolutionary biologists, and the debates continue...

Wrong. There is no better or worse in evolution. What is good one day sucks when the environment changes. Evolution is not directed towards anything, it can not progress or retreat.

The philosopher of science Daniel Dennet argues quite persuasively that evolution does indeed result in real progress, beyond fleeting temporary advantage. His arguments are best articulated in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his talks (e.g. TED2009, TED2006, TED2003, and TED2002).

The jury is still out on whether Dennet is right on this point, but it has support from some evolutionary biologists, and the debates continue...

If they can't make stuff last, they should makes stuff that can either be reused (like putting old cpu's in toys) or recycled. Intel could design chips so they can easily be turned back into raw materials. Here's a guy who recycles 100% material and makes a good profit on it, besides the obvious environmental benefits.

Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.

It is not the business of scientists to decide what must be done at "any" cost. Economists decide cost/benefit situations. I invite you to watch this TED talk that echos my point quite well.

Bottom line: scientists study and discover facts and principals about how the universe works. Economists decide how best to prioritize resources. If we did it your way and let scientsts decide what "must" be done at "any" cost then every scientists is going to say that their field is the most important.

Why do you think China is kicking our asses so hard? Yes, it is partially lax environmental laws there

While that may be true---I don't know---it's interesting to note what Hans Rosling pointed out in one of his TED talks*, as countries get wealthier and decrease their infant mortality, they all start emitting more CO2.

That is, no country knows how to get rich without polluting. China's getting rich is not more "at the expense of the environment" than anyone else's getting rich.

* http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html. I don't know which of the three videos, but watch them all because they're good ;-)

I really like how there are stages in raising a child that, if followed honestly, usually lead to children becoming very capable, healthy adults.

Check out this TED talk about delayed gratification, your statement reminded me of it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

I think Jacob Nielsen is both right, slightly wrong, and not so slightly wrong.

First, the personal anecdote. There's one place and time where I really want to look at my password. That's when I'm installing a new OS.

I'm typically alone in my room when I'm doing that. Or I'm doing it for a friend who trusts me (and I could install a back door if I had one anyways). I use the Dvorak keyboard layout, but my point works equally well just for just about any layout except the US bog standard. The trick is: I'm not used to using the installation software. I don't know whether it has really picked up on my keyboard layout---in debian/ubuntu installers, the password is among the first things I type. I would _really_ like to (at my discretion) have the password displayed.

Next, let's consider what Nielsen is saying.

Providing feedback and visualizing the system's status have always been among the most basic usability principles.

True.

Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn't even protect fully against snoopers.

I tried that against a sales representative today, twice. Didn't work. But I'm not truly skilled. If the password had been on the screen, I'm sure it had been a lot easier.

It's not like masking passwords buys you nothing. It does buy you something. If he has evidence that the value doesn't exceed its cost, I'd like to see it.

But maybe masking rarely buys you anything?

[Usually] It's just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.

Could be true, but that actually makes unmasking a problem. I'll get to that.

Yes, users are sometimes truly at risk of having bystanders spy on their passwords, such as when they're using an Internet cafe. It's therefore worth offering them a checkbox to have their passwords masked; for high-risk applications, such as bank accounts, you might even check this box by default.

As we all know, the expected utility of any uncertain event is its probability times its utility.

Nielsen does address security compromises with a large (negative) utility, such as bank account passwords. He fails at considering the probability.

Why is that crucial?

The probability of compromise can be largely influenced by use context. That is, am I sitting alone in my cubicle? Am I giving a presentation using a projector? Am I using a public kiosk?

I don't know about you guys, but when I look at any login screen I'm used to using, I type my username and password without asking myself "is my security at risk?". When I'm using a projector, I'm reflecting over the fact that other people can't see my password while I'm typing it.

Said another way: the correct system for logging in changes from

• Type username and password

To

• Assess the situational risks
• Type username and password

I think the second habit is much harder to form, and takes more thought. Most users will fail. He points out that loss of security is a danger with masked passwords. With unmasked passwords, it's a certainty. We need fail-safe, because failures an inevitable. If one of your employees accidentally forgets to check the checkbox at a trade show, your competitor can now log in as that employee and steal your trade secrets.

Dan Ariely gave a great TED talk about how we go with defaults if the options are complicated: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

We need a fail-safe default.

On the other hand, don't listen to me. Listen to the evidence. Note how I don't have any, and Jacob doesn't have any. I think that's the biggest failure. Sure, well-controlled studies of his hypothesis are hard to do, so other evidence will have to make do.

But he doesn't have any.

I recall watching this TED talk a while ago that touches on the subject of how defaults heavily influence our decisions. Cool stuff:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

At its core, socialism is a removal of individual consequences for individual actions.

at its core, the sentiment behind this sentiment is that it is rational to lie, cheat, steal, and lounge around the couch if you can get away with it. I've read some reports lately that individuals with right wing belief systems have heightened neurological activity in the fear and disgust circuits. It strikes me as plausible, but nowhere near firmly established.

I tend to think that people with a well nourished sense of self-esteem are intrinsically motivated to pursue an engaged and meaningful life.

Martin Seligman on positive psychology | Video on TED.com

Is it naive socialism to believe in human potential? There's no question here that people kicked to the margins will engage in despicable behaviour, or that most of the people doing the kicking will be extremely well groomed.

If we're going to continue kicking people to the margins, we'd better have individual consequences for individual actions, because there's going to be a lot of people behaving badly.

The real question for me is whether a different social order is possible which doesn't require so much old-testament bravado to keep the wheels of justice turning.

It is funny and very telling of the real goal of pharma companies, that despite (or because of) all our "technology", the human immune system now is the weakest in the whole animal kingdom.

Wow. What we have here is a total collapse of the cognitive immune system responsible for thinking before typing.

Over all I think the human brain is a remarkable organ, but some of its failure modes defy rational analysis. Six billion counter examples. Maybe it's hard to count to six billion with your fingers.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria "talk" | Video on TED.com
* 10 times more bacterial cells in or on a human than human cells
* 100 times more bacterial genes in you or on you than human genes

So there it is. If our immune system was worth shit, it wouldn't permit all these freeloaders.

This seems to be working:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html

I agree, I didn't say self was constant I said "persistence of self is constant". I am "me" no matter how I define "me" at any particular point in time. The exception to this persistence can come about in stroke victims or with the use of phycotropic drugs where some people report not being able to disinguish self from surroundings. I imagine when I'm dead all my perceptions will cease.

But make sure you decide carefully which skillsets to give priority to. I'd recommend having a look at TED, MMPORG / gaming, and Second Life before deciding. Make sure income is sure because if you decide to junk a job and then lose the other, you might end up hating your decision or yourself, which isn't justified looking at the multitude of amazing technologies coming up and much lesser people focussing on those at the moment. Combinatorial genomics isn;t as bad as it sounds, for example - it may need programming, but teaching it to a lot of people needs visualisations and programming of simulations and animations - those things are where you can make a career of quality.

In this TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space.html , Burt Rutan makes a very compelling argument for the Commercialised space industry.

Yup. Costs about a lump of coal per Megabyte
http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_s_library_of_human_imagination.html

Clearly if you had INVESTIGATED the proposal, you would know that it does not involve lifting turbines. The kite is flown in a circular or figure-8 motion. On the ground, a generator extracts energy from the rotating tether. There are already test sites.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/saul_griffith_on_kites_as_the_future_of_renewable_energy.html