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Why Time Flies By As You Get Older
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
And we just think it does.
Michio Kaku did a great show about time for the BBC and at the end of one episode he asked young/old people to count 60 seconds. The older people consistently counted for much longer than the actual minute while younger people consistently counted much faster.
I calculated it out, and If you factor in how slow time moves after you die this is pretty obvious.
I'm not falling for that one again.
Are you sure you'd want to? The typical work-day is longer than the typical adolescent school day... On the other hand, school doesn't bring a paycheck... Let me ponder this a bit longer before we make a deal.
The immortal Bill Watterson described that effect best.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
definately would. you don't understand it yet, but you will never be healthier and more free then you are right now. i'm turning 30 this year and already i can see why they say youth is wasted on the young.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Generally young people have a lot more to look forward too so time seems to go by quickly, older people have really not much to look forward to so time goes slowly. How many times in school did you count down the days till summer? With older people there is less to look forward to because there is generally less things to -do- that is fresh and new. While you might have really enjoyed TV while young, by the time someone is older they begin to see that all of the plots are exactly the same.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
shit, that's a boredom-laced eternity.
> I'd like a defrag please.
...needing to defrag is like saying you need fresh horses...
Hellooo...have you seen the type of brains available now? Six, going on seven layers...adaptive reasoning, darwin-series inhibitors, enlarged stem, v2 fight-or-flight firmware. Things have changed since some people started wearing pants you know.
If you are 1 year old, then 1 day represents about 1/365th of your life. If you are 10 years old, then 1 day represents about 1/3,650th of your life. Thus the older you are the faster time may appear to pass by. When you are 1 year old, 1 day may seem to last much longer than 1 day when you are 10 years old.
I'm sure the Universe is expanding because when I drive to my son's house it seems further away every year. Actually, time goes faster because we accelerate when we go downhill!
When you're one year old, your entire life memory is a year. Thus, a year's passage is a lifetime. When you're 100, a year's passage is 1/100th of the same time.
"Anyone want to trade bodies?"
Sure, but can you drive a 1959 "Uncle Buck" model without endagering small children?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the older you get, the faster it goes."
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I figured that out all on my own in my mid twenties. Seems like it was just yesterday.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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Psychology Feed @ Feed Distiller
i'm turning 30 this year and already i can see why they say youth is wasted on the young.
If you're 30, then you are young. You should have another 10 years or so before the effects of entropy really start making themselves noticed. Mind you, although my knees and ankles creak and my eyes don't work that well, I really wouldn't want the chore of having to live the last 5 decades all over again....
On a related note:
The Secret Advantage Of Being Short
So if we grow taller with age, time will remain constant.
Brilliant!!
Time flies when having fun, and as one gets older, one is allowed to do more fun things. People also get more responsibility as they age, so more responibilities = less time. That's my thesis; I think it's pretty good!
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. A Flock of seagulls, Wham, Adam and The Ants, Human League, Culture Club etc. I don't know how we did it, but we finally realized that just because a synthesizer could make nearly every possible sound, they didn't all have to be in the same song! And the fashion! Dear God, what horrors! - shoulder pads, big hair, jackets with sleeves rolled up, zip-up shoes (remember Ciaks?), scraps of brightly fabric tied everywhere, puffy shirts, skinny leather neckties, faux military uniforms, solitary white gloves. Oh, the humanity!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Porcupine Tree's most recent album has an excellent 15 minute epic on this subject, titled "Time Flies". Check it out if you're bored one day and in the mood for some excellent modern rock.
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
I'd trade for some better teeth, though.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I seriously don't know why the parent god modded Funny. He should have been modded insightful. I, for one, could not wait for the 80's to be over, for exactly the reasons the parent mentions. The only thing that got me through it was the fact that the 80's also happened to be the golden age of heavy metal. Bands like Dio, Van Halen, AC/DC, Iron Maiden -- all of them peaked in the early-to-mid 80's. The last 3 or 4 years of that decade were pretty grim, though. By that time, even Van Halen and Iron Maiden were using synthesizers quite heavily (although, Van Halen's 1984 album was a great album, synthesizers or not).
For what it's worth, I still disagree with the guy but there's got to be some advantage to your youth, if nothing else, think of all the abysmal 1980s technology you skipped right over!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. (...)
Sometimes it feels I'm the only one who liked the 1980s...
Those were the times of Cindy Lauper, (young) Madonna, A-Ha and pop-things alike.
Those were the golden years of 8-bit computing. Machines like Amiga, Mac etc were created in that decade.
Those were the years of Gorbachev, Thatcher, Khomeini... The video of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" was hilarious.
The girls were colorful and with crazy hairs...
It was shamelessly stupid and joyful.
The 1970s OTOH, were overrated IMO (I'm glad I was too young to experience that).
Bell pants? Afro-power microphone-like hair? Beatles gone? Progressive rock? Hippies getting older?
Aarrrgh...
Fuck you, prog rock is life.
Now I just feel old and depressed. Yay! Thanks, Slashdot!
Bugger that! Think of all the abysmal 1980s music you skipped over. A Flock of seagulls, Wham, Adam and The Ants, Human League, Culture Club etc.
And Lady GaGa is an improvement?
8 and 16 bit computing are the only positive things from the eighties...with "Wargames" or "Back to the Future" and "Indiana Jones" movies. CD marked the end of 45RPM records and hence the beginning of the domination of marketing over artistic sense in music. 1983 marked the end of interesting pop music IMHO. Then there was AIDS. This is why we spent our time programming C64 in assembler rather than fucking hippie or disco girls like in the 60's or 70's. The end of the cold war marked the beginning of decadence in science education and funding. Reaganism brought to us infinite jealousy for others, permanent competition, and an obsession with money and consumerism. The space shuttle sucked ass in comparison to Apollo program, for instance. There were no decent cameras to speak of. Remember the german cameras from the 30's and 50's, and japanese from the early 70's..The same for Hifi. It should say something about the period.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I like aspects of the 80s too, the technology, at least the computers, were a lot of fun. They were simple enough you could understand them pretty much entirely, you could actually get down to the bare iron and not be wrapped up in 15 layers of abstraction, even proprietary software was somewhat open - you had books like "The Complete Spectrum ROM disassembly" - a complete and well commented listing of the entire machine OS - imagine if someone tried to do that with Windows - firstly, you'd need something the size of Britannica, and secondly you'd be sued to smithereens within milliseconds of thinking of the idea.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Full attention != Full processing capacity
He obviously has tons of background daemons running and was in a situation of "some degree of peril" and physical change (the skin graft thing) which clearly would have triggered several others. A more useful, relevant, pertinent (and I predict...) reliable benchmark would be something like "thoughts per second" or "operations per thought" (since different thoughts would have different operations and a different number of operations). "Thought operations" (or "thoughts") could be a standard for thinking-speed.
So - how an AI thinks is more important than how fast it thinks since "operation speed" can changed via hardware. Thinking-speed is a result of underlying algorithms that actually make up the "I" in AI. Thinking-speed is also affected by the AIs own growth and ability to change itself. IQ of an AI would also result from that.
Which also implies that AIs can be distracted from a task - simply by causing it to a) spend more operations about input received or b) making it think about something else simultaneously. An AI being able to manage that/reduce the effect of the distraction, again, is dependent on design, self-growth and self-modification.
It would be have sounded even more worrying if in those 0.68 seconds, he had as many "thoughts" as an intelligent person would in a year...or two. (Endless loops, non-breaks, etc. adds to the worry.)
Ofcourse, I do agree with your statement. It IS an eternity for any AI.
Sidenote with math-conjectures:
60 trillion OPS = 60 x 10^12 OPS (or in MIPS = 60 * 10^6 MIPS, since we are not assuming only-FLOPS) - and yes, many operations make up 1 instruction, so assume best case is 1 instruction = 2 operations. So 30 * 10^6 MIPS? An X9100 is 32472 MIPS ~= 32 * 10^3 MIPS. So only slightly-less-than 1000 times slower than Data.