Support for video in Linux seems pretty imperiled in general. If you have even slightly complicated needs, it can be a real struggle. If you really want to avoid closed source drivers, you can be out of luck completely. If it weren't for the fact that some heavy hitters like Linux systems, I'd feel like we're only a few shady deals away from Linux no longer having video.
I think you're right, but it's hard to tell when you use it every day. Some days there's an update and it really does get better. Other days I just get better at working around its deficiencies. I think I like it better than most because I've never been one to dump stuff on my desktop. That obviates one shortcoming that really seems to irk people.
We all know KDE4 isn't cooked yet. The problem isn't KDE, it's Fedora (and like-minded distributions). Fedora 10 did away with KDE 3 while not providing a solid KDE 4 (because none exists). If for whatever reason you need to use Fedora 10, and you've been using KDE, you're in a bad position. I've been a longtime KDE user, and Fedora 10 almost forced me to convert to Gnome, but I've persevered and now I'm reasonably comfortable with KDE 4.1. That's not the same thing as "happy," but it's good enough to keep me from an even more uncomfortable (and probably shortsighted) switch to Gnome.
I don't know why it was impractical for Linus to stick with 3.5, but distributions that herd their users into this kind of decision aren't doing anyone any favors.
In the context of this hot-button topic, this is an important and necessary decision, but it's probably in general a good idea to impress upon students that scientific theories are never perfect, they all have strengths and weaknesses and even the most successful (e.g., evolution, Newtonian mechanics) leave plenty of room for refinement. Scientific theories have their own kind of Darwinian evolution, and while I don't necessarily want introductory classes to undermine everything they're teaching, it might be helpful if a part of science education were to provide better insight into the nature of the scientific enterprise than they do currently.
You're obviously right at some level, because if ten million people start using the term "brick" to mean "glowing purple flying saucer," then that is clearly one of the word's many meanings.
But when people complain about the misuse of the word in this context, I think they have a legitimate gripe. People too stupid to understand the difference between "bricked" and "broken" are turning the former into a synonym for the latter, probably because they think it sounds cooler. Alas, in these kinds of debates the stupid people usually win. But that doesn't mean they're not stupid.
I've been using OpenOffice exclusively for a long time, and I've never noticed any performance issues. But I'm not really stressing the program, I use it mostly for word processing, and my documents generally only have a few non-text items (figures, etc.) in them. What are the specific performance issues you're seeing?
I have noticed in the past that it seems more sluggish under OSX, although I haven't used the OSX version much since 3.0 came out.
I used to do that, but it's a weak procedure. People can infer what you've been up to by the lengths to which you will go to wipe your drive. Once you push the planet into a star, there are only a few possibilities for what was on your drive. (Shame on you.)
If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story.
Easier, but still basically impossible. Scientists write for a specialized audience that's defined by having a background in the field, and journalists for the most part don't have that background. In fact, for science writing to be at fault, we would have to assume that science journalists are at least trying to understand the articles. From what I've seen, most of them barely get through the press release and don't care what their interview subjects say.
I'm not going to claim that most scientists are good writers, but many scientists are. Scientists shouldn't be faulted if publications meant for their peers can't be understood by journalists with no working knowledge of the field. The alternative to this system would be for each journal article to recap the field's entire progress to date, solely for the benefit of laypeople and journalists who haven't been paying attention.
I don't know any readers that crave super-deluxe realism, but I'll take your word for it. Still, I've read many works of fiction that are undermined by the author's ignorance. It comes up a lot in science fiction, but in other kinds of fiction as well. Sometimes ignorance undermines the work, sometimes it doesn't. Shakespeare is not on that list for me, but perhaps I'd feel differently if I knew more about how kings act.
No two operating systems are exactly the same, from the programmer's perspective. The available operating system interfaces for everything from file access to network interface control can be very different. Not just the names of library functions, but how the needed functionality is divided into operations. It turns out that the major division in widely used desktop OSes right now is between Windows (does everything its own way) and everyone else (does everything the UNIX way). It's not to say there aren't many consequential and subtle differences between UNIX variants (among which are Linux, OSX, and the many BSDs), but if you make it your first priority to support the most widely used OS, Windows, then it could be a while before you get around to Linux and OSX. Whereas if you made one of the UNIX-like OSes your first priority, the rest of those would probably follow more quickly than the Windows version.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of how Google develops software, but in general terms this is why you might not get the Windows version and the OSX/Linux versions all at the same time.
Shouldn't all science fiction writers have some firsthand experience with science, ideally from an actual involvement with science? Well, maybe or maybe not. But more disturbing is the prevalence of people with no knowledge of science in the business of so-called science journalism. Of course, a few months in a science lab won't cure what ails most science writers. But it would be better than nothing, which is apparently the status quo.
The chapter contains a bland stew of ideas that were commonplace even a decade ago (when the chapter was written). Most of the engineering goals were major targets even back then, and he didn't exactly nail the timing on most of these. Factor out general knowledge of the tech industry, and he's no more accurate than your average tea leaf reader (even worse, if you imagine that Kurzweil has some access to industry insiders who actually know what technologies they're going to push next). It's a nice chapter as a summary of some of the things to look forward to in the near future (even now, since most of the tech ones are still not here), but nothing special in terms of prognostication.
Incidentally, how hard would it have been to mention the year in which these predictions were made. I put it at 1998, based on publication dates.
This article actually makes the opposite point. The authors had all the numbers from an actual commercial cross-platform game at their disposal, and because their game got picked up by Mac writers but not Windows writers, they had the perfect opportunity to present best-case numbers to make this point. But all they could muster was a pie chart that should be in textbooks on how to present non-information, and a few ridiculously weak arguments. I would kill to see decent games for Linux, but I can't imagine how this article is going to help any. Did anyone's belief in the value of supporting Linux and/or OSX actually go up after reading it?
Great analogy. If the switch to tone dialing were being made today, pulse dialing phones would still work, but it would take upwards of a minute to connect after dialing. For many customers, pulse dialing would either sporadically or completely stop working completely, and the phone company would tell you they can't fix it. To fix the problem you would have to get a tone dialing phone and upgrade your service with the new tone dialing package. Within 18 months, the phone company would introduce new ultra-tone dialing, and your new equipment and service contract would again become unusable. A superficial investigation would reveal that the phone companies only needed to flip a single toggle switch on some hardware to support the old methods perfectly, and the whole case would end up in a multi-million dollar class action settlement that would cost the telecoms roughly a nickel per subscriber, including lawyer costs.
My recollection is that none of these things actually happened with pulse dialing, because many of these innovations in phone service business methods are recent. But I'll bet there are some good stories out there.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
On the whole I think you're right about acupuncture. But bear in mind that PubMed doesn't say anything. PubMed indexes articles published in many journals, many of which are decidedly shoddy. Many more people do medical research than actually know how to do it properly. Also, trying to adjudicate any dispute about efficacy with a cursory look at PubMed is dangerous, not least due to publication bias, but also due to the aforementioned shoddiness of the indexed journals.
I have a question for anyone who's read this book. In general, do the authors argue that we have high-quality studies concerning these four treatment modalities, and that we therefore know with pretty good certainty that they're not much good? Or do they downplay the quality of the existing data?
If funding agencies believe it, it becomes true. Large granting institutions like the National Institutes of Health certainly behave as though they believe this. We often joke that it's easier to get a $30 million dollar grant to do research you're already doing than it is to get a $1 million grant to do something you haven't. There's more than a small kernel of truth to this. Certainly although I wouldn't discount the importance of good infrastructure to scientific research, it certainly has more to do with showmanship and politics than with a sober evaluation of what's best for moving biomedical research forward. I'd imagine this pattern is not unique to the NIH. In any case, between the heavy emphasis on "big science" and the difficult funding situation due to unfavorable federal budgets, individual researchers in many fields are being squeezed out, drastically reducing the pool of people who could potentially be doing good research relatively independently.
CUDA on ATI would help me a bit. But a quick googling of this concept turned up a bunch of pages saying it'll never happen, doesn't work, etc. Could you post a link?
The obvious answer to your question is to ask a lawyer familiar with current Canadian IP law. But perhaps more to the point, given that the software is for academic research and NSERC-funded, why isn't it being released as free software anyway? The reasons boil down to money, and are unconscionable. Whatever the legal merits, most if not all Universities are run much more like sleazy businesses than like research/educational institutions.
Without knowing the details about where you stand with things, my advice would be to concentrate on finishing your PhD first. There's no limit to the number of distractions during that final push, but big new areas of study are usually a bad idea.
Assuming that's not an issue (nor or eventually), as a beginner in the field, you don't need to start with articles, there are books that will help for a while. But you may find quickly that you need to place yourself in one of two camps: people who want to develop artificial brains that work just like the real brain, and people who want to develop artificial intelligence that does some/all of the things real intelligence does but isn't constrained to do it the same way people do it. As a quick and dirty litmus test, would you consider your project successful if it had near-perfect memory for names and numbers (like computers do) or flawed memory for names and numbers (like people).
Beyond that, I will recommend the following book some friends of mine wrote:
You may be right, but it's never been a major goal of AI researchers to duplicate how the brain works. AI has been steadfastly interested in building machines that do what the brain does, but not how the brain does it. So while I'm sure that many AI researchers keep an eye on these things, I don't think that "wrong ideas about how the brain actually works" is the problem, since ideas about how the brain works have relatively little influence on AI.
As an aside, MapReduce is not that complicated, nor is it particularly novel except in scale. Many people who are interested in AI, the brain, or both understand it pretty thoroughly and don't get much insight from it. So if you're otherwise right about things, I'll put my money on the neurobiologists, the systems neuroscientists, and all the other groups of researchers trying to understand memory and other brain functions.
We live with all kinds of risks. You leave the house, you risk dying in all kinds of ways. Is someone seriously suggesting that the risks associated with merely using a computer on the internet are so grave compared to everyday risks that no one should do it? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really debate the finer points, and the article didn't quantify risks (are we expecting 1% of MySpace users to be thrown in jail over the next year?). But this really sounds like the kind of needless hysteria that threatens to overshadow legitimate concerns with a bad ruling. I will predict that despite the spectre of arbitrary MySpace rules leading to criminal convictions, no one is going to get thrown in jail for doing anything innocuous on MySpace. The ruling is disturbing for many reasons, but not because it makes using the internet too risky.
Anyone who can't instantly recognize SD quality is nearly blind, doesn't watch that much HD, doesn't know what "HD" means, or doesn't care that much. Frankly, this last reason is easily enough to add up to 18%, so I'm very surprised the number wasn't higher. Many people probably don't realize that HD refers to the resolution, and doesn't just mean the picture takes up your whole widescreen TV. Okay, so a few people aren't up on the latest abbreviations. I care about that even less than I care about how many people know what HDMI stands for.
But I have to get in my standard rant here. A lot more goes into video resolution than just the number of pixels encoded. If you want to make a comparison between two formats and make arguments about how much better one is, or about who can tell the difference between what, or anything of that sort, you need to know much, much more about how the two were encoded beyond just the fact that one is (for example) a DVD and the other is Blu-Ray. All else being equal, HD is much nicer than SD, and noticeably better than DVD, but many HD evangelists don't seem to care about the role of encoding. If you don't know anything about the encoding details, any comparison is liable to be misleading.
I went to the Franklin Institute hundreds of times growing up. It was not bad, but I didn't learn much about science from it. I treated it like a video game, but to be fair to myself, that's how things were presented (for the most part). I went again a year or so ago, and... well, it was more educational than a visit to the mall, but not by as wide a margin as you'd think. Philadelphia is a blue-collar town at a very deep level.
Certainly agree on most points; I really think the price of keeping a pro sports team in town often grows to the point where it's a bad investment. Of course, video games are no help either, but just to get back on topic, if video games help draw interest away from pro sports teams, that could have a beneficial effect on the parts of local budgets set aside for "culture." Pro sports teams sucker big cities into bad investments, but so far video games haven't.
I do want to address one thing you said specifically. I know you were speaking figuratively, but my friends absolutely do not sit around watching the Sox. My friends sit around watching the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES. Just had to get that in there, we don't have much opportunity around here.
That's a very interesting post. But I think the numbers must tilt heavily in favor of spectator sports if you include not just attendance but also sports on TV (which I believe is the main source of revenue for most pro sports franchises). Most sports fans I know see about two orders of magnitude more games on television than live. This would account for why, although museums have more live attendance, you're more likely to end up talking about sports around the water cooler.
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Support for video in Linux seems pretty imperiled in general. If you have even slightly complicated needs, it can be a real struggle. If you really want to avoid closed source drivers, you can be out of luck completely. If it weren't for the fact that some heavy hitters like Linux systems, I'd feel like we're only a few shady deals away from Linux no longer having video.
I think you're right, but it's hard to tell when you use it every day. Some days there's an update and it really does get better. Other days I just get better at working around its deficiencies. I think I like it better than most because I've never been one to dump stuff on my desktop. That obviates one shortcoming that really seems to irk people.
We all know KDE4 isn't cooked yet. The problem isn't KDE, it's Fedora (and like-minded distributions). Fedora 10 did away with KDE 3 while not providing a solid KDE 4 (because none exists). If for whatever reason you need to use Fedora 10, and you've been using KDE, you're in a bad position. I've been a longtime KDE user, and Fedora 10 almost forced me to convert to Gnome, but I've persevered and now I'm reasonably comfortable with KDE 4.1. That's not the same thing as "happy," but it's good enough to keep me from an even more uncomfortable (and probably shortsighted) switch to Gnome.
I don't know why it was impractical for Linus to stick with 3.5, but distributions that herd their users into this kind of decision aren't doing anyone any favors.
In the context of this hot-button topic, this is an important and necessary decision, but it's probably in general a good idea to impress upon students that scientific theories are never perfect, they all have strengths and weaknesses and even the most successful (e.g., evolution, Newtonian mechanics) leave plenty of room for refinement. Scientific theories have their own kind of Darwinian evolution, and while I don't necessarily want introductory classes to undermine everything they're teaching, it might be helpful if a part of science education were to provide better insight into the nature of the scientific enterprise than they do currently.
You're obviously right at some level, because if ten million people start using the term "brick" to mean "glowing purple flying saucer," then that is clearly one of the word's many meanings.
But when people complain about the misuse of the word in this context, I think they have a legitimate gripe. People too stupid to understand the difference between "bricked" and "broken" are turning the former into a synonym for the latter, probably because they think it sounds cooler. Alas, in these kinds of debates the stupid people usually win. But that doesn't mean they're not stupid.
I've been using OpenOffice exclusively for a long time, and I've never noticed any performance issues. But I'm not really stressing the program, I use it mostly for word processing, and my documents generally only have a few non-text items (figures, etc.) in them. What are the specific performance issues you're seeing?
I have noticed in the past that it seems more sluggish under OSX, although I haven't used the OSX version much since 3.0 came out.
I used to do that, but it's a weak procedure. People can infer what you've been up to by the lengths to which you will go to wipe your drive. Once you push the planet into a star, there are only a few possibilities for what was on your drive. (Shame on you.)
If real scientists were better writers then it'd be easier for the science journalists to copy-and-paste from their technical papers and conference presentations to tell the real story.
Easier, but still basically impossible. Scientists write for a specialized audience that's defined by having a background in the field, and journalists for the most part don't have that background. In fact, for science writing to be at fault, we would have to assume that science journalists are at least trying to understand the articles. From what I've seen, most of them barely get through the press release and don't care what their interview subjects say.
I'm not going to claim that most scientists are good writers, but many scientists are. Scientists shouldn't be faulted if publications meant for their peers can't be understood by journalists with no working knowledge of the field. The alternative to this system would be for each journal article to recap the field's entire progress to date, solely for the benefit of laypeople and journalists who haven't been paying attention.
I don't know any readers that crave super-deluxe realism, but I'll take your word for it. Still, I've read many works of fiction that are undermined by the author's ignorance. It comes up a lot in science fiction, but in other kinds of fiction as well. Sometimes ignorance undermines the work, sometimes it doesn't. Shakespeare is not on that list for me, but perhaps I'd feel differently if I knew more about how kings act.
No two operating systems are exactly the same, from the programmer's perspective. The available operating system interfaces for everything from file access to network interface control can be very different. Not just the names of library functions, but how the needed functionality is divided into operations. It turns out that the major division in widely used desktop OSes right now is between Windows (does everything its own way) and everyone else (does everything the UNIX way). It's not to say there aren't many consequential and subtle differences between UNIX variants (among which are Linux, OSX, and the many BSDs), but if you make it your first priority to support the most widely used OS, Windows, then it could be a while before you get around to Linux and OSX. Whereas if you made one of the UNIX-like OSes your first priority, the rest of those would probably follow more quickly than the Windows version.
I don't have any firsthand knowledge of how Google develops software, but in general terms this is why you might not get the Windows version and the OSX/Linux versions all at the same time.
Shouldn't all science fiction writers have some firsthand experience with science, ideally from an actual involvement with science? Well, maybe or maybe not. But more disturbing is the prevalence of people with no knowledge of science in the business of so-called science journalism. Of course, a few months in a science lab won't cure what ails most science writers. But it would be better than nothing, which is apparently the status quo.
The chapter contains a bland stew of ideas that were commonplace even a decade ago (when the chapter was written). Most of the engineering goals were major targets even back then, and he didn't exactly nail the timing on most of these. Factor out general knowledge of the tech industry, and he's no more accurate than your average tea leaf reader (even worse, if you imagine that Kurzweil has some access to industry insiders who actually know what technologies they're going to push next). It's a nice chapter as a summary of some of the things to look forward to in the near future (even now, since most of the tech ones are still not here), but nothing special in terms of prognostication.
Incidentally, how hard would it have been to mention the year in which these predictions were made. I put it at 1998, based on publication dates.
This article actually makes the opposite point. The authors had all the numbers from an actual commercial cross-platform game at their disposal, and because their game got picked up by Mac writers but not Windows writers, they had the perfect opportunity to present best-case numbers to make this point. But all they could muster was a pie chart that should be in textbooks on how to present non-information, and a few ridiculously weak arguments. I would kill to see decent games for Linux, but I can't imagine how this article is going to help any. Did anyone's belief in the value of supporting Linux and/or OSX actually go up after reading it?
Great analogy. If the switch to tone dialing were being made today, pulse dialing phones would still work, but it would take upwards of a minute to connect after dialing. For many customers, pulse dialing would either sporadically or completely stop working completely, and the phone company would tell you they can't fix it. To fix the problem you would have to get a tone dialing phone and upgrade your service with the new tone dialing package. Within 18 months, the phone company would introduce new ultra-tone dialing, and your new equipment and service contract would again become unusable. A superficial investigation would reveal that the phone companies only needed to flip a single toggle switch on some hardware to support the old methods perfectly, and the whole case would end up in a multi-million dollar class action settlement that would cost the telecoms roughly a nickel per subscriber, including lawyer costs.
My recollection is that none of these things actually happened with pulse dialing, because many of these innovations in phone service business methods are recent. But I'll bet there are some good stories out there.
On the whole I think you're right about acupuncture. But bear in mind that PubMed doesn't say anything. PubMed indexes articles published in many journals, many of which are decidedly shoddy. Many more people do medical research than actually know how to do it properly. Also, trying to adjudicate any dispute about efficacy with a cursory look at PubMed is dangerous, not least due to publication bias, but also due to the aforementioned shoddiness of the indexed journals.
I have a question for anyone who's read this book. In general, do the authors argue that we have high-quality studies concerning these four treatment modalities, and that we therefore know with pretty good certainty that they're not much good? Or do they downplay the quality of the existing data?
If funding agencies believe it, it becomes true. Large granting institutions like the National Institutes of Health certainly behave as though they believe this. We often joke that it's easier to get a $30 million dollar grant to do research you're already doing than it is to get a $1 million grant to do something you haven't. There's more than a small kernel of truth to this. Certainly although I wouldn't discount the importance of good infrastructure to scientific research, it certainly has more to do with showmanship and politics than with a sober evaluation of what's best for moving biomedical research forward. I'd imagine this pattern is not unique to the NIH. In any case, between the heavy emphasis on "big science" and the difficult funding situation due to unfavorable federal budgets, individual researchers in many fields are being squeezed out, drastically reducing the pool of people who could potentially be doing good research relatively independently.
CUDA on ATI would help me a bit. But a quick googling of this concept turned up a bunch of pages saying it'll never happen, doesn't work, etc. Could you post a link?
The obvious answer to your question is to ask a lawyer familiar with current Canadian IP law. But perhaps more to the point, given that the software is for academic research and NSERC-funded, why isn't it being released as free software anyway? The reasons boil down to money, and are unconscionable. Whatever the legal merits, most if not all Universities are run much more like sleazy businesses than like research/educational institutions.
Without knowing the details about where you stand with things, my advice would be to concentrate on finishing your PhD first. There's no limit to the number of distractions during that final push, but big new areas of study are usually a bad idea.
Assuming that's not an issue (nor or eventually), as a beginner in the field, you don't need to start with articles, there are books that will help for a while. But you may find quickly that you need to place yourself in one of two camps: people who want to develop artificial brains that work just like the real brain, and people who want to develop artificial intelligence that does some/all of the things real intelligence does but isn't constrained to do it the same way people do it. As a quick and dirty litmus test, would you consider your project successful if it had near-perfect memory for names and numbers (like computers do) or flawed memory for names and numbers (like people).
Beyond that, I will recommend the following book some friends of mine wrote:
Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience
You may be right, but it's never been a major goal of AI researchers to duplicate how the brain works. AI has been steadfastly interested in building machines that do what the brain does, but not how the brain does it. So while I'm sure that many AI researchers keep an eye on these things, I don't think that "wrong ideas about how the brain actually works" is the problem, since ideas about how the brain works have relatively little influence on AI.
As an aside, MapReduce is not that complicated, nor is it particularly novel except in scale. Many people who are interested in AI, the brain, or both understand it pretty thoroughly and don't get much insight from it. So if you're otherwise right about things, I'll put my money on the neurobiologists, the systems neuroscientists, and all the other groups of researchers trying to understand memory and other brain functions.
We live with all kinds of risks. You leave the house, you risk dying in all kinds of ways. Is someone seriously suggesting that the risks associated with merely using a computer on the internet are so grave compared to everyday risks that no one should do it? I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really debate the finer points, and the article didn't quantify risks (are we expecting 1% of MySpace users to be thrown in jail over the next year?). But this really sounds like the kind of needless hysteria that threatens to overshadow legitimate concerns with a bad ruling. I will predict that despite the spectre of arbitrary MySpace rules leading to criminal convictions, no one is going to get thrown in jail for doing anything innocuous on MySpace. The ruling is disturbing for many reasons, but not because it makes using the internet too risky.
Anyone who can't instantly recognize SD quality is nearly blind, doesn't watch that much HD, doesn't know what "HD" means, or doesn't care that much. Frankly, this last reason is easily enough to add up to 18%, so I'm very surprised the number wasn't higher. Many people probably don't realize that HD refers to the resolution, and doesn't just mean the picture takes up your whole widescreen TV. Okay, so a few people aren't up on the latest abbreviations. I care about that even less than I care about how many people know what HDMI stands for.
But I have to get in my standard rant here. A lot more goes into video resolution than just the number of pixels encoded. If you want to make a comparison between two formats and make arguments about how much better one is, or about who can tell the difference between what, or anything of that sort, you need to know much, much more about how the two were encoded beyond just the fact that one is (for example) a DVD and the other is Blu-Ray. All else being equal, HD is much nicer than SD, and noticeably better than DVD, but many HD evangelists don't seem to care about the role of encoding. If you don't know anything about the encoding details, any comparison is liable to be misleading.
I went to the Franklin Institute hundreds of times growing up. It was not bad, but I didn't learn much about science from it. I treated it like a video game, but to be fair to myself, that's how things were presented (for the most part). I went again a year or so ago, and... well, it was more educational than a visit to the mall, but not by as wide a margin as you'd think. Philadelphia is a blue-collar town at a very deep level.
Certainly agree on most points; I really think the price of keeping a pro sports team in town often grows to the point where it's a bad investment. Of course, video games are no help either, but just to get back on topic, if video games help draw interest away from pro sports teams, that could have a beneficial effect on the parts of local budgets set aside for "culture." Pro sports teams sucker big cities into bad investments, but so far video games haven't.
I do want to address one thing you said specifically. I know you were speaking figuratively, but my friends absolutely do not sit around watching the Sox. My friends sit around watching the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES. Just had to get that in there, we don't have much opportunity around here.
That's a very interesting post. But I think the numbers must tilt heavily in favor of spectator sports if you include not just attendance but also sports on TV (which I believe is the main source of revenue for most pro sports franchises). Most sports fans I know see about two orders of magnitude more games on television than live. This would account for why, although museums have more live attendance, you're more likely to end up talking about sports around the water cooler.