We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.
Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.
See also by John Taylor Gatto:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.worldtrans.org/whol... "After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know."
Especially: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com... "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
"not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified."
What if both your 3D printer and X-Ray data analysis software are compromised? See also: "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke... "The final step is represented in Figure 7. This simply adds a second Trojan horse to the one that already exists. The second pattern is aimed at the C compiler. The replacement code is a Stage I self-reproducing program that inserts both Trojan horses into the compiler. This requires a learning phase as in the Stage II example. First we compile the modified source with the normal C compiler to produce a bugged binary. We install this binary as the official C. We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new binary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled. Of course, the login command will remain bugged with no trace in source anywhere... The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."
Still, the more angles you look at something from, the more likely you might detect some discrepancy... Like excess power usage, processing delays, slightly different electromagnetic signatures, etc...
In any case, the less you want, perhaps the easier it is to secure. Look into creating or using Forth chips for simplicity... The less gates you need, and the less cycles they need, the easier it would be to make your own hardware from scratch, even from discrete components if it is simple enough. http://www.colorforth.com/ http://www.greenarraychips.com...
A leader might accidentally trip and fall on the button in your scenario too. Einstein said, learning how to release atomic power changed everything except our thinking. That issue is still playing out, and motivates much of my efforts (whether towards abundance for all, better tools for civic sensemaking and education, or work towards self-replicating habitats for Earth and space). Who in the tech profession has not seen a variety of complex systems fail in unexpected ways over the years? So, speaking purely probabilistically, chances are, we will see these weapons go off sooner or later due to accident or error. They might go off because of a technical accident ("99 Red Balloons" wrongly interpreted as an attack, a massive solar flare causing a launch, bad capacitors causing a launch, etc.). Or they might be used because of a psychological or political accident (like the one your insightful story is about). As others have also pointed out, "MAD" assumes rational actors trying to act in self-preservation; if you put lunatics in charge of the button then it might get pressed for any number of crazy reasons same as many people regularly do other self-destructive things.
21st century technologies of abundance (nuclear, biological, chemical, nanotech, robotic, AI, communications, bureaucracy) create more "buttons" in more places in the hands of more people. That makes it more and more likely a button somewhere will get pressed. Worse, many (probably most) the people using these 21st technologies are still locked in a 20th century (and earlier) mindset of worrying about material scarcity. So, they ironically are willing to use nuclear energy (as bombs) to fight over oil fields, when nuclear energy could instead produce all the energy we might otherwise get from oil (not that I'm much of a conventional nuclear fan compared to renewables, energy efficiency, fusion, or LENR).
While we need to do what we can to reduce the chance that any of the buttons get pressed including by promoting a philosophy of mutual security, we should also design with the expectation they will eventually get pressed, and create an infrastructure that is resilient and distributed enough to muddle through anyway as a form on intrinsic security. The internet was supposedly designed to survive nuclear war. We need to apply some of the same thinking to agriculture, power, medicine, education, transportation, and so on. However, this strategy for intrinsic and mutual security is completely at odds with maximizing short-term economic profits by "just in time" delivery of good produced or routed through centralized hubs controlled by a few monopolistic actors.
My OSCOMAK project (and precursors) was a hope in that direction (not that I've succeeded much with it directly). http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin... "Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological
"A pandemic like this is incredibly scary. In every major city in the US we have enough medical beds to support about 1/4 of 1% of the population being sick enough to require hospitalization. If 20% of the population needed medical attention about 19.75% probably wouldn't get any."
So true. And as I suggest in the linked essay an abundance perspective resulting in a basic income and health care for all and investing in true civil defense could help prepare for pandemics: "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?" http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... "Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
Instead of empowering more people to be involved in health care, the US medical monopolies have restricted the production of US physicians to keep MD salaries up, which is tremendously short-sighted as well as indirectly cruel. Nonetheless, the internet has been broadening access to DIY subsistence health knowledge (like eating more vegetables and fruits, and getting more vitamin D and adequate iodine, and leading a healthy lifestyle with exercise, good sleep, community, etc.), but not without some downsides as shown by this Dilbert comic... http://www.dilbert.com/strips/...
For part of the history of how US medicine got this way starting 100 years ago (which included abandoning an emphasis on prevention via lifestyle and nutrition to focus on profitable hands-on "scientific" cures for ailments), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Poverty often forces people to take on risks they might otherwise avoid (like in the USA driving old rusty cars that will collapse in an accident). To the extent this current Ebola outbreak is based on poached bushmeat and ignorance, any Ebola pandemic is also in a sense a verdict on failed US-pushed global economic/defense policies promoting wealth concentration and which ignored externalities and systemic risks (like the risk of plague as a systemic risk to the marketplace). So, shortsighted global policies have not reduced such risks by helping lift Africans out of material poverty sooner rather than later and instead have pushed many impoverished p
http://steamcommunity.com/app/... "ishanda --- Kerbal Space Program Apr 17, 2013 @ 2:29am; If you REALLY want Star Trek Style impulse engines why not mod them yourself? All you really need is to make copies of the relevant part files, change the name of the Xenon Tank to "Deuterium" and change the Ion Engine to "Impulse Engine" and then change a few values to make them super efficient. Done."
Still looking forward to seeing how the real device pans out though... Just like I'm still wondering about all the claimed cold fusion results which may also be exploring new areas of physics and chemistry with the behavior of hydrogen atoms at the edges of metal lattices or in cracks in them perhaps in interaction with electro-magnetic pulses... http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
I'm still waiting on "Tom Swift and his Space Solartron" though::-) http://www.tomswift.info/homep... "The main invention in this book is, of course, the Space Solartron. The Space Solartron was probably Tom Swift's most amazing -- and far-fetched -- invention. Its purpose was to make space travel practical by creating oxygen, water, and food from sunlight -- not a simple task, to be sure."
I've mused about even better tech that will extract energy and mass from zero point energy. Although we might then get a "tragedy of the commons" as so much mass and energy is created in nearby outer space as to collectively form a black hole? Now that might be another good mode for the multi-player version of Kerbal Space Program to see what happens politically as that "tragedy" plays out as the outer space equivalent of anthropogenic global warming?:-) http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...
Back to the EmDrive device, it would not surprise me if the impulse provided by the microwave device is much less than the impulse imparted by photons and/or solar wind on any satellite's solar panels to capture needed electricity. But that might be a non-issue if you have a small "Mr. Fusion" fusion reactor or cold fusion LENR device onboard the satellite?:-)
Of course, station keeping is even easier if you have a "HyperEdit" debugger hook into the simulation.:-) http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11... "If you still think MechJeb is cheating, take a look at HyperEdit. It is cheating. Install it, tap Alt+H, and you're given a menu full of options that let you tweak and edit the game. With a few clicks, you can teleport your craft to the orbit of any planet on the solar system, then use the landing options to gracefully touch down. Alternatively, you can instantly replenish your fuel, obliterate a selected craft, or readjust Kerbin's gravity to make escaping its atmosphere unnaturally difficult. HyperEdit is a flexible toolbox that, when used without restriction, completely destroys the difficulty. With a little imagination, though, you can use it to create your own custom scenarios. It's as simple as popping an abandoned craft on a distant planet, and suddenly you've got the basis for a tricky retrieval mission."
See also: http://www.simulation-argument... "This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct
See my essay here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."
We need a better "press" 4 collective sensemaking
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The CIA Does Las Vegas
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As I suggested here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Or here: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities" http://slashdot.org/comments.p... "
Good point. Going even further, from something I wrote in 1992: https://groups.google.com/foru... --- A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep. In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space. With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure. You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward. We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away and take eons more before I get this close again to having the children I always wanted.
(Paul D. Fernhout, Lindenhurst, NY 6/92)
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The preceeding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in Earth's history.
The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired it written at the same time.
--Paul Fernhout (NY Adirondack Park, Oct 2008)
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If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five million years ago, how should one feel about this?
Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed. Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.
Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.
Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will occur where the more specialized creatures wi
It's called "Blowback". In order to prevent another 9/11/2001 or worse, it seems important to understand the motivations behind the first one (I'm using the year to distinguish from the US-supported 9/11/1973 coup in Chile). Like you, I also doubt the Saudi government had anything to do directly with funding that 9/11. In fact, that 9/11 seems more a protest against the Saudi government by Saudi citizens, but with the protest directed at the perceived source of funding for the Saudi government by the USA. Let's turn the political situation around hypothetically to try to understand the emotional aspect of it better, imagining what it might be like if the Saudi government was meddling directly in US affairs.
Here is a first cut at trying to understand the social/psychological dynamics of the situation from a different perspective. Imagine Saudi Arabia somehow was sending billions of dollars of campaign donations annually to the USA to keep in power an oppressive administration in the USA (passing laws forcing all US women to wear burkas, only allowing males with brown eyes to hold public office or get university degrees, and with capital punishment on suspicion of premarital sex or homosexuality). Also, imagine that there were millions of Saudi soldiers stationed in US states to ensure a flow of manufactured goods to Saudi Arabia despite strikes and other unrest in the USA and nearby countries. Also imagine that the Saudis were also funding Japanese people who, from fear of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, had moved to Canada, bought a lot of the land, claimed a right to govern all of Canada because some Japanese people had moved to Canada 10,000 years ago across the land bridge from Siberia, and then forced most non-Japanese Canadian citizens in all of Canada to flee to the USA and were killing non-Japanese Canadians who remained and resisted the Japanese occupation. If you are a US citizen in such a hypothetical world, would you be at all upset by such a situation whatever your eye color? Imagine that some very upset and frustrated young US citizens decide to protest this situation by attacking some big buildings in Saudi Arabia by hijacking airliners to show how unhappy they are with Saudi government foreign policy and to show how they felt their hopes and dreams for a good life in the USA had been thwarted by Saudi meddling in US government. Imagine this attack is then used by Saudi Arabia to justify invading Mexico (where some of the hypothetical American hijackers trained) and Brazil (because it is claimed by the Saudis to have WMDs that hypothetical young Americans might use against Saudis). Imagine the Saudis then start supplying "intelligence" to the US government from listening to all US telephone calls about specific US citizens who might be unhappy about the situation and perhaps plotting unrest in the USA or planning more blowback against the Saudis.
Now flip this scenario around and back to reality (US funding Saudis and Israel and US troops in the Middle East) and does the fact the almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were frustrated young Saudi men make more sense?
Soon after 9/11 I saw an analysis in a magazine (maybe the Atlantic or New Yorker) of why the hijackers did what they did. I have not seen many such articles since. The point made there was that these were mostly young men whose hopes for significant advancement in Saudi society had seemed thwarted and they were led to blame the USA for that, because the USA was propping up the Saudi regime and otherwise meddling in the Middle East. Of course, being promised eternal bliss in "paradise" for becoming murderers can not be ignored as a related aspect of religious fundamentalism (including outrage about the occupation of Palestine), so there are layers of complexity here for that and other reasons. The motivations of the hijackers themselves may also be somewhat different than the motivations of the organizers at higher levels.
Re:FONC: Fundamentals of New Computing -- Alan Kay
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I certainly understand the frustration of dealing will overly complex systems or also a rushed language like JavaScript where variables are globals by default. Still, did you know that you can compile almost anything to JavaScript these days and have it run in the browser at near native speeds (well, only some browsers, but likely more and more). See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/... "While Google is betting on Native Client to allow web apps to execute native compiled code in the browser, Mozilla is betting on its ability to run JavaScript at near-native speeds, too. While they approach this problem from very different angles, both Google, through Native Client, and Mozilla, through its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler, allow developers to write their code in C or C++ and then run it in the browser."
So, JavaScript is just another platform now in that sense. But it is a platform that is almost everywhere significant for substantial human interaction... And installing JavaScript software for the end-user is as easy often-times as just surfing to a web page. If people don't actually install your software, what good is it?
Does JavaScript have problems? Yes. Tons. But it also has a lot of merits.
As for gibberish -- Cantonese sounds mostly like gibberish to me, but that is because I never learned to speak it.:-)
Would I like a simpler software stack and simpler but better languages and tools? Yes. I helped fight that battle over a decade ago like with VisualWorks/Squeak and we lost to stuff like Java, PHP, and JavaScript and the associated tool chains. Squeak showed what was possible, but almost no one would install it (the Squeak licensing confusion did not help there either). See also: http://bitworking.org/news/290... "Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it's quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display. Ten years later we have the Lively Kernel:..."
But the past is the past. We have to start from where we are -- and today, people live in their HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript browsers or will soon (even on phones, and especially on the emerging Firefox OS phones). I'm writing this from a US$250 Chromebook that is almost entirely just a browser as far as user experience. Any sophisticated-enough system could eventually remake the stack underneath it, like native Squeak could do. So, saying we could build on JavaScript does not mean endless perpetual complexity. Chrome OS shows how a focus on HTML/CSS/JavaScript can sometimes simplify things though from one perspective, especially user experience.
There are several issues related to complexity (inherent complexity, accidental complexity, user expectations, installability, standards, etc.). Regardless of technical merit, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP won in key areas. Sure, you can create the next Squeak, and good luck with that, it is a fun project. And/or we can try to use the current widespread platform as best as we can. For me right now, that means minimizing the backend (PHP or whatever) while emphasizing the front-end (JavaScript) and ideally encoding data in useful long-term forms.
And for those who like their Smalltalk deployed as HTML/CSS/JavaScript, see: http://amber-lang.net/ "The Amber language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. Amber includes a live development environment with a class b
From: http://www.servalproject.org/ and http://developer.servalproject... --- "Serval Mesh is an Android app that provides highly secure mesh networking, voice calls, text messaging and file sharing between mobile phones using Wi-Fi, without the need for a SIM or any other infrastructure like mobile cell towers, Wi-Fi hotspots or Internet access." 1. Communicate anytime Mobile phones stop working when cellular infrastructure fails. The Serval Mesh changes this, allowing mobile phones to form impromptu networks consisting only of phones. This allows people nearby to keep communicating when needed most. 2. Communicate anywhere Cellular networks are not available everywhere. In Australia for example, around 75% of the land area lacks mobile coverage. Letting mobile phones form stand-alone networks provides a cost-effective solution for communities in these remote areas to enjoy mobile communications. 3. Communicate privately In this modern world private conversation with friends, families and service providers is vital, whether discussing medical issues or other private subjects. The Serval Mesh is built on a foundation engineered to support security. Voice calls and text messages are always end-to-end encrypted using strong 256-bit ECC cryptography. Encrypted calls work even on low-cost Android phones. 4.Communicate with people The Serval Mesh is about enabling people to communicate with one another, regardless of what circumstances may befall them, or where they live in the world. Because at the end of the day, relationship with one another is what life is all about. ---
Serval was one of the first things I installed on a trio of cheap Android phones I bought for Andriod development and testing purposes several months ago (the Kyocera Hydro phones themselves ranged from US$35-$55 in price each). Still has rough edges, but getting there.
The Serval project is also working towards cheap rugged repeaters. "The Serval Mesh Extender is a hardware device that helps other devices to join and participate in a Serval Mesh network.... Mesh Extenders mesh together over short distances using Ad Hoc Wi-Fi, over longer distances using packet radio on the ISM 915 MHz band"
I suggested related ideas back around 2000 based on two-mile range radios: "[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..." http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Very cheap insurance to make sure people have these sorts of devices for an emergency, which these days would not cost much more than a decent US$100 "weather radio" even with basic Smartphone features...
In the past, I used whether an email contained my first name as an indicator (a textual token) of whether the email was legitimate, as a sort of password to gain access to your attention. That stopped being useful several years ago as many spammers must have a name database to go with email addresses now. That also would not work for people whose entire first name was in their email address, as is often a corporate practice. Still, the idea of filtering email on a token can make sense, where the token says the sender has been authorized to send you email.
I still have filters for certain keywords like products I support as a way of doing some of this filtering. A next step could be to tell people (on a contact web page) that they need to include some token phrase like "swordfish" in any email to you if they want it to get read as a first-time sender. Or the token could be a random uuid like "f34f775b-3ccb-45e0-a75e-06f845f0c318". It is relatively easy to make filters in many email clients that would prioritize emails with an expected token. After you get such an email from someone the first time, you can whitelist the sender. Granted, phishing or spam often forges sender email addresses. So, there is a problem here that the validity token ideally should be in every email sent to you to avoid relying on whitelisting address.
Ideally, there could be one unique token per entity (or email address) you want to get emails from. Then you could selectively disable and change the token if spammers got one. These tokens then are specific to an allowed communications channel. That requires more complexity though. For example, when you signed up for a mailing list, you could give the list a token such as the above (or perhaps just accept a random one from the list signup procedure), and the list software would store that token to include in a header when it sends a message to you. You would also tell your email client about the token being associated with the sender somehow (either the email address or the sender name or perhaps some other unique sender identifier like a public key). When your client software receives email, it would check if the email has the expected token for the sender. If the email does not have the token, it would be marked as probably spam or phishing. Email tools would need to have this facility built into them, both for sending and receiving. Public mailing lists might need to filter out such tokens from their public web pages of email archives to prevent spammers from harvesting such data to spam the list.
Still, how can people contact you the first time? One answer is to separate the process of getting emails from a trusted source from the process of requesting a token. For example, when someone new wanted to contact you, they could need to go to a web page (or other means) and get a token for their sending email address (or other identifying information, like a public key). That web page might include some sort of captcha challenge or something requiring computational cost or even direct monetary cost (like a small amount of money required to be spent via Paypal or another service, perhaps as a donation to a favorite charity). A web form to do this might need to send a special email to your client that includes both its own token and the new sender and new token, which would need to be processed by your email client to make the association.
This would be a big difference from now, when the first contact you get from someone new might be directly via a new email which could be the spam or phishing attempt. Tokens could also be valid for a limited time. There could even be general tokens not associated with a specific email address, perhaps time-limited ones, ones that need to be paired with other tokens or perhaps topical key words (like a product name) to be considered valid. This does make it harder for senders to send emails, but it makes it more likely they will be read and not ignored as spam.
One advantage of this system is it could build on top of the current email
FONC: Fundamentals of New Computing -- Alan Kay
on
'Just Let Me Code!'
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
From: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde... --- We are faced with a need for significant action and the odds are stacked against us. Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly understood) receives lip service in the press but no current-day vehicle exists to to nurture it. This wiki is an open invitation for talented individuals to pool their energy and collaborate towards fundamentally changing computing.
Over the years many groups have debated how to make progress in computing. There were likely as many opinions as there were people in the debates. Nevertheless personal accounts suggest that initiatives were sometimes reduced to a handful and then pursued with vigour. Consider what could be achieved by following the same pattern today, with the added benefit of doing it as a virtual, distributed team.
Our goal could be to capture the significant ideas and initiatives that we have been exposed to, are aware of, or can discover, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful of concepts worthy of vigorous exploration, and focus our efforts on these common ideas with the eventual aim of making substantial progress towards finding a common set of fundamentals of new computing. ---
A big focus of FONC was in reducing lots of complexity. Smalltalk shows what is possible... But in practice new languages and new standards often just add more complexity to the mix and what we often need are better tools for dealing with complexity. And community and trends mean a lot too, as does hireability and ubiquity and easy installability. So, again, in practice, I'm moving to JavaScript with conceptually simple backends (even in, yikes, PHP) -- inspired in part by Dan Ingall's own work with the Lively Kernel which shows what is possible as near-zero-effort-to-install JavaScript apps.
My own thoughts on FONC from 2010: "fonc] On inventing the computing microscope/telescope for the dynamic semantic web" https://www.mail-archive.com/f... --- Biology made a lot of progress by inventing the microscope -- and that was done way before it invented genetic engineering, and even before it understood there were bacteria around.:-)
What are our computing microscopes now? What are our computing telescopes? Are debuggers crude computing microscopes? Are class hierarchy browsers and package managers and IDEs and web browsers crude computing telescopes?
Maybe we need to reinvent the computing microscope and computing telescope to help in trying to engineer better digital organisms via FONC?:-) Maybe it is more important to do it first?...
It's taken a while for me to see this, but, with JavaScript, essentially each web page can be seen like a Smalltalk ObjectMemory (or text-based image like PataPata writes out). While I work towards using the Pointrel System to add triples in a declarative way, in practice, the web of calling cgi scripts at URLs is a lot like message passing (just more like the earlier Smalltalk-72 way without well-defined syntax). So, essentially, a web of HTML pages with JavaScript and CGI on servers is like the Smalltalk system written large.:-) Just in a very ad hoc and inelegant way.:-)
And also eating more vegetables and fruits (such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work or Dr. Andrew Weil's work) to reduce inflammation. You might also be sensitive to some compounds in food, such as in the nightshade family (like tomatoes) or possibly other things (food additives, etc.)
If you want true alternatives. gold and guns/ammo won't help. All that can be confiscated.
I collected some better solutions at this link and elsewhere on my site: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Learning more about health creation for yourself falls in part under subsistence production... And also the gift economy,,,
Glad to here about your success story! If you want to take your success to the next level, you may find this of interest: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/... http://www.amazon.com/The-End-... "This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse diabetesâ"without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."
The grand parent poster said quadrupling *vegetables* (many of which are leafy greens like Kale) not "complex carbs"... And there are much healthier things to eat than cancer-implicated processed lunchmeat if you want to eat meat...
Also, exercise does not help much with weight loss because it stimulates the appetite, even though exercise in general is good for health...
Also, for yet another different perspective (on how the recommendations decades ago to avoid fat on the theory it made people fat have instead led to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease by leading people to eat too much sugar): http://healthimpactnews.com/20...
Good luck staying with what is working for you and maybe even going further which might then free up energy for your titanic plans!:-)
Granted there are many people who contribute to the WordPress ecosystem who don't formally work for Automattic given the FOSS nature of WordPress and related plugins. It's just a very different 21st century way of doing business compared to the 20th century Microsoft model, and is doing a better job of bridging the exchange and gift economies (like I talk about on my site).
Automattic, which shepherds the core of WordPress, sounds like a great place to work for people like me who are comfortable working from home. The future for WordPress looks pretty amazing, especially given ever better JSON/AJAX RESTful support for JavaScript-powered frontend apps. See also: http://inside.envato.com/the-f... "For those willing to ignore the prevailing opinions in the programming community, Tom Willmot says that WordPress presents developers with incredible opportunities, and a wonderful sense of community:..."
I've been looking at shifting my own "Pointrel" and "Twirlip" projects, my wife's "Rakontu" and "NarraCat" projects and other similar work (stuff related to participative narrative inquiry, civic sensemaking, public intelligence, social semantic desktop tools, educational simulations, and more) to have JavaScript frontends that use WordPress as an application server backend (rather than have them run stand-alone). That would make it easy for millions of WordPress users who might want such tools to install them as a WordPress plugin with a couple clicks. As Alan Kay said about Squeak, getting people to install anything to try it is hard. Other benefits would include easy authentication support. I expect more and more projects by other people will be moving in that direction. I'm tempted to apply to work at Automattic myself at some point given their FOSS focus. They are also hiring as they got a bunch of venture financing recently. But I would want to make at least a demo of that integration first. I plan on putting such a demo here when it works: http://twirlip.com/
Of course, JavaScript has problems (globals by default), PHP has problems (such a long list..), and WordPress has problems (no doubt), with many problems coming from their historical roots and a need for backward-compatibility. But I can't deny all three won some battle for mindshare for whatever reasons (especially ease of initial use), and when you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right?:-) Like Manuel De Landa wrote in "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces", a uniformity on one level can often in turn support a diversity on a level above it.
See also on the value of having a diversity of programmers of a variety of experience levels in an organization: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
What I especially envision is that all those millions of WordPress sites could start talking to each other in interesting ways... See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" for where it all might lead... http://slashdot.org/comments.p... https://archive.org/details/pr...
Or as I reprise here: http://lists.alioth.debian.org... "Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]? General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense."
While I agree with the validity of your points for the next 10 to 20 years, in the longer term, better design and better tools will make it cheaper to completely rebuild houses so they are lower maintenance, more energy efficient, and easier to clean and maintain by robotics or by modular snap in replacements like the grandparent poster suggested. The only reason not to bulldoze older housing in a world of cheap energy and cheap robotics would be for historical preservation reasons or perhaps sentimentality (although Virtual Reality could address some of the sentimentality aspect).
This is similar to how people are now generally getting rid of old computer equipment (especially cellphones) when a capacitor or battery goes bad rather and replacing it with something new rather than trying to take it apart and repair the component like 50 years ago. "Computers" used to cost millions of dollars and take up rooms, now you can put a few in your pocket. I don't know what the equivalent shift for housing is, but we will no doubt find out. Some speculations are VR and pods like the Matrix or like in Marshall Brain's "Manna", or even just complete simulation of uploaded humans "living" in silicon RAM instead of air-filled wooden houses?
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" for a suggestion of how computer-given instructions delivered by wearables could turn almost every profession, even plumbing, into a micromanaged low-wage nightmare before general robotics arrive: http://marshallbrain.com/manna... "Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.... Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance. The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. For example, "Bob, we need to load more patties. Please walk toward the freezer." Or, "Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. Then we will clean the women's restroom." And so on.... And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could t
You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past."
I think a "basic income" for all could be part of the solution, because a BI would make it possible for anyone to live like a graduate student and do independent research if they wanted.
I like Dojo in part because it attempts to make all the core widgets accessible. From: http://dojotoolkit.org/referen... "Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition....
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus...."
So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following: age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias....
Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.
Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India. ---
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... "This was a 4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial. The primary outcome was fracture incidence, and the principal secondary outcome was cancer incidence."
Eating a lots of vegetables and fruits and mushrooms can also reduce cancer risk (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's summary works like "Eat To Live" with many references). I've found by eating more fruits and vegetables that my skin tone has changed from pale to having more color (even in winter). Adequate iodine can also help prevent cancer.
Reducing risk of incidence is not the same as cure though. Sorry to hear about you father getting cancer. Once you get cancer, everything is iffy, so cancer is best avoided preventatively. Fasting may also help in some cancer situations, and it also helps with chemotherapy by protecting cells from the toxic chemicals (since fasting seems to causes many normal cells to go into a safe survival mode but cancer cells generally do not). And eating better may hope prevent recurrence. In general, the human body is always developing cancerous cells, but generally they are dealt with by the immune system. So boosting the immune system could help with some cancers and there are many ways to do that -- but again, it is all iffy once cancer is established.
I agree supplements and natural sunlight are probably better choices than tanning beds --although there may still be unknowns about how the skin reacts to sun or tanning beds and produces many compounds vs. supplements. I also agree conventional tanning beds are not tuned to give lots of vitamin D.That is unfortunate, even if they produce some. See also about other tanning choices (and supplement suggestions): http://www.vitamindcouncil.org... "If you choose to use a tanning bed, the Vitamin D Council recommends using the same common sense you use in getting sunlight. This includes: Getting half the amount of exposure that it takes for your skin to turn pink. Using low-pressure beds that has good amount of UVB light, rather than high-intensity UVA light."
BTW, if you look into chemotherapy for cancer, for many cancers you'll find it is of questionable value relative to the costs both in money and suffering, where is on average may add at most a couple months of life on average if that. Chemotherapy can apparently even sometimes make cancer worse: http://www.nydailynews.com/lif... "The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival."
It's hard to know who to trust regarding medical research results or interpretations: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j... "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
Good luck sorting it all out. I've suggested creating better tools for medical sensemaking, but still not time to work on them...
Slashdot Mirror
We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.
Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.
See also by John Taylor Gatto:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know."
More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
Especially: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a for
Related suggestion: http://vitamincfoundation.org/...
More: https://www.google.com/search?...
And in connection with scurvy: https://www.google.com/search?...
Would be good to have better software tools to try to make sense of all this often-conflicting health information...
"not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified."
What if both your 3D printer and X-Ray data analysis software are compromised? See also: ... The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."
"Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke...
"The final step is represented in Figure 7. This simply adds a second Trojan horse to the one that already exists. The second pattern is aimed at the C compiler. The replacement code is a Stage I self-reproducing program that inserts both Trojan horses into the compiler. This requires a learning phase as in the Stage II example. First we compile the modified source with the normal C compiler to produce a bugged binary. We install this binary as the official C. We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new binary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled. Of course, the login command will remain bugged with no trace in source anywhere
Still, the more angles you look at something from, the more likely you might detect some discrepancy... Like excess power usage, processing delays, slightly different electromagnetic signatures, etc...
In any case, the less you want, perhaps the easier it is to secure. Look into creating or using Forth chips for simplicity... The less gates you need, and the less cycles they need, the easier it would be to make your own hardware from scratch, even from discrete components if it is simple enough.
http://www.colorforth.com/
http://www.greenarraychips.com...
For software more complex than Forth that is still fairly understandable from the ground up, see also the FONC project by Alan Kay as well as Squeak on bare metal.
http://www.viewpointsresearch....
https://www.google.com/search?...
A leader might accidentally trip and fall on the button in your scenario too. Einstein said, learning how to release atomic power changed everything except our thinking. That issue is still playing out, and motivates much of my efforts (whether towards abundance for all, better tools for civic sensemaking and education, or work towards self-replicating habitats for Earth and space). Who in the tech profession has not seen a variety of complex systems fail in unexpected ways over the years? So, speaking purely probabilistically, chances are, we will see these weapons go off sooner or later due to accident or error. They might go off because of a technical accident ("99 Red Balloons" wrongly interpreted as an attack, a massive solar flare causing a launch, bad capacitors causing a launch, etc.). Or they might be used because of a psychological or political accident (like the one your insightful story is about). As others have also pointed out, "MAD" assumes rational actors trying to act in self-preservation; if you put lunatics in charge of the button then it might get pressed for any number of crazy reasons same as many people regularly do other self-destructive things.
21st century technologies of abundance (nuclear, biological, chemical, nanotech, robotic, AI, communications, bureaucracy) create more "buttons" in more places in the hands of more people. That makes it more and more likely a button somewhere will get pressed. Worse, many (probably most) the people using these 21st technologies are still locked in a 20th century (and earlier) mindset of worrying about material scarcity. So, they ironically are willing to use nuclear energy (as bombs) to fight over oil fields, when nuclear energy could instead produce all the energy we might otherwise get from oil (not that I'm much of a conventional nuclear fan compared to renewables, energy efficiency, fusion, or LENR).
While we need to do what we can to reduce the chance that any of the buttons get pressed including by promoting a philosophy of mutual security, we should also design with the expectation they will eventually get pressed, and create an infrastructure that is resilient and distributed enough to muddle through anyway as a form on intrinsic security. The internet was supposedly designed to survive nuclear war. We need to apply some of the same thinking to agriculture, power, medicine, education, transportation, and so on. However, this strategy for intrinsic and mutual security is completely at odds with maximizing short-term economic profits by "just in time" delivery of good produced or routed through centralized hubs controlled by a few monopolistic actors.
My OSCOMAK project (and precursors) was a hope in that direction (not that I've succeeded much with it directly).
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological
"A pandemic like this is incredibly scary. In every major city in the US we have enough medical beds to support about 1/4 of 1% of the population being sick enough to require hospitalization. If 20% of the population needed medical attention about 19.75% probably wouldn't get any."
So true. And as I suggest in the linked essay an abundance perspective resulting in a basic income and health care for all and investing in true civil defense could help prepare for pandemics:
"Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
Instead of empowering more people to be involved in health care, the US medical monopolies have restricted the production of US physicians to keep MD salaries up, which is tremendously short-sighted as well as indirectly cruel. Nonetheless, the internet has been broadening access to DIY subsistence health knowledge (like eating more vegetables and fruits, and getting more vitamin D and adequate iodine, and leading a healthy lifestyle with exercise, good sleep, community, etc.), but not without some downsides as shown by this Dilbert comic...
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/...
For part of the history of how US medicine got this way starting 100 years ago (which included abandoning an emphasis on prevention via lifestyle and nutrition to focus on profitable hands-on "scientific" cures for ailments), see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
Poverty often forces people to take on risks they might otherwise avoid (like in the USA driving old rusty cars that will collapse in an accident). To the extent this current Ebola outbreak is based on poached bushmeat and ignorance, any Ebola pandemic is also in a sense a verdict on failed US-pushed global economic/defense policies promoting wealth concentration and which ignored externalities and systemic risks (like the risk of plague as a systemic risk to the marketplace). So, shortsighted global policies have not reduced such risks by helping lift Africans out of material poverty sooner rather than later and instead have pushed many impoverished p
http://steamcommunity.com/app/...
"ishanda --- Kerbal Space Program Apr 17, 2013 @ 2:29am; If you REALLY want Star Trek Style impulse engines why not mod them yourself? All you really need is to make copies of the relevant part files, change the name of the Xenon Tank to "Deuterium" and change the Ion Engine to "Impulse Engine" and then change a few values to make them super efficient. Done."
Still looking forward to seeing how the real device pans out though... Just like I'm still wondering about all the claimed cold fusion results which may also be exploring new areas of physics and chemistry with the behavior of hydrogen atoms at the edges of metal lattices or in cracks in them perhaps in interaction with electro-magnetic pulses ...
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
I'm still waiting on "Tom Swift and his Space Solartron" though: :-)
http://www.tomswift.info/homep...
"The main invention in this book is, of course, the Space Solartron. The Space Solartron was probably Tom Swift's most amazing -- and far-fetched -- invention. Its purpose was to make space travel practical by creating oxygen, water, and food from sunlight -- not a simple task, to be sure."
I've mused about even better tech that will extract energy and mass from zero point energy. Although we might then get a "tragedy of the commons" as so much mass and energy is created in nearby outer space as to collectively form a black hole? Now that might be another good mode for the multi-player version of Kerbal Space Program to see what happens politically as that "tragedy" plays out as the outer space equivalent of anthropogenic global warming? :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...
Perhaps that political problem might already be playing out at the core of out galaxy? :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Back to the EmDrive device, it would not surprise me if the impulse provided by the microwave device is much less than the impulse imparted by photons and/or solar wind on any satellite's solar panels to capture needed electricity. But that might be a non-issue if you have a small "Mr. Fusion" fusion reactor or cold fusion LENR device onboard the satellite? :-)
Of course, station keeping is even easier if you have a "HyperEdit" debugger hook into the simulation. :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...
"If you still think MechJeb is cheating, take a look at HyperEdit. It is cheating. Install it, tap Alt+H, and you're given a menu full of options that let you tweak and edit the game. With a few clicks, you can teleport your craft to the orbit of any planet on the solar system, then use the landing options to gracefully touch down. Alternatively, you can instantly replenish your fuel, obliterate a selected craft, or readjust Kerbin's gravity to make escaping its atmosphere unnaturally difficult. HyperEdit is a flexible toolbox that, when used without restriction, completely destroys the difficulty. With a little imagination, though, you can use it to create your own custom scenarios. It's as simple as popping an abandoned craft on a distant planet, and suddenly you've got the basis for a tricky retrieval mission."
See also:
http://www.simulation-argument...
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct
See my essay here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."
As I suggested here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Or here: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"
Or various other places...
Lately I've been thinking about such a system fo
Good point. Going even further, from something I wrote in 1992: https://groups.google.com/foru...
---
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation
Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the
rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I
knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to
filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.
What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep.
In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This
has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will
break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread
species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these
survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each
time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.
Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to
more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have
hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.
Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms
to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space.
With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in
outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can
talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and
biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.
Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not
live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am
sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure.
You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and
mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without
ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.
There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward.
We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of
barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away
and take eons more before I get this close again to having the
children I always wanted.
(Paul D. Fernhout, Lindenhurst, NY 6/92)
===========
The preceeding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was
in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone
to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned
there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity
from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in
Earth's history.
The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired
it written at the same time.
--Paul Fernhout (NY Adirondack Park, Oct 2008)
=================
If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated
a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five
million years ago, how should one feel about this?
Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On
the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and
the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a
tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted
and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed.
Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.
Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High
levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in
about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may
not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this
may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after
all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.
Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will
occur where the more specialized creatures wi
It's called "Blowback". In order to prevent another 9/11/2001 or worse, it seems important to understand the motivations behind the first one (I'm using the year to distinguish from the US-supported 9/11/1973 coup in Chile). Like you, I also doubt the Saudi government had anything to do directly with funding that 9/11. In fact, that 9/11 seems more a protest against the Saudi government by Saudi citizens, but with the protest directed at the perceived source of funding for the Saudi government by the USA. Let's turn the political situation around hypothetically to try to understand the emotional aspect of it better, imagining what it might be like if the Saudi government was meddling directly in US affairs.
Here is a first cut at trying to understand the social/psychological dynamics of the situation from a different perspective. Imagine Saudi Arabia somehow was sending billions of dollars of campaign donations annually to the USA to keep in power an oppressive administration in the USA (passing laws forcing all US women to wear burkas, only allowing males with brown eyes to hold public office or get university degrees, and with capital punishment on suspicion of premarital sex or homosexuality). Also, imagine that there were millions of Saudi soldiers stationed in US states to ensure a flow of manufactured goods to Saudi Arabia despite strikes and other unrest in the USA and nearby countries. Also imagine that the Saudis were also funding Japanese people who, from fear of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, had moved to Canada, bought a lot of the land, claimed a right to govern all of Canada because some Japanese people had moved to Canada 10,000 years ago across the land bridge from Siberia, and then forced most non-Japanese Canadian citizens in all of Canada to flee to the USA and were killing non-Japanese Canadians who remained and resisted the Japanese occupation. If you are a US citizen in such a hypothetical world, would you be at all upset by such a situation whatever your eye color? Imagine that some very upset and frustrated young US citizens decide to protest this situation by attacking some big buildings in Saudi Arabia by hijacking airliners to show how unhappy they are with Saudi government foreign policy and to show how they felt their hopes and dreams for a good life in the USA had been thwarted by Saudi meddling in US government. Imagine this attack is then used by Saudi Arabia to justify invading Mexico (where some of the hypothetical American hijackers trained) and Brazil (because it is claimed by the Saudis to have WMDs that hypothetical young Americans might use against Saudis). Imagine the Saudis then start supplying "intelligence" to the US government from listening to all US telephone calls about specific US citizens who might be unhappy about the situation and perhaps plotting unrest in the USA or planning more blowback against the Saudis.
Now flip this scenario around and back to reality (US funding Saudis and Israel and US troops in the Middle East) and does the fact the almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were frustrated young Saudi men make more sense?
Soon after 9/11 I saw an analysis in a magazine (maybe the Atlantic or New Yorker) of why the hijackers did what they did. I have not seen many such articles since. The point made there was that these were mostly young men whose hopes for significant advancement in Saudi society had seemed thwarted and they were led to blame the USA for that, because the USA was propping up the Saudi regime and otherwise meddling in the Middle East. Of course, being promised eternal bliss in "paradise" for becoming murderers can not be ignored as a related aspect of religious fundamentalism (including outrage about the occupation of Palestine), so there are layers of complexity here for that and other reasons. The motivations of the hijackers themselves may also be somewhat different than the motivations of the organizers at higher levels.
See also:
http://en
I certainly understand the frustration of dealing will overly complex systems or also a rushed language like JavaScript where variables are globals by default. Still, did you know that you can compile almost anything to JavaScript these days and have it run in the browser at near native speeds (well, only some browsers, but likely more and more). See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/...
"While Google is betting on Native Client to allow web apps to execute native compiled code in the browser, Mozilla is betting on its ability to run JavaScript at near-native speeds, too. While they approach this problem from very different angles, both Google, through Native Client, and Mozilla, through its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler, allow developers to write their code in C or C++ and then run it in the browser."
So, JavaScript is just another platform now in that sense. But it is a platform that is almost everywhere significant for substantial human interaction... And installing JavaScript software for the end-user is as easy often-times as just surfing to a web page. If people don't actually install your software, what good is it?
Does JavaScript have problems? Yes. Tons. But it also has a lot of merits.
As for gibberish -- Cantonese sounds mostly like gibberish to me, but that is because I never learned to speak it. :-)
Would I like a simpler software stack and simpler but better languages and tools? Yes. I helped fight that battle over a decade ago like with VisualWorks/Squeak and we lost to stuff like Java, PHP, and JavaScript and the associated tool chains. Squeak showed what was possible, but almost no one would install it (the Squeak licensing confusion did not help there either). See also: ..."
http://bitworking.org/news/290...
"Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it's quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display. Ten years later we have the Lively Kernel:
But the past is the past. We have to start from where we are -- and today, people live in their HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript browsers or will soon (even on phones, and especially on the emerging Firefox OS phones). I'm writing this from a US$250 Chromebook that is almost entirely just a browser as far as user experience. Any sophisticated-enough system could eventually remake the stack underneath it, like native Squeak could do. So, saying we could build on JavaScript does not mean endless perpetual complexity. Chrome OS shows how a focus on HTML/CSS/JavaScript can sometimes simplify things though from one perspective, especially user experience.
There are several issues related to complexity (inherent complexity, accidental complexity, user expectations, installability, standards, etc.). Regardless of technical merit, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP won in key areas. Sure, you can create the next Squeak, and good luck with that, it is a fun project. And/or we can try to use the current widespread platform as best as we can. For me right now, that means minimizing the backend (PHP or whatever) while emphasizing the front-end (JavaScript) and ideally encoding data in useful long-term forms.
And for those who like their Smalltalk deployed as HTML/CSS/JavaScript, see:
http://amber-lang.net/
"The Amber language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. Amber includes a live development environment with a class b
From: http://www.servalproject.org/ and http://developer.servalproject...
---
"Serval Mesh is an Android app that provides highly secure mesh networking, voice calls, text messaging and file sharing between mobile phones using Wi-Fi, without the need for a SIM or any other infrastructure like mobile cell towers, Wi-Fi hotspots or Internet access."
1. Communicate anytime
Mobile phones stop working when cellular infrastructure fails. The Serval Mesh changes this, allowing mobile phones to form impromptu networks consisting only of phones. This allows people nearby to keep communicating when needed most.
2. Communicate anywhere
Cellular networks are not available everywhere. In Australia for example, around 75% of the land area lacks mobile coverage. Letting mobile phones form stand-alone networks provides a cost-effective solution for communities in these remote areas to enjoy mobile communications.
3. Communicate privately
In this modern world private conversation with friends, families and service providers is vital, whether discussing medical issues or other private subjects. The Serval Mesh is built on a foundation engineered to support security. Voice calls and text messages are always end-to-end encrypted using strong 256-bit ECC cryptography. Encrypted calls work even on low-cost Android phones.
4.Communicate with people
The Serval Mesh is about enabling people to communicate with one another, regardless of what circumstances may befall them, or where they live in the world. Because at the end of the day, relationship with one another is what life is all about.
---
Serval was one of the first things I installed on a trio of cheap Android phones I bought for Andriod development and testing purposes several months ago (the Kyocera Hydro phones themselves ranged from US$35-$55 in price each). Still has rough edges, but getting there.
The Serval project is also working towards cheap rugged repeaters. "The Serval Mesh Extender is a hardware device that helps other devices to join and participate in a Serval Mesh network. ... Mesh Extenders mesh together over short distances using Ad Hoc Wi-Fi, over longer distances using packet radio on the ISM 915 MHz band"
I suggested related ideas back around 2000 based on two-mile range radios:
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Very cheap insurance to make sure people have these sorts of devices for an emergency, which these days would not cost much more than a decent US$100 "weather radio" even with basic Smartphone features...
In the past, I used whether an email contained my first name as an indicator (a textual token) of whether the email was legitimate, as a sort of password to gain access to your attention. That stopped being useful several years ago as many spammers must have a name database to go with email addresses now. That also would not work for people whose entire first name was in their email address, as is often a corporate practice. Still, the idea of filtering email on a token can make sense, where the token says the sender has been authorized to send you email.
I still have filters for certain keywords like products I support as a way of doing some of this filtering. A next step could be to tell people (on a contact web page) that they need to include some token phrase like "swordfish" in any email to you if they want it to get read as a first-time sender. Or the token could be a random uuid like "f34f775b-3ccb-45e0-a75e-06f845f0c318". It is relatively easy to make filters in many email clients that would prioritize emails with an expected token. After you get such an email from someone the first time, you can whitelist the sender. Granted, phishing or spam often forges sender email addresses. So, there is a problem here that the validity token ideally should be in every email sent to you to avoid relying on whitelisting address.
Ideally, there could be one unique token per entity (or email address) you want to get emails from. Then you could selectively disable and change the token if spammers got one. These tokens then are specific to an allowed communications channel. That requires more complexity though. For example, when you signed up for a mailing list, you could give the list a token such as the above (or perhaps just accept a random one from the list signup procedure), and the list software would store that token to include in a header when it sends a message to you. You would also tell your email client about the token being associated with the sender somehow (either the email address or the sender name or perhaps some other unique sender identifier like a public key). When your client software receives email, it would check if the email has the expected token for the sender. If the email does not have the token, it would be marked as probably spam or phishing. Email tools would need to have this facility built into them, both for sending and receiving. Public mailing lists might need to filter out such tokens from their public web pages of email archives to prevent spammers from harvesting such data to spam the list.
Still, how can people contact you the first time? One answer is to separate the process of getting emails from a trusted source from the process of requesting a token. For example, when someone new wanted to contact you, they could need to go to a web page (or other means) and get a token for their sending email address (or other identifying information, like a public key). That web page might include some sort of captcha challenge or something requiring computational cost or even direct monetary cost (like a small amount of money required to be spent via Paypal or another service, perhaps as a donation to a favorite charity). A web form to do this might need to send a special email to your client that includes both its own token and the new sender and new token, which would need to be processed by your email client to make the association.
This would be a big difference from now, when the first contact you get from someone new might be directly via a new email which could be the spam or phishing attempt. Tokens could also be valid for a limited time. There could even be general tokens not associated with a specific email address, perhaps time-limited ones, ones that need to be paired with other tokens or perhaps topical key words (like a product name) to be considered valid. This does make it harder for senders to send emails, but it makes it more likely they will be read and not ignored as spam.
One advantage of this system is it could build on top of the current email
From: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...
---
We are faced with a need for significant action and the odds are stacked against us. Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly understood) receives lip service in the press but no current-day vehicle exists to to nurture it. This wiki is an open invitation for talented individuals to pool their energy and collaborate towards fundamentally changing computing.
Over the years many groups have debated how to make progress in computing. There were likely as many opinions as there were people in the debates. Nevertheless personal accounts suggest that initiatives were sometimes reduced to a handful and then pursued with vigour. Consider what could be achieved by following the same pattern today, with the added benefit of doing it as a virtual, distributed team.
Our goal could be to capture the significant ideas and initiatives that we have been exposed to, are aware of, or can discover, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful of concepts worthy of vigorous exploration, and focus our efforts on these common ideas with the eventual aim of making substantial progress towards finding a common set of fundamentals of new computing.
---
See also: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...
A big focus of FONC was in reducing lots of complexity. Smalltalk shows what is possible... But in practice new languages and new standards often just add more complexity to the mix and what we often need are better tools for dealing with complexity. And community and trends mean a lot too, as does hireability and ubiquity and easy installability. So, again, in practice, I'm moving to JavaScript with conceptually simple backends (even in, yikes, PHP) -- inspired in part by Dan Ingall's own work with the Lively Kernel which shows what is possible as near-zero-effort-to-install JavaScript apps.
My own thoughts on FONC from 2010: :-)
"fonc] On inventing the computing microscope/telescope for the dynamic semantic web"
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
---
Biology made a lot of progress by inventing the microscope -- and that was done way before it invented genetic engineering, and even before it understood there were bacteria around.
What are our computing microscopes now? What are our computing telescopes? Are debuggers crude computing microscopes? Are class hierarchy browsers and package managers and IDEs and web browsers crude computing telescopes?
Maybe we need to reinvent the computing microscope and computing telescope to help in trying to engineer better digital organisms via FONC? :-) Maybe it is more important to do it first? ...
It's taken a while for me to see this, but, with JavaScript, essentially each web page can be seen like a Smalltalk ObjectMemory (or text-based image like PataPata writes out). While I work towards using the Pointrel System to add triples in a declarative way, in practice, the web of calling cgi scripts at URLs is a lot like message passing (just more like the earlier Smalltalk-72 way without well-defined syntax). So, essentially, a web of HTML pages with JavaScript and CGI on servers is like the Smalltalk system written large. :-) Just in a very ad hoc and inelegant way. :-)
---
http://www.simulation-argument...
And also eating more vegetables and fruits (such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work or Dr. Andrew Weil's work) to reduce inflammation. You might also be sensitive to some compounds in food, such as in the nightshade family (like tomatoes) or possibly other things (food additives, etc.)
If you want true alternatives. gold and guns/ammo won't help. All that can be confiscated.
I collected some better solutions at this link and elsewhere on my site:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Learning more about health creation for yourself falls in part under subsistence production... And also the gift economy,,,
Glad to here about your success story! If you want to take your success to the next level, you may find this of interest:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse diabetesâ"without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."
And see:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disea...
The grand parent poster said quadrupling *vegetables* (many of which are leafy greens like Kale) not "complex carbs"... And there are much healthier things to eat than cancer-implicated processed lunchmeat if you want to eat meat...
Also, exercise does not help much with weight loss because it stimulates the appetite, even though exercise in general is good for health...
Also, for yet another different perspective (on how the recommendations decades ago to avoid fat on the theory it made people fat have instead led to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease by leading people to eat too much sugar):
http://healthimpactnews.com/20...
Good luck staying with what is working for you and maybe even going further which might then free up energy for your titanic plans! :-)
See the chart here: http://automattic.com/work-wit...
Granted there are many people who contribute to the WordPress ecosystem who don't formally work for Automattic given the FOSS nature of WordPress and related plugins. It's just a very different 21st century way of doing business compared to the 20th century Microsoft model, and is doing a better job of bridging the exchange and gift economies (like I talk about on my site).
Automattic, which shepherds the core of WordPress, sounds like a great place to work for people like me who are comfortable working from home. The future for WordPress looks pretty amazing, especially given ever better JSON/AJAX RESTful support for JavaScript-powered frontend apps. See also: ..."
http://inside.envato.com/the-f...
"For those willing to ignore the prevailing opinions in the programming community, Tom Willmot says that WordPress presents developers with incredible opportunities, and a wonderful sense of community:
I've been looking at shifting my own "Pointrel" and "Twirlip" projects, my wife's "Rakontu" and "NarraCat" projects and other similar work (stuff related to participative narrative inquiry, civic sensemaking, public intelligence, social semantic desktop tools, educational simulations, and more) to have JavaScript frontends that use WordPress as an application server backend (rather than have them run stand-alone). That would make it easy for millions of WordPress users who might want such tools to install them as a WordPress plugin with a couple clicks. As Alan Kay said about Squeak, getting people to install anything to try it is hard. Other benefits would include easy authentication support. I expect more and more projects by other people will be moving in that direction. I'm tempted to apply to work at Automattic myself at some point given their FOSS focus. They are also hiring as they got a bunch of venture financing recently. But I would want to make at least a demo of that integration first. I plan on putting such a demo here when it works: http://twirlip.com/
Of course, JavaScript has problems (globals by default), PHP has problems (such a long list..), and WordPress has problems (no doubt), with many problems coming from their historical roots and a need for backward-compatibility. But I can't deny all three won some battle for mindshare for whatever reasons (especially ease of initial use), and when you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? :-) Like Manuel De Landa wrote in "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces", a uniformity on one level can often in turn support a diversity on a level above it.
See also on the value of having a diversity of programmers of a variety of experience levels in an organization:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
What I especially envision is that all those millions of WordPress sites could start talking to each other in interesting ways... See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" for where it all might lead...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
Or as I reprise here:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org...
"Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense."
http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...
While I agree with the validity of your points for the next 10 to 20 years, in the longer term, better design and better tools will make it cheaper to completely rebuild houses so they are lower maintenance, more energy efficient, and easier to clean and maintain by robotics or by modular snap in replacements like the grandparent poster suggested. The only reason not to bulldoze older housing in a world of cheap energy and cheap robotics would be for historical preservation reasons or perhaps sentimentality (although Virtual Reality could address some of the sentimentality aspect).
This is similar to how people are now generally getting rid of old computer equipment (especially cellphones) when a capacitor or battery goes bad rather and replacing it with something new rather than trying to take it apart and repair the component like 50 years ago. "Computers" used to cost millions of dollars and take up rooms, now you can put a few in your pocket. I don't know what the equivalent shift for housing is, but we will no doubt find out. Some speculations are VR and pods like the Matrix or like in Marshall Brain's "Manna", or even just complete simulation of uploaded humans "living" in silicon RAM instead of air-filled wooden houses?
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" for a suggestion of how computer-given instructions delivered by wearables could turn almost every profession, even plumbing, into a micromanaged low-wage nightmare before general robotics arrive: ... Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance. The software would speak to the employees individually and tell each one exactly what to do. For example, "Bob, we need to load more patties. Please walk toward the freezer." Or, "Jane, when you are through with this customer, please close your register. Then we will clean the women's restroom." And so on. ... And Manna was starting to move in on some of the white collar work force. The basic idea was to break every job down into a series of steps that Manna could manage. No one had ever realized it before, but just about every job had parts that could be subdivided out.HMOs and hospitals, for example, were starting to put headsets on the doctors and surgeons. It helped lower malpractice problems by making sure that the surgeon followed every step in a surgical procedure. The hospitals could also hyper-specialize the surgeons. For example, one surgeon might do nothing but open the chest for heart surgery. Another would do the arterial grafts. Another would come in to inspect the work and close the patient back up. What this then meant, over time, was that the HMO could train technicians to do the opening and closing procedures at much lower cost. Eventually, every part of the subdivided surgery could be performed by a super-specialized technician. Manna kept every procedure on an exact track that virtually eliminated errors. Manna would schedule 5 or 10 routine surgeries at a time. Technicians would do everything, with one actual surgeon overseeing things and handling any emergencies. They all wore headsets, and Manna controlled every minute of their working lives.That same hyper-specialization approach could apply to lots of white collar jobs. Lawyers, for example. You could t
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
...about structural unemployment and a basic income: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past."
I think a "basic income" for all could be part of the solution, because a BI would make it possible for anyone to live like a graduate student and do independent research if they wanted.
https://github.com/kogmbh/WebO...
I like Dojo in part because it attempts to make all the core widgets accessible. From:
http://dojotoolkit.org/referen...
"Dojo has made a serious commitment to creating a toolkit that allows the development of accessible Web applications for all users, regardless of physical abilities. The core widget set of Dojo, dijit, is fully accessible since the 1.0 release, making Dojo the only fully accessible open source toolkit for Web 2.0 development. This means that users who require keyboard only navigation, need accommodations for low vision or who use an assistive technology, can interact with the dijit widgets."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... ... ..."
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus.
So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).
More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
From: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
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Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. ...
Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.
Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"This was a 4-y, population-based, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial. The primary outcome was fracture incidence, and the principal secondary outcome was cancer incidence."
Eating a lots of vegetables and fruits and mushrooms can also reduce cancer risk (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's summary works like "Eat To Live" with many references). I've found by eating more fruits and vegetables that my skin tone has changed from pale to having more color (even in winter). Adequate iodine can also help prevent cancer.
Reducing risk of incidence is not the same as cure though. Sorry to hear about you father getting cancer. Once you get cancer, everything is iffy, so cancer is best avoided preventatively. Fasting may also help in some cancer situations, and it also helps with chemotherapy by protecting cells from the toxic chemicals (since fasting seems to causes many normal cells to go into a safe survival mode but cancer cells generally do not). And eating better may hope prevent recurrence. In general, the human body is always developing cancerous cells, but generally they are dealt with by the immune system. So boosting the immune system could help with some cancers and there are many ways to do that -- but again, it is all iffy once cancer is established.
See also for other ideas:
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...
I agree supplements and natural sunlight are probably better choices than tanning beds --although there may still be unknowns about how the skin reacts to sun or tanning beds and produces many compounds vs. supplements. I also agree conventional tanning beds are not tuned to give lots of vitamin D.That is unfortunate, even if they produce some. See also about other tanning choices (and supplement suggestions):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
"If you choose to use a tanning bed, the Vitamin D Council recommends using the same common sense you use in getting sunlight. This includes:
Getting half the amount of exposure that it takes for your skin to turn pink.
Using low-pressure beds that has good amount of UVB light, rather than high-intensity UVA light."
BTW, if you look into chemotherapy for cancer, for many cancers you'll find it is of questionable value relative to the costs both in money and suffering, where is on average may add at most a couple months of life on average if that. Chemotherapy can apparently even sometimes make cancer worse:
http://www.nydailynews.com/lif...
"The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival."
It's hard to know who to trust regarding medical research results or interpretations:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
Good luck sorting it all out. I've suggested creating better tools for medical sensemaking, but still not time to work on them...