Humans have had the same vision since they've been homo sapien sapiens (at least), so I think they can wait a little longer for x-ray vision.:)
From my perspective, it's more like "we've been waiting for an upgrade since before we existed as a species; that's long enough!"
I'm enthusiastic about the idea of having better vision at age 70 than at my current 46. I'm not exactly a practicing transhumanist, but we really are starting to see some interesting shadows and shafts of light emanating from just beyond the horizon.
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I sympathize with your predicament, and I want to see a lot more resources going into neurological interfacing and repair.
I also very much appreciate my own largely-intact nervous system, and my more-or-less-correctable-to-"normal" vision. However, I think a visual system that's only correctable to 20/20 or so, only resolves three widely-overlapping color bands (and can't focus one of them worth squat), needs 15-30 minutes for full dark adaptation, is subject to irreversible damage from common light sources, reliably loses focal accommodation between age 40 and 50, and is repairable (for a very few failure modes) only at great risk and expense, IS "broken".
And don't even get me started on the lack of thermal IR, or a 360-degree FOV, or recordability, or image intensification, or...
Maybe my geography or astronomy are off - Feel free to correct/bitch-slap me if I'm confused.
How does a satellite in geosynchronous orbit get 24-hours/day of sunlight?
Geosync is way out there. If the satellite's orbit were in the same plane as the Earth's, it would only get blocked for about an hour a day. But since geostationary orbit is inclined to Earth's orbit (as Earth's equator is inclined), it only gets blocked at all during two times of the year; the rest of the time, when it's "behind" Earth relative to the Sun, the Sun shines "over" or "under" the Earth and hits it unimpeded.
I suppose they'd have to use some sort of holographic optics to form a virtual image at a distance. I think this is possible, but it's not my field. Besides, for good AR, you want to be able to layer dark as well as bright images. When you're flying through a daylit cloud, your overlays should be black.
Retinal projection displays are overrated in my experience. They throw your eye's imperfections into overwhelming, distracting relief.
Divert 10% of the incoming light to a recorder, and the wearer will never notice. Put the sensors on the outside face of some of the opaque lens components. Or put them around the periphery. There's no way you're going to do AR without a way to detect and analyze the "R" that you're "A"ing, anyhow.
Blinks. Leech kinetic energy from the eyelid. Teeny-tiny stick-on magnets go on the outside of your eyelid; they'll be the next fashion statement. Every time you blink, it induces a current pulse in the lens pickup coils.
For that matter, it might be possible to collect energy from saccades and other natural eye movements. That's potentially a higher-res and lower-latency method for eye-tracking than cameras, which you'll need for AR, and if you can harvest energy to boot, so much the better!
I don't have the physics/EE chops to run the numbers, but I'll bet you'd get more power this way than from a "solar cell module". (Who wants to keep their eyes wide open and directed toward a bright light source?)
I've got superhuman reflexes, godlike judgement, and 99.99th-percentile driving skills, so those rules constitute an unconstitutional burden! I can easily thread through cross-traffic in an intersection or use the two-millisecond rule for following, with perfect safety -- as long as all the other drivers refrain from their usual rank idiocy.
Oh, sorry, I though this was a speed-limit thread.
Does anyone know if traffic accident rates have gone up in recent years?
Irrelevant. Accident rates in general depend on too many other things, including safety features (new and old) in cars on the road, how many cars are on the road, and how the roads are designed.
It's not rocket science to deduce that taking your eyes and mind off the road make you a more dangerous driver. If it's not contributing significantly to the accident rate, that just means that a lot of people, believe it or not, aren't stupid enough to do it.
The Difference Engine and the rest of steampunk aside, it's going to be hard to implement Moore's Law without something like semiconductor technology. You could certainly get there starting with 1940's technology, but it would probably take 20 or 30 years.
That said, there were a few false starts that could have launched semiconductors a few decades earlier. So if you were starting in the teens or twenties, you could have made a significant difference.
At the time semiconductors took off, I believe researchers were looking into vacuum-tube integration -- putting more than just one or two tubes into a single envelope. That could have helped things along, especially if we'd gotten a robust cold-cathode technology going, but I'm not sure how we could have scaled the mechanical grid and electrode structures down in a sustainable way.
Try using a portrait monitor sometime. For most things it's a pain. We're used to arranging things more or less horizontally in front of ourselves, not vertically.
For that matter, we now expect to be able to "arrange" more than one "thing" on our screen at once, and move between multiple applications/documents/etc. In the late 1980s, it was all most machines could do to let you edit one document at a time, and running more than one program at once was a stunt, not a workflow.
Yep. They were vector displays, and while they normally just displayed vector-sketched character data, they could show arbitrary vector graphics. As I recall, one of the eyes would wink.
Well, the textbook drawings are supposed to represent the underlying physical reality, so it would be disappointing if the drawings and the "photo" didn't resemble one another.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?
Since the 1970's, and possibly earlier, computer monitors have piggybacked off TV technology, which first standardized on the 4:3 ratio and later moved to 16:9. The 4:3 ratio was a compromise between picture-tube technology, which wanted to present a circular face, and the material presented, which tended to be wider than it was tall.
Why is that? Well, it's they way we're used to seeing our world and the things in it. The human visual field is wider than it is tall, because the things we're looking at tend to be spread out more horizontally than vertically. Your food and your enemies are likely to be at approximately the same level as you are (standing or growing on the ground), so it's better to be able to take in more information from the space "around" you than from the space "above" (which is likely to be empty) or "below" (which is likely to be close, and therefore smaller and less occupied).
Printed matter in Western languages, though, especially code, tends to occupy a relatively narrow width and extend further in the vertical direction. That's why writers and coders want taller monitors, and that's why the relentless drive to "wider", that is, more squat aspect ratios is bad news for the computer field.
Actually, his most direct treatment of it is in the short "The Jigsaw Man", collected in Tales of Known Space and elsewhere. The "Gil the ARM" stories also explore it in depth.
I'm quite sure I got modded "informative" then modded "troll" because this really is the AGW argument, also funny how all the people replying have yet to contradict my characterization of AGW.
No, I'm quite sure you got modded "troll" because you led with the egregious stupidity of "C02 [sic] is not a pollutant".
Oh the warming is "undeniable"? Well that works both ways, because the "cooling" for the last decade is also undeniable, and that does not fit into any theory on AGW.
Except the ones that acknowledge short-term variations modulating a long-term trend. Like, you know, all of them.
But please, before you reply, please work out for me where my characterization of AGW is wrong. You say it's wrong earlier but go on to say the same things I said, even if it is in a more litigious manner.
Well, IANAL, so I hope I'm not being too "litigious" here.
Your characterization of AGW is wrong because you're basing it on the comical argument that something necessary to life can't be considered a "pollutant", and that any claim that it's bad for the environment in excess is beneath consideration. Ask anyone who's been through a major flood whether water, that necessity of life, is harmless regardless of quantity.
C02, something we exhale with every breath you take. Without this gas life on earth would not be possible. Plants require this gas to live, indeed when this gas is abundant plants thrive. This gas is given off by all animals. A gas that is turned back into O2 by the plants, plants which we require to survive. All these things are well established facts, as valid as the earth is round.
Oh, FFS. "Insightful"? Really?
Crap is also necessary to life. All animals crap. Plants need crap to live. So I'm sure you're ready to campaign against the health and safety regulations "the government and politicians" set up to prevent me from taking a big, smelly dump all over your restaurant table just as your main course is arriving. After all, it's necessary to life!
Or maybe, since water is also necessary to life, I should just pump a few thousand cubic meters of it into the basement from which you're posting. After all, it's necessary, so more must be better!
Hogan has written some entertaining science fiction, and he's got a fairly broad grasp of a lot of scientific fields, but he suffers badly from blind arrogance -- he decides what ought to be right, and then focuses in on evidence to support it, dismissing evidence that contradicts it. Not that this is particularly uncommon, of course, but since his successful fiction career has earned him a wide readership, he's in a better position than most to spread disinformation.
Just remember that he's no Clarke or Asimov when it comes to science writing.
You're right, of course. All metals should end in "-ium". Of course, "magnesium" and "manganesium" will be even more confusing than they are now. "Platinium", well, we'll get used to it. But most people have forgotten the traditional "aurum" for gold, "argentum" for silver, "plumbum" for lead, "ferrum" for iron, and so on, and they'll be baffled by "aurium", "argentium", "plumbium" and "ferrium". And when it comes to "nickelium", "cobaltium", "zincium", "tungstium" and so forth, you can probably expect even more push-back.
Maybe I do, but I've never heard of "fallacy of genus", and as a matter of fact, neither has Google. On the other hand, "I don't trust your logic because of one of your personal characteristics" is, in fact, a textbook example of ad hominem. (If you insist, I'll try to dig out my old introductory logic textbooks and provide a citation.)
Sometimes i like to play dumb to see how anal people are
um ok. Car crashes are easy to film, they happen around cars.
um ok. "Ball lightning is easy to film, it happens around thunderstorms."
Most of the time though we just film the aftermath, most of the filmed car crashes you've seen have either been in movies or cop car chases.
What's your point? Sure, most car-crash footage is filmed after the fact, not when an accident is actually happening. For that matter, most "footage" has nothing to do with crashes at all. But, as the number of cameras has increased, so has the number of captures of actual accidents as they happen.
Lightning comes in bunches if you didn't know, very easy to film, come on, you can actually smell a lightning storm coming.
Okay, my bad here. I should have said "close-up footage of a direct lightning strike". You may, of course, point out that most footage of lightning is still from far away, but again, more cameras = more captures of actual strikes "in the foreground".
Meteors are visible for a lot longer than a few or fractions of a second. Nothing you mentionned comes even close to the parameters of catching ball lightning on film.
Ball lightning, if it exists at all, is probably much rarer than meteors, or conventional lightning strikes, or maybe even car crashes. But, based on the apparent frequency with which it's reported, it's common enough that someone should be getting it on a cell phone at least.
At least come up with comparable examples. What are those things called, red herrings? Strawmen? or just plain absence of logic?
Somehow, i don't trust the logic of a mind that is clumsy and prone to almost blowing itself up.
Well, if you'd rather not pay attention to an argument from someone who's willing to be wryly up-front about his limitations, that's fine. But groping around for the term you want, and then lurching directly into a textbook ad hominem fallacy, doesn't exactly strengthen your own argument.
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Humans have had the same vision since they've been homo sapien sapiens (at least), so I think they can wait a little longer for x-ray vision. :)
From my perspective, it's more like "we've been waiting for an upgrade since before we existed as a species; that's long enough!"
I'm enthusiastic about the idea of having better vision at age 70 than at my current 46. I'm not exactly a practicing transhumanist, but we really are starting to see some interesting shadows and shafts of light emanating from just beyond the horizon.
I mean, a heads-up display telling you what your BAC is would be nice and all, but I think we should be using biological interfaces with machines to fix systems that are actually broken first.
I sympathize with your predicament, and I want to see a lot more resources going into neurological interfacing and repair.
I also very much appreciate my own largely-intact nervous system, and my more-or-less-correctable-to-"normal" vision. However, I think a visual system that's only correctable to 20/20 or so, only resolves three widely-overlapping color bands (and can't focus one of them worth squat), needs 15-30 minutes for full dark adaptation, is subject to irreversible damage from common light sources, reliably loses focal accommodation between age 40 and 50, and is repairable (for a very few failure modes) only at great risk and expense, IS "broken".
And don't even get me started on the lack of thermal IR, or a 360-degree FOV, or recordability, or image intensification, or...
Maybe my geography or astronomy are off - Feel free to correct/bitch-slap me if I'm confused.
How does a satellite in geosynchronous orbit get 24-hours/day of sunlight?
Geosync is way out there. If the satellite's orbit were in the same plane as the Earth's, it would only get blocked for about an hour a day. But since geostationary orbit is inclined to Earth's orbit (as Earth's equator is inclined), it only gets blocked at all during two times of the year; the rest of the time, when it's "behind" Earth relative to the Sun, the Sun shines "over" or "under" the Earth and hits it unimpeded.
I suppose they'd have to use some sort of holographic optics to form a virtual image at a distance. I think this is possible, but it's not my field. Besides, for good AR, you want to be able to layer dark as well as bright images. When you're flying through a daylit cloud, your overlays should be black.
Retinal projection displays are overrated in my experience. They throw your eye's imperfections into overwhelming, distracting relief.
Divert 10% of the incoming light to a recorder, and the wearer will never notice. Put the sensors on the outside face of some of the opaque lens components. Or put them around the periphery. There's no way you're going to do AR without a way to detect and analyze the "R" that you're "A"ing, anyhow.
Blinks. Leech kinetic energy from the eyelid. Teeny-tiny stick-on magnets go on the outside of your eyelid; they'll be the next fashion statement. Every time you blink, it induces a current pulse in the lens pickup coils.
For that matter, it might be possible to collect energy from saccades and other natural eye movements. That's potentially a higher-res and lower-latency method for eye-tracking than cameras, which you'll need for AR, and if you can harvest energy to boot, so much the better!
I don't have the physics/EE chops to run the numbers, but I'll bet you'd get more power this way than from a "solar cell module". (Who wants to keep their eyes wide open and directed toward a bright light source?)
My sidearm can tweet when it's unloaded! The possibilities are endless!
I've got superhuman reflexes, godlike judgement, and 99.99th-percentile driving skills, so those rules constitute an unconstitutional burden! I can easily thread through cross-traffic in an intersection or use the two-millisecond rule for following, with perfect safety -- as long as all the other drivers refrain from their usual rank idiocy.
Oh, sorry, I though this was a speed-limit thread.
Does anyone know if traffic accident rates have gone up in recent years?
Irrelevant. Accident rates in general depend on too many other things, including safety features (new and old) in cars on the road, how many cars are on the road, and how the roads are designed.
It's not rocket science to deduce that taking your eyes and mind off the road make you a more dangerous driver. If it's not contributing significantly to the accident rate, that just means that a lot of people, believe it or not, aren't stupid enough to do it.
The Difference Engine and the rest of steampunk aside, it's going to be hard to implement Moore's Law without something like semiconductor technology. You could certainly get there starting with 1940's technology, but it would probably take 20 or 30 years.
That said, there were a few false starts that could have launched semiconductors a few decades earlier. So if you were starting in the teens or twenties, you could have made a significant difference.
At the time semiconductors took off, I believe researchers were looking into vacuum-tube integration -- putting more than just one or two tubes into a single envelope. That could have helped things along, especially if we'd gotten a robust cold-cathode technology going, but I'm not sure how we could have scaled the mechanical grid and electrode structures down in a sustainable way.
A comprehensive page on the selectron tube here, with LOTS of pictures and technical data:
http://home.att.net/~thercaselectron/index1.html
Run your mouse over the tube pins on the front page to see a simulation of the tube in operation.
I see what they did there, with a glider going down the bottom panel as you sweep from left to right. Life is good. :-)
Try using a portrait monitor sometime. For most things it's a pain. We're used to arranging things more or less horizontally in front of ourselves, not vertically.
For that matter, we now expect to be able to "arrange" more than one "thing" on our screen at once, and move between multiple applications/documents/etc. In the late 1980s, it was all most machines could do to let you edit one document at a time, and running more than one program at once was a stunt, not a workflow.
Yep. They were vector displays, and while they normally just displayed vector-sketched character data, they could show arbitrary vector graphics. As I recall, one of the eyes would wink.
Scrith.
Well, the textbook drawings are supposed to represent the underlying physical reality, so it would be disappointing if the drawings and the "photo" didn't resemble one another.
Here was an interesting one, an old PC with a monitor in portrait format. It asks why they didn't catch on, and I'm not sure I know the answer. It seems like it WOULD be better, especially because you could look at an entire page on the thing. Now with 21 inch monitors I can do that anyway, but what was it that caused our landscape monitors to become standardized like they are?
Since the 1970's, and possibly earlier, computer monitors have piggybacked off TV technology, which first standardized on the 4:3 ratio and later moved to 16:9. The 4:3 ratio was a compromise between picture-tube technology, which wanted to present a circular face, and the material presented, which tended to be wider than it was tall.
Why is that? Well, it's they way we're used to seeing our world and the things in it. The human visual field is wider than it is tall, because the things we're looking at tend to be spread out more horizontally than vertically. Your food and your enemies are likely to be at approximately the same level as you are (standing or growing on the ground), so it's better to be able to take in more information from the space "around" you than from the space "above" (which is likely to be empty) or "below" (which is likely to be close, and therefore smaller and less occupied).
Printed matter in Western languages, though, especially code, tends to occupy a relatively narrow width and extend further in the vertical direction. That's why writers and coders want taller monitors, and that's why the relentless drive to "wider", that is, more squat aspect ratios is bad news for the computer field.
Actually, his most direct treatment of it is in the short "The Jigsaw Man", collected in Tales of Known Space and elsewhere. The "Gil the ARM" stories also explore it in depth.
I'm quite sure I got modded "informative" then modded "troll" because this really is the AGW argument, also funny how all the people replying have yet to contradict my characterization of AGW.
No, I'm quite sure you got modded "troll" because you led with the egregious stupidity of "C02 [sic] is not a pollutant".
Oh the warming is "undeniable"? Well that works both ways, because the "cooling" for the last decade is also undeniable, and that does not fit into any theory on AGW.
Except the ones that acknowledge short-term variations modulating a long-term trend. Like, you know, all of them.
But please, before you reply, please work out for me where my characterization of AGW is wrong. You say it's wrong earlier but go on to say the same things I said, even if it is in a more litigious manner.
Well, IANAL, so I hope I'm not being too "litigious" here.
Your characterization of AGW is wrong because you're basing it on the comical argument that something necessary to life can't be considered a "pollutant", and that any claim that it's bad for the environment in excess is beneath consideration. Ask anyone who's been through a major flood whether water, that necessity of life, is harmless regardless of quantity.
C02, something we exhale with every breath you take. Without this gas life on earth would not be possible. Plants require this gas to live, indeed when this gas is abundant plants thrive. This gas is given off by all animals. A gas that is turned back into O2 by the plants, plants which we require to survive. All these things are well established facts, as valid as the earth is round.
Oh, FFS. "Insightful"? Really?
Crap is also necessary to life. All animals crap. Plants need crap to live. So I'm sure you're ready to campaign against the health and safety regulations "the government and politicians" set up to prevent me from taking a big, smelly dump all over your restaurant table just as your main course is arriving. After all, it's necessary to life!
Or maybe, since water is also necessary to life, I should just pump a few thousand cubic meters of it into the basement from which you're posting. After all, it's necessary, so more must be better!
I came here to say this. I'm glad someone took care of it early on.
Hogan has written some entertaining science fiction, and he's got a fairly broad grasp of a lot of scientific fields, but he suffers badly from blind arrogance -- he decides what ought to be right, and then focuses in on evidence to support it, dismissing evidence that contradicts it. Not that this is particularly uncommon, of course, but since his successful fiction career has earned him a wide readership, he's in a better position than most to spread disinformation.
Just remember that he's no Clarke or Asimov when it comes to science writing.
You're right, of course. All metals should end in "-ium". Of course, "magnesium" and "manganesium" will be even more confusing than they are now. "Platinium", well, we'll get used to it. But most people have forgotten the traditional "aurum" for gold, "argentum" for silver, "plumbum" for lead, "ferrum" for iron, and so on, and they'll be baffled by "aurium", "argentium", "plumbium" and "ferrium". And when it comes to "nickelium", "cobaltium", "zincium", "tungstium" and so forth, you can probably expect even more push-back.
Helium is a bad example. It's not a metal. If you want elements named systematically, it should be "helon".
You mean fallacy of genus not ad hominem.
Maybe I do, but I've never heard of "fallacy of genus", and as a matter of fact, neither has Google. On the other hand, "I don't trust your logic because of one of your personal characteristics" is, in fact, a textbook example of ad hominem. (If you insist, I'll try to dig out my old introductory logic textbooks and provide a citation.)
Sometimes i like to play dumb to see how anal people are
Feel free to stop whenever you're ready.
um ok. Car crashes are easy to film, they happen around cars.
um ok. "Ball lightning is easy to film, it happens around thunderstorms."
Most of the time though we just film the aftermath, most of the filmed car crashes you've seen have either been in movies or cop car chases.
What's your point? Sure, most car-crash footage is filmed after the fact, not when an accident is actually happening. For that matter, most "footage" has nothing to do with crashes at all. But, as the number of cameras has increased, so has the number of captures of actual accidents as they happen.
Lightning comes in bunches if you didn't know, very easy to film, come on, you can actually smell a lightning storm coming.
Okay, my bad here. I should have said "close-up footage of a direct lightning strike". You may, of course, point out that most footage of lightning is still from far away, but again, more cameras = more captures of actual strikes "in the foreground".
Meteors are visible for a lot longer than a few or fractions of a second. Nothing you mentionned comes even close to the parameters of catching ball lightning on film.
Ball lightning, if it exists at all, is probably much rarer than meteors, or conventional lightning strikes, or maybe even car crashes. But, based on the apparent frequency with which it's reported, it's common enough that someone should be getting it on a cell phone at least.
At least come up with comparable examples. What are those things called, red herrings? Strawmen? or just plain absence of logic?
Somehow, i don't trust the logic of a mind that is clumsy and prone to almost blowing itself up.
Well, if you'd rather not pay attention to an argument from someone who's willing to be wryly up-front about his limitations, that's fine. But groping around for the term you want, and then lurching directly into a textbook ad hominem fallacy, doesn't exactly strengthen your own argument.