Tom originally marketed his phonograph as a revolutionary education tool. Said it would turn schools upside down. Made the same claim for his invention of motion pictures twenty years later.
NOAA & NASA funds were cut to the bone by a 3 out past four congresses that disliked climate change. This alone doesnt explain the who situation. Articles say that NOAA project management has not been that good.
Due to inefficient distributed immigration software they pretty much accepted every app until the deadline. They did not have a definitive way of priotitizing the apps. This nearly doubled the actual amount in popular years.
Back in ancient times they year started with the Freshman Picnic in the Great Court. Most of us were turned off by strangers trying to impress each other with their intellectual exploits. The final nail in coffin was when average score on the first physics test was like 50%. Few MIT students had ever seen less than a 90 in their lives. Or when your dorm throws a party and no women from neighboring colleges come (worse than the Social Network movie).
I've been in [personal] computers over 40 years, seeing them from the kilobyte/kiloflop era to the threshhold of the terabyte/teraflop era.
There have been both surprises and disappointments at every turning. I dont see why this would not continue for another 40 or 100 years.
My two biggest mispredictions were:
(1) In the mid 70s I wounder why anyone would buy a store-made computer. They were so fun to solder together yourself.
(2) The sudden rise of the world wide web in 1993. Everyone knew cycberspace would eventually happen, but probably another decade or so. That was a huge victory for open source: thanks Tim!
I heard the Italian Court consultant Thomas Jordan head of the Southern Calfornia Earthquake Center talk on this topic. Look at slides 15 & 16 about the difference between prediction and forecasting. The current methodology is to give a probabalistic forecast, like in weather, and not a yes/no prediction. The Italian scientists did not follow current methodology and gave a less useful prediction. The court convicted these scientists of negligence for not being current enough and might have cost some lives. Nearly the entire seismologic community including Dr. Jordan thinks the court decision was wrong.
Generally only nuclear bomb has enough energy to create a quake. (M4 to M6 depending on bomb size.) Human activity in adding or extracting fluids from the earth can accelerated or retard a quake, but rarely create new ones.
One fear is the consolidation of natural small quakes into a larger bigger quake. Each earthquake is equivalent in energy to 30 quakes of smaller magnitude. Perhaps human activity may have many of these smaller quakes go off at once.
The inverse has been proposed to prevent damaging quakes. Try to trigger hundreds of tiny quakes in place of a larger quake to relieve stress. but no one knows how to safely do this.
Before there were cells. Robert Hazen's Origin of Life book/course suggests this possibility. When they two systems joined together, their progress was irresistible.
Both systems make the conceptual leap that a number can be represented by a name rather than digits. Then both systems give you a large number of recipies for manipulating that name to compute something.
Usually most people can hand abstraction after a few years of arithmetic. But I've seen some people go mentally blank after leaving the concrete system of digits and never grasp algebra or programming.
Thats why I am a little skeptical about hearing of 5 or 6 year olds "programming". I dont think the foundation is really there yet. But I think some 9 or 10 year olds can handle both kinds of abstraction. I could by that age.
There are these surveys collecting vast amounts of image and other sensor data and posting them on the internet. I have a friend who has discovered a couple dozen asteroids and comets trolling the SOHO solar image data. You might start with some the crowdsourcing astronomical projects at Astronomical Zoo and Mechanical Turk to get your feet wet.
As a hobby both in grad school and the working world. Thats where the real enthusiasm is. I was at the introduction of the Apple-1 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium in 1976. Mac, Amiga, NeXT, SIGGRAPH, java, mobile user groups too.
Right now the java and mobile user groups are swarming with recruiters buying us pizza and beer. There are about 20 job openings for everyone looking for a position. However, the interest is in younger people.
More so when I can work on new projects I initiate rather than fix some legacy code.
As computer become ever more powerful, it remains fun.
I started when memories were measured in kilobytes and speeds kiloflops. We are on the tera-threshhold now.
Describes the immediate aftermath of an utter loss of electricity. It estimates a 90% population decline in the first year. We return to a pre-civil war "steampunk" type agrarian lifestyle until we recover. Humanity did fine before the mid 19th century. The trauma is transitioning to that.
Some electrical devices will be shielded in sub-basements and caves. Its unclear if would be a critical nucleus for recovery.
The TV show Revolution is 15 years after such an event. They hint at a 3rd cause other than a nuclear blast or massive solar storm.
Ever since the Carrington event of 2023 and its cruel repeat in 2025 most food production and life in the western world has been confined to a few miles of home. 98% of the US electric power transformers were fried along with the computers of almost every truck, car, and train. The US only had about ten percent transformer replacements in stock. And most of those got fried in the repeat event two years later.
In the first months most of the old and sick people died. Then plenty of the rest in the gang wars. The most difficult thing to deal with was the utter electronic silence. No phone, internet, radio or TV. More than one teenage girl jumped off a roof when the smartphones stopped working.
But its the cellphone service that is coming back first. One can runner the towers of solar cells during the day. Every little neighborhood has its solar charging station. No ventral power stations or wires necessary. I recall that was the situation in deepest Africa in the early 2000s: minimum infrastructure, but every family prized its cellphone.
Right now personal computing is bordering giga/tera speed and memory devices. In 15 years persona devices will be knocking at the peta-door.
I went to early school in the kilo era, grad school and early work in the mega era, then recent work in the giga and tera eras.
Hardware trends are easier to predict than software. The WW web came faster than many of us at the time thought. Social computing after a half dozen major failures is gaining traction. I've always wondered why vocal inferences stilll havent dominated by now. I have difficulty imaging the "killer apps" of 2030.
Slashdot Mirror
Tom originally marketed his phonograph as a revolutionary education tool. Said it would turn schools upside down. Made the same claim for his invention of motion pictures twenty years later.
Nothing increases appetite for "forbidden fruit" than prohibition and the accompanying press about it.
NOAA & NASA funds were cut to the bone by a 3 out past four congresses that disliked climate change. This alone doesnt explain the who situation. Articles say that NOAA project management has not been that good.
Due to inefficient distributed immigration software they pretty much accepted every app until the deadline. They did not have a definitive way of priotitizing the apps. This nearly doubled the actual amount in popular years.
I heard our state still runs its unemployment system this way. I would think something like that would be practically self-encrypting.
Back in ancient times they year started with the Freshman Picnic in the Great Court. Most of us were turned off by strangers trying to impress each other with their intellectual exploits. The final nail in coffin was when average score on the first physics test was like 50%. Few MIT students had ever seen less than a 90 in their lives. Or when your dorm throws a party and no women from neighboring colleges come (worse than the Social Network movie).
I've been in [personal] computers over 40 years, seeing them from the kilobyte/kiloflop era to the threshhold of the terabyte/teraflop era. There have been both surprises and disappointments at every turning. I dont see why this would not continue for another 40 or 100 years.
My two biggest mispredictions were:
(1) In the mid 70s I wounder why anyone would buy a store-made computer. They were so fun to solder together yourself.
(2) The sudden rise of the world wide web in 1993. Everyone knew cycberspace would eventually happen, but probably another decade or so. That was a huge victory for open source: thanks Tim!
Way too complicated GUI for mobile. Steve jobs correctly decided a cell phone GUI was better.
I heard the Italian Court consultant Thomas Jordan head of the Southern Calfornia Earthquake Center talk on this topic. Look at slides 15 & 16 about the difference between prediction and forecasting. The current methodology is to give a probabalistic forecast, like in weather, and not a yes/no prediction. The Italian scientists did not follow current methodology and gave a less useful prediction. The court convicted these scientists of negligence for not being current enough and might have cost some lives. Nearly the entire seismologic community including Dr. Jordan thinks the court decision was wrong.
Generally only nuclear bomb has enough energy to create a quake. (M4 to M6 depending on bomb size.) Human activity in adding or extracting fluids from the earth can accelerated or retard a quake, but rarely create new ones.
One fear is the consolidation of natural small quakes into a larger bigger quake. Each earthquake is equivalent in energy to 30 quakes of smaller magnitude. Perhaps human activity may have many of these smaller quakes go off at once.
The inverse has been proposed to prevent damaging quakes. Try to trigger hundreds of tiny quakes in place of a larger quake to relieve stress. but no one knows how to safely do this.
Before there were cells. Robert Hazen's Origin of Life book/course suggests this possibility. When they two systems joined together, their progress was irresistible.
Mobile phones and tablets are sucking the profit out of them. They dont have a vertical supply chain of factories and stores like Apple.
The make their advertising dollars from the latest news. Life, Look US News, Newsweek all gone. Just Time left in this category.
Not spent on a daily basis, but for large transactions like land or cargos. Silver and copper were the daily currency.
Plus individuals
Both systems make the conceptual leap that a number can be represented by a name rather than digits. Then both systems give you a large number of recipies for manipulating that name to compute something.
Usually most people can hand abstraction after a few years of arithmetic. But I've seen some people go mentally blank after leaving the concrete system of digits and never grasp algebra or programming.
Thats why I am a little skeptical about hearing of 5 or 6 year olds "programming". I dont think the foundation is really there yet. But I think some 9 or 10 year olds can handle both kinds of abstraction. I could by that age.
Took about a minute to print a new grid of asterisks on a teletype then.
There are these surveys collecting vast amounts of image and other sensor data and posting them on the internet. I have a friend who has discovered a couple dozen asteroids and comets trolling the SOHO solar image data. You might start with some the crowdsourcing astronomical projects at Astronomical Zoo and Mechanical Turk to get your feet wet.
As a hobby both in grad school and the working world. Thats where the real enthusiasm is. I was at the introduction of the Apple-1 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium in 1976. Mac, Amiga, NeXT, SIGGRAPH, java, mobile user groups too.
Right now the java and mobile user groups are swarming with recruiters buying us pizza and beer. There are about 20 job openings for everyone looking for a position. However, the interest is in younger people.
More so when I can work on new projects I initiate rather than fix some legacy code.
As computer become ever more powerful, it remains fun.
I started when memories were measured in kilobytes and speeds kiloflops. We are on the tera-threshhold now.
That makes Apple the largest player
Describes the immediate aftermath of an utter loss of electricity. It estimates a 90% population decline in the first year. We return to a pre-civil war "steampunk" type agrarian lifestyle until we recover. Humanity did fine before the mid 19th century. The trauma is transitioning to that.
Some electrical devices will be shielded in sub-basements and caves. Its unclear if would be a critical nucleus for recovery.
The TV show Revolution is 15 years after such an event. They hint at a 3rd cause other than a nuclear blast or massive solar storm.
Ever since the Carrington event of 2023 and its cruel repeat in 2025 most food production and life in the western world has been confined to a few miles of home. 98% of the US electric power transformers were fried along with the computers of almost every truck, car, and train. The US only had about ten percent transformer replacements in stock. And most of those got fried in the repeat event two years later.
In the first months most of the old and sick people died. Then plenty of the rest in the gang wars. The most difficult thing to deal with was the utter electronic silence. No phone, internet, radio or TV. More than one teenage girl jumped off a roof when the smartphones stopped working.
But its the cellphone service that is coming back first. One can runner the towers of solar cells during the day. Every little neighborhood has its solar charging station. No ventral power stations or wires necessary. I recall that was the situation in deepest Africa in the early 2000s: minimum infrastructure, but every family prized its cellphone.
Right now personal computing is bordering giga/tera speed and memory devices. In 15 years persona devices will be knocking at the peta-door.
I went to early school in the kilo era, grad school and early work in the mega era, then recent work in the giga and tera eras.
Hardware trends are easier to predict than software. The WW web came faster than many of us at the time thought. Social computing after a half dozen major failures is gaining traction. I've always wondered why vocal inferences stilll havent dominated by now. I have difficulty imaging the "killer apps" of 2030.
Now nor when I am retired in 15 years