I don't know how you got the idea that I think people should trash their washer. I own one of these style washers and I have no intention of replacing it any time soon. My point was that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to not know that HE washer doors should remain open until dry. It doesn't make _them_ stupid/idiots, it makes the product stupid. You went and inferred a heck of a lot out of a guy's mother-in-law and his family just from two short sentences, and you shifted the fault to them when it wasn't deserved. Sure, she could install a sign saying "do not close", but it would only serve any benefit on the few times that people come to visit. Their current system of the lady just being vigilant sounds like it works fine. The important part of the dialog is that the guy shouldn't be afraid of all HE machines based on that experience. There's no need to go insulting the intelligence of a person's family, or humanity in general on this one.
Agreed. If the thing needs to air out, then have a discreet vent panel that stays open when not operating, possibly even unbeknownst to the user. The open door obstructs the flow of traffic in small spaces.The original HE washers didn't even say anything about needing to leave the door open in the manual. They screwed up, and that's why they lost the suit. Needing to keep that large swing-out door open represents a massive failure in UX design. But again, it's supposedly no longer an issue on the more recent models.
No. That's the fascinating thing about ultrasonics. It's got a strong effect on fluids, but a minimal impact on intertwined solids. Line-drying is still likely to be better on delicate fabrics, but ultrasonics are going to be way gentler than hot-air tumble-drying. I'm not saying that this is a marketable solution, and yeah, bleeding-edge early adopters deserve every problem they get, but the frequencies and amplitudes used aren't any good at pulling apart fibers (and that's part of why ultrasonic clothes washing isn't feasible).
And it's funny because any time any time you mention "Haier" to an appliance/repair guy, they immediately shudder. Apparently, even though it's a massively huge company, they only ever used the "Haier" label in the US on their bottom-line products.
Wow, someone else noticed this! It stuck out to me in the Summary so I went searching. According to Google, "green transducers" is not a thing. They're just transducers as far as I'm able to tell. And if someone did invent some new kind of transducer, no engineer in their right mind would name it that unless it needed to be the color green in order to function. Now if marketing decided they want to sell their new appliance as using "the power of Green Transducer Technology(TM)!", then, uh, whatever; that's on them, but science/engineering wants no part of it.
That said, line-drying is way more common in Japan than it is in the US. I think the US does indeed have a stigma about it that does play a role. Appliance companies in the 1950s convinced everyone that a proper household has a washer & dryer, and if you don't, you should be wishing for the day you can get a house that supports one.
You either need direct sunlight or a breeze to get ice to sublimate at sub-freezing temperatures; unless your grandma is drying her clothes in a vacuum chamber (which would work pretty well). Some apartments wouldn't give you the ability to dry clothes when freezing cold without lots of time. That said, I agree that people in the US have some (pardon the pun) hangups about line-drying. Those commercials in the 1950s were really good at convincing us that a washer/dryer was part of the American Dream, and that's stuck with us through the generations. Truth is we use dryers because it's convenient and because energy has often been really really cheap in the US compared to much of Europe.
Old-school front-loaders were fine. There have been problems with the HE washers from around 2000-2010. A huge lawsuit was settled about it last year. I currently own one, and I used another one in my previous home. The mold problems can usually be avoided by keeping the door open after you've finished using the washer, which is annoying but whatever. The newest HE washers have added features to resolve these problems, and Consumer Reports says that they no longer detect any mold problems.
I've never heard of NASA checking genotype in the beginning, and I don't believe I've heard of them checking it since. When Gattaca came out, we still hadn't even sequenced a single human genome. So yeah, if you need glasses, you're out; two friends of mine lost out on their dreams of piloting because of that; one, an officer in the USAF, the other, a graduate degree holder applying to NASA (unrelated, but another friend of mine is an engineer at NASA Goddard). But if you pass all the tests of your ability, you qualify. It is science fiction because it allows these sort of discussions. Certainly, the main character used deception. But the question raised is that could it be true that you can rise above the genotype, such that the test criteria aren't appropriate? Can you know for certain that you aren't risking a multi-billion dollar program, because you are so confident in your ability to succeed every bit as well as the person with the better genes?
Imagine a futuristic society in a world where people don't bother to point out grammatical typos unless they cause actual ambiguity. Coming to theaters Summer 20....Ya know what, no one would ever buy that premise; project canceled.
The AI elements of 2001 with the Hal-9000 are valid science fiction. The concept of colonizing the moon or mars are science fiction concepts too. A Black Obelisk presented by hyper-dimensional aliens being the mechanism to spark human evolution is the problem part for me.
Forbidden Planet doesn't really investigate any science topics. It's psychokinesis, a homonculus (robot-servent), and explorers. No science required. The extinct society that had inhabited the planet before them might be science-fiction, but it is barely explored, and only in a hearsay manner. I don't mean to completely reject them as Science Fiction; I'm just saying that depending on the definition you go with, they may not be the "best" science fiction.
Gattaca followed the rules of what Science Fiction should be, from it's traditional meaning, extremely well. It took a scientific premise, and explored how the world would be shaped socially as a result of that premise. The result, forces the viewer to reexamine the current state of society in the present and their feelings about it. I really can't think of all that many films that do a good job of that.
I love 2001, but many of the key themes are more in the realm of fantasy. I love Forbidden Planet but it's really an adaptation of The Tempest; replacing the sorcery with science. Metropolis is a beautiful film, but it hardly depends on the scientific themes to deliver its message. Same thing with most of the other dystopian films like Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, or Logan's Run.
But that's really the tricky part about "best science fiction". You've gotta get everyone to agree on what defines quality science fiction.
I specifically want a light pickup, which we haven't really seen in the US for decades because of the tax status for pickup trucks. Presumably, an EV could duck all those problems since they were only put in place because of emissions and fuel economy concerns (and then the industry ducked around it all by creating the SUV, the clever buggers)
I don't disagree, but I was under the impression that a lot more of that local transport is medium trucks. I would've guessed it'd make more sense to push that market first and worry about the semi-tractor heavy trucks after proving yourself on that smaller scale. At the same time, I presume they know what they're doing. I look forward to seeing what that battery pack ends up looking like; I bet it'll be impressive.
I'm glad a couple people knew the reference. But yeah, the insight of the movie is a big part of why it was so well regarded. Not that the anime was the first to acknowledge the huge problem of the Baby Boomer population in Japan, but it did help to widen the dialogue and realize that yeah, about now, caring for the elderly is going to involve a lot of work.
Still, I'm hopeful that the robots employed here won't be experimental military prototypes that are imbued with the personality of the users' dead loved ones. The movie taught us that this could be a bit perilous.
Well, this reply got too long. Sorry about that. Anyway, might as well post it:
In my experience, Academia teaches undergrads only enough UML to be able to express concepts to them via diagrams. They go on to explain that it tends to be useful only when you need extremely formalized explicit design. They acknowledge that's frequently not the situation in the commercial world. However, it's useful for the sake of writing and understanding academic papers, and for mission-critical designs.
The Scientific method is a wonderful way to do science. But it's not the only way. I used to disagree with this, but I've slowly come around. For one thing, knowledge can be gained via rationalism and not just empirical measurement. General and special relativity was worked out on a chalkboard, not by taking measurements. Social sciences make testable explanations and predictions about their field. They cannot use strict scientific method because they are observing a dynamic system. It's not a realm like physics or chemistry where variables can be controlled and experiments can be repeatable. Social sciences attempt to take this into account, they acknowledge it's frequently an important consideration, but that doesn't mean they are prevented from making explanations and predictions. And when those explanations or predictions are falsified, they try and learn from it. They're forced to deal with more uncertainty, but science allows for that. Most of the stuff that perturbs you about social science conclusions, you may find, actually has more to do with popular-media interpretations of those conclusions. The academics themselves try to qualify their claims as much as possible, or the community does not consider the paper to be reputable. These fields are not useless. Sociology drives political campaigns. Psychology drives everything from marketing to gauging demand for new drug treatments. Economics drives...the economy. Linguistics predicts language change, and unlocks or verifies history. Human geography allows better predictions of the impact of significant changes on local, national and global scales. Even fields brought forth from now falsified theories have had massive benefits. Learning about the miasma theory, aka the "bad smells" theory of disease, inspired Ben Franklin who wrote something that inspired Alessandro Volta to investigate swamp-gas, discover methane, and this contributed to kicking off the organic chemistry revolution. Is it so impossible that the fields you consider "useless" are fields that you either don't fully appreciate, or are fields for which you experience a negativity bias, causing you to give undue weight to the failures of that particular field, thus dismissing the successes?
I agree with some of your points. Yeah, academia frequently has an ivory-tower problem that causes them to grow out of touch with applied-science. They do work that only serves as a benefit to other academics in what feels like a perpetuating cycle. The justifications of this sort of research can be tricky to understand, but that doesn't mean it fails to serve a benefit. So yeah, things are developed that serve no foreseeable benefit, and realistically, sometimes things do ultimately serve no benefit. Dead-ends happen, oh well. Other times, the benefits just happen to be very indirect. A paper influences a paper that influences a paper and so on until one actually does serve a practical benefit. It's often slow and painful, but that's often the nature of science.
Career academicians might sometimes not have a clue how things are in the commercial world. But at times, that can be a major benefit. All that "you can't do that because 5 years ago, we didn't have the ability to do this thing, so we did a work around with this ugly thing, but now we're forced to maintain support for this ugly thing because it breaks this other thing" problems are certainly important, but it's useful to explore realms without those problems. It can let you accomplish things so useful that people look at it and unde
That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. For added points, have your 11 year old daughter give the presentation, and have her talk about how she learned a new appreciation for software development as well as the environment. Maybe even talk about a website encouraging the crowd-sourcing of elementary-school science classes to contribute GPS coordinates of their local recycle-bins to the app's server as part of a teachable experience? I'm not even joking, unless another team does an even better job of pulling on heartstrings, that's a $6k 1st prize right there. Write up the experience in an essay a few years later and the kid won't have to worry about her college applications either.
We read the rules. We're no dummies. We don't give up any rights to our creations just because they're entered into a hackathon. That'd be a great way to get no talented people to show up. And in our case, even if we did give up any rights, we aren't building anything that could be profited upon without massive amounts of work and risk that frankly no one would bother with. We build stuff that just isn't gonna exist in the world unless you make it or commission it; either because it's too dangerous or too impractically silly. It turns out, in the real world, a great idea is almost always worthless. Any idea that is actually practical has already been thought of by hundreds of other people. A great idea and a proof of concept is only worth a little bit. There's only real value in a concept the moment you convince people with money to invest that money in your idea, whether that be venture capital, preorders, or a job offer.
That said, I did speak to a DeWalt product developer head at one of these things. I told him about a product I very much wanted to exist in the DeWalt brand. He told me it was already in development, and sure enough it was on the market that year. Here again, even if it wasn't already in development, the idea wasn't worth anything, the value is in people with money deciding the idea is worth pursuing and bringing to market. And there's a chance that my cold-input helped them verify that there was a demand for the product instead of canning it. So I got the ability to purchase my desired accessory, and that makes me happy:)
It's tongue-in-cheek. Everyone who knows anything about Moore's Law is perfectly aware it is not an actual physical law. It doesn't need mentioning. We only need to be careful in our terminology when there's genuine ambiguity, which is not the case here.
I once won a hackathon in my category, snagging $2k in prize money for me and a couple friends. We were doing a hardware project, and spent so much on materials that we didn't come close to anything rembling a profit. But we weren't trying to profit or even trying to win; we were just making something we would've made on our own anyway. But the experience made me wonder about the possibility for this. I think the biggest issues are that you'd need to be in the bay-area with the lowest rent you could find, or learn to travel really cheap. My area doesn't have nearly enough events. But after attending my 2nd event, it quickly became obvious that there are things you can do that would enable you to gain an edge, potentially allowing you to win a category despite not having the best submission in that category. The larger sponsors are frequently judges, and PR is obviously an important thing. So frequently, it's more about doing a project that has a feel-good narrative with the potential to make headlines than it is about writing quality code, or writing code that does something genuinely novel, as opposed to code that just has the appearance of novelty, or about making a product that's actually feasible.
The implications sort of alarmed us. We don't particularly like the idea of competing against people exploiting these potentials, acting like they are doing a community service, when really motivated by fame & fortune. But we also decided that we don't really care about winning. For us, a hackathon is a motivation to get off our asses and work really hard on something cool we want to create instead of just wasting yet another weekend on YouTube and video games. If we win, any prize money is just gonna go into the next crazy project we want to see exist.
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I don't know how you got the idea that I think people should trash their washer. I own one of these style washers and I have no intention of replacing it any time soon. My point was that it's perfectly reasonable for a person to not know that HE washer doors should remain open until dry. It doesn't make _them_ stupid/idiots, it makes the product stupid. You went and inferred a heck of a lot out of a guy's mother-in-law and his family just from two short sentences, and you shifted the fault to them when it wasn't deserved. Sure, she could install a sign saying "do not close", but it would only serve any benefit on the few times that people come to visit. Their current system of the lady just being vigilant sounds like it works fine. The important part of the dialog is that the guy shouldn't be afraid of all HE machines based on that experience. There's no need to go insulting the intelligence of a person's family, or humanity in general on this one.
Agreed. If the thing needs to air out, then have a discreet vent panel that stays open when not operating, possibly even unbeknownst to the user. The open door obstructs the flow of traffic in small spaces.The original HE washers didn't even say anything about needing to leave the door open in the manual. They screwed up, and that's why they lost the suit. Needing to keep that large swing-out door open represents a massive failure in UX design. But again, it's supposedly no longer an issue on the more recent models.
No. That's the fascinating thing about ultrasonics. It's got a strong effect on fluids, but a minimal impact on intertwined solids. Line-drying is still likely to be better on delicate fabrics, but ultrasonics are going to be way gentler than hot-air tumble-drying. I'm not saying that this is a marketable solution, and yeah, bleeding-edge early adopters deserve every problem they get, but the frequencies and amplitudes used aren't any good at pulling apart fibers (and that's part of why ultrasonic clothes washing isn't feasible).
And it's funny because any time any time you mention "Haier" to an appliance/repair guy, they immediately shudder. Apparently, even though it's a massively huge company, they only ever used the "Haier" label in the US on their bottom-line products.
Wow, someone else noticed this! It stuck out to me in the Summary so I went searching. According to Google, "green transducers" is not a thing. They're just transducers as far as I'm able to tell. And if someone did invent some new kind of transducer, no engineer in their right mind would name it that unless it needed to be the color green in order to function. Now if marketing decided they want to sell their new appliance as using "the power of Green Transducer Technology(TM)!", then, uh, whatever; that's on them, but science/engineering wants no part of it.
When an engineer is doing research, you're allowed to call the person a scientist.
Yup, this is the best answer I've seen in this thread. Energy is cheap, free-time is expensive.
That said, line-drying is way more common in Japan than it is in the US. I think the US does indeed have a stigma about it that does play a role. Appliance companies in the 1950s convinced everyone that a proper household has a washer & dryer, and if you don't, you should be wishing for the day you can get a house that supports one.
You either need direct sunlight or a breeze to get ice to sublimate at sub-freezing temperatures; unless your grandma is drying her clothes in a vacuum chamber (which would work pretty well). Some apartments wouldn't give you the ability to dry clothes when freezing cold without lots of time. That said, I agree that people in the US have some (pardon the pun) hangups about line-drying. Those commercials in the 1950s were really good at convincing us that a washer/dryer was part of the American Dream, and that's stuck with us through the generations. Truth is we use dryers because it's convenient and because energy has often been really really cheap in the US compared to much of Europe.
Old-school front-loaders were fine. There have been problems with the HE washers from around 2000-2010. A huge lawsuit was settled about it last year. I currently own one, and I used another one in my previous home. The mold problems can usually be avoided by keeping the door open after you've finished using the washer, which is annoying but whatever. The newest HE washers have added features to resolve these problems, and Consumer Reports says that they no longer detect any mold problems.
I've never heard of NASA checking genotype in the beginning, and I don't believe I've heard of them checking it since. When Gattaca came out, we still hadn't even sequenced a single human genome. So yeah, if you need glasses, you're out; two friends of mine lost out on their dreams of piloting because of that; one, an officer in the USAF, the other, a graduate degree holder applying to NASA (unrelated, but another friend of mine is an engineer at NASA Goddard). But if you pass all the tests of your ability, you qualify. It is science fiction because it allows these sort of discussions. Certainly, the main character used deception. But the question raised is that could it be true that you can rise above the genotype, such that the test criteria aren't appropriate? Can you know for certain that you aren't risking a multi-billion dollar program, because you are so confident in your ability to succeed every bit as well as the person with the better genes?
Imagine a futuristic society in a world where people don't bother to point out grammatical typos unless they cause actual ambiguity. Coming to theaters Summer 20....Ya know what, no one would ever buy that premise; project canceled.
I hadn't thought of that. Interesting point. I enjoyed Gattaca more, but they do explore some similar themes.
Forbidden Planet doesn't really investigate any science topics. It's psychokinesis, a homonculus (robot-servent), and explorers. No science required. The extinct society that had inhabited the planet before them might be science-fiction, but it is barely explored, and only in a hearsay manner. I don't mean to completely reject them as Science Fiction; I'm just saying that depending on the definition you go with, they may not be the "best" science fiction.
I love 2001, but many of the key themes are more in the realm of fantasy. I love Forbidden Planet but it's really an adaptation of The Tempest; replacing the sorcery with science. Metropolis is a beautiful film, but it hardly depends on the scientific themes to deliver its message. Same thing with most of the other dystopian films like Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, or Logan's Run.
But that's really the tricky part about "best science fiction". You've gotta get everyone to agree on what defines quality science fiction.
I specifically want a light pickup, which we haven't really seen in the US for decades because of the tax status for pickup trucks. Presumably, an EV could duck all those problems since they were only put in place because of emissions and fuel economy concerns (and then the industry ducked around it all by creating the SUV, the clever buggers)
Oh, you.
I don't disagree, but I was under the impression that a lot more of that local transport is medium trucks. I would've guessed it'd make more sense to push that market first and worry about the semi-tractor heavy trucks after proving yourself on that smaller scale. At the same time, I presume they know what they're doing. I look forward to seeing what that battery pack ends up looking like; I bet it'll be impressive.
Still, I'm hopeful that the robots employed here won't be experimental military prototypes that are imbued with the personality of the users' dead loved ones. The movie taught us that this could be a bit perilous.
They even made a documentary about it, called Roujin Z.
In my experience, Academia teaches undergrads only enough UML to be able to express concepts to them via diagrams. They go on to explain that it tends to be useful only when you need extremely formalized explicit design. They acknowledge that's frequently not the situation in the commercial world. However, it's useful for the sake of writing and understanding academic papers, and for mission-critical designs.
The Scientific method is a wonderful way to do science. But it's not the only way. I used to disagree with this, but I've slowly come around. For one thing, knowledge can be gained via rationalism and not just empirical measurement. General and special relativity was worked out on a chalkboard, not by taking measurements. Social sciences make testable explanations and predictions about their field. They cannot use strict scientific method because they are observing a dynamic system. It's not a realm like physics or chemistry where variables can be controlled and experiments can be repeatable. Social sciences attempt to take this into account, they acknowledge it's frequently an important consideration, but that doesn't mean they are prevented from making explanations and predictions. And when those explanations or predictions are falsified, they try and learn from it. They're forced to deal with more uncertainty, but science allows for that. Most of the stuff that perturbs you about social science conclusions, you may find, actually has more to do with popular-media interpretations of those conclusions. The academics themselves try to qualify their claims as much as possible, or the community does not consider the paper to be reputable. These fields are not useless. Sociology drives political campaigns. Psychology drives everything from marketing to gauging demand for new drug treatments. Economics drives...the economy. Linguistics predicts language change, and unlocks or verifies history. Human geography allows better predictions of the impact of significant changes on local, national and global scales. Even fields brought forth from now falsified theories have had massive benefits. Learning about the miasma theory, aka the "bad smells" theory of disease, inspired Ben Franklin who wrote something that inspired Alessandro Volta to investigate swamp-gas, discover methane, and this contributed to kicking off the organic chemistry revolution. Is it so impossible that the fields you consider "useless" are fields that you either don't fully appreciate, or are fields for which you experience a negativity bias, causing you to give undue weight to the failures of that particular field, thus dismissing the successes?
I agree with some of your points. Yeah, academia frequently has an ivory-tower problem that causes them to grow out of touch with applied-science. They do work that only serves as a benefit to other academics in what feels like a perpetuating cycle. The justifications of this sort of research can be tricky to understand, but that doesn't mean it fails to serve a benefit. So yeah, things are developed that serve no foreseeable benefit, and realistically, sometimes things do ultimately serve no benefit. Dead-ends happen, oh well. Other times, the benefits just happen to be very indirect. A paper influences a paper that influences a paper and so on until one actually does serve a practical benefit. It's often slow and painful, but that's often the nature of science.
Career academicians might sometimes not have a clue how things are in the commercial world. But at times, that can be a major benefit. All that "you can't do that because 5 years ago, we didn't have the ability to do this thing, so we did a work around with this ugly thing, but now we're forced to maintain support for this ugly thing because it breaks this other thing" problems are certainly important, but it's useful to explore realms without those problems. It can let you accomplish things so useful that people look at it and unde
That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. For added points, have your 11 year old daughter give the presentation, and have her talk about how she learned a new appreciation for software development as well as the environment. Maybe even talk about a website encouraging the crowd-sourcing of elementary-school science classes to contribute GPS coordinates of their local recycle-bins to the app's server as part of a teachable experience? I'm not even joking, unless another team does an even better job of pulling on heartstrings, that's a $6k 1st prize right there. Write up the experience in an essay a few years later and the kid won't have to worry about her college applications either.
That said, I did speak to a DeWalt product developer head at one of these things. I told him about a product I very much wanted to exist in the DeWalt brand. He told me it was already in development, and sure enough it was on the market that year. Here again, even if it wasn't already in development, the idea wasn't worth anything, the value is in people with money deciding the idea is worth pursuing and bringing to market. And there's a chance that my cold-input helped them verify that there was a demand for the product instead of canning it. So I got the ability to purchase my desired accessory, and that makes me happy :)
It's tongue-in-cheek. Everyone who knows anything about Moore's Law is perfectly aware it is not an actual physical law. It doesn't need mentioning. We only need to be careful in our terminology when there's genuine ambiguity, which is not the case here.
The implications sort of alarmed us. We don't particularly like the idea of competing against people exploiting these potentials, acting like they are doing a community service, when really motivated by fame & fortune. But we also decided that we don't really care about winning. For us, a hackathon is a motivation to get off our asses and work really hard on something cool we want to create instead of just wasting yet another weekend on YouTube and video games. If we win, any prize money is just gonna go into the next crazy project we want to see exist.