I think that we have a bit of an issue with, among other things, time scale here. What exactly do we mean by "multitasking"? Personally, I think that at least several of the people I have mentioned accomplished as much as they did precisely by keeping several perspectives on an issue in mind simultaneously while addressing them. The Franklin stove isn't just good engineering and good physics; it was also a good fit to the needs of his intended market and if you read about him, he was known for seeing many aspects of a problem at once and creating a solution that was, shall we say, an effective bit of multivariate analysis, finding the best combined set of optima for five or six variables rather than simply "the best shape for a reflector" or "the oven design most practical to make with limited casting facilities".
Is "multitasking" only about simultaneously trying to solve multiple unrelated problems or does it apply to maintaining concurrent and synergistic streams of thought towards the same overall goal but addressing different aspects of that problem? And what is our time unit for determining how many problems are being addressed? A day? An hour? A second? If we're talking about anything longer than two or three seconds then most of the men above (I would have included women if any had come to mind) would certainly qualify as habitual multitaskers. Sticking to the two who hung out together, read about Franklin and Jefferson and their behavior in the meetings of, say, the Continental Congress. Or about Franklin's playing five or six factions off each other at a party in Paris while playing a musical instrument, flirting, and gaming how he was perceived by the opinionmakers in general.
These words; I truly don't know, do they mean what you think they mean?
Yeah, but most of his lute pieces, for example, are superb brain boosters. And, staying on topic, let's remember, people, that chamber music and early opera were meant to be played in a room full of people talking. One was expected to process the music while doing other things. Read up on the circumstances of the "chambers" in question and you've find that they were a long way away from the quiet, silent audience that is now considered "appropriate".
In fact, read about court gatherings in general. If you couldn't say witty things that were both on topic and full of subtext, while watching the other groups across the room, while planning a liason later with somebody you were signaling to, and listening to the broader conversation, you were considered too much of a loser to be bothered with. Les Precieuses were all f*ckin' fast, and unforgiving of those who couldn't keep up. As were Oscar Wilde's circle and plenty of others. And since they tended to spend a lot of time playing cards while doing all of the above, sometimes for gut-wrenchingly high stakes, you could get seriously fubared to the scale of personal bankruptcy by not being able to track all the variables at once. Same thing in Imperial China, right down to the gambling. Multitasking wasn't just admired, it was a survival skill. And, what a surprise, it was just such a card player who invented the Sandwich. Because, logically, he couldn't spare the attention to eat a conventional sit down meal. Sounds kinda like a techie mid-project, no?
Trust me, folks, you want to read about serious multitasking, read about Cyrano de Bergerac. The guy wrote pretty damn good poetry, quite literally while sword-fighting. And flirting. And watching for the Guard.
You mean like, say, Thomas Jefferson? Or Nikola Tesla? Or Henry Ford? Or Richard Feymann? Or Benjamin Franklin? Or Alan Turing? I don't know about you, I've only read about forty or fifty biographies of "geniuses" so maybe my sample is too small. But I'm under the impression that they're not only not all "monofocused", many of them drove everybody around them nuts with how many things they were thinking (and talking) about at once. If you want a good starting point on this behavior, I recommend The Eudaemonic Pie. It articulates this phenomenon quite well.
Personally, I would say I've only known five or six world class "geniuses" and to a one they were into quite a few things. Say, classical music, mathematics, programming, social dynamics, and religion. That one is actually a pretty common combination.
I certainly hope so. I was when I last looked in my wallet;-> Nice to see you here on/.
Do we get an award for being two of the only people here using our real names?
Actually, no. Many modern cars and all race cars are light enough to have to face issues of poor surface contact. They don't address that by adding weight; they address that by shifting the aerodynamic profile of the car so that at high speeds the airflow pushes the car down against the road. That's what all those spoilers one sees on high performance cars are for.
As for "unsafe materials", dude, passengers are best protected by things like a space frame, not by brute force use of heavy materials. And the Dymaxion had, for its time, a very sophisticated frame.
Your user links don't work. Is there anywhere we can look to find out more about this house you live in? If not, please at least put some images on Flickr. I, for one, would certainly link to them.
Okay, let's go over this with at least of modicum of clue, shall we?
A.) The crash you're talking about, as you would know if you'd RTFA, was determined not to be the fault of the car.
B.) Otoh, the thing was set up, for no sufficient reason, to steer "backwards". Like the rear seat of a fire truck, you steered left to turn right and vice-versa. Fuller liked boats, that's how tillers work, so he built it that way. This did make the car less safe, as drivers complained, but it in no way relates to the fundamental design.
C.) On yet a third hand, the whole beastie, since it was designed to "take off" at high enough speeds, had a dangerous tendency for the rear wheel to lose touch with the road once the car was moving at any kind of serious slip. This was bad design, no doubt, but again, easy enough to fix and would have been if more had been built.
D.) Being so lightweight, it tended to be pushed sideways by wind. This would be harder to address but seemed far worse to drivers of the time, used to big honkin' steel contraptions, than it would to, say, modern riders of enclosed bicycles, who have long since figured out ways to deal with this.
E.) Whatever its flaws, the thing was fantastically maneuverable. Its turning radius makes the average BMW look like a freight train. It was also, as I wrote above, built with cheap salvaged parts for many of the innards that would have been replaced with decent ones if it had ever gone into production. It's not reasonable to compare it to a production car in terms of things like the suspension, which was a total kluge.
F.) If you want to criticize the Dymaxion car, first read a book like Small Wonder on the creation of the Volkwagen bug. It took over ten frickin' years to get Professor Porsche's original chowderheaded version refined into the car that has now earned such reverence. But like the Dymaxion, his fundamental ideas were good, and those eventually made it great. The difference is that Porsche's team was able to keep going through years of rebuilding, prototyping, and redesign, up to and including inventing new kinds of steel since the unibody design and the suspension couldn't be made with the kinds that existed when Porsche first designed it.
Get the facts. Otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
For once I can't respond with a firm RTFA since the FA is fundamentally clueless. Which since it's in a publication with less genuine interest in technology and engineering than Parade Magazine shouldn't be too much of a surprise.
Fuller's domes may not be The One True Faith that people like Brand wanted but they're still a damn good choice for certain kinds of commercial structures. They also got modern engineers thinking about dynamic load distribution in ways that are very relevant and important now, a time when yurt design, for example, is going high-tech fast. Tensegrity Posts are just now starting to be appreciated for the resource-frugal, vastly compressible wonders they are. I guarantee that we'll see more and more variations on this scheme in the coming years in structures that need to be boosted out of the gravity well or simply transported at very low cost in absolutely minimal space. Fuller's cardboard versions of his dome worked quite well as temporary structures during World War II. If we had any sense at all we'd be making them now out of modern materials.
Many of his designs failed in large part for lack of, basically, computing power and, to a lesser degree, modern materials. Done with modern resources they're practical as all get out. You may want to laugh at his two piece steel bathroom but the hundreds of thousands of blowmolded shower enclosures sold every year at places like Home Despot are direct descendents. His cooling approach in the Dymaxion Home was far more sophisticated and resource-savvy than most of the "eco-homes" being built even today. And trust me, I've reviewed the plans of hundreds.
I agree, Fuller was an obscurantist pain in the ass with some serious delusions. He also got a hell of a lot of useful work done that considerably advanced manufacturing technology, approaches in several branches of engineering, and topology. Where he focused his attention, things advanced. As for his stuff including make-do components, like the famed Ford suspension put on its side in the Dymaxion Car, he made it clear from day one that this was a proof of concept, a proof that, even with make-do parts, carried ten passengers, got over 30 mpg, and turned on its own radius. Go ahead, show me that the first proofs of concept by Burt Rutan or Armadillo Aerospace or OLPC work that well.
I'm sorry, but as a former consultant, occasional inventor*, and business owner, I've always thought that non-competes were mostly b.s. If you're afraid that they'll steal your IP, register and enforce your IP. If you're afraid that they'll provide better services, well then, best you do a good job there, cobber. Seems to me that non-competes usually just protect those with lots of lawyers against those competing on the basis of value for the dollar.
Sounds like a plan. Now if you can have it work from bots within the Swedish government and the offices of the MPAA/RIAA's paid legal whores, we'll be good to go.
I dunno. It all just looks too similar to me. Anybody lazy enough to steal like that would be too lazy to be so precise. I'm guessing that one way or another they were using the same CAD files the creators of the original game used. And quite possibly that much or all of this came from staff who had worked on both teams, either directly, or as subcontractors.
Think about it, the only time that somebody works that hard to create something that is EXACTLY like what they're copying is when they're intentionally attempting to counterfeit the original. This isn't just "plagarism"; this is reuse of editorial files.
I wouldn't trust it for much on its own, but part of how one responsibly studies *any* phenomenon is that if there are witnesses, especially witnesses who each personally have from dozens to hundreds of relevant experiences, one does interview them. I'm not claiming that their statements would be flawless; note that I said that getting camera footage would be better. But something is better than nothing.
Bubelah, part of the point of the article is that this was a correlation they weren't expecting to find. That's what science is. You collect data based on a rough idea of where you should look and only when you've looked at the data do you start finalizing your conclusions on what you're looking at.
I have no idea how much I trust this data but I do know that it will probably get replicated or, at the least, somebody will do a variation on the idea. And once we have multiple studies to judge by, then we'll start knowing what the correlations are. Personally, I would be fascinated to see a correlation between degree of deviation from the speed of surrounding traffic and visible modifications to the car, because that would prevent reporting error.
One way or another, this should start a very productive round of FINALLY having more useful scientific data about territoriality and driving.
Of course the obvious other thing to do, which I'm willing to bet would be quite useful if done right, would be to interview highway cops on their experiences about what kinds of cars correlate with what behaviors. We know well that they profile, but I'll betcha dollars to donuts that some of their generalizations are non-obvious and true. Ideally, this would then be supplemented with reviewing footage from squadcar cameras but that might not be so easy to arrange.
If there were any justice in the world, this would be modded up to five for shear glorious geekiness. Thank you, oh, AC. I'll be saving your post as a text file.
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Is "multitasking" only about simultaneously trying to solve multiple unrelated problems or does it apply to maintaining concurrent and synergistic streams of thought towards the same overall goal but addressing different aspects of that problem?
And what is our time unit for determining how many problems are being addressed? A day? An hour? A second? If we're talking about anything longer than two or three seconds then most of the men above (I would have included women if any had come to mind) would certainly qualify as habitual multitaskers. Sticking to the two who hung out together, read about Franklin and Jefferson and their behavior in the meetings of, say, the Continental Congress. Or about Franklin's playing five or six factions off each other at a party in Paris while playing a musical instrument, flirting, and gaming how he was perceived by the opinionmakers in general. These words; I truly don't know, do they mean what you think they mean?
In fact, read about court gatherings in general. If you couldn't say witty things that were both on topic and full of subtext, while watching the other groups across the room, while planning a liason later with somebody you were signaling to, and listening to the broader conversation, you were considered too much of a loser to be bothered with. Les Precieuses were all f*ckin' fast, and unforgiving of those who couldn't keep up. As were Oscar Wilde's circle and plenty of others. And since they tended to spend a lot of time playing cards while doing all of the above, sometimes for gut-wrenchingly high stakes, you could get seriously fubared to the scale of personal bankruptcy by not being able to track all the variables at once. Same thing in Imperial China, right down to the gambling. Multitasking wasn't just admired, it was a survival skill. And, what a surprise, it was just such a card player who invented the Sandwich. Because, logically, he couldn't spare the attention to eat a conventional sit down meal. Sounds kinda like a techie mid-project, no?
Trust me, folks, you want to read about serious multitasking, read about Cyrano de Bergerac. The guy wrote pretty damn good poetry, quite literally while sword-fighting. And flirting. And watching for the Guard.
Absolutely badass.
Personally, I would say I've only known five or six world class "geniuses" and to a one they were into quite a few things. Say, classical music, mathematics, programming, social dynamics, and religion. That one is actually a pretty common combination.
Unfortunately they've usually been buying them for their programmer boyfriends.
I certainly hope so. I was when I last looked in my wallet ;-> Nice to see you here on /.
Do we get an award for being two of the only people here using our real names?
Nice.
Actually, no. Many modern cars and all race cars are light enough to have to face issues of poor surface contact. They don't address that by adding weight; they address that by shifting the aerodynamic profile of the car so that at high speeds the airflow pushes the car down against the road. That's what all those spoilers one sees on high performance cars are for.
As for "unsafe materials", dude, passengers are best protected by things like a space frame, not by brute force use of heavy materials. And the Dymaxion had, for its time, a very sophisticated frame.
Yes, some of us are far more efficient when we allow our focus to stretch beyond one thing.
Your user links don't work. Is there anywhere we can look to find out more about this house you live in? If not, please at least put some images on Flickr. I, for one, would certainly link to them.
Naw, you just need Lando Calrissian to manage it properly. He'll bitch but I hear that he's pretty good at that sort of thing.
Dymaxion house. . . had some bizarre space-saving tricks.
Such as?
A.) The crash you're talking about, as you would know if you'd RTFA, was determined not to be the fault of the car.
B.) Otoh, the thing was set up, for no sufficient reason, to steer "backwards". Like the rear seat of a fire truck, you steered left to turn right and vice-versa. Fuller liked boats, that's how tillers work, so he built it that way. This did make the car less safe, as drivers complained, but it in no way relates to the fundamental design.
C.) On yet a third hand, the whole beastie, since it was designed to "take off" at high enough speeds, had a dangerous tendency for the rear wheel to lose touch with the road once the car was moving at any kind of serious slip. This was bad design, no doubt, but again, easy enough to fix and would have been if more had been built.
D.) Being so lightweight, it tended to be pushed sideways by wind. This would be harder to address but seemed far worse to drivers of the time, used to big honkin' steel contraptions, than it would to, say, modern riders of enclosed bicycles, who have long since figured out ways to deal with this.
E.) Whatever its flaws, the thing was fantastically maneuverable. Its turning radius makes the average BMW look like a freight train. It was also, as I wrote above, built with cheap salvaged parts for many of the innards that would have been replaced with decent ones if it had ever gone into production. It's not reasonable to compare it to a production car in terms of things like the suspension, which was a total kluge.
F.) If you want to criticize the Dymaxion car, first read a book like Small Wonder on the creation of the Volkwagen bug. It took over ten frickin' years to get Professor Porsche's original chowderheaded version refined into the car that has now earned such reverence. But like the Dymaxion, his fundamental ideas were good, and those eventually made it great. The difference is that Porsche's team was able to keep going through years of rebuilding, prototyping, and redesign, up to and including inventing new kinds of steel since the unibody design and the suspension couldn't be made with the kinds that existed when Porsche first designed it.
Get the facts. Otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
Fuller's domes may not be The One True Faith that people like Brand wanted but they're still a damn good choice for certain kinds of commercial structures. They also got modern engineers thinking about dynamic load distribution in ways that are very relevant and important now, a time when yurt design, for example, is going high-tech fast.
Tensegrity Posts are just now starting to be appreciated for the resource-frugal, vastly compressible wonders they are. I guarantee that we'll see more and more variations on this scheme in the coming years in structures that need to be boosted out of the gravity well or simply transported at very low cost in absolutely minimal space.
Fuller's cardboard versions of his dome worked quite well as temporary structures during World War II. If we had any sense at all we'd be making them now out of modern materials.
Many of his designs failed in large part for lack of, basically, computing power and, to a lesser degree, modern materials. Done with modern resources they're practical as all get out. You may want to laugh at his two piece steel bathroom but the hundreds of thousands of blowmolded shower enclosures sold every year at places like Home Despot are direct descendents. His cooling approach in the Dymaxion Home was far more sophisticated and resource-savvy than most of the "eco-homes" being built even today. And trust me, I've reviewed the plans of hundreds.
I agree, Fuller was an obscurantist pain in the ass with some serious delusions. He also got a hell of a lot of useful work done that considerably advanced manufacturing technology, approaches in several branches of engineering, and topology. Where he focused his attention, things advanced. As for his stuff including make-do components, like the famed Ford suspension put on its side in the Dymaxion Car, he made it clear from day one that this was a proof of concept, a proof that, even with make-do parts, carried ten passengers, got over 30 mpg, and turned on its own radius. Go ahead, show me that the first proofs of concept by Burt Rutan or Armadillo Aerospace or OLPC work that well.
I'm sorry, but as a former consultant, occasional inventor*, and business owner, I've always thought that non-competes were mostly b.s. If you're afraid that they'll steal your IP, register and enforce your IP. If you're afraid that they'll provide better services, well then, best you do a good job there, cobber. Seems to me that non-competes usually just protect those with lots of lawyers against those competing on the basis of value for the dollar.
*See patent 4,808,204.
I'm curious, what sort of "state intervention" are you thinking of?
Sounds like a plan. Now if you can have it work from bots within the Swedish government and the offices of the MPAA/RIAA's paid legal whores, we'll be good to go.
These are static screenshots? Pathetic. I say lobotomize 'em all and hand them over to the creators of the original images as body slaves.
Think about it, the only time that somebody works that hard to create something that is EXACTLY like what they're copying is when they're intentionally attempting to counterfeit the original. This isn't just "plagarism"; this is reuse of editorial files.
What about that surprises you? I, for one, am delighted.
No, it's not just you.
Bubelah, part of the point of the article is that this was a correlation they weren't expecting to find. That's what science is. You collect data based on a rough idea of where you should look and only when you've looked at the data do you start finalizing your conclusions on what you're looking at.
One way or another, this should start a very productive round of FINALLY having more useful scientific data about territoriality and driving.
Of course the obvious other thing to do, which I'm willing to bet would be quite useful if done right, would be to interview highway cops on their experiences about what kinds of cars correlate with what behaviors. We know well that they profile, but I'll betcha dollars to donuts that some of their generalizations are non-obvious and true. Ideally, this would then be supplemented with reviewing footage from squadcar cameras but that might not be so easy to arrange.
If there were any justice in the world, this would be modded up to five for shear glorious geekiness. Thank you, oh, AC. I'll be saving your post as a text file.
Almost makes me wish I were still a sysadmin and still had server alerts to set up that way. Almost.