While sight certainly is important, these kinds of treatments are so new that we can't really predict how long we'll actually have to watch before we really know for sure. It could be the case that in another week the new retinal tissue is chemically indistinguishable from what should have been there, or they might already be—that is, after all, the point of this trial, which is really more of an experiment.
Suppositionally, though: given how the vision system develops in human infants, though, I would actually say that three years is probably enough time to be sure one of these treatments was a complete success. When people experience 5-10 year life spans after heart transplants, that's generally because of ancillary factors (replacement heart quality, vessels elsewhere in the body weakened by the same thing that led to the first heart giving out...) and not really the fault of the surgery (well, unless the weak spot is the point of fusion on the vessels.) Rejection happens pretty quick by comparison.
The main reason for this (for those of you who haven't seen a neocognitron in a fourth-year machine learning course) is that the eye does a lot more pre-work for the brain than just blitting a grid of pixels down the optic nerve. Recent efforts attempted to do that, however. There's much more complex pattern recognition going on even at this most basic level, in addition to the loss of precision for the non-focal area, and that helps reduce the cognitive load to something we can fully utilize.
I looked it up. Instead of using a null pointer they have an explicit "optional" type. I believe the compiler then checks to make sure you're using them correctly, like Java does with everything, instead of letting you burn yourself on the stove by trying to dereference a null. When you get down to it, it's not that exciting or surprising.
1. Feel free to back up some or all of those claims about "constant refusal".
2. The migration to Rust will be gradual, and although it uses some new syntax and permits new paradigms, the code's not that hard to read.
I could now go on about how a developer not interested in facing new challenges, such as a change in language or project, does not have the right mindset to be a good programmer, but that may be a bit harsh.
Having felt for a very long while as you do, that there ought to be one overriding authority on how the English language should be spoken, and being something of a hobbyist linguist besides, I was surprised to find that it took the wisdom of a programmer arguing about how to pronounce "char" to set me straight: the reality is that you should just enjoy the variety and how it challenges the way you think about language, rather than rebelling against the difference.
Almost without exception, all natural languages are descended from a single source. If we insisted that all of the rules and vocabularies had to remain uniform at every step, then we would never have the richness of linguistic instruments that we do today. A language reflects the mindset of its users in subtle ways: Americans, for example, think of corporations as big, faceless entities with free will, whereas the very nature of the language used by Brits underscores the fact that a corporation is nothing more than an agreement between people. The former is more conceptually efficient, but devalues the people within the organization.
I think the key change here is that, like SPYW, this form of Twitter integration might not be a panopticon of the whole Twitterverse; it would only integrate the "your world" part and you'd have to provide your login credentials to do so. (Anyway, think about that seriously: do you really want your search results clogged up with every Twitter post ever?)
I think one way to mitigate this sort of thing is to have a kind of factuality tribunal—any argument put forth that is not sufficiently grounded in scientific consensus or sound logic can be brought to such a court, headed by academics summoned through something akin to jury duty (to minimize the chance of influence.) The court would be able to rule whether a position was permissible based on available evidence, unapproachable due to too much supposition or lack of scientific consensus, or demonstrably factually inaccurate. If properly implemented, this would help reduce the number of points of corruptibility, and mitigate openly baseless claims.
(Note that, amongst all of this, there are still all of the trappings and stumblings of normal democracy; I'm not proposing a complete technocracy. The people can still vote out bad candidates, they just won't be nearly as glamourous or flashy.)
It's true that horrors like Social Darwinism (the more generalized form of scientific racism, originated in a document about the history of Ireland) have happened in the past, and that even today there are problems in the scientific apparatus, like secretly corporate-funded drug studies that exaggerate results or under-report the effectiveness of competitors' products. But these problems are dealt with much more maturely by the academic apparatus, and there are much better controls for review and verification when a four-page paper needs a dozen references to make a generalization. Many scientific revolutions have come about simply because there was proof of something—it didn't take lobbying or marketing to make people accept PCR, shotgun sequencing, quantum mechanics, or climate change once they'd been demonstrated.
At the end of the day, I'm not necessarily advocating the complete conquest of the political sphere by science, but I do want to stress that there are ways to make complex policy decisions that are consistently better. Going back to scientific racism, that theory arose and maintained permanence when (a) there was a strong cultural pressure in favour of it and (b) science wasn't yet mature enough to pull away from it. The scientific method was developed centuries earlier, but the clarity of thought required to apply it to everything around us was conspicuously absent in the 19th century. The magnitude of such transgressions (excepting certain fundamental philosophical problems, which we are still feeling around in the dark about) has decreased over time.
I'm not sure how I see the connection. Are you suggesting that such research teams would automatically gravitate toward faulty justifications like scientific racism and social Darwinism? If so, sir or madam, I think you have a lot of explaining to do.
Semi-relatedly, there actually were projects to grow bacteria for human consumption in the sixties (source: one of my professors) but the extremely high nucleic acid content proved toxic to humans.
You're going to plant seaweed in fields, are you? Good luck with that. There's more than one species of seaweed, and the sort we eat is not a major component of the planet's diet like corn is.
Nah, those are special species of seaweed, grown expressly for eating. This strategy works for seaweed in general, most of which is pennies to the ton because there's no pre-existing (human) use for it.
Actually, do not eat the microbes. E. coli is lots of things to lots of people, but it is not a "stomach microbe," it's a small intestine microbe. They're harmless in small quantities (which is how they get there in the first place) but chowing down on bacteria tends to make people sick.
Slashdot Mirror
While sight certainly is important, these kinds of treatments are so new that we can't really predict how long we'll actually have to watch before we really know for sure. It could be the case that in another week the new retinal tissue is chemically indistinguishable from what should have been there, or they might already be—that is, after all, the point of this trial, which is really more of an experiment.
Suppositionally, though: given how the vision system develops in human infants, though, I would actually say that three years is probably enough time to be sure one of these treatments was a complete success. When people experience 5-10 year life spans after heart transplants, that's generally because of ancillary factors (replacement heart quality, vessels elsewhere in the body weakened by the same thing that led to the first heart giving out...) and not really the fault of the surgery (well, unless the weak spot is the point of fusion on the vessels.) Rejection happens pretty quick by comparison.
The main reason for this (for those of you who haven't seen a neocognitron in a fourth-year machine learning course) is that the eye does a lot more pre-work for the brain than just blitting a grid of pixels down the optic nerve. Recent efforts attempted to do that, however. There's much more complex pattern recognition going on even at this most basic level, in addition to the loss of precision for the non-focal area, and that helps reduce the cognitive load to something we can fully utilize.
I looked it up. Instead of using a null pointer they have an explicit "optional" type. I believe the compiler then checks to make sure you're using them correctly, like Java does with everything, instead of letting you burn yourself on the stove by trying to dereference a null. When you get down to it, it's not that exciting or surprising.
1. Feel free to back up some or all of those claims about "constant refusal".
2. The migration to Rust will be gradual, and although it uses some new syntax and permits new paradigms, the code's not that hard to read.
I could now go on about how a developer not interested in facing new challenges, such as a change in language or project, does not have the right mindset to be a good programmer, but that may be a bit harsh.
Perhaps you have to create a tag expressly labelled "end"? Like a constant or something. Null±1.
Those aren't illegal... Did I miss something?
You wouldn't!
Having felt for a very long while as you do, that there ought to be one overriding authority on how the English language should be spoken, and being something of a hobbyist linguist besides, I was surprised to find that it took the wisdom of a programmer arguing about how to pronounce "char" to set me straight: the reality is that you should just enjoy the variety and how it challenges the way you think about language, rather than rebelling against the difference.
Almost without exception, all natural languages are descended from a single source. If we insisted that all of the rules and vocabularies had to remain uniform at every step, then we would never have the richness of linguistic instruments that we do today. A language reflects the mindset of its users in subtle ways: Americans, for example, think of corporations as big, faceless entities with free will, whereas the very nature of the language used by Brits underscores the fact that a corporation is nothing more than an agreement between people. The former is more conceptually efficient, but devalues the people within the organization.
(At any rate, there's no academic consensus.)
I see. So you're saying that we have a duty to use as much as possible of the planet for growing food. I had no idea seafood was that popular.
It is not a strawman, sir: there's more than enough ocean to do both at the same time.
What are you talking about? The hackers are "possibly from abroad"! This is serious! Why would the article author use such a blatantly sensationalist subclause if it weren't serious?! Especially when the last time this was claimed turned out to be exactly what you're describing!
I think the key change here is that, like SPYW, this form of Twitter integration might not be a panopticon of the whole Twitterverse; it would only integrate the "your world" part and you'd have to provide your login credentials to do so. (Anyway, think about that seriously: do you really want your search results clogged up with every Twitter post ever?)
To be fair, when Captain Underpants isn't hypnotized, there isn't much to catch....
Slashdot eats degree symbols, even if encoded as HTML entities. Alas we cannot poke fun at people for that particular typographical wandering.
You probably would have gotten more if it looked like a disk, a black flap, and a scorpion.
I think one way to mitigate this sort of thing is to have a kind of factuality tribunal—any argument put forth that is not sufficiently grounded in scientific consensus or sound logic can be brought to such a court, headed by academics summoned through something akin to jury duty (to minimize the chance of influence.) The court would be able to rule whether a position was permissible based on available evidence, unapproachable due to too much supposition or lack of scientific consensus, or demonstrably factually inaccurate. If properly implemented, this would help reduce the number of points of corruptibility, and mitigate openly baseless claims.
(Note that, amongst all of this, there are still all of the trappings and stumblings of normal democracy; I'm not proposing a complete technocracy. The people can still vote out bad candidates, they just won't be nearly as glamourous or flashy.)
It's true that horrors like Social Darwinism (the more generalized form of scientific racism, originated in a document about the history of Ireland) have happened in the past, and that even today there are problems in the scientific apparatus, like secretly corporate-funded drug studies that exaggerate results or under-report the effectiveness of competitors' products. But these problems are dealt with much more maturely by the academic apparatus, and there are much better controls for review and verification when a four-page paper needs a dozen references to make a generalization. Many scientific revolutions have come about simply because there was proof of something—it didn't take lobbying or marketing to make people accept PCR, shotgun sequencing, quantum mechanics, or climate change once they'd been demonstrated.
At the end of the day, I'm not necessarily advocating the complete conquest of the political sphere by science, but I do want to stress that there are ways to make complex policy decisions that are consistently better. Going back to scientific racism, that theory arose and maintained permanence when (a) there was a strong cultural pressure in favour of it and (b) science wasn't yet mature enough to pull away from it. The scientific method was developed centuries earlier, but the clarity of thought required to apply it to everything around us was conspicuously absent in the 19th century. The magnitude of such transgressions (excepting certain fundamental philosophical problems, which we are still feeling around in the dark about) has decreased over time.
I'm not sure how I see the connection. Are you suggesting that such research teams would automatically gravitate toward faulty justifications like scientific racism and social Darwinism? If so, sir or madam, I think you have a lot of explaining to do.
A better system might be requiring the representatives to run a research team/think tank, so that bringing information to them is unnecessary.
Semi-relatedly, there actually were projects to grow bacteria for human consumption in the sixties (source: one of my professors) but the extremely high nucleic acid content proved toxic to humans.
The secondary metabolites would probably still be pretty unpleasant.
What about the eighteen months before that? :)
Seriously. Fiction is ripe with way better names than that. Next time just swipe one! I'd feel much safer in the hands of the Earth Defense Force.
You're going to plant seaweed in fields, are you? Good luck with that. There's more than one species of seaweed, and the sort we eat is not a major component of the planet's diet like corn is.
Hemp would still compete with crops for arable land.
Nah, those are special species of seaweed, grown expressly for eating. This strategy works for seaweed in general, most of which is pennies to the ton because there's no pre-existing (human) use for it.
Actually, do not eat the microbes. E. coli is lots of things to lots of people, but it is not a "stomach microbe," it's a small intestine microbe. They're harmless in small quantities (which is how they get there in the first place) but chowing down on bacteria tends to make people sick.