Can you explain how IQ test data is subjective? It was my understanding that it was a bad indicator of intelligence as a whole because the repeatable IQ tests all depend on pattern recognition and other very narrow topics, and that the test itself had a "subjective" component in how the definition of "intelligence" was established—not in the test data itself.
No, I'm in my mid-twenties; just of an historical bent. I was diagnosed with hipsterism as a child, but a shallow appreciation for the obscure and bygone was too mainstream. It's very satisfying to criticize other young people for getting their history wrong.
...that being said, it's a great way to burn bridges, so I don't actually recommend it.
...more to the point, intrinsic value is a construction. No one lives or dies because we decide to consider gold valuable and little green squares of paper not. At some point down this chain of currencies you encounter barter, where monetary value becomes an ethical construct ("I give you something you need in exchange for something I need equally"), but that's not materially real, either; not in the same sense that an absolute command economy enforced by locks and keys is.
For some reason no one ever takes that last critical step when we discuss economics on Slashdot, as if there's something special about atomic nuclei with 79 protons, other than the fact that they're shiny, malleable, and bad at oxidizing when in metal form.
The really special thing about Courier is that one of the reasons it died was because it didn't support traditional e-mail (An altogether weak reason to kill a hardware platform when it could surely be patched in.) And then, what does MS launch Windows RT without?...That's right, an e-mail client!
You'd think The Fifth Element would've been a huge boon to Dial, the company most known for selling borax, but alas they never seem to have capitalized on it. This would never happen in Futurama!
There are actually about a couple dozen companies that could realistically compete, in addition to labs like Church's. (This list includes them, along with some ancillary service companies.) The eight participants mentioned were merely those parties that had announced intent earlier; the rules have been revised and the other six gave up. The fact that it never attracted participants like Illumina, arguably the biggest name in sequencing, shows that the technology just isn't commercially viable enough, even with the possibility of the $10M subsidy if they win.
But it still leaves the point that the prize being too small may have been part of the reason why there were only two entrants. There are lots of players in the sequencing game, but as arobatino pointed out, the industry has slowed to a halt because it's not currently profitable to push the boundaries of technology—sequencing companies make all of their money from selling chemicals (much like printer companies and ink) and the demand just hasn't been escalating like they hoped. The X-Prize is thus a way to justify trying to meet the goals set out by the competition organizers due to short-term profitability, and if it's too low, then not many groups are going to try and pursue it (as demonstrated.)
Not as great as it sounds—you need to consider the R&D costs too. Those could easily run into the millions, especially when you're building a device that can cost as much as half a million and requires innovative, scalable analytical biochemistry and biophysics. I don't know the exact industry figures, but I think the anonymous commenter is probably more right than not.
A lot of people seemed to complain about my analysis of automated meals, not noticing that I actually put it in both lists because we're only half way there.
Definitely the most impressive prototype I've seen—although I get the feeling AR glasses are going to be the killer technology in the quest to create a holodeck.
A lot of people have been complaining about this recently. The suggestion made Reddit's front page a few months ago, but with explicit mention of a QR code instead of just a barcode.
They started putting the grave accent over the e when it became silent. In Shakespeare's time there was no such thing; it was assumed that the "e" was pronounced. If you read the actual passage, it's an apostrophe, meant to reduce it to one syllable because two doesn't fit the metre.
...by "birth control efforts" I meant "birth rate control policies," i.e. China's One-child policy, not merely the existence of, distribution of, and education regarding contraceptives.
He did mention flying cars, but he got a lot of stuff right, too! Here's a tally.
Yes:
Photosensitive windows that block out extreme light levels (well, usually sunglasses)
Automatically prepared meals (sort of, in microwave dinners; there's no standard for automated scanning of cooking times yet)
Machine language translation (this is still a big thing; Microsoft had a pretty big demo just a year or two ago—but, of course, the game's all about Chinese now)
Large solar arrays
Heavy dependence on nuclear (although not as much as he hoped)
Automated driving (definitely show-off material, if not on the market much)
Video calls (still not as popular as futurists want them to be)
Satellite networking
Mostly-automated road construction Still no manned missions to Mars
Optical networking (although he thought it'd be through pipes and not glass fibres)
Bus rapid transit (special lanes on highways)
Earth's population over 6.5 billion
US population around 350 million (actually 319)
Less developed areas will have slipped further behind the well-developed ones (although he didn't realise that some of them would actually fall backward)
Life expectancies around 85 in some countries (82.59 in Japan)
Slowing population growth (it peaked in the 60s)
Creative industries amongst the most valued ("The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.")
No:
Windows will be archaic replaced with ubiquitous light panels (apparently scenery had no appeal in 1964)
Cities will move underground so that the surface can be parks and farms.
Automatically prepared meals (he gave the example of ordering bacon, eggs, and coffee prepared in the usual manner)
Clumsy robot housekeepers (long live the Roomba—although the general spirit of the robot obsession is going strong in Japan, a land apparently unravaged by the Terminator franchise)
3D movies (on holographic cube TVs)
Radioisotope batteries in consumer electronics FLYING CARS (well, actually hovering ones—but seriously, why?)
Outdoor moving sidewalks in cities
Heavy use of compressed air tubes for postal mail (these remain only used in special settings like moving samples around hospitals, although my supermarket has one for money, weirdly)
No parking on the street (well, except on big mainstreets, but that was common even in his day) MOON COLONIES
Line-of-sight laser communications would be preferable to cable conduits (?!)
Boston and Washington DC will have merged into a giant city with 40 million inhabitants
Higher population in deserts and the Arctic due to population explosion (high-rises were apparently unanticipated)
Underwater housing
Attempts to sell yeast and algae as food sources (we have real tubesteak now, thank you very much)
Widespread birth control efforts (only in China, I think?) All high school students will be able to program
Automation of all automatable jobs (going so far as to eliminate classroom teaching, apparently)
Psychiatry the most important medical specialty (due to boredom caused by automation—apparently we'll all be unemployed in about four months)
And I'm not really sure how to classify this one:
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!
So on the whole, about 50-50, mostly small things. There are some items in there that I thought were rather unexpectedly good (no manned Mars visits), but for the most part it seems we'll have to file this batch of Asimov's predictions as over-optimistic, with most other futurist forecasts.
As someone who didn't grow up being promised flying cars, I have to wonder why (other than "because they're cool" and/or
Your high school education has definitely failed you if you weren't taught about the origins of science. The road to absolute empirical clarity was a long one. (Isaac Newton was an occultist in his day!)
Hamlet. To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die—to sleep.
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death— The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins rememb'red.
You have to remove the "e" when putting an apostrophe there. The point is to make the word fit the verse. "remember'd" is how we pronounce the word today; without the apostrophe, the correct reading would have been "re-mem-ber-ed" in Shakespeare's time. Squint more carefully!
Wait till they discover Ctrl-Shift-N, and gain the power to recover whole windows!
Also, minus 10,000 points to the original author and those who quoted him without (sic) for writing "undiscovere'd." Seriously, what the fuck do you think that apostrophe is doing? Get rid of that last E!
I find that depends entirely on the shop—I know some older C++ warlocks who are utterly annoyed by that culture and assume hotshot kids can't possibly know anything because they lack experience. Granted, those are mostly in smaller companies, but the knee-jerking goes both ways.
Welcome to the wonderful world of ageism, where anyone more than ten years younger than you is automatically an ignorant, lazy degenerate with no future! Please line up under the sign with the year of your birth so you can receive a bag of nostalgic items from your childhood, to further cement your prejudices about people you've never gotten to know and don't understand, and to ensure fully that the rosy tint of memory prevents you from remembering how you actually were as a person at that age, and thus from empathising with any children or teenagers.
At my alma mater, the university library would frequently provide course textbooks on hourly loans to cope with the small number of copies. Terrifying fees if you lost one or were late in returning the book. Some books weren't even allowed to leave the library; "checking" them out consisted of getting them off the shelf from behind the librarian's desk. I cannot imagine what a horrible existence it would be to try and work through a homework-heavy course under such circumstances.
It's slightly worse than that—lack of updates isn't enough for most of these things. They just keeeep going, utterly unmaintainable, as long as they run.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you explain how IQ test data is subjective? It was my understanding that it was a bad indicator of intelligence as a whole because the repeatable IQ tests all depend on pattern recognition and other very narrow topics, and that the test itself had a "subjective" component in how the definition of "intelligence" was established—not in the test data itself.
This entry proves conclusively that you will probably enjoy the Wikimedia Project's efforts in this area more.
No, I'm in my mid-twenties; just of an historical bent. I was diagnosed with hipsterism as a child, but a shallow appreciation for the obscure and bygone was too mainstream. It's very satisfying to criticize other young people for getting their history wrong.
...that being said, it's a great way to burn bridges, so I don't actually recommend it.
...more to the point, intrinsic value is a construction. No one lives or dies because we decide to consider gold valuable and little green squares of paper not. At some point down this chain of currencies you encounter barter, where monetary value becomes an ethical construct ("I give you something you need in exchange for something I need equally"), but that's not materially real, either; not in the same sense that an absolute command economy enforced by locks and keys is.
For some reason no one ever takes that last critical step when we discuss economics on Slashdot, as if there's something special about atomic nuclei with 79 protons, other than the fact that they're shiny, malleable, and bad at oxidizing when in metal form.
The really special thing about Courier is that one of the reasons it died was because it didn't support traditional e-mail (An altogether weak reason to kill a hardware platform when it could surely be patched in.) And then, what does MS launch Windows RT without? ...That's right, an e-mail client!
You'd think The Fifth Element would've been a huge boon to Dial, the company most known for selling borax, but alas they never seem to have capitalized on it. This would never happen in Futurama!
It's a totally different and real thing, bub. Here's your ticket to the moon.
There are actually about a couple dozen companies that could realistically compete, in addition to labs like Church's. (This list includes them, along with some ancillary service companies.) The eight participants mentioned were merely those parties that had announced intent earlier; the rules have been revised and the other six gave up. The fact that it never attracted participants like Illumina, arguably the biggest name in sequencing, shows that the technology just isn't commercially viable enough, even with the possibility of the $10M subsidy if they win.
But it still leaves the point that the prize being too small may have been part of the reason why there were only two entrants. There are lots of players in the sequencing game, but as arobatino pointed out, the industry has slowed to a halt because it's not currently profitable to push the boundaries of technology—sequencing companies make all of their money from selling chemicals (much like printer companies and ink) and the demand just hasn't been escalating like they hoped. The X-Prize is thus a way to justify trying to meet the goals set out by the competition organizers due to short-term profitability, and if it's too low, then not many groups are going to try and pursue it (as demonstrated.)
Not as great as it sounds—you need to consider the R&D costs too. Those could easily run into the millions, especially when you're building a device that can cost as much as half a million and requires innovative, scalable analytical biochemistry and biophysics. I don't know the exact industry figures, but I think the anonymous commenter is probably more right than not.
I probably should've looked that one up. Not being from the region it seemed preposterous—but, hey, the world's weird like that.
A lot of people seemed to complain about my analysis of automated meals, not noticing that I actually put it in both lists because we're only half way there.
Definitely the most impressive prototype I've seen—although I get the feeling AR glasses are going to be the killer technology in the quest to create a holodeck.
A lot of people have been complaining about this recently. The suggestion made Reddit's front page a few months ago, but with explicit mention of a QR code instead of just a barcode.
They started putting the grave accent over the e when it became silent. In Shakespeare's time there was no such thing; it was assumed that the "e" was pronounced. If you read the actual passage, it's an apostrophe, meant to reduce it to one syllable because two doesn't fit the metre.
...by "birth control efforts" I meant "birth rate control policies," i.e. China's One-child policy, not merely the existence of, distribution of, and education regarding contraceptives.
He did mention flying cars, but he got a lot of stuff right, too! Here's a tally.
Yes:
Photosensitive windows that block out extreme light levels (well, usually sunglasses)
Automatically prepared meals (sort of, in microwave dinners; there's no standard for automated scanning of cooking times yet)
Machine language translation (this is still a big thing; Microsoft had a pretty big demo just a year or two ago—but, of course, the game's all about Chinese now)
Large solar arrays
Heavy dependence on nuclear (although not as much as he hoped)
Automated driving (definitely show-off material, if not on the market much)
Video calls (still not as popular as futurists want them to be)
Satellite networking
Mostly-automated road construction
Still no manned missions to Mars
Optical networking (although he thought it'd be through pipes and not glass fibres)
Bus rapid transit (special lanes on highways)
Earth's population over 6.5 billion
US population around 350 million (actually 319)
Less developed areas will have slipped further behind the well-developed ones (although he didn't realise that some of them would actually fall backward)
Life expectancies around 85 in some countries (82.59 in Japan)
Slowing population growth (it peaked in the 60s)
Creative industries amongst the most valued ("The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.")
No:
Windows will be archaic replaced with ubiquitous light panels (apparently scenery had no appeal in 1964)
Cities will move underground so that the surface can be parks and farms.
Automatically prepared meals (he gave the example of ordering bacon, eggs, and coffee prepared in the usual manner)
Clumsy robot housekeepers (long live the Roomba—although the general spirit of the robot obsession is going strong in Japan, a land apparently unravaged by the Terminator franchise)
3D movies (on holographic cube TVs)
Radioisotope batteries in consumer electronics
FLYING CARS (well, actually hovering ones—but seriously, why?)
Outdoor moving sidewalks in cities
Heavy use of compressed air tubes for postal mail (these remain only used in special settings like moving samples around hospitals, although my supermarket has one for money, weirdly)
No parking on the street (well, except on big mainstreets, but that was common even in his day)
MOON COLONIES
Line-of-sight laser communications would be preferable to cable conduits (?!)
Boston and Washington DC will have merged into a giant city with 40 million inhabitants
Higher population in deserts and the Arctic due to population explosion (high-rises were apparently unanticipated)
Underwater housing
Attempts to sell yeast and algae as food sources (we have real tubesteak now, thank you very much)
Widespread birth control efforts (only in China, I think?)
All high school students will be able to program
Automation of all automatable jobs (going so far as to eliminate classroom teaching, apparently)
Psychiatry the most important medical specialty (due to boredom caused by automation—apparently we'll all be unemployed in about four months)
And I'm not really sure how to classify this one:
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!
So on the whole, about 50-50, mostly small things. There are some items in there that I thought were rather unexpectedly good (no manned Mars visits), but for the most part it seems we'll have to file this batch of Asimov's predictions as over-optimistic, with most other futurist forecasts.
As someone who didn't grow up being promised flying cars, I have to wonder why (other than "because they're cool" and/or
Your high school education has definitely failed you if you weren't taught about the origins of science. The road to absolute empirical clarity was a long one. (Isaac Newton was an occultist in his day!)
Not in any modern edition, it's not:
Hamlet. To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die—to sleep.
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia!—Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins rememb'red.
You have to remove the "e" when putting an apostrophe there. The point is to make the word fit the verse. "remember'd" is how we pronounce the word today; without the apostrophe, the correct reading would have been "re-mem-ber-ed" in Shakespeare's time. Squint more carefully!
Wait till they discover Ctrl-Shift-N, and gain the power to recover whole windows!
Also, minus 10,000 points to the original author and those who quoted him without (sic) for writing "undiscovere'd." Seriously, what the fuck do you think that apostrophe is doing? Get rid of that last E!
I find that depends entirely on the shop—I know some older C++ warlocks who are utterly annoyed by that culture and assume hotshot kids can't possibly know anything because they lack experience. Granted, those are mostly in smaller companies, but the knee-jerking goes both ways.
Yes. Ageism works in both ways. As a general rule, discrimination works in all directions, and always includes the keyword "lazy."
Welcome to the wonderful world of ageism, where anyone more than ten years younger than you is automatically an ignorant, lazy degenerate with no future! Please line up under the sign with the year of your birth so you can receive a bag of nostalgic items from your childhood, to further cement your prejudices about people you've never gotten to know and don't understand, and to ensure fully that the rosy tint of memory prevents you from remembering how you actually were as a person at that age, and thus from empathising with any children or teenagers.
At my alma mater, the university library would frequently provide course textbooks on hourly loans to cope with the small number of copies. Terrifying fees if you lost one or were late in returning the book. Some books weren't even allowed to leave the library; "checking" them out consisted of getting them off the shelf from behind the librarian's desk. I cannot imagine what a horrible existence it would be to try and work through a homework-heavy course under such circumstances.
It's slightly worse than that—lack of updates isn't enough for most of these things. They just keeeep going, utterly unmaintainable, as long as they run.