Some abilities are really intricate and hard to re-learn. Some other very basic functions are essentially the result of hard-coded developmental programs, and are (probably) outside of the space of things we can learn naturally; anterograde amnesia is an example of this. I can't say what facial recognition falls under, (not a neurologist) but I would guess it's more like the latter. Here's an example of a man who lost the ability to generate novel speech, although he can still recognize language and repeat memorized sequences like the alphabet.
I'm filing this one under "the vagaries of public science education"—anything that equates learning to programming an FPGA is already pretty detached from reality. I really just wanted to emphasize the idea that neuronal activation generally cascades, and that, at least locally, the idea of activation at a regular interval is biologically relevant. I'd edit the old post if I could.
Longevity vitamins. The vapid sensationalism of his writing is advertisement and subtle self-promotion. He is not a dreamer or great thinker, like Carl Sagan or Douglas Hofstader; merely a con man who tries to avoid being too transparent.
It works up to a certain point—there's evidence the brain even has a clock rate, for example (but you can't mess with it because everything else depends on it, so don't joke about that)—but be wary of making too many assumptions about comparing it to a normal computer. While the tasks are localized to some extent, the localizations aren't always physically contiguous, and the placement of bottlenecks is wildly complex and hard to fathom. Also, it's probably less like a standard CPU and more like an FPGA, though we don't really understand how abstracted everything is.
The concept of 'a small percentage' is a misrepresentation—it's like saying we only use a small amount of a CPU's die in each instruction. The whole brain gets used, just not constantly.
– Both Saturn V and the shuttle launch system were designed to handle failure of at least one engine
– The entire engine didn't actually explode, as some sources have reported; the onboard computers were still sending data from it (SpaceX believes it was just the aerodynamic casing (fairing) that exploded, due to the pressure release of the engine)
– This doesn't mean the Falcon 9 system is necessarily less safe than NASA systems; on two occasions, Saturn V rockets experienced a similar loss, with similar (i.e., nil) impact to the mission's success
So, y'know. Rejoice nerdily about the fact that the failsafes worked, rather than worrying about commercial technology being inferior.
Personally, I'm voting for "literary necessity" followed by "some convenient agricultural innovation."
More seriously: without having read nearly as much Tolkien as I'd like to be able to claim, and without even referencing your LotR Project link because it's Slashdotted right now, one of the theories behind island dwarfism is a series of population explosions: the creatures over-eat, consume all available resources, and only the smallest organisms are able to find enough food to survive afterwards. This doesn't really scale well to an agrarian culture like the hobbits, since the primary purpose of farming is to make food sources more steady.
That leaves us with the possibility that their crops are very nutrient-poor as a general rule, and over time evolution (perhaps even sexual selection) led to smaller creatures. The conservative culture of hobbits would permit a much later influx of resources would increase the breeding rate but not allow sexual selection to suggest taller individuals.
See how TFA is a Slashdot BI story? The people having the headaches aren't the coders, but the IT people who support the cloud servers that support their products. The cure, presumably, is buying more business solutions. This is a "people are gonna buy stuff!" market-manipulating fluff piece, which is why it makes no sense to us as engineers. It boils down to "we're dumb enough to think the idea of a lot of people streaming video simultaneously is a non-trivial problem for existing infrastructure, and we want you to be that dumb, too."
There isn't really a how here—just (rather gamy) reflections on possible "why"s. The piece is not really very good at generating sympathy, either; the author comes across as erratic, impatient, and insecure—more than a little like a stereotypical teenage girl in disguise. Perhaps the true lesson is that marketing is a strange, shallow world. (And more importantly, why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go? Do they just randomly axe underperformers at FB, or was that another critical part of the coherent thinking process left out of the story?)
Silly. I was talking about the summary and the summary only. Obviously they're not actually constructed that way. Keep working on those reading comprehension skills!
Considering how many robocall campaigns have been unleashed on Americans during the past few elections to purposefully mislead groups of voters about where polling stations are, this is a pretty important service. I just hope they get it to other countries soon, too—the Conservative Party of Canada appears to have stolen the last election using such a tactic.
To make up for that perceived shortage, the official GNU/Emacs distribution comes with a large amount of crufty, unfunny junk crammed in its/etc directory. Take a look!
I was thinking the same thing. Even with medical implants, electronic waste disposal is a problem because of the materials used, not the fact that they need to be removed. Even a more literal reading of TFS implies that our bodies will just absorb mercury, gold, silicon, lead, and so on from these new implants. (Awkward.)
...Ununtrium! Like all of the elements in that range that haven't been sufficiently studied yet. Great job naming it, Japan.
But for those curious, it's a toss-up between "Japonium," "Rikenium," and "Becquerelium". (Some Russians were involved and felt that the French physicist Henri Becquerel was under appreciated.)
The retina display scales everything by 200%, which means that a grid of one-pixel lines will at least be displayed evenly even with bilinear filtering. In TFA, they scaled to 125%, causing (predictably) this to mess up in IE. If anything I'd blame the user, although the argument can be made that IE should use a nicer scaling algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
That might not be quite as much of a victory as it seems if you want 3D printers to be mainstream products.
Some abilities are really intricate and hard to re-learn. Some other very basic functions are essentially the result of hard-coded developmental programs, and are (probably) outside of the space of things we can learn naturally; anterograde amnesia is an example of this. I can't say what facial recognition falls under, (not a neurologist) but I would guess it's more like the latter. Here's an example of a man who lost the ability to generate novel speech, although he can still recognize language and repeat memorized sequences like the alphabet.
I'm filing this one under "the vagaries of public science education"—anything that equates learning to programming an FPGA is already pretty detached from reality. I really just wanted to emphasize the idea that neuronal activation generally cascades, and that, at least locally, the idea of activation at a regular interval is biologically relevant. I'd edit the old post if I could.
That sounds even more terrifying.
Do you really think humans need more ways to kill each other?
Longevity vitamins. The vapid sensationalism of his writing is advertisement and subtle self-promotion. He is not a dreamer or great thinker, like Carl Sagan or Douglas Hofstader; merely a con man who tries to avoid being too transparent.
It works up to a certain point—there's evidence the brain even has a clock rate, for example (but you can't mess with it because everything else depends on it, so don't joke about that)—but be wary of making too many assumptions about comparing it to a normal computer. While the tasks are localized to some extent, the localizations aren't always physically contiguous, and the placement of bottlenecks is wildly complex and hard to fathom. Also, it's probably less like a standard CPU and more like an FPGA, though we don't really understand how abstracted everything is.
That's the power of obscenely deep neural networks, for you.
The concept of 'a small percentage' is a misrepresentation—it's like saying we only use a small amount of a CPU's die in each instruction. The whole brain gets used, just not constantly.
Number one: Ray and Terry's Longevity Products.
The best part about Trailblazer is that it doesn't care who or where you are—it knows anyway!
Given that they cost somewhere in the vicinity of a billion dollars, I hope so?
– Both Saturn V and the shuttle launch system were designed to handle failure of at least one engine
– The entire engine didn't actually explode, as some sources have reported; the onboard computers were still sending data from it (SpaceX believes it was just the aerodynamic casing (fairing) that exploded, due to the pressure release of the engine)
– This doesn't mean the Falcon 9 system is necessarily less safe than NASA systems; on two occasions, Saturn V rockets experienced a similar loss, with similar (i.e., nil) impact to the mission's success
So, y'know. Rejoice nerdily about the fact that the failsafes worked, rather than worrying about commercial technology being inferior.
Personally, I'm voting for "literary necessity" followed by "some convenient agricultural innovation."
More seriously: without having read nearly as much Tolkien as I'd like to be able to claim, and without even referencing your LotR Project link because it's Slashdotted right now, one of the theories behind island dwarfism is a series of population explosions: the creatures over-eat, consume all available resources, and only the smallest organisms are able to find enough food to survive afterwards. This doesn't really scale well to an agrarian culture like the hobbits, since the primary purpose of farming is to make food sources more steady.
That leaves us with the possibility that their crops are very nutrient-poor as a general rule, and over time evolution (perhaps even sexual selection) led to smaller creatures. The conservative culture of hobbits would permit a much later influx of resources would increase the breeding rate but not allow sexual selection to suggest taller individuals.
Commoditization of all human affection! The incurably Single intend to devalue all of the In A Relationships and It's Complicateds!
See how TFA is a Slashdot BI story? The people having the headaches aren't the coders, but the IT people who support the cloud servers that support their products. The cure, presumably, is buying more business solutions. This is a "people are gonna buy stuff!" market-manipulating fluff piece, which is why it makes no sense to us as engineers. It boils down to "we're dumb enough to think the idea of a lot of people streaming video simultaneously is a non-trivial problem for existing infrastructure, and we want you to be that dumb, too."
There isn't really a how here—just (rather gamy) reflections on possible "why"s. The piece is not really very good at generating sympathy, either; the author comes across as erratic, impatient, and insecure—more than a little like a stereotypical teenage girl in disguise. Perhaps the true lesson is that marketing is a strange, shallow world. (And more importantly, why doesn't the blog article mention any attempts at intervention before he was let go? Do they just randomly axe underperformers at FB, or was that another critical part of the coherent thinking process left out of the story?)
Well, they tried reversing the acronym, but then no one cared...
Silly. I was talking about the summary and the summary only. Obviously they're not actually constructed that way. Keep working on those reading comprehension skills!
Considering how many robocall campaigns have been unleashed on Americans during the past few elections to purposefully mislead groups of voters about where polling stations are, this is a pretty important service. I just hope they get it to other countries soon, too—the Conservative Party of Canada appears to have stolen the last election using such a tactic.
To make up for that perceived shortage, the official GNU/Emacs distribution comes with a large amount of crufty, unfunny junk crammed in its /etc directory. Take a look!
I was thinking the same thing. Even with medical implants, electronic waste disposal is a problem because of the materials used, not the fact that they need to be removed. Even a more literal reading of TFS implies that our bodies will just absorb mercury, gold, silicon, lead, and so on from these new implants. (Awkward.)
Dude, it's idiot savant, not cosmonaut. Get it right!
...Ununtrium! Like all of the elements in that range that haven't been sufficiently studied yet. Great job naming it, Japan.
But for those curious, it's a toss-up between "Japonium," "Rikenium," and "Becquerelium". (Some Russians were involved and felt that the French physicist Henri Becquerel was under appreciated.)
The retina display scales everything by 200%, which means that a grid of one-pixel lines will at least be displayed evenly even with bilinear filtering. In TFA, they scaled to 125%, causing (predictably) this to mess up in IE. If anything I'd blame the user, although the argument can be made that IE should use a nicer scaling algorithm.