We should deal with the fact that more people are passionate about topics like Art and Humanities than Math and Computer Science. It's just the reality of academia right now.
Of course it is, because we have these ridiculous stigmas:
Art is passionate, frivolous, and beautiful. Math is boring, uninspiring, and useful.
What?! There is no such thing as frivolous beauty; no utility is uninspiring and cold. Lockhart, I fear, misses this point. I understand the frustration Lockhart feels at the 'math = boring' stigma, but countering that 'math = art' is just as damning in our obsessed-with-mutual-exclusion society.
Beauty and utility have long been a happy couple. The false rumors of their divorce is, I think, the root of Lockhart's (and my) frustration.
Gold at 30% extra is swell deal if you are faced with possibility that your cash would be worth 50% less tomorrow.
No it isn't, because one of your other options is gold without the 30% premium. If you don't like fiat currency, fine, invest in whatever you like. But why you'd pay a premium over the market value is beyond me.
Vending machines work for candy bars. I'm willing to pay a markup because I want my snack in my hand right now. What could possibly be the urgency with gold?
(Yeah, yeah, hyperinflation in post-WWI Germany or late '80s Argentina or current Zimbabwe. You think what Zimbabwe needs are vending machines for gold?)
Software, like science, produces a non-rival public good. (Nonrival means it is not consumed when somebody uses it.) But there are private research companies just like there are private software companies.
I used to work in a publicly-funded virology lab studying Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). My biggest result was finding this particular human gene that HCV required in order to infect a person. If you took liver tissue, knocked out that gene, and tried to infect it with HCV... no infection. Has anyone seen this before? Nothing in the scientific literature, but we found a dusty old patent from a company that had clearly found this connection years earlier, but never published it or followed it up. The company was likely hedging its bets in case it wanted to follow up later. HCV kills tens of thousands of people a year (liver cancer). Just makes me so frustrated.
Most people are already familiar with negative market externalities like pollution or overfishing. Science and software both exemplify positive externalities, which are just as problematic in free market capitalism. If only there were a clear way to internalize externalities!
The internet-justice connection is also about making information easily accessible to the public. And sometimes the public know what the police don't.
Ted Kaczynsky was identified by his brother somewhat due to his reversed (though also correct) use of the phrase 'you can't eat your cake and have it too.' I imagine many aspects of a crime could be identified through that kind of esoteric data, if only the right people saw it.
GPS shoes could track... anyone wearing the shoes. Wandering children, suspicious spouses, prisoners, whomever you want.
Am I missing something, or is this story less "new tech" and more "we finally found a relatively non-controversial market." Congrats for the shareholders, but hardly newsworthy.
Sorry to be pedantic, but guano comes out of a cloaca, which is kinda like a combined urine/feces vent. Humans, and most placentals, have separate urine and feces vents.
We usually equate urine with water and salt regulation, but it's also our way of getting rid of nitrogenous waste (ammonia mostly), which we expel as urea. (Incidentally, the word 'urea' derives from 'urine,' and not vice-versa.) Since birds don't urinate, they convert their nitrogenous wastes into uric acid, which is what stains rocks and statues white. So, especially given the point of this article, the guano/feces precision is relevant.
You raise a common question: why not look for life as we do not know it? Why are we looking for something so darn Earth-like?
Yes, life could exist elsewhere. There are soooo many possibilities. I mean, we seem pretty distance-from-the-star-centric, but even on Earth some critters aren't solar-energy dependent! Did you know Jupiter radiates more heat than it gets from the sun?
But basically, here's why we're looking for Earth-like planets:
Big gas giants are 0 for 4 on having life (that we know of)
Objects that do not revolve around a star: 0 for many
Small rocky planets: 1 for 4
Rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star: 1 for 1
We have limited resources, so we are forced to narrow our scope. Narrowing our sights based on the few dozen studied objects in our solar system... it's easy to mock, but what else can we do? We can (1) keep searching through our own solar system to ameliorate some of the "sampling bias," and (2) look for rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star. And that's pretty much what we're doing.
Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.
From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."
To use a polemical and simple example, imagine a time before trisomy 21 (aka Down's Syndrome) was understood. Then instead of understanding a cause (trisomy 21), we had to rely on symptoms (mental retardation). You can't take a symptom and pretend it's a cause. Mental retardation is ill-defined and has many potential causes, and lumping all "mentally retarded" people together is disingenuous. If mental retardation were treated like ADHD is today, then anyone who did poorly in school would be labeled mentally retarded and given a prescription, some pills, a stigma, and a glass ceiling.
We should welcome even small steps towards objectivity and causation for ill-defined diagnoses like ADHD.
Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"
My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...
This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.
TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.
the dentistry was for purely cosmetic purposes. "They were not marks of social class,"
Hmm. Methinks that all cosmetics are about improving your social class, and the quality of those cosmetics indicates which social class you can get away with claiming to be part of.
Actions can only determine social class in meritocratic cultures.
If this was a caste culture, then cosmetics might have made someone more important within their class, but... an Untouchable cannot become a Brahmin. Perhaps Jimenez meant that the cosmetics were not indicative of any particular social class.
From TFA: "Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they'll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible."
Once you give participants the tools to mold a game, then "molding the game" becomes a meta-game. And the goal is obviously to exploit loopholes in the original game as much as possible. It's just too bad the meta-game-playing folk conflict with the original-game-playing folk.
If we want people to use less gas, why not just raise the darn price?
There are times and places for government regulation, but requiring a minimum fuel efficiency? If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, then fuel efficiency is just a half-assed proxy for fuel consumption.
42 mpg x 20 mile commute each day is a lot more fuel consumptive than 20 mpg x occasional grocery trip.
And what qualifies as a "car" and what as a "light truck" and "SUV," all of which have their separate regulations? What a mess.
People respond to their pocketbooks. In this case, it's easy to align people's incentives with the goals we want to achieve: Make gas expensive.
(Hint: Cows point north, but not necessarily magnetic north, which can be off by a VERY large margin in some areas.)
The disparity between polar north and magnetic north is exactly what led the researchers to conclude that the cattle are EMF sensing. From the 2008 paper:
"To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north."
3 and 4 are essentially the same, since what is preventing offspring between A and C is a physical problem. Generally, none of these reasons are considered valid for determining species.
Okay, instead of the dog example, try the canonical example of a 'ring species': these California salamanders. In that case, A and C cannot interbreed, and neither can their gametes.
* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!
Yes, that's what we call "speciation". It's a single species differentiating into two species. I hope you can see why going back in time is not reasonable for determining species.
I'm saying that going back in time shows how arbitrary the species concept is. At one point, we and chimps shared a common ancestor. Then we went our separate ways, and are now considered two species. 5 million years ago, we were one species. Now, we're two species. Where do you draw the line?
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
Obviously, it's a more complicated problem.
Ability to produce viable offspring is actually only one measure of whether two species are separate, but it's a fairly useful one.
I'm genuinely curious: what other definitions do you use? (I'm a grad student in evo bio.)
We're pretty much on the same page. I just lean towards the Jung/collective unconscious camp of myths, rather than the retelling of historical events. But hey, I've seen sand dollars in the Sahara, and a catastrophic flood sure fits the bill.
Good link on Aboriginal mythology! Didn't know any of that. Thanks.
Reading over my own post, you're right: I did sound like I think myths have no value. What I mean is: I think myths tell us more about ourselves than about the physical world around us.
As I was reading this I wondered if this is perhaps the origin of the "Cain and Abel" myth?
Not a bad idea, but I'm always skeptical of the "myths must have some ancient basis in reality" theme.
Neanderthals went extinct ~30,000 years ago. That's ~1500 generations between Neanderthals going extinct and the writing of the bible. Maybe the story was passed on from grandparent to grandkid 800 times, but it seems more likely that Cain and Abel was just made up.
Maybe the unicorn really is grounded in the narwhal, or the cyclops in elephant skulls, or sea serpents in oarfish. But I bet the vast majority of myths are exactly that: myths. And I wonder if 'justifying' myths with science is misguided.
Lots of comments say "not cannibalism!" And they have a point. But...
The root of this semantic impasse is that there is no good definition of species, and I don't think there ever will be.
The one usually taught in undergrad bio -- ability to make viable offspring -- has problems. To name a few:
* Two same-gendered humans can't make a viable offspring.
* Prepubescent children, post-menopausal women, and many other humans are sterile.
* Sometimes two "species" could create viable offspring, but they don't. (E.g., different mating dances preclude them mating, but in a lab, sperm A and egg B make a viable offspring.)
* Sometimes A can mate with B, and B with C, but A cannot mate with C directly. (A Chihuahua cannot mate with a Great Dane. It's physically impossible.)
* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
So whether or not this is 'cannibalism' relies on whether the fossil H. sapiens are conspecific with the fossil H. neanderwhatever. And that's a semantic question with no answer.
But cannibalism or not, our ancestors apparently ate them some neanderthals!
Old arcade games had points. Your goal was to get on the high score list, so everyone could see how good you were. You weren't meant to actually win games. Heck, if you get too far in Pac-Man, it crashes.
When console gaming got big, people didn't care too much about points. It wasn't as fun -- nobody was there to see it. So points went out of fashion, and the goal was instead to win. Super Mario 3 for NES had points, but who cared? It was beatable, and we wanted to win.
Now that consoles are networked, gamers can have public recognition again. And back to points we go...
Slashdot Mirror
We should deal with the fact that more people are passionate about topics like Art and Humanities than Math and Computer Science. It's just the reality of academia right now.
Of course it is, because we have these ridiculous stigmas:
Art is passionate, frivolous, and beautiful.
Math is boring, uninspiring, and useful.
What?! There is no such thing as frivolous beauty; no utility is uninspiring and cold. Lockhart, I fear, misses this point. I understand the frustration Lockhart feels at the 'math = boring' stigma, but countering that 'math = art' is just as damning in our obsessed-with-mutual-exclusion society.
Beauty and utility have long been a happy couple. The false rumors of their divorce is, I think, the root of Lockhart's (and my) frustration.
Gold at 30% extra is swell deal if you are faced with possibility that your cash would be worth 50% less tomorrow.
No it isn't, because one of your other options is gold without the 30% premium. If you don't like fiat currency, fine, invest in whatever you like. But why you'd pay a premium over the market value is beyond me.
Vending machines work for candy bars. I'm willing to pay a markup because I want my snack in my hand right now. What could possibly be the urgency with gold?
(Yeah, yeah, hyperinflation in post-WWI Germany or late '80s Argentina or current Zimbabwe. You think what Zimbabwe needs are vending machines for gold?)
Software, like science, produces a non-rival public good. (Nonrival means it is not consumed when somebody uses it.) But there are private research companies just like there are private software companies.
I used to work in a publicly-funded virology lab studying Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). My biggest result was finding this particular human gene that HCV required in order to infect a person. If you took liver tissue, knocked out that gene, and tried to infect it with HCV... no infection. Has anyone seen this before? Nothing in the scientific literature, but we found a dusty old patent from a company that had clearly found this connection years earlier, but never published it or followed it up. The company was likely hedging its bets in case it wanted to follow up later. HCV kills tens of thousands of people a year (liver cancer). Just makes me so frustrated.
Most people are already familiar with negative market externalities like pollution or overfishing. Science and software both exemplify positive externalities, which are just as problematic in free market capitalism. If only there were a clear way to internalize externalities!
Unlike homeowner's insurance, where you ARE playing against the house. Or car insurance. Or the state lottery. Or mutual funds. Or health insurance.
We manage risk all the time, and happily pay people for the privilege. I've never understood why poker got such a bad rep.
The internet-justice connection is also about making information easily accessible to the public. And sometimes the public know what the police don't.
Ted Kaczynsky was identified by his brother somewhat due to his reversed (though also correct) use of the phrase 'you can't eat your cake and have it too.' I imagine many aspects of a crime could be identified through that kind of esoteric data, if only the right people saw it.
GPS shoes could track... anyone wearing the shoes. Wandering children, suspicious spouses, prisoners, whomever you want.
Am I missing something, or is this story less "new tech" and more "we finally found a relatively non-controversial market." Congrats for the shareholders, but hardly newsworthy.
Sorry to be pedantic, but guano comes out of a cloaca, which is kinda like a combined urine/feces vent. Humans, and most placentals, have separate urine and feces vents.
We usually equate urine with water and salt regulation, but it's also our way of getting rid of nitrogenous waste (ammonia mostly), which we expel as urea. (Incidentally, the word 'urea' derives from 'urine,' and not vice-versa.) Since birds don't urinate, they convert their nitrogenous wastes into uric acid, which is what stains rocks and statues white. So, especially given the point of this article, the guano/feces precision is relevant.
...from his residence under a highway bridge.
Sometimes you just gotta hand it to a troll for sheer dedication. (+1, troll?)
You raise a common question: why not look for life as we do not know it? Why are we looking for something so darn Earth-like?
Yes, life could exist elsewhere. There are soooo many possibilities. I mean, we seem pretty distance-from-the-star-centric, but even on Earth some critters aren't solar-energy dependent! Did you know Jupiter radiates more heat than it gets from the sun?
But basically, here's why we're looking for Earth-like planets:
Big gas giants are 0 for 4 on having life (that we know of)
Objects that do not revolve around a star: 0 for many
Small rocky planets: 1 for 4
Rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star: 1 for 1
We have limited resources, so we are forced to narrow our scope. Narrowing our sights based on the few dozen studied objects in our solar system... it's easy to mock, but what else can we do? We can (1) keep searching through our own solar system to ameliorate some of the "sampling bias," and (2) look for rocky Earth-sized planets that are 0.9-1.1 AU from a medium-sized star. And that's pretty much what we're doing.
Personally I don't believe there is such a thing as anthropomorphic climate change...
Climate Change is furious at your disbelief! Climate Change rages, shaking in thunderous fury!
(I think you were looking for anthropogenic...)
Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.
From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."
To use a polemical and simple example, imagine a time before trisomy 21 (aka Down's Syndrome) was understood. Then instead of understanding a cause (trisomy 21), we had to rely on symptoms (mental retardation). You can't take a symptom and pretend it's a cause. Mental retardation is ill-defined and has many potential causes, and lumping all "mentally retarded" people together is disingenuous. If mental retardation were treated like ADHD is today, then anyone who did poorly in school would be labeled mentally retarded and given a prescription, some pills, a stigma, and a glass ceiling.
We should welcome even small steps towards objectivity and causation for ill-defined diagnoses like ADHD.
Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"
My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...
This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.
TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.
Hmm. Methinks that all cosmetics are about improving your social class, and the quality of those cosmetics indicates which social class you can get away with claiming to be part of.
Actions can only determine social class in meritocratic cultures.
If this was a caste culture, then cosmetics might have made someone more important within their class, but... an Untouchable cannot become a Brahmin. Perhaps Jimenez meant that the cosmetics were not indicative of any particular social class.
From TFA:
"Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they'll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible."
Once you give participants the tools to mold a game, then "molding the game" becomes a meta-game. And the goal is obviously to exploit loopholes in the original game as much as possible. It's just too bad the meta-game-playing folk conflict with the original-game-playing folk.
If we want people to use less gas, why not just raise the darn price?
There are times and places for government regulation, but requiring a minimum fuel efficiency? If the goal is to reduce greenhouse gases, then fuel efficiency is just a half-assed proxy for fuel consumption.
42 mpg x 20 mile commute each day is a lot more fuel consumptive than 20 mpg x occasional grocery trip.
And what qualifies as a "car" and what as a "light truck" and "SUV," all of which have their separate regulations? What a mess.
People respond to their pocketbooks. In this case, it's easy to align people's incentives with the goals we want to achieve: Make gas expensive.
quote> Huh, I usually rush like hell to get code out, and to this day/em> nobody lets me near their computer...
Maybe I'll try your tack.
(Hint: Cows point north, but not necessarily magnetic north, which can be off by a VERY large margin in some areas.)
The disparity between polar north and magnetic north is exactly what led the researchers to conclude that the cattle are EMF sensing. From the 2008 paper:
"To test the hypothesis that cattle orient their body axes along the field lines of the Earth's magnetic field, we analyzed the body orientation of cattle from localities with high magnetic declination. Here, magnetic north was a better predictor than geographic north."
These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.
By that definition, why not count your sense of humor?
Only recently have we realized that cows and deer have a sense of magnetic direction. Just this month, the same group found that power lines can muddle the cattle's sense of direction.
It's a stretch, but is it possible we humans have a weak magnetic sense that's simply drowned out by urban noise?
Surely there have been studies on this. Anyone?
3 and 4 are essentially the same, since what is preventing offspring between A and C is a physical problem. Generally, none of these reasons are considered valid for determining species.
Okay, instead of the dog example, try the canonical example of a 'ring species': these California salamanders. In that case, A and C cannot interbreed, and neither can their gametes.
* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!
Yes, that's what we call "speciation". It's a single species differentiating into two species. I hope you can see why going back in time is not reasonable for determining species.
I'm saying that going back in time shows how arbitrary the species concept is. At one point, we and chimps shared a common ancestor. Then we went our separate ways, and are now considered two species. 5 million years ago, we were one species. Now, we're two species. Where do you draw the line?
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
Obviously, it's a more complicated problem.
Ability to produce viable offspring is actually only one measure of whether two species are separate, but it's a fairly useful one.
I'm genuinely curious: what other definitions do you use? (I'm a grad student in evo bio.)
We're pretty much on the same page. I just lean towards the Jung/collective unconscious camp of myths, rather than the retelling of historical events. But hey, I've seen sand dollars in the Sahara, and a catastrophic flood sure fits the bill.
Good link on Aboriginal mythology! Didn't know any of that. Thanks.
Reading over my own post, you're right: I did sound like I think myths have no value. What I mean is:
I think myths tell us more about ourselves than about the physical world around us.
As I was reading this I wondered if this is perhaps the origin of the "Cain and Abel" myth?
Not a bad idea, but I'm always skeptical of the "myths must have some ancient basis in reality" theme.
Neanderthals went extinct ~30,000 years ago. That's ~1500 generations between Neanderthals going extinct and the writing of the bible. Maybe the story was passed on from grandparent to grandkid 800 times, but it seems more likely that Cain and Abel was just made up.
Maybe the unicorn really is grounded in the narwhal, or the cyclops in elephant skulls, or sea serpents in oarfish. But I bet the vast majority of myths are exactly that: myths. And I wonder if 'justifying' myths with science is misguided.
Lots of comments say "not cannibalism!" And they have a point. But...
The root of this semantic impasse is that there is no good definition of species, and I don't think there ever will be.
The one usually taught in undergrad bio -- ability to make viable offspring -- has problems. To name a few:
* Two same-gendered humans can't make a viable offspring.
* Prepubescent children, post-menopausal women, and many other humans are sterile.
* Sometimes two "species" could create viable offspring, but they don't. (E.g., different mating dances preclude them mating, but in a lab, sperm A and egg B make a viable offspring.)
* Sometimes A can mate with B, and B with C, but A cannot mate with C directly. (A Chihuahua cannot mate with a Great Dane. It's physically impossible.)
* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
So whether or not this is 'cannibalism' relies on whether the fossil H. sapiens are conspecific with the fossil H. neanderwhatever. And that's a semantic question with no answer.
But cannibalism or not, our ancestors apparently ate them some neanderthals!
Old arcade games had points. Your goal was to get on the high score list, so everyone could see how good you were. You weren't meant to actually win games. Heck, if you get too far in Pac-Man, it crashes.
When console gaming got big, people didn't care too much about points. It wasn't as fun -- nobody was there to see it. So points went out of fashion, and the goal was instead to win. Super Mario 3 for NES had points, but who cared? It was beatable, and we wanted to win.
Now that consoles are networked, gamers can have public recognition again. And back to points we go...