Biology turns out to be way cooler than all this computer stuff. The cells in your body are actually stochastic digital computers which were not designed by a human intelligence, and so we're basically hacking alien computers to figure out how life works, and these computers are WAY more complicated and powerful than anything you've ever experienced.
If you're a young tech geek, then this might just inspire a career-path change.
The MIT OCW course linked here has both audio and video lectures (I first listened to the audio version and was able to get most of it without needing the video content). Don't get too bogged down in the chemistry at the beginning. And know that what we know has increased dramatically from the time of this 2004 snapshot.
It's getting a bit long in the tooth now (there's an updated 701SC in their simplistic "Scholar" series, but I find it just too light and fluffy without most of the really inspiring stuff). Hopefully they will release the full 7.012 from fall 2011 at some point.
I mean, isn't it going to be both a bit creepy and scary?
You've got the memories of all the people who died next door, and if there's one thing that would get a terrorist excited it would be the idea of knocking down the tower *again* after we went to the trouble to rebuild the thing.
You're going to need one heck of an immunity to superstition and a lot of faith to not at least consider these things.
I'm really curious to know how much occupancy they have lined up and whether the rates reflect any of this.
It's a silly sporting event that happens every few years. It's not like they're landing on Mars for the first time or something.
Actually we are landing on Mars during the London Olympics!
The nuclear-powered Mars rover Curiosity should arrive there around August 6th, smack in the middle of the Olympics.
And I expect the coverage of that event to be WAAAAY more exciting than any of the Olympic events.
G.
P.S. Unless the new Rover ends up following the Simplified Planetary Landing Approach Trajectory that was so popular with some other Mars missions in the past.
...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.
But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.
So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.
It seems to me that the 10 and 2 thing probably derives from a time when cars did not have power steering or even when power steering was less effective than it often is now. We're not *quite* to steer-by-wire yet:
but there has been a continuous evolution from steering-as-force to steering-as-information-input (at least for most ordinary street vehicles).
The reasons for drilling the 10 and 2 thing into people may be mostly irrelevant in many of today's vehicles, which explains why the dangers of the airbag may now overwhelm any other consideration.
But it didn't even have to be Encarta or any electronic encyclopedia that did it.
The market for encyclopedias at that time was probably almost exactly the same market for PCs, middle-class families willing to make a large one-time expenditure to help with their kids future (or their own).
The PC was new and held the same promise that it would inform and educate your kids so they could grow up to be smarter and more successful. The fact that something like Encarta was available for it was simply icing on the cake, but people would probably have chosen the cake anyway.
The Encyclopedia was old-and-busted and the PC was teh-new-hotness and their customers could only afford one or the other. Sure, rich people could buy both, but that wasn't how EB made their money. They sold "the larger world and knowledge and the future" to greater middle-class america, and the computer was those things made incarnate and so I suspect everyone who had a nagging feeling that maybe an Encyclopedia would be something they should buy replaced it with a nagging feeling that they really ought to buy a computer, and the rest is as they say, history.
In the US at least it's a federal crime to copy or scan and print (potentially even just scan) US currency, so this is one of those lame things you really don't want to do.
You can end up with a visit from the FBI and potentially even prosecution if someone simply finds your copies in the trash and reports it.
Just fooling around or having no criminal intent probably will not protect you, and the RIAA/MPAA will probably be more than happy to report you if you mail copies to them.
So does their service provide every DVD and BluRay movie on earth, or if I go in with my obscure DVD collection am I going to be told "Sorry, don't have that one, sorry don't have that one,...". I assume they're not actually ripping disks, just scanning the barcodes on the box or inserting the disc in a reader for a few seconds to ID it.
If you're too honest to download torrents, but not quite honest enough to pay full price, it seems as though there is a big opportunity to borrow your friends disc collections and stop by Walmart and get your own access to all of them for $2 each.
I wonder if their system can identify burned DVD and distinguish them from the real thing (image of dim Walmart employee happily feeding DVD-R disks with hand written labels into the system...
Jacques get in his car, decides to use his $2 breathalyzer which says he is under the legal limit.
He drives off and ends up killing a family of four in a crosswalk.
Which of these is going to be the case:
A) The fact that he used the breathalyzer and it indicated he was not over the limit is a sufficient defense against a charge of drunk driving.
B) The fact that he used the breathalyzer indicates he felt there was a chance he was over the limit, and is thus sufficient proof that he was impaired.
Yes, it's about 816 characters in total. This is complete fail compared to the kind of stuff that's done for the IOCCC competition. The 140 byte function they wrote implements once tiny part of the whole thing, and looking at it suggests that there really aren't going to be many interesting programs possible in 140 bytes of javascript.
If you want to see actually impressive tiny programs written in 2K of C code, like the guy who wrote an entire BASIC interpreter one year and then followed it up with a compiler for the same language the next year, then check out the IOCCC sinners page:
HP convinced Intel that it was not going to be possible to scale performance of the x86 architecture any more, and that the only options was a new architecture that exposed massive processor resources directly to the compiler which would use its broad scope of compile-time code visibility to explicitly schedule the code optimally for execution. The result was the Itanium architecture,
Unfortunately (for them) this turned out not to be a win, because even the best compilers can't predict what's really going to happen at runtime. They also took WAY too long to get Itanium working, and also what they were doing was pushing a hardware problem back up into software with an apparent belief that a silver bullet would be available to slay the problem of a ridiculously complicated piece of software that they needed to develop (the compiler).
If not for the delays and one other little problem they probably would have succeeded in replacing x86 with Itanium, whether or not it was a technically viable idea.
That one other little problem was AMD, who decided that yes you could push the x86 architecture quite a bit further along than where it was when Intel effectively abandoned it during the Itanium development. AMD pulled some rabbits out of hats and basically took over x86 development from Intel for a while. Eventually Intel was forced to get back into the x86 world in a serious way, when it became clear that AMD was going to pretty much take over the market with 100% compatible processors (and with 64-bit capability) where Intel was going to be stuck pushing an overweight, incompatible, late, and under-performing alternative.
Unfortunately for AMD, once Intel finally got the boat turned around in the right direction, they had the money and the engineers and architects to do x68 even better, and they have proceeded to produce a series of incredibly impressive implementations which squeeze the most out of both process improvements as well as architectural advances.
I think that without the Itanium detour there would never have been an opportunity for AMD to do what they did, but without AMD we would probably all be struggling with the baroque complexities of Itanium-powered PCs (which is too bad because then I would have been able to make lots of money hand-coding Itanium machine instructions for people:)
Quite a few years ago we bought an allegedly new drive from a bay area electronics retailer, and found it to contain some sort of raw partition containing a list of the names of approximately HALF THE PEOPLE in the United States along with some "number". Those of us who were listed in the data were unable to figure out what the number might be (an account number etc.)
Eventually we got bored with the data and put the drive in service for its originally intended application.
I wrote up the event and sent it off to the RISKS list, especially as Peter G. Neumann, the moderator of RISKS, was listed in the data, but they didn't publish it.
And not just in terms of hiring low-wage people in 3rd world countries. Ultimately there is no magical American advantage in smarts and intelligence that says we're going to have an advantage in inventing stuff.
Starting a manufacturing plant requires a huge investment, cooperation of the local government, etc., etc., but the next big thing in software can still come out of someone's garage, and that garage can be anywhere, even some "backwater" country where they don't even have garages. A couple motivated developers and a couple mangy PCs are all you need, and that's rapidly becoming available to a large percentage of our 7,000,000,000 people.
As an example of the internationalization of creative talent, take a look at CGSociety's GCChoice gallery on the front page at:
which shows the latest images voted to be some of the best submitted by artists using computer graphics software. Just like software development, the tools to produce these images are available to anyone in the world with a computer, and that is reflected by the international nature of these images. Just a quick look today shows the most recent top images coming from: Slovakia, the UK, Sweden (x2), Mexico, Iran, China (x3), the USA (x3), Turkey, Korea, and Singapore.
Maybe we can use our big money to quickly buy up the talent when it appears, but the "next big sotware things" are ultimately going to come from all over the world.
Or at least I hope the iPad 3 comes in a 256GB version, because the first 51 pages of "Life on Earth" weigh in at about 1GB. A fully interactive AND full-length textbook at 19MB/page is going to end up being something like 16GB per book. And the authoring costs for something like this produced through a traditional author/publisher process are going to make the things cost way more than a traditional textbook to produce, so will publishers really be on board to charge people less than the typical $120 or so that they want for the much simpler dead-tree edition?
But this technology looks like it holds great hope for community developed collaborative works, though it's not clear if there's a mechanism for collaboration, or whether the sort of people who would be involved in such a collaboration are going to be willing to buy into a proprietary platform-locked technology. Hopefully Apple's efforts will at least inspire the community to come up with similar capabilities.
Now DARPA has provided $500,000 in seed money to help jumpstart the effort
"All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for."
Perhaps they'll just argue that the viewers of the movie are the ones who are infringing by the act of looking at the counterfeit item, and so each moviegoer will owe LV $3,000.
And Android device makers are going to make tens of dollars on each unit while Apple makes hundreds.
I really hope 2012 IS the "year of Android tablets" so that after that we can get on to something else.
Honestly I haven't yet seen a device that's compelling to most end users the way the Apple products are. YES you can do everything with an Android device, but it's the same way you can do everything with Ubuntu Linux on a desktop instead of MacOS or Windows. It's great for us techies, but can you really get your parents to to use one every day?
It's not about the device hardware, It's about the software and the user experience, and at the moment Android devices are just not there yet (well, they are there, but "there" is basically 1995), and the market is way too fragmented without sufficient standardization, and google is not driving things in the correct direction with Android at this point (IMHO).
Google needs to stop assuming they know everything and step back and look at what makes iOS successful, and it's *not* nerdy technical innovation every few months that's incompatible with the previous version. They need to build and own a long-term infrastructure ecosystem that's based on the user experience if they ever want to have a chance at competing with Apple. Currently Google lacks the ability to stick to something for more than a year at a time, and their interests do not actually seem to be driven by end-user happiness.
I predict a year of unfulfilled Android tablet promises.
Kodak introduced it's first high-end (ok, that was the only end there was) digital camera in 1991, more than 20 years ago, so I think it's fair to say they should have seen this coming.
If you can't get the ship turned around given 20 years of pretty clear notice then I don't really feel the need to get all sniffly and sad over their passage.
I recall reading an article that said that all of Facebook's (then) hundreds of programmers all have full access to the live system data. Especially on top of the announcement that they want to double their employees in the next year or whatever, it sort of makes it hopeless to expect any sort of privacy there if anyone actually gets interested in you.
Slashdot Mirror
Most inspiring course that I've seen:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-biology-fall-2004/
Biology turns out to be way cooler than all this computer stuff. The cells in your body are actually stochastic digital computers which were not designed by a human intelligence, and so we're basically hacking alien computers to figure out how life works, and these computers are WAY more complicated and powerful than anything you've ever experienced.
If you're a young tech geek, then this might just inspire a career-path change.
The MIT OCW course linked here has both audio and video lectures (I first listened to the audio version and was able to get most of it without needing the video content). Don't get too bogged down in the chemistry at the beginning. And know that what we know has increased dramatically from the time of this 2004 snapshot.
It's getting a bit long in the tooth now (there's an updated 701SC in their simplistic "Scholar" series, but I find it just too light and fluffy without most of the really inspiring stuff). Hopefully they will release the full 7.012 from fall 2011 at some point.
G.
But at the moment we have cable data only ($53/month or some-such) and upgrading to cable with HBO would be the better part of another $100 per month.
I seriously look forward to a time when the last-mile people can GTFO and allow me to pay for the specific content that I want to buy.
G.
I mean, isn't it going to be both a bit creepy and scary?
You've got the memories of all the people who died next door, and if there's one thing that would get a terrorist excited it would be the idea of knocking down the tower *again* after we went to the trouble to rebuild the thing.
You're going to need one heck of an immunity to superstition and a lot of faith to not at least consider these things.
I'm really curious to know how much occupancy they have lined up and whether the rates reflect any of this.
G.
It's a silly sporting event that happens every few years. It's not like they're landing on Mars for the first time or something.
Actually we are landing on Mars during the London Olympics!
The nuclear-powered Mars rover Curiosity should arrive there around August 6th, smack in the middle of the Olympics.
And I expect the coverage of that event to be WAAAAY more exciting than any of the Olympic events.
G.
P.S. Unless the new Rover ends up following the Simplified Planetary Landing Approach Trajectory that was so popular with some other Mars missions in the past.
...but people forget that "scientists" are not "science", they are simply people using the tools of science to seek the kind of knowledge that the scientific method and process can produce. As such they are subject to all of the same pressures, hopes, dreams, failures, etc. that the rest of us are.
But the process of science itself will always move forward, since science is only about reproducible experiments, so no matter how much bad (human) behavior might get involved, eventually the "truth" will win out. But the bad behavior can of course be extremely damaging to the process.
So there's nothing wrong with "science" or even its application I think. There are probably economic incentives that are promoting behaviors that affect the short-term reliability and the long-term costs of gaining useful scientific knowledge though, and hopefully we can come up with ways of improving the meta-processes.
G.
It seems to me that the 10 and 2 thing probably derives from a time when cars did not have power steering or even when power steering was less effective than it often is now. We're not *quite* to steer-by-wire yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering#Steer-by-wire
but there has been a continuous evolution from steering-as-force to steering-as-information-input (at least for most ordinary street vehicles).
The reasons for drilling the 10 and 2 thing into people may be mostly irrelevant in many of today's vehicles, which explains why the dangers of the airbag may now overwhelm any other consideration.
G.
But it didn't even have to be Encarta or any electronic encyclopedia that did it.
The market for encyclopedias at that time was probably almost exactly the same market for PCs, middle-class families willing to make a large one-time expenditure to help with their kids future (or their own).
The PC was new and held the same promise that it would inform and educate your kids so they could grow up to be smarter and more successful. The fact that something like Encarta was available for it was simply icing on the cake, but people would probably have chosen the cake anyway.
The Encyclopedia was old-and-busted and the PC was teh-new-hotness and their customers could only afford one or the other. Sure, rich people could buy both, but that wasn't how EB made their money. They sold "the larger world and knowledge and the future" to greater middle-class america, and the computer was those things made incarnate and so I suspect everyone who had a nagging feeling that maybe an Encyclopedia would be something they should buy replaced it with a nagging feeling that they really ought to buy a computer, and the rest is as they say, history.
G.
In the US at least it's a federal crime to copy or scan and print (potentially even just scan) US currency, so this is one of those lame things you really don't want to do.
You can end up with a visit from the FBI and potentially even prosecution if someone simply finds your copies in the trash and reports it.
Just fooling around or having no criminal intent probably will not protect you, and the RIAA/MPAA will probably be more than happy to report you if you mail copies to them.
G.
So does their service provide every DVD and BluRay movie on earth, or if I go in with my obscure DVD collection am I going to be told "Sorry, don't have that one, sorry don't have that one, ...". I assume they're not actually ripping disks, just scanning the barcodes on the box or inserting the disc in a reader for a few seconds to ID it.
If you're too honest to download torrents, but not quite honest enough to pay full price, it seems as though there is a big opportunity to borrow your friends disc collections and stop by Walmart and get your own access to all of them for $2 each.
I wonder if their system can identify burned DVD and distinguish them from the real thing (image of dim Walmart employee happily feeding DVD-R disks with hand written labels into the system...
G.
Unless say, there were suddenly 275 people with an interest in your Open Source project who had a lot of time on their hands.
"Sorry about firing your ass, but ya know now that you have nothing better to do, maybe you might..."
G.
Jacques get in his car, decides to use his $2 breathalyzer which says he is under the legal limit.
He drives off and ends up killing a family of four in a crosswalk.
Which of these is going to be the case:
A) The fact that he used the breathalyzer and it indicated he was not over the limit is a sufficient defense against a charge of drunk driving.
B) The fact that he used the breathalyzer indicates he felt there was a chance he was over the limit, and is thus sufficient proof that he was impaired.
G.
Was supposed to be "winners" of course, but then "sinners" might well be the more appropriate term anyway...
G.
Yes, it's about 816 characters in total. This is complete fail compared to the kind of stuff that's done for the IOCCC competition. The 140 byte function they wrote implements once tiny part of the whole thing, and looking at it suggests that there really aren't going to be many interesting programs possible in 140 bytes of javascript.
If you want to see actually impressive tiny programs written in 2K of C code, like the guy who wrote an entire BASIC interpreter one year and then followed it up with a compiler for the same language the next year, then check out the IOCCC sinners page:
http://www.ioccc.org/years.html
G.
HP convinced Intel that it was not going to be possible to scale performance of the x86 architecture any more, and that the only options was a new architecture that exposed massive processor resources directly to the compiler which would use its broad scope of compile-time code visibility to explicitly schedule the code optimally for execution. The result was the Itanium architecture,
Unfortunately (for them) this turned out not to be a win, because even the best compilers can't predict what's really going to happen at runtime. They also took WAY too long to get Itanium working, and also what they were doing was pushing a hardware problem back up into software with an apparent belief that a silver bullet would be available to slay the problem of a ridiculously complicated piece of software that they needed to develop (the compiler).
If not for the delays and one other little problem they probably would have succeeded in replacing x86 with Itanium, whether or not it was a technically viable idea.
That one other little problem was AMD, who decided that yes you could push the x86 architecture quite a bit further along than where it was when Intel effectively abandoned it during the Itanium development. AMD pulled some rabbits out of hats and basically took over x86 development from Intel for a while. Eventually Intel was forced to get back into the x86 world in a serious way, when it became clear that AMD was going to pretty much take over the market with 100% compatible processors (and with 64-bit capability) where Intel was going to be stuck pushing an overweight, incompatible, late, and under-performing alternative.
Unfortunately for AMD, once Intel finally got the boat turned around in the right direction, they had the money and the engineers and architects to do x68 even better, and they have proceeded to produce a series of incredibly impressive implementations which squeeze the most out of both process improvements as well as architectural advances.
I think that without the Itanium detour there would never have been an opportunity for AMD to do what they did, but without AMD we would probably all be struggling with the baroque complexities of Itanium-powered PCs (which is too bad because then I would have been able to make lots of money hand-coding Itanium machine instructions for people :)
G.
Quite a few years ago we bought an allegedly new drive from a bay area electronics retailer, and found it to contain some sort of raw partition containing a list of the names of approximately HALF THE PEOPLE in the United States along with some "number". Those of us who were listed in the data were unable to figure out what the number might be (an account number etc.)
Eventually we got bored with the data and put the drive in service for its originally intended application.
I wrote up the event and sent it off to the RISKS list, especially as Peter G. Neumann, the moderator of RISKS, was listed in the data, but they didn't publish it.
G.
...if scorpions could fly.
G.
And not just in terms of hiring low-wage people in 3rd world countries. Ultimately there is no magical American advantage in smarts and intelligence that says we're going to have an advantage in inventing stuff.
Starting a manufacturing plant requires a huge investment, cooperation of the local government, etc., etc., but the next big thing in software can still come out of someone's garage, and that garage can be anywhere, even some "backwater" country where they don't even have garages. A couple motivated developers and a couple mangy PCs are all you need, and that's rapidly becoming available to a large percentage of our 7,000,000,000 people.
As an example of the internationalization of creative talent, take a look at CGSociety's GCChoice gallery on the front page at:
http://www.cgsociety.org/
which shows the latest images voted to be some of the best submitted by artists using computer graphics software. Just like software development, the tools to produce these images are available to anyone in the world with a computer, and that is reflected by the international nature of these images. Just a quick look today shows the most recent top images coming from: Slovakia, the UK, Sweden (x2), Mexico, Iran, China (x3), the USA (x3), Turkey, Korea, and Singapore.
Maybe we can use our big money to quickly buy up the talent when it appears, but the "next big sotware things" are ultimately going to come from all over the world.
G.
$500M? That's like, what, one .mp3 file these days?
G.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Or at least I hope the iPad 3 comes in a 256GB version, because the first 51 pages of "Life on Earth" weigh in at about 1GB. A fully interactive AND full-length textbook at 19MB/page is going to end up being something like 16GB per book. And the authoring costs for something like this produced through a traditional author/publisher process are going to make the things cost way more than a traditional textbook to produce, so will publishers really be on board to charge people less than the typical $120 or so that they want for the much simpler dead-tree edition?
But this technology looks like it holds great hope for community developed collaborative works, though it's not clear if there's a mechanism for collaboration, or whether the sort of people who would be involved in such a collaboration are going to be willing to buy into a proprietary platform-locked technology. Hopefully Apple's efforts will at least inspire the community to come up with similar capabilities.
G.
Don't you mean: RPN in it no place has?
G.
Now DARPA has provided $500,000 in seed money to help jumpstart the effort
"All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for."
G.
Perhaps they'll just argue that the viewers of the movie are the ones who are infringing by the act of looking at the counterfeit item, and so each moviegoer will owe LV $3,000.
G.
And Android device makers are going to make tens of dollars on each unit while Apple makes hundreds.
I really hope 2012 IS the "year of Android tablets" so that after that we can get on to something else.
Honestly I haven't yet seen a device that's compelling to most end users the way the Apple products are. YES you can do everything with an Android device, but it's the same way you can do everything with Ubuntu Linux on a desktop instead of MacOS or Windows. It's great for us techies, but can you really get your parents to to use one every day?
It's not about the device hardware, It's about the software and the user experience, and at the moment Android devices are just not there yet (well, they are there, but "there" is basically 1995), and the market is way too fragmented without sufficient standardization, and google is not driving things in the correct direction with Android at this point (IMHO).
Google needs to stop assuming they know everything and step back and look at what makes iOS successful, and it's *not* nerdy technical innovation every few months that's incompatible with the previous version. They need to build and own a long-term infrastructure ecosystem that's based on the user experience if they ever want to have a chance at competing with Apple. Currently Google lacks the ability to stick to something for more than a year at a time, and their interests do not actually seem to be driven by end-user happiness.
I predict a year of unfulfilled Android tablet promises.
G.
Kodak introduced it's first high-end (ok, that was the only end there was) digital camera in 1991, more than 20 years ago, so I think it's fair to say they should have seen this coming.
If you can't get the ship turned around given 20 years of pretty clear notice then I don't really feel the need to get all sniffly and sad over their passage.
G.
I recall reading an article that said that all of Facebook's (then) hundreds of programmers all have full access to the live system data. Especially on top of the announcement that they want to double their employees in the next year or whatever, it sort of makes it hopeless to expect any sort of privacy there if anyone actually gets interested in you.
G.