Well, the one time I read a martial artist describing being in that time-altered state, they did indicate they had tunnel vision. Perhaps the martial arts state also combines a hyperfocus with flow and it's the hyperfocus that produces the tunnel vision?
Well, the difference is that there are lots of tall people, but only a few work hard enough to develop the strength, endurance, coordination, skills, and situational awareness to become a professional sports player, be it for basketball, football, baseball, hockey, or some other high profile sport with lucrative TV contracts and advertising endorsement. Those positions are highly competitive. However, you can be a couch potato, elementary school dropout with an IQ well below 100 and still inherit billions.
Actually the retina does have a "sensitivity rate" akin to a refresh rate, but it varies among individuals. When it comes to light level decay from a scanned phosphor in a picture tube, the retinal response is markedly different than it is for gated systems like LED panels. Some people don't see stroboscopic flicker at a 50Hz refresh rate, and some people see flicker at anything less than a 100Hz refresh rate. But as you point out, the vision system is much more complicated than just the retina, and many other functions/layers in the vision system work together to provide the illusion of motion that was originally attributed to persistence of vision.
I think that multiple anecdotes of time slowing down for martial artists in flow indicates that some people are capable of accelerated vision processing, although it apparently involves temporary tunnel vision - ignoring peripheral vision to concentrate vision processing on the more detailed central retinal area. It's unlikely to be a capability used by most people watching TV or computer screens through, let alone cell phones.
End-runs around pesky laws and the constitution is all government knows these days.
So Apple is a branch of the US government? Here I thought it was one of those private corporations that the free marketers claim are the solution to the inherent evil of government. Or did government troops somehow force Steve Jobs at gunpoint to start this litigation and then similarly forced Tim Cook to continue it?
Or you have it in manual mode but the empty Taxis will block you in and force you to a stop. The bank/police dept. will probably pick up the tab on any bodywork the taxis might require afterwards. The problem isn't the bank robbers really; if they get caught then too bad, so sad. It's the other people like whistleblowers who may anger the authorities through legitimate activities beneficial to society but detrimental to certain entrenched power groups, and who get targeted by those entrenched groups.
On the other hand, part of the reason that hour+ matters so much is because your time is being wasted controlling an automobile instead of doing something productive with your time. With an AI is doing the driving, if you're reading, finishing off or prepping for that presentation, or playing a game of PunchBuggy/OhHell/Risk with the kids then you may not care as much if it takes an extra hour.
Because I'm pretty sure those GPS-guided cruise missiles the US Air Force uses are supposed to work in the middle of Siberia, thousands of miles from the nearest town, so that they are hard to detect and stop.
when the nearest hospital is nearly a hundred miles away and the ambulance won't even come to your home. (GPS Doesn't work is their excuse) these self driving cars are going be a godsend since you know they drive by gps and will totally work.
If the self-driving car is in your driveway, how is it going to have problems finding your home? I'm sure that the GPS is used in town because it's cheap. In cases like yours, you could have inertial recorders to track where you are. They use GPS to help determine what intersection they are at but I'm pretty sure they don't drive solely by GPS, so even occasional GPS signalling to true up position calculated from the inertial recorder should be enough. This kind of stuff is EASY to do, the hard part is the real-time 3D vision and spatial recognition of the surrounding environment.
the fact that gps devices generally are only good if you live in a dense urban area, i'll stick to a car where i'm in control.
Only-cheap phone based GPS needs the cell tower information in urban environments. I'm pretty sure the GPS that the Army uses works anywhere that has line-of-sight to satellites. You got a lot of tunnels in Kentucky hollas? Otherwise how good is your driving when you're alone and having a heart attack?
And if neither of you had been there but there had been a self-driving car in the driveway that he managed to walk/crawl to, he also would have made it to the hospital faster than in an ambulance. But without a self-driving car he would be at the mercy of amulance services.
You're ignoring the possibility that in the case you are talking about, in a world of self-driving cars, it might be possible to have a medical emergency code signal that effectively turns your car into a siren-less ambulance where all cars pull off to the side of the road, and all signals and cars on cross streets are stopped so that your automatic car gets to barrel down the street at 90MPH.
I would also add that government is better at funding and managing long-term/basic research - something that most of private enterprise has no interest in doing. There are significant benefits from doing so (for an example look at all that has come out from the human genome project). Otherwise I completely agree with you.
And in a well-managed service where demand is properly monitored and staffing is appropriate, that's as it should be - so long as you avoid obvious peak periods of user activity like lunch break. You'll also get served faster at a restaurant if you show up at 11:45 AM.
However if you don't believe that government can deliver services as effectively as private businesses, even though they have the same tools available and don't need to carry the overhead of returning a profit, then you probably shouldn't be put in charge of running those services. Talk about Nabobs of Negativism!
Part of the reason why the DMV and Social Security customer service experiences are so poor is that there is an overriding effort to provide those services at the least cost. This means that instead of staffing for customer needs, the queuing setup is arranged for maximum worker productivity and these goals are diametrically opposite (which you would understand if you had ever learned any queuing theory). The latter in private business would not be a good thing because it would provide an opportunity for a competitor to gain market share by providing a superior customer experience, however it's done with government because the latter has a monopoly over those services.
Now, if DMV or Social Security inquiry visits naturally tended to be of a predetermined length, it might be possible to allow the online booking of DMV or Social Security appointments in advance, with the caveat that you would miss your appointment if you were even 1 minute late. That would provide improved customer service while still maximizing employee productivity. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of communications capabilities of DMV and Social Security customers, it's doubtful that visit length is that predictable. The variance from the average will result in loss of employee productivity (because you need to use interview slots on the high side of the variance to have guaranteed scheduling) and increased costs would be deemed unacceptable by conservative legislators, so that the only results from attempting such a change would be more delays in getting your issue addressed due to staff shortages from constrained budgets. So about the best you could do is have an online estimate of the servicing time for the current queue (similar to what they do for international border lineups), as well as estimates for the next week based on past trends for that time of day/week/month (taking into account floating holidays).
The people who complain about government providing poor service tend to be the ones who complain the most vociferously about government services being too expensive and demanding drastic cost containment/reductions in those services (which requires maximizing worker productivity at the expense of customer satisfaction). In other words, the ones who complain the most vociferously about the services provided by government are the ones least qualified to manage those services since they can't even see the contradiction in their own positions.
I think he meant that reporters' biases will guide what they think is worth investigating, and therefore some may be less likely to cover certain areas of public or political life. As long as other reporters with different biases choose to cover those areas then that's actually good. Keeping all other things equal (training, talent, skill), those with passion for their work will tend to do a better job of it. However once their subject is chosen, those reporters' investigations may still be carried out and reported in a thorough and unbiased way despite their biases, if their professionalism is sufficiently high.
I think he means higher as in self-aware and capable of the creation of sophisticated cultural systems, as opposed to non-self-aware intelligence in most animals.
I don't believe I have seen anyone argue that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas
Not recently, but I have a few (5 or 6?) years ago. I remember one by a self proclaimed biologist who claimed that CO2 is a natural byproduct of life and therefore can't be dangerous. I kid you not, I remember it was a very popular argument with AGW (as it was called) deniers at the time. Those types of pages don't show up in top Google searches anymore because it's been so easily disproved by anyone with a modicum of understanding of blackbody radiation and absorption spectrums, so its page rank is probably near the bottom now. I mean this is junior high school stuff. But they were out there, and probably still are there now if you knew where to look. I just don't want to waste my time to try to find the links.
There are a lot more small companies in the US than large conglomerates, and yet the US Chamber of Commerce has policies that tend to favour the large corporations. Small companies don't work well with each other enough to have their responsiveness/nimbleness be an enough of an advantage against the economies of scale (and yes the bureaucratic inefficiencies) of the hierarchically organized big players. Multiple levels of hierarchy works against the upper levels being in touch with the leaf workers, but is nevetheless a huge force multiplier when commands are simple and directly articulated.
The problem with your approach is that you ignore the fact that these "like-minded individuals" will use the very "controls" you seek to "protect" the economy to actually exploit it.
I'm sorry but the 19th and 20th centuries are rife with counterexamples, from the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the Wall Street leveraging that caused the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and the US Savings and Loans scandals of the 80s where significant or massive economic damage is perpetrated, requiring decades for recovery. And that's just in the US. The mortgage crisis of 2008 is only the latest example. Even if it is true that a majority of power actors seek to protect the economy, there are significant examples that even a minority of colluding power actors who control a critical segment of the economy can be willing to inflict horrific damage if they can also enrich themselves sufficiently in the process.
On the other hand, an individual can much more easily choose a different product to purchase, business to frequent, job to work at, or place to live than they can choose a new government to be ruled by. Not to mention, natural market forces discourage exploitation and collusion, as competitors can find opportunity to upset incumbents who provide an inferior and/or over-priced product.
That is only true if the proper regulatory environment exists, enforced by that government you want to reduce. Otherwise constructs like company towns can be used to eliminate everyone of the freedoms that you espouse.
Not really. Small companies and individuals don't normally organize as well as hierarchical power structures in large enterprises. Despite the latter's inefficiencies, their executives command much more resources at their disposal than organizations of the former. Individuals and small companies in aggregate have much more diverse interests, resulting in a harder time building conscensus for more than single issues. While there are notable apparent exceptions such as the NRA, but they are often supported by large corporate interests. One of the few real exceptions might be environmental movements, but their available resources are miniscule compared to the IBMs, Exxons, GMs, Walmarts, and Goldman Sachs of the world. The power imbalance is striking. If you don't believe that go look at the wage distribution of Walmart employees.
You appear to misunderstand social dynamics. Those who desire power and the ability to exploit it will naturally do whatever it takes and exploit whatever loopholes may exist in the system to achieve those aims. They will seek out and recognize like-minded individuals and work together to achieve those aims.
This is the basis of cronyism and only a system with appropriate controls, such as fair general elections by an informed populace, can prevent it. Current corporate law does not prevent such actions leading to cronyism, and in fact has a number of exploitable loopholes which facilitate the concentration of power among a connected few.
Market economic theory is based on the fundamental assumption that participants are rational actors interested in maximizing the personal utility of any exchanges. Since things like happiness obtained through altruism are not easily quantifiable and highly variable across the population, in practice they are generally ignored in most economic analyses. So the result is that most economic theories and models are predicated on selfish actors.
Sure but none of those things you mentioned go through the level of wear and tear of an internal combustion engine and its transmission. Few of those things require the level of diagnostic equipment, protected by patented protocols and copyrighted implementations, that the modern ICE does, and therefore those services can be easily provided by third parties like Jiffy Lube or Budget Brake (and Muffler) at prices that seriously undercut typical dealer profit margins.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the one time I read a martial artist describing being in that time-altered state, they did indicate they had tunnel vision. Perhaps the martial arts state also combines a hyperfocus with flow and it's the hyperfocus that produces the tunnel vision?
Well, the difference is that there are lots of tall people, but only a few work hard enough to develop the strength, endurance, coordination, skills, and situational awareness to become a professional sports player, be it for basketball, football, baseball, hockey, or some other high profile sport with lucrative TV contracts and advertising endorsement. Those positions are highly competitive. However, you can be a couch potato, elementary school dropout with an IQ well below 100 and still inherit billions.
Actually the retina does have a "sensitivity rate" akin to a refresh rate, but it varies among individuals. When it comes to light level decay from a scanned phosphor in a picture tube, the retinal response is markedly different than it is for gated systems like LED panels. Some people don't see stroboscopic flicker at a 50Hz refresh rate, and some people see flicker at anything less than a 100Hz refresh rate. But as you point out, the vision system is much more complicated than just the retina, and many other functions/layers in the vision system work together to provide the illusion of motion that was originally attributed to persistence of vision.
I think that multiple anecdotes of time slowing down for martial artists in flow indicates that some people are capable of accelerated vision processing, although it apparently involves temporary tunnel vision - ignoring peripheral vision to concentrate vision processing on the more detailed central retinal area. It's unlikely to be a capability used by most people watching TV or computer screens through, let alone cell phones.
So Apple is a branch of the US government? Here I thought it was one of those private corporations that the free marketers claim are the solution to the inherent evil of government. Or did government troops somehow force Steve Jobs at gunpoint to start this litigation and then similarly forced Tim Cook to continue it?
Airliner avionics aren't exactly simple software. They're a mission-critical integral part of modern airliners.
You would think there would at least be grounds for a Nokia shareholder and employee class action lawsuit.
Actually, I would expect binary star systems to be much more likely candidates for origin of rogue planets.
Or you have it in manual mode but the empty Taxis will block you in and force you to a stop. The bank/police dept. will probably pick up the tab on any bodywork the taxis might require afterwards. The problem isn't the bank robbers really; if they get caught then too bad, so sad. It's the other people like whistleblowers who may anger the authorities through legitimate activities beneficial to society but detrimental to certain entrenched power groups, and who get targeted by those entrenched groups.
On the other hand, part of the reason that hour+ matters so much is because your time is being wasted controlling an automobile instead of doing something productive with your time. With an AI is doing the driving, if you're reading, finishing off or prepping for that presentation, or playing a game of PunchBuggy/OhHell/Risk with the kids then you may not care as much if it takes an extra hour.
Because I'm pretty sure those GPS-guided cruise missiles the US Air Force uses are supposed to work in the middle of Siberia, thousands of miles from the nearest town, so that they are hard to detect and stop.
If the self-driving car is in your driveway, how is it going to have problems finding your home? I'm sure that the GPS is used in town because it's cheap. In cases like yours, you could have inertial recorders to track where you are. They use GPS to help determine what intersection they are at but I'm pretty sure they don't drive solely by GPS, so even occasional GPS signalling to true up position calculated from the inertial recorder should be enough. This kind of stuff is EASY to do, the hard part is the real-time 3D vision and spatial recognition of the surrounding environment.
Only-cheap phone based GPS needs the cell tower information in urban environments. I'm pretty sure the GPS that the Army uses works anywhere that has line-of-sight to satellites. You got a lot of tunnels in Kentucky hollas? Otherwise how good is your driving when you're alone and having a heart attack?
And if neither of you had been there but there had been a self-driving car in the driveway that he managed to walk/crawl to, he also would have made it to the hospital faster than in an ambulance. But without a self-driving car he would be at the mercy of amulance services.
You're ignoring the possibility that in the case you are talking about, in a world of self-driving cars, it might be possible to have a medical emergency code signal that effectively turns your car into a siren-less ambulance where all cars pull off to the side of the road, and all signals and cars on cross streets are stopped so that your automatic car gets to barrel down the street at 90MPH.
I would also add that government is better at funding and managing long-term/basic research - something that most of private enterprise has no interest in doing. There are significant benefits from doing so (for an example look at all that has come out from the human genome project). Otherwise I completely agree with you.
And in a well-managed service where demand is properly monitored and staffing is appropriate, that's as it should be - so long as you avoid obvious peak periods of user activity like lunch break. You'll also get served faster at a restaurant if you show up at 11:45 AM.
However if you don't believe that government can deliver services as effectively as private businesses, even though they have the same tools available and don't need to carry the overhead of returning a profit, then you probably shouldn't be put in charge of running those services. Talk about Nabobs of Negativism!
Part of the reason why the DMV and Social Security customer service experiences are so poor is that there is an overriding effort to provide those services at the least cost. This means that instead of staffing for customer needs, the queuing setup is arranged for maximum worker productivity and these goals are diametrically opposite (which you would understand if you had ever learned any queuing theory). The latter in private business would not be a good thing because it would provide an opportunity for a competitor to gain market share by providing a superior customer experience, however it's done with government because the latter has a monopoly over those services.
Now, if DMV or Social Security inquiry visits naturally tended to be of a predetermined length, it might be possible to allow the online booking of DMV or Social Security appointments in advance, with the caveat that you would miss your appointment if you were even 1 minute late. That would provide improved customer service while still maximizing employee productivity. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of communications capabilities of DMV and Social Security customers, it's doubtful that visit length is that predictable. The variance from the average will result in loss of employee productivity (because you need to use interview slots on the high side of the variance to have guaranteed scheduling) and increased costs would be deemed unacceptable by conservative legislators, so that the only results from attempting such a change would be more delays in getting your issue addressed due to staff shortages from constrained budgets. So about the best you could do is have an online estimate of the servicing time for the current queue (similar to what they do for international border lineups), as well as estimates for the next week based on past trends for that time of day/week/month (taking into account floating holidays).
The people who complain about government providing poor service tend to be the ones who complain the most vociferously about government services being too expensive and demanding drastic cost containment/reductions in those services (which requires maximizing worker productivity at the expense of customer satisfaction). In other words, the ones who complain the most vociferously about the services provided by government are the ones least qualified to manage those services since they can't even see the contradiction in their own positions.
I think he meant that reporters' biases will guide what they think is worth investigating, and therefore some may be less likely to cover certain areas of public or political life. As long as other reporters with different biases choose to cover those areas then that's actually good. Keeping all other things equal (training, talent, skill), those with passion for their work will tend to do a better job of it. However once their subject is chosen, those reporters' investigations may still be carried out and reported in a thorough and unbiased way despite their biases, if their professionalism is sufficiently high.
I think he means higher as in self-aware and capable of the creation of sophisticated cultural systems, as opposed to non-self-aware intelligence in most animals.
Not recently, but I have a few (5 or 6?) years ago. I remember one by a self proclaimed biologist who claimed that CO2 is a natural byproduct of life and therefore can't be dangerous. I kid you not, I remember it was a very popular argument with AGW (as it was called) deniers at the time. Those types of pages don't show up in top Google searches anymore because it's been so easily disproved by anyone with a modicum of understanding of blackbody radiation and absorption spectrums, so its page rank is probably near the bottom now. I mean this is junior high school stuff. But they were out there, and probably still are there now if you knew where to look. I just don't want to waste my time to try to find the links.
There are a lot more small companies in the US than large conglomerates, and yet the US Chamber of Commerce has policies that tend to favour the large corporations. Small companies don't work well with each other enough to have their responsiveness/nimbleness be an enough of an advantage against the economies of scale (and yes the bureaucratic inefficiencies) of the hierarchically organized big players. Multiple levels of hierarchy works against the upper levels being in touch with the leaf workers, but is nevetheless a huge force multiplier when commands are simple and directly articulated.
I'm sorry but the 19th and 20th centuries are rife with counterexamples, from the robber barons of the Gilded Age, the Wall Street leveraging that caused the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and the US Savings and Loans scandals of the 80s where significant or massive economic damage is perpetrated, requiring decades for recovery. And that's just in the US. The mortgage crisis of 2008 is only the latest example. Even if it is true that a majority of power actors seek to protect the economy, there are significant examples that even a minority of colluding power actors who control a critical segment of the economy can be willing to inflict horrific damage if they can also enrich themselves sufficiently in the process.
That is only true if the proper regulatory environment exists, enforced by that government you want to reduce. Otherwise constructs like company towns can be used to eliminate everyone of the freedoms that you espouse.
Not really. Small companies and individuals don't normally organize as well as hierarchical power structures in large enterprises. Despite the latter's inefficiencies, their executives command much more resources at their disposal than organizations of the former. Individuals and small companies in aggregate have much more diverse interests, resulting in a harder time building conscensus for more than single issues. While there are notable apparent exceptions such as the NRA, but they are often supported by large corporate interests. One of the few real exceptions might be environmental movements, but their available resources are miniscule compared to the IBMs, Exxons, GMs, Walmarts, and Goldman Sachs of the world. The power imbalance is striking. If you don't believe that go look at the wage distribution of Walmart employees.
You appear to misunderstand social dynamics. Those who desire power and the ability to exploit it will naturally do whatever it takes and exploit whatever loopholes may exist in the system to achieve those aims. They will seek out and recognize like-minded individuals and work together to achieve those aims.
This is the basis of cronyism and only a system with appropriate controls, such as fair general elections by an informed populace, can prevent it. Current corporate law does not prevent such actions leading to cronyism, and in fact has a number of exploitable loopholes which facilitate the concentration of power among a connected few.
Market economic theory is based on the fundamental assumption that participants are rational actors interested in maximizing the personal utility of any exchanges. Since things like happiness obtained through altruism are not easily quantifiable and highly variable across the population, in practice they are generally ignored in most economic analyses. So the result is that most economic theories and models are predicated on selfish actors.
Sure but none of those things you mentioned go through the level of wear and tear of an internal combustion engine and its transmission. Few of those things require the level of diagnostic equipment, protected by patented protocols and copyrighted implementations, that the modern ICE does, and therefore those services can be easily provided by third parties like Jiffy Lube or Budget Brake (and Muffler) at prices that seriously undercut typical dealer profit margins.