Dang, didn't see this and posted my own. Gene Wolfe for the absolute utter win. I think other authors can stop now. Wolfe already reached the peak. And the Pringles angle!
I don't know. Not so thrilled with the Academy (Hutchins) series, and the Benedict novels have become formulaic. The first four were great but I'm afraid he's beginning to just churn.
How about the Miles Vorkosigan books by Bujold? Also an iconic and charismatic protagonist who rarely fights his own battles, but with a much higher tempo. And the entire series from beginning to end, including short stories, does not sag at all.
Absolutely Wolfe. He was a writer's writer, with strong but silent Hemingway-ish protagonists who told the story by what they did not say. Wrote a series "The Book of the New Sun" where the main character is a congenial and level-headed torturer on a dying Earth far in the future. Mr. Wolfe also developed the machine that makes Pringles.
How could such genius be overlooked?
This is not true. The Concorde's flight path on takeoff was directly over my old elementary school and it ROARED. Windows rattled and if you were outdoors you could feel it. I still live near JFK and we have regular jets passing overhead and there is simply no comparison.
I'm not sure why it's even the government's obligation to "close the deal" (from TFA) and help a victim fix their infected systems. If the victim felt they "have more important things to worry about" than prevent infection, then felt they "have more important things to worry about" than routinely scan their system, AND THEN when told that they were infected they "have more important things to worry about" than fix it themselves and pay out of pocket... maybe the government has "more important things to worry about", too.
tl;dr If you didn't wear a condom, and you didn't get tested, and you found out you had syphilis and didn't care - why should I?
^This. I may pin my most common programs - Search Everything, Firefox, Sticky Notes, Folders - but I don't think an hour goes by without hitting the Start Button. I tried both Developer and Consumer Previews for Windows 8. With 20 years experience in every Windows environment produced, and with a printed guide, a magazine article, and Youtube, I still could not navigate or get work done at all.
MS is going to take a huge hit because they listened to the wrong people. Vista sucked because it didn't run, 8 sucks because it's unusable.
"But most of all, Apple is here going beyond their mandate. They should not sell to Iran, but they have no business deciding that a US citizen with Iranian ancestry should not buy an iDevice. No matter whether they think it's later going to be sent to Iran. If they have suspicion that a crime is about to be committed, they should contact the authorities. They are not deputized nor judges."
RTFA: The iPad can't be sold for export to Iran. She said she intends to send it to Iran. Therefore he refused to sell it to her. No judgements, no legal wrangling. If you walk into an Apple store, announce your love for Nascar, Budweiser, and the Ol' Red White and Blue, then lean over the counter and tell them "This here iPad doohickey is goin' straight to Eeee-ran," they cannot sell it to you.
The other stuff about him being an Iranian-American and her speaking Farsi are just background. She announced her intent to send the iPad to Iran while speaking in Farsi, and he understood what she said because he understands Farsi.
How did this get rated insightful? Jews have never attempted to prevent the sale of non-kosher food here. The only legal wrangling I've ever seen over kosher certification is when a company claims to be kosher and does not meet kosher standards. That's just as fair as any group protesting misrepresentation of their symbols.
I can't comment about specifics regarding foreign languages, but yes, in general there are stages of learning that are visible on a brain scan. I can see when someone is still trying to learn a skill, when they're refining it, and when it's learned.
As for the ten percent of our brain thing, it's a crock. No connection with reality, not a figure taken out of context. I read an article years ago that traced the original source. I don't recall the content, but the gist was someone was saying that we only use ten percent of our potential. Maybe a motivational speech sort of thing.
We use the whole blob and then some. Simpler tasks are in fact relegated to lower centers or to areas of the spine. When you walk, you don't have a brain area saying "Lift the leg - yes, like that! Higher - steady... good job!" You have central pattern generators that can regulate the basic motions of walking for example, and then oversight from brain areas that modify the gait to make it more efficient or effective.
For a perfectly horrible start to your day, watch a video of a decerebrate or transected cat walking on a treadmill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK7nKweiDro
Animals can walk based on the CPG alone, they just can't plan adjustments ahead because there is no input from vision. If the leg strikes an obstacle, it lifts higher with no input from the brain.
The upshot of it all is we have lots of circuits doing other stuff like maintenance or watching for objects, and those circuits can be directed, enhanced, or suppressed by attention.
You're completely right, but there's an invisible component I tried to describe before drinking coffee. A bit post-coffee now, I meant that certain behaviors -and I am confident that texting is one of them - also take your mind elsewhere. Distraction isn't just failure to point your eyes in the right direction. During certain activities your eyes can be pointed perfectly fine, and your conscious mind will simply not register. Your sensory systems were told to be quiet and they just won't signal. Or the circuit's busy because it's used for something else.
Ever watch the basketball selective attention test? It's on Youtube, don't read the comments before watching. Or during saccades - look into your own eyes in a mirror. Look at your left eye, then your right, then your left... You know your eyes are moving but you don't see them move. Have someone else do the same, and you can see their eyes move. We suppress vision during saccades - and no one notices!
Lots of reasons why distraction short-circuits our systems, but the key is it happens without us knowing. Our brains cheerfully lie to us. Works fine when you're concerned about rubbing sticks to make fire, or not getting eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, but it's shit at high speed in traffic. I'll bet a texting person shuts down certain necessary percepts.
There are significant differences between thinking about a text and reading or replying to one. Two comments above nailed it - there's a spectrum of distractions, and also spatial concepts really pull the mind away. Other types of thoughts and activities also drag attentiveness down, too. I'd also add that people are very bad at assessing their own attentiveness, and I can demonstrate this in a laboratory. (I'm a neuroscience grad student.)
When we perform activities like texting, recall, or speaking in a foreign language, we reuse neural circuits that would otherwise be devoted to something else. Look at people with hemisphere neglect - not only can they not see things in their right visual field for example, they cannot even describe things in their right visual field from memories stored before the damage. In some cases, they cannot even be made aware that they're missing half the world. They just don't believe you, or explain it away. In that case clearly the memory recall is trying to use a damaged visual circuit, not just loading a memory from a hard drive.
There's lots more about this - I can show you studies where neurons light up when something enters their visual receptive field, unless the subject is instructed to ignore them - and then the neuron acts like the stimulus is almost not there, like you failed to load the right drivers. Ever have an old computer insist the keyboard is not connected when it is?
The upshot is twofold - attention can be directed and cannot be effectively split, since brains are a limited resource, and also we are very very bad at even realizing we're bad at it. I'm guessing one of the problems with the young drivers is not simply the amount that they text, but also they are inexperienced and less capable of recognizing the effect that texting has on them.
I'm in a similar community but unfortunately people outside of science, even educated and intelligent people, do not distinguish between the two breeds. My university is honoring a well-respected faculty thinker who proffers deep and meaningful opinions with little evidence, while us fact-based scientists slave like Morlocks in the subterranean labs to find evidence for little things. The people who set our salaries enjoy showmanship; they call it "good communication."
I'm often asked, in fact, why we don't discover stuff like Scientist X, or when we'll have a cure for Malady Y. I'm a scientist after all, shouldn't I have a silver bullet by now?
I should probably point out that I AM wearing earplugs. I really do think you should ride the A sometime; it would be illuminating. I envy your posh commute but it might be bracing for you to broaden your experiences and discover how the rest of us live.
Old thread but worth the reply. Read my entire post. I'm not referring to my own phone calls. I'm referring to everyone's. We all go about our normal business. People call, play games on their phones, read, or put on makeup. (Not me.) But there is often an abusive asshole who begins screaming into their phone. Then I turn on a jammer.
It would help if you understood the nature of the A train's riders. The train line begins in a very high crime neighborhood, passes through a few more, and terminates in Harlem. It's also the only Metrocard train line to service Far Rockaway and it's environs, so if you work in Manhattan, the Bronx, or parts of Brooklyn it is the only way to get there. The LIRR runs a similar route, but the price difference is around $16 daily.
During the regular commuting hours, the composition of riders is mostly working professionals, blue or white collar. And there are also thugs. Real thugs, not suburbanites who listen to rap. I've enjoyed conversations involving the different types of knife wounds, the difficulty in finding a good parole officer, and how it's hard to find decent crack nowadays. Most people use their phone the way you probably do; to call someone. But sometimes it's to threaten a "bitch," to arrange a delivery, or just to tell a friend how stoned they are and how shitty their bitch is.
Think of what I do as a public service. It's self-serving, but I promise you that no one is put out by those calls getting snuffed except a person whom frankly I don't care if I'm stepping on his civil rights or freedom of speech. The jammer is on long enough for the thug to find something else to do. It's usually two or three minutes. I don't travel in a bubble of blessed silence.
It might also help for you to realize that the jammer works for about ten feet in any direction. Posters, upset much like yourself, have been imagining the jammer shutting down emergency calls in the distance as the train or bus sweeps past. It doesn't happen.
An author's author, his fantasy series Book of the New Sun is beautiful prose about a brutal world. His most powerful characters are defined more by their silence than their speech, like many of Hemingway's heroes.
Michael Moorcock's Eternal Hero books are great and subtle, and I also recommend Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.
I ride the infamous A train in NYC and my jammer is a relief. I experience much the same - hellfire preachers, drunks pissing on the floor, and stoned thugs arguing about which court they're supposed to be in today. The train is held at the station about once a month for police to search it. My ride is nearly two hours and a jammer makes it a bit quieter. I don't even turn it on for most of the ride; why would I interfere with Words with Friends or a quiet phone call? But when someone starts screaming into their phone they discover there's no service anymore.
My last cable installer felt it was best to drill from the outside, then discover where it went. Apparently the kitchen is the best place for a cable modem and wireless router, on the countertop next to the microwave.
Suggestions to the contrary were ignored. The landlord said "He's an expert. Let him handle it."
I'm glad the drill didn't end up in the shower.
Adenovirus 36 is strongly implicated in obesity. Infection with this virus during childhood leads to disproportionate weight gain compared to a control group who shows no signs of exposure to the virus. The mechanism is demonstrated. It seems a person's body diverts more resources to depositing fat than it would without infection.
And that's just one brick in the wall.
Read up, Zeek. It's easy to feel superior when you're ignorant.
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Dang, didn't see this and posted my own. Gene Wolfe for the absolute utter win. I think other authors can stop now. Wolfe already reached the peak. And the Pringles angle!
I don't know. Not so thrilled with the Academy (Hutchins) series, and the Benedict novels have become formulaic. The first four were great but I'm afraid he's beginning to just churn. How about the Miles Vorkosigan books by Bujold? Also an iconic and charismatic protagonist who rarely fights his own battles, but with a much higher tempo. And the entire series from beginning to end, including short stories, does not sag at all.
Absolutely Wolfe. He was a writer's writer, with strong but silent Hemingway-ish protagonists who told the story by what they did not say. Wrote a series "The Book of the New Sun" where the main character is a congenial and level-headed torturer on a dying Earth far in the future. Mr. Wolfe also developed the machine that makes Pringles. How could such genius be overlooked?
Whoever did the statistical analysis should be fired.
Why should they be fired? Their job is public relations, not honesty.
This is not true. The Concorde's flight path on takeoff was directly over my old elementary school and it ROARED. Windows rattled and if you were outdoors you could feel it. I still live near JFK and we have regular jets passing overhead and there is simply no comparison.
If Iran continues its weapons program the virus escalates to playing "Rock the Casbah."
I'd buy one if they paid me just $200!
I'm not sure why it's even the government's obligation to "close the deal" (from TFA) and help a victim fix their infected systems. If the victim felt they "have more important things to worry about" than prevent infection, then felt they "have more important things to worry about" than routinely scan their system, AND THEN when told that they were infected they "have more important things to worry about" than fix it themselves and pay out of pocket... maybe the government has "more important things to worry about", too. tl;dr If you didn't wear a condom, and you didn't get tested, and you found out you had syphilis and didn't care - why should I?
^This. I may pin my most common programs - Search Everything, Firefox, Sticky Notes, Folders - but I don't think an hour goes by without hitting the Start Button. I tried both Developer and Consumer Previews for Windows 8. With 20 years experience in every Windows environment produced, and with a printed guide, a magazine article, and Youtube, I still could not navigate or get work done at all. MS is going to take a huge hit because they listened to the wrong people. Vista sucked because it didn't run, 8 sucks because it's unusable.
"But most of all, Apple is here going beyond their mandate. They should not sell to Iran, but they have no business deciding that a US citizen with Iranian ancestry should not buy an iDevice. No matter whether they think it's later going to be sent to Iran. If they have suspicion that a crime is about to be committed, they should contact the authorities. They are not deputized nor judges." RTFA: The iPad can't be sold for export to Iran. She said she intends to send it to Iran. Therefore he refused to sell it to her. No judgements, no legal wrangling. If you walk into an Apple store, announce your love for Nascar, Budweiser, and the Ol' Red White and Blue, then lean over the counter and tell them "This here iPad doohickey is goin' straight to Eeee-ran," they cannot sell it to you. The other stuff about him being an Iranian-American and her speaking Farsi are just background. She announced her intent to send the iPad to Iran while speaking in Farsi, and he understood what she said because he understands Farsi.
Read what the OP wrote, and the responder as well. Both referred to the Taliban, not Islam in general. Or are you making that generalization?
How did this get rated insightful? Jews have never attempted to prevent the sale of non-kosher food here. The only legal wrangling I've ever seen over kosher certification is when a company claims to be kosher and does not meet kosher standards. That's just as fair as any group protesting misrepresentation of their symbols.
I can't comment about specifics regarding foreign languages, but yes, in general there are stages of learning that are visible on a brain scan. I can see when someone is still trying to learn a skill, when they're refining it, and when it's learned. As for the ten percent of our brain thing, it's a crock. No connection with reality, not a figure taken out of context. I read an article years ago that traced the original source. I don't recall the content, but the gist was someone was saying that we only use ten percent of our potential. Maybe a motivational speech sort of thing. We use the whole blob and then some. Simpler tasks are in fact relegated to lower centers or to areas of the spine. When you walk, you don't have a brain area saying "Lift the leg - yes, like that! Higher - steady... good job!" You have central pattern generators that can regulate the basic motions of walking for example, and then oversight from brain areas that modify the gait to make it more efficient or effective. For a perfectly horrible start to your day, watch a video of a decerebrate or transected cat walking on a treadmill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK7nKweiDro Animals can walk based on the CPG alone, they just can't plan adjustments ahead because there is no input from vision. If the leg strikes an obstacle, it lifts higher with no input from the brain. The upshot of it all is we have lots of circuits doing other stuff like maintenance or watching for objects, and those circuits can be directed, enhanced, or suppressed by attention.
You're completely right, but there's an invisible component I tried to describe before drinking coffee. A bit post-coffee now, I meant that certain behaviors -and I am confident that texting is one of them - also take your mind elsewhere. Distraction isn't just failure to point your eyes in the right direction. During certain activities your eyes can be pointed perfectly fine, and your conscious mind will simply not register. Your sensory systems were told to be quiet and they just won't signal. Or the circuit's busy because it's used for something else. Ever watch the basketball selective attention test? It's on Youtube, don't read the comments before watching. Or during saccades - look into your own eyes in a mirror. Look at your left eye, then your right, then your left... You know your eyes are moving but you don't see them move. Have someone else do the same, and you can see their eyes move. We suppress vision during saccades - and no one notices! Lots of reasons why distraction short-circuits our systems, but the key is it happens without us knowing. Our brains cheerfully lie to us. Works fine when you're concerned about rubbing sticks to make fire, or not getting eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, but it's shit at high speed in traffic. I'll bet a texting person shuts down certain necessary percepts.
There are significant differences between thinking about a text and reading or replying to one. Two comments above nailed it - there's a spectrum of distractions, and also spatial concepts really pull the mind away. Other types of thoughts and activities also drag attentiveness down, too. I'd also add that people are very bad at assessing their own attentiveness, and I can demonstrate this in a laboratory. (I'm a neuroscience grad student.) When we perform activities like texting, recall, or speaking in a foreign language, we reuse neural circuits that would otherwise be devoted to something else. Look at people with hemisphere neglect - not only can they not see things in their right visual field for example, they cannot even describe things in their right visual field from memories stored before the damage. In some cases, they cannot even be made aware that they're missing half the world. They just don't believe you, or explain it away. In that case clearly the memory recall is trying to use a damaged visual circuit, not just loading a memory from a hard drive. There's lots more about this - I can show you studies where neurons light up when something enters their visual receptive field, unless the subject is instructed to ignore them - and then the neuron acts like the stimulus is almost not there, like you failed to load the right drivers. Ever have an old computer insist the keyboard is not connected when it is? The upshot is twofold - attention can be directed and cannot be effectively split, since brains are a limited resource, and also we are very very bad at even realizing we're bad at it. I'm guessing one of the problems with the young drivers is not simply the amount that they text, but also they are inexperienced and less capable of recognizing the effect that texting has on them.
Dammit, I need mod points.
I'm in a similar community but unfortunately people outside of science, even educated and intelligent people, do not distinguish between the two breeds. My university is honoring a well-respected faculty thinker who proffers deep and meaningful opinions with little evidence, while us fact-based scientists slave like Morlocks in the subterranean labs to find evidence for little things. The people who set our salaries enjoy showmanship; they call it "good communication." I'm often asked, in fact, why we don't discover stuff like Scientist X, or when we'll have a cure for Malady Y. I'm a scientist after all, shouldn't I have a silver bullet by now?
I should probably point out that I AM wearing earplugs. I really do think you should ride the A sometime; it would be illuminating. I envy your posh commute but it might be bracing for you to broaden your experiences and discover how the rest of us live.
Old thread but worth the reply. Read my entire post. I'm not referring to my own phone calls. I'm referring to everyone's. We all go about our normal business. People call, play games on their phones, read, or put on makeup. (Not me.) But there is often an abusive asshole who begins screaming into their phone. Then I turn on a jammer. It would help if you understood the nature of the A train's riders. The train line begins in a very high crime neighborhood, passes through a few more, and terminates in Harlem. It's also the only Metrocard train line to service Far Rockaway and it's environs, so if you work in Manhattan, the Bronx, or parts of Brooklyn it is the only way to get there. The LIRR runs a similar route, but the price difference is around $16 daily. During the regular commuting hours, the composition of riders is mostly working professionals, blue or white collar. And there are also thugs. Real thugs, not suburbanites who listen to rap. I've enjoyed conversations involving the different types of knife wounds, the difficulty in finding a good parole officer, and how it's hard to find decent crack nowadays. Most people use their phone the way you probably do; to call someone. But sometimes it's to threaten a "bitch," to arrange a delivery, or just to tell a friend how stoned they are and how shitty their bitch is. Think of what I do as a public service. It's self-serving, but I promise you that no one is put out by those calls getting snuffed except a person whom frankly I don't care if I'm stepping on his civil rights or freedom of speech. The jammer is on long enough for the thug to find something else to do. It's usually two or three minutes. I don't travel in a bubble of blessed silence. It might also help for you to realize that the jammer works for about ten feet in any direction. Posters, upset much like yourself, have been imagining the jammer shutting down emergency calls in the distance as the train or bus sweeps past. It doesn't happen.
An author's author, his fantasy series Book of the New Sun is beautiful prose about a brutal world. His most powerful characters are defined more by their silence than their speech, like many of Hemingway's heroes. Michael Moorcock's Eternal Hero books are great and subtle, and I also recommend Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.
I ride the infamous A train in NYC and my jammer is a relief. I experience much the same - hellfire preachers, drunks pissing on the floor, and stoned thugs arguing about which court they're supposed to be in today. The train is held at the station about once a month for police to search it. My ride is nearly two hours and a jammer makes it a bit quieter. I don't even turn it on for most of the ride; why would I interfere with Words with Friends or a quiet phone call? But when someone starts screaming into their phone they discover there's no service anymore.
My last cable installer felt it was best to drill from the outside, then discover where it went. Apparently the kitchen is the best place for a cable modem and wireless router, on the countertop next to the microwave. Suggestions to the contrary were ignored. The landlord said "He's an expert. Let him handle it." I'm glad the drill didn't end up in the shower.
Adenovirus 36 is strongly implicated in obesity. Infection with this virus during childhood leads to disproportionate weight gain compared to a control group who shows no signs of exposure to the virus. The mechanism is demonstrated. It seems a person's body diverts more resources to depositing fat than it would without infection. And that's just one brick in the wall. Read up, Zeek. It's easy to feel superior when you're ignorant.
I hope he doesn't sneeze into that air tube and nail a toddler. Or is he going to have a trained bloodthirsty attack monkey to pull the trigger?