That's all true but besides the point. For one, if you don't know the right book/article to read, it's just as hard. Don't forget that Google Books exists, it may just point you to the right book. I've been looking around for things related to advanced compilation/optimization topics, and Google Books has nailed a couple books for me that had exactly the stuff I was looking for.
The problem you describe, though, is the main problem with encyclopedias: they offer very little redundancy, lest they'd ballon. An encyclopedia is pretty much an entirely impractical creation if you don't have domain knowledge; and to those who do have such knowledge they'll almost universally find better answers in a specialist text or articles. So what you're saying is very true, but doesn't indicate a problem with Googling, only with encyclopedias.
The problem is that the guy is clueless about "God's law", too. He has done no real scholarship of anything in his life, and, say, any bible scholar worth his salt would probably laugh him out of the building. He's a fundamentalist, stupid jerk, that's all, and uses his faith as an excuse for lack of rationality. He's a dangerous, stupid man. My worry is that he may, just may, become the President of the U.S.
At least now that teenager has Google, and perhaps she'll be able to find the correct answers out there. In the years past, she had no Google, and she would not even bother looking anything up, because it was too much work (research in a library, bleh).
What's wrong with braking while cornering? That's pretty much what you need to do if you're cornering fast or if you think the traction margins are low, since it puts extra weight on the front wheels. Here's how F1 formula drivers do it. To those who argue that one "shouldn't" need to do it on the street: it's only for added margins, especially in bad weather. If, when racing, given technique gains you time, it means it really gains you traction. You can use that at any speed, and not necessarily when racing. Extra traction and control is good. Yeah, I do drive my slushbox with both feet, and I'd never feel safe in a manual transmission car that has a clutch pedal. Steering wheel paddle or auto-clutch is OK, of course, as both feet are still on the pedals. The idea that one foot is shared between accelerator and brake is something that only makes sense on paper and when you haven't tried the alternative.
This has been the status quo for many decades, unfortunately. Feynman was dealing with that problem in the 60s, and it drove him crazy and he had to stop participating. For what it's worth, my daughter's math materials for elementary school, coming from a big academic publisher, have substantial deficiencies and flat out lies. The section on probability (spanning a couple years) was done by someone who had no effing clue, heck, that person didn't even bother doing the simple experiments they were proposing!
Why is every fucking thing these days that may be an inconvenience taken to be discrimation? How is it that the 3/4 of a billion of Europeans, apparently, don't mind it?! I think it's perfectly acceptable for everyone to have a government-issued id.
Let me put my devil's advocate hat on. Who's to say that the "anonymous" part of the ballot doesn't have a bunch of yellow spots on it that, by pure coincidence of course, are a hash of the serial number...
It's all in the economy of scale. Spirit and Opportunity have been doing their job for many years, at a duty cycle that beats or exceeds that of a human, even if their functionality is obviously much lower. Yet you can cover a lot of ground if you've got a couple years to look at things:) Something like an upsized MSL rover could do what would be fairly uneconomical for humans to achieve. That rover could realistically roam around on the Moon for a couple years, and we're talking about a minivan-sized machine. Good luck with sustaining any meatbags that long even on the Moon, never mind Mars...
I agree somewhat with your 1st paragraph, even though many word problems I've seen are fairly horrible (many unspoken assumptions, they show a fair lack of engagement by the author, etc).
The deal is that once there is a barrier made up in one's mind, anything further that appears in the tests or problem books is automatically filed behind the barrier. There's some sort of positive feedback there. I believe that word problems need to be, at least initially, dealt on an entirely interactive level. You literally need to talk to the kid and figure out something that applies directly to their situation, ideally to a fairly recent experience (same day if possible). Once the barrier is broken you can start abstracting things back, getting an impersonal book in the place of conversation, etc.
The "incuriosity" I think is not a cause, it's an effect. Once the idea is planted into a pupil's head that the "school stuff" belongs in school, and real life is a wholly another thing, you need quite some active effort to reverse that. Before the barrier is torn down, I agree that you can observe what passes for incuriosity. It seems to be incuriosity because the "school stuff" is simply not interesting to many kids, just as many kids won't be interested in any particular fictional world (fad biases aside). I've been observing this barrier start to get erected in my daughter's mind. It was a startling observation. We worked hard and took swift steps to make sure she understood that it's all about real life, though.
Perhaps a highly educated society would be able to deploy technology to replace menial labor. Hmm, that would be a novel thing, let's patent it, say: a hardware and software system to replace switchboard ladies. Hmm...
Basically by the simple fact that the endpoints are at zero, and the function itself is not a zero constant function, it must have a maximum somewhere (perhaps more than one). That's calculus 101, stuff that should be taught in grade 9. Now it may be that the optimal point is very sensitive to overall economic conditions, or simply that the maximum is a broad peak, so the curve may not be very practical, but it doesn't change its basic properties. Alas, the "curve" is a completely abstract thing, it's pretty much impossible to produce the data for such a curve in reality, so it's a mental exercise only.
Percentages are just fractions, and that really is multiplication by non-integers, so yeah, people can't multiply even two very short significands (perhaps just 1 decimal figure) and shift the decimal sign around. We covered that in my village elementary school in 2nd grade. SIGH.
Car insurance has limits, and the legally mandated minimums are silly in some places. In many, if not all, U.S. states, the minimums are at or under $20k per person in bodily injury liability coverage. If I'd be seriously injured by someone in a car accident, then say $20k pretty much pays to get me in the door of a hospital and may cover a relatively simple trauma case like a simple fracture of a leg, say. It won't cover any rehabilitation, loss of wages, nor any complex procedures that include external circulation and such, nor will it cover more than a couple of days of stay in the hospital. IOW: it's a joke. I personally carry injury coverage for more than 25x that, and I seriously consider doubling or tripling that.
There is a point at which you can't make good decisions without knowing stuff. You'll be hurting yourself and/or the others, the question is: is it your fault, and there's admittedly no clear answer to that. For example, a fool of a politician, legislating stuff that's genuinely bad, while having all the good intentions and truly not realizing the error of his/her ways...
I agree. To me, not being able to do math in your head is akin to being unable to spell properly without a dictionary/spellchecker. If you can't write properly, you'll be called illiterate, the same IMHO should apply if you can't figure out the math of basic everyday things -- frontloading of debt repayment with interest, dealing with change when paying for things, how MPG is a nonlinear scale, etc.
It's worse than that. Today's society requires, IMHO, as part of the basic literacy, to not only know how to read and write, but to have good numeracy skills, and to have decent understanding of basic science and of issues related to applied computing -- at least as far as security, social engineering, etc. is concerned.
I think that the real issue is that things are taught in a way that separates them in the heads of the pupils. Instead of having a coherent image of science and technology, overlapping and applying to everyday experiences, the knowledge is built in an abstract way and seems to be decoupled from real life. People seem to be horribly unable to apply basic principles from grade level maths, physics, chemistry and biology to everyday life. That's why you see so many people go "dumb" when they see computers: no one taught them in a way that links computing to other knowledge they have. It's black magic to them because it was never shown to them to be otherwise; they don't understand that computers fundamentally process numbers according to fixed recipes, etc. That's why there's so much bad legislation around: the lawmakers don't have a clue how their laws relate to reality, they only see political buzzwords.
That's all true, but the "part" of the Apollo stack that is the human is quite decoupled and limited. You don't need a human there, it's a frivolous excess, practically speaking. Having a robot in the Apollo stack would be just as fine; the humans were pretty useless -- for example in Apollo 13 you couldn't utilize human potential to go out there to the service module to fix stuff (not that it was fixable anyway); they barely could maintain their own life support to get back alive. Whatever they did on the Moon during Apollo was also something that would be no biggie for a robotic rover to do.
When it comes to whatever science you can do on the Moon (never mind Mars), it'd be much, much better to launch something like the MSL rover to the Moon. The support costs of such a mission would be much lower since you don't have to transmit so damn far, and the communication latency is so small that if you want, you can drive the rover remotely with a joystick.
The lunar module was 14,000kg. The ascent stage (the payload of the descent stage, really) was 4,500kg. Compare that to the MSL rover of just 900kg, and that's quite a lab if you ask me. You could have one heck of a rover on that Apollo descent stage!
What humans did on the Moon was equivalent perhaps to what the Spirit/Opportunity could do, modified for a sample return mission if you really want to hold the rocks down here on Earth. Once you have a couple tons to play with, you can have as complex of a lab as you can on Earth.
Hah, CDMA should be plenty robust to multipath, you can use more than one adaptive correlator per channel, and each correlator gives you the relative multipath phase as a diagnostic output, too. Ideally you'd want more than one antenna to make the adaptive scheme more robust, but it'll work with just one. What's more, you can always record the high-bandwidth datastream from the digital radio I/Q inputs for offline data recovery: whatever processing you do online is limited by the maximum latency allowed in your decoder, offline has no such problem. To integrate "offline" with other recording equipment, you can simply have two outputs: a realtime output that goes to the program mixing console, and a more delayed offline output that goes to the multitrack "source" recorder for a studio mix (where you can easily shift things around, time-wise).
Admittedly satellite links have stable channel properties, but the error correction codes that they use are as close to optimal for given datarate-to-bandwidth as is feasible, and that's not very common in non-cellular consumer point-to-point gear. I agree that terrestrial channels are more challenging when it comes to varying channel properties.
A wireless mike is a very specific application. It shouldn't ever need a receiver, so the only way to deal with potentially strong narrowband interference is to use CDMA and as wide of a transmit bandwidth as possible -- using frequency division (one channel per mike) is not robust enough, usually. All of the "brains" need to be in the base station, the transmitter circuitry can be hardwired in a relatively simple FPGA that takes input from an audio codec, a couple jumper settings (node ID / code selection) and pushes it via a DAC to the filter/upconverter/final amp. All the encoding etc. is done completely digitally and can be probably modeled in a few pages of Verilog.
Wouldn't it be simpler to have just internet service and get a VOIP number for like $5 a month from one of numerous provider? You can buy a full-featured VoIP phone like Zultys ZIP 4x4 on eBay for around $40, wireless (WIFI) ones aren't much more expensive either. And you get a managed Ethernet switch for free:)
I don't know why booting up is such a big deal. All of the machines I have simply sleep when you're not using them, memory doesn't really take all that much power just to keep it refreshed. I think the iMac at home gets rebooted whenever the software update tells you to, there's no reason to do it otherwise.
The clock cycle comparison is true, but not indicative of performance: a modern CPU can easily do almost 3 orders of magnitude more per cycle than an 8086 could. A 16x16 multiply on 8086 took a hundred clock cycles. A modern general-purpose CPU pulls off 8 of these in one clock cycle. So we're talking about an aggregate speedup of 5-6 orders of magnitude per core.
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That's all true but besides the point. For one, if you don't know the right book/article to read, it's just as hard. Don't forget that Google Books exists, it may just point you to the right book. I've been looking around for things related to advanced compilation/optimization topics, and Google Books has nailed a couple books for me that had exactly the stuff I was looking for.
The problem you describe, though, is the main problem with encyclopedias: they offer very little redundancy, lest they'd ballon. An encyclopedia is pretty much an entirely impractical creation if you don't have domain knowledge; and to those who do have such knowledge they'll almost universally find better answers in a specialist text or articles. So what you're saying is very true, but doesn't indicate a problem with Googling, only with encyclopedias.
The problem is that the guy is clueless about "God's law", too. He has done no real scholarship of anything in his life, and, say, any bible scholar worth his salt would probably laugh him out of the building. He's a fundamentalist, stupid jerk, that's all, and uses his faith as an excuse for lack of rationality. He's a dangerous, stupid man. My worry is that he may, just may, become the President of the U.S.
At least now that teenager has Google, and perhaps she'll be able to find the correct answers out there. In the years past, she had no Google, and she would not even bother looking anything up, because it was too much work (research in a library, bleh).
What's wrong with braking while cornering? That's pretty much what you need to do if you're cornering fast or if you think the traction margins are low, since it puts extra weight on the front wheels. Here's how F1 formula drivers do it. To those who argue that one "shouldn't" need to do it on the street: it's only for added margins, especially in bad weather. If, when racing, given technique gains you time, it means it really gains you traction. You can use that at any speed, and not necessarily when racing. Extra traction and control is good. Yeah, I do drive my slushbox with both feet, and I'd never feel safe in a manual transmission car that has a clutch pedal. Steering wheel paddle or auto-clutch is OK, of course, as both feet are still on the pedals. The idea that one foot is shared between accelerator and brake is something that only makes sense on paper and when you haven't tried the alternative.
This has been the status quo for many decades, unfortunately. Feynman was dealing with that problem in the 60s, and it drove him crazy and he had to stop participating. For what it's worth, my daughter's math materials for elementary school, coming from a big academic publisher, have substantial deficiencies and flat out lies. The section on probability (spanning a couple years) was done by someone who had no effing clue, heck, that person didn't even bother doing the simple experiments they were proposing!
Very interesting. I think I can relate to your observations. Good job.
Why is every fucking thing these days that may be an inconvenience taken to be discrimation? How is it that the 3/4 of a billion of Europeans, apparently, don't mind it?! I think it's perfectly acceptable for everyone to have a government-issued id.
Let me put my devil's advocate hat on. Who's to say that the "anonymous" part of the ballot doesn't have a bunch of yellow spots on it that, by pure coincidence of course, are a hash of the serial number...
It's all in the economy of scale. Spirit and Opportunity have been doing their job for many years, at a duty cycle that beats or exceeds that of a human, even if their functionality is obviously much lower. Yet you can cover a lot of ground if you've got a couple years to look at things :) Something like an upsized MSL rover could do what would be fairly uneconomical for humans to achieve. That rover could realistically roam around on the Moon for a couple years, and we're talking about a minivan-sized machine. Good luck with sustaining any meatbags that long even on the Moon, never mind Mars...
I agree somewhat with your 1st paragraph, even though many word problems I've seen are fairly horrible (many unspoken assumptions, they show a fair lack of engagement by the author, etc).
The deal is that once there is a barrier made up in one's mind, anything further that appears in the tests or problem books is automatically filed behind the barrier. There's some sort of positive feedback there. I believe that word problems need to be, at least initially, dealt on an entirely interactive level. You literally need to talk to the kid and figure out something that applies directly to their situation, ideally to a fairly recent experience (same day if possible). Once the barrier is broken you can start abstracting things back, getting an impersonal book in the place of conversation, etc.
The "incuriosity" I think is not a cause, it's an effect. Once the idea is planted into a pupil's head that the "school stuff" belongs in school, and real life is a wholly another thing, you need quite some active effort to reverse that. Before the barrier is torn down, I agree that you can observe what passes for incuriosity. It seems to be incuriosity because the "school stuff" is simply not interesting to many kids, just as many kids won't be interested in any particular fictional world (fad biases aside). I've been observing this barrier start to get erected in my daughter's mind. It was a startling observation. We worked hard and took swift steps to make sure she understood that it's all about real life, though.
Perhaps a highly educated society would be able to deploy technology to replace menial labor. Hmm, that would be a novel thing, let's patent it, say: a hardware and software system to replace switchboard ladies. Hmm...
You're my hero of the day today. Well deserved, too. Kudos!
Basically by the simple fact that the endpoints are at zero, and the function itself is not a zero constant function, it must have a maximum somewhere (perhaps more than one). That's calculus 101, stuff that should be taught in grade 9. Now it may be that the optimal point is very sensitive to overall economic conditions, or simply that the maximum is a broad peak, so the curve may not be very practical, but it doesn't change its basic properties. Alas, the "curve" is a completely abstract thing, it's pretty much impossible to produce the data for such a curve in reality, so it's a mental exercise only.
Percentages are just fractions, and that really is multiplication by non-integers, so yeah, people can't multiply even two very short significands (perhaps just 1 decimal figure) and shift the decimal sign around. We covered that in my village elementary school in 2nd grade. SIGH.
Car insurance has limits, and the legally mandated minimums are silly in some places. In many, if not all, U.S. states, the minimums are at or under $20k per person in bodily injury liability coverage. If I'd be seriously injured by someone in a car accident, then say $20k pretty much pays to get me in the door of a hospital and may cover a relatively simple trauma case like a simple fracture of a leg, say. It won't cover any rehabilitation, loss of wages, nor any complex procedures that include external circulation and such, nor will it cover more than a couple of days of stay in the hospital. IOW: it's a joke. I personally carry injury coverage for more than 25x that, and I seriously consider doubling or tripling that.
That one major thing I like about Japan. Their attitude is the exact opposite I think.
There is a point at which you can't make good decisions without knowing stuff. You'll be hurting yourself and/or the others, the question is: is it your fault, and there's admittedly no clear answer to that. For example, a fool of a politician, legislating stuff that's genuinely bad, while having all the good intentions and truly not realizing the error of his/her ways...
I agree. To me, not being able to do math in your head is akin to being unable to spell properly without a dictionary/spellchecker. If you can't write properly, you'll be called illiterate, the same IMHO should apply if you can't figure out the math of basic everyday things -- frontloading of debt repayment with interest, dealing with change when paying for things, how MPG is a nonlinear scale, etc.
It's worse than that. Today's society requires, IMHO, as part of the basic literacy, to not only know how to read and write, but to have good numeracy skills, and to have decent understanding of basic science and of issues related to applied computing -- at least as far as security, social engineering, etc. is concerned.
I think that the real issue is that things are taught in a way that separates them in the heads of the pupils. Instead of having a coherent image of science and technology, overlapping and applying to everyday experiences, the knowledge is built in an abstract way and seems to be decoupled from real life. People seem to be horribly unable to apply basic principles from grade level maths, physics, chemistry and biology to everyday life. That's why you see so many people go "dumb" when they see computers: no one taught them in a way that links computing to other knowledge they have. It's black magic to them because it was never shown to them to be otherwise; they don't understand that computers fundamentally process numbers according to fixed recipes, etc. That's why there's so much bad legislation around: the lawmakers don't have a clue how their laws relate to reality, they only see political buzzwords.
That's all true, but the "part" of the Apollo stack that is the human is quite decoupled and limited. You don't need a human there, it's a frivolous excess, practically speaking. Having a robot in the Apollo stack would be just as fine; the humans were pretty useless -- for example in Apollo 13 you couldn't utilize human potential to go out there to the service module to fix stuff (not that it was fixable anyway); they barely could maintain their own life support to get back alive. Whatever they did on the Moon during Apollo was also something that would be no biggie for a robotic rover to do.
When it comes to whatever science you can do on the Moon (never mind Mars), it'd be much, much better to launch something like the MSL rover to the Moon. The support costs of such a mission would be much lower since you don't have to transmit so damn far, and the communication latency is so small that if you want, you can drive the rover remotely with a joystick.
The lunar module was 14,000kg. The ascent stage (the payload of the descent stage, really) was 4,500kg. Compare that to the MSL rover of just 900kg, and that's quite a lab if you ask me. You could have one heck of a rover on that Apollo descent stage!
What humans did on the Moon was equivalent perhaps to what the Spirit/Opportunity could do, modified for a sample return mission if you really want to hold the rocks down here on Earth. Once you have a couple tons to play with, you can have as complex of a lab as you can on Earth.
Hah, CDMA should be plenty robust to multipath, you can use more than one adaptive correlator per channel, and each correlator gives you the relative multipath phase as a diagnostic output, too. Ideally you'd want more than one antenna to make the adaptive scheme more robust, but it'll work with just one. What's more, you can always record the high-bandwidth datastream from the digital radio I/Q inputs for offline data recovery: whatever processing you do online is limited by the maximum latency allowed in your decoder, offline has no such problem. To integrate "offline" with other recording equipment, you can simply have two outputs: a realtime output that goes to the program mixing console, and a more delayed offline output that goes to the multitrack "source" recorder for a studio mix (where you can easily shift things around, time-wise).
Admittedly satellite links have stable channel properties, but the error correction codes that they use are as close to optimal for given datarate-to-bandwidth as is feasible, and that's not very common in non-cellular consumer point-to-point gear. I agree that terrestrial channels are more challenging when it comes to varying channel properties.
A wireless mike is a very specific application. It shouldn't ever need a receiver, so the only way to deal with potentially strong narrowband interference is to use CDMA and as wide of a transmit bandwidth as possible -- using frequency division (one channel per mike) is not robust enough, usually. All of the "brains" need to be in the base station, the transmitter circuitry can be hardwired in a relatively simple FPGA that takes input from an audio codec, a couple jumper settings (node ID / code selection) and pushes it via a DAC to the filter/upconverter/final amp. All the encoding etc. is done completely digitally and can be probably modeled in a few pages of Verilog.
+1 informative. Thanks.
Wouldn't it be simpler to have just internet service and get a VOIP number for like $5 a month from one of numerous provider? You can buy a full-featured VoIP phone like Zultys ZIP 4x4 on eBay for around $40, wireless (WIFI) ones aren't much more expensive either. And you get a managed Ethernet switch for free :)
Thinking of processor capabilities, I honestly think that in 1984 8086 sucked compared to 68k.
I don't know why booting up is such a big deal. All of the machines I have simply sleep when you're not using them, memory doesn't really take all that much power just to keep it refreshed. I think the iMac at home gets rebooted whenever the software update tells you to, there's no reason to do it otherwise.
The clock cycle comparison is true, but not indicative of performance: a modern CPU can easily do almost 3 orders of magnitude more per cycle than an 8086 could. A 16x16 multiply on 8086 took a hundred clock cycles. A modern general-purpose CPU pulls off 8 of these in one clock cycle. So we're talking about an aggregate speedup of 5-6 orders of magnitude per core.