If you want to get a visceral appreciation for the complexity of medical billing today, check out the Medicare Claims Processing Manual.
It almost seems like you can't merely get an administrative assistant, but you need someone with an A.A. in medical billing.
The thing that really left me aghast was the move from ICD 9 to ICD 10 (diagnosis codes and descriptions). Those #$&!!?! policy geniuses completely abandoned the ICD 9 codes and instituted all new ICD 10 codes. There was a big infrastructure around ICD 9. There is plenty of overlap in the codes, so it's a recipe for mass confusion. It's stunning that there was not even any attempt to have even a scintilla of backward compatibility.
It is almost like there are no senior database or programming architects involved in any of these decisions regarding medical IT. From what I've seen, it seems to me that it's purely non-technical policy staff driving this stuff. You have to get senior database and programming and UI architects in some of these decisions to reintroduce some sanity and control over the complexity of the solutions.
So you've got this encrypted system that's kind of like a Usenet for transactions. I make a change locally, eventually it propagates across the world. The databases are on everyone's computers versus on several hundred servers like Usenet.
The "distributed ledger" is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. And I don't mean that with any sarcasm or negativity. But how well will it scale really, if the ledgers/databases are on people's computers instead of a network of several powerful servers connected by a fast backbone?
I'm a total tyro when it comes to the distributed ledger. I've never used Bitcoin. But it - the distributed ledger - seems hackable, with no recourse if you lose your stash. And its scalability seems limited.
In the past, Microsoft used to piss off other businesses by crushing them, ruthlessly.
Now, they are gratuitously fucking with their non-captive PAID UP customer base. That's just bizarre. Incomprehensible. Smells like poor management.
If you think your customer is captive, sure, you can squeeze them, if they have limited other choices, as the typical person does with an operating system. But with non-captive customers? Smells like poor management. It seems like a management philosophy that permeates the Windows and Office divisions is spreading to the non-captive-customer divisions.
"When I was a young man, they told me if I voted for Goldwater, I'd get sent to Vietnam. I voted for Goldwater and sure enough, I got sent to Vietnam."
People say he did it out of conviction or stayed true to his principles. Well, so does a suicide bomber.
But here's the difference: The suicide bomber is expecting a reward - 72 virgins or some other heavenly reward. Snowden knew he would throw away his life but he didn't do it for a personal reward. He did it for others, for his country.
I haven't made up my mind whether Snowden was misguided, stupid or justified. But I have concluded that the man is principled and a selfless patriot. He might be stupid and misguided, but he felt he did the right thing, at great personal cost to himself, for no personal reward.
Though the individual dies, the life "virus" (DNA, genetic material) leaps from host to host. From what I've seen and read, it seems that the individual's behavior and its life and death itself are designed, by the "virus", to maximize the health and size of the herd. In that context, it could well be mechanisms are then activated to quickly break down the individual body back into its components for re-use, which maximizes herd health in some way.
However, that could be driven to maximize not merely the population of the individual's species but the overall presence of life itself, from its most minute forms and larger. Again driven by the desire of the underlying "life virus" to maximize the incidence of lifeforms, for whatever reason.
Money is a measure of effort required to get a unit of it. It is also like a claim on goods and services. It is a logical construct, but it is not meaningless. The construct has persisted for millennia as a result of the benefits it provides to individuals.
To a central bank which can have it printed, it can seem meaningless. And the effort required to obtain a unit of it by an agricultural field hand versus the CEO of a financial services company are obviously very different. Central banks can distribute it to desired companies via bond purchases and other enticements.
An extra 1500 years before catching the attention of aliens is probably not a bad thing. That's more time to prepare defenses. It's hard to guess the nature of the extremophiles which live in space, or the space-faring races which navigate it.
We shockingly might not be perceived as peers or equals by space-faring races, but as an inferior species. And the history of superior species meeting inferior ones is not all rainbows and unicorns.
Now... if The Bern runs on the Green Party ticket with Jill Stein, in a 3-way race, he could actually become president. At a minimum, he could accuse Hillary of siphoning votes from him instead of vice versa, if he gets a larger percentage of national votes.
Mess with someone's life's work and they ain't going to be very happy about it. Academics aren't typically prone to this kind of violence, but clearly it is not out of the realm of possibility.
Because the only real "Black" family is completely dysfunctional and nobody in the Black Community actually wants to solve that problem because the problem itself doesn't reflect well on the black community as a whole.
Platitudes get more votes than hard, accusatory solutions.
Platitudes make the speaker and listener feel good in the moment.
So, platitudes is what they (we) are going to get.
I'll tell you the primary power difference between Christianity and Islam:
1) Jesus said, "Render to Caesar what is Caesar and to God what is God's". This cleaves the core religion from government. Jesus was a single, poor itinerant preacher who was crucified between thieves. One can be a good Christian and accept a separation of church and state.
2) Muhammad was a political and military leader who created a religion which also was a system of government. There can be no separation of church and state in Islam. One cannot be a good Muslim and accept a separation of mosque and state.
Henry VIII was sick of being pushed around by the Catholic Church, a competing power center to his own. So he formed the Anglican church and set himself as the head of it.
The Founders said, in the First Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". They too understood organized religion as a competing power center and knew not to allow one to spread its roots to take hold of the government. Such a dichotomy is nonsensical in Islam.
It is quite amusing that Facebook is trying to pretend to be a source of unbiased news. I heard this story and thought, what kind of halfwit would expect even the pretense of unbiased news from Facebook? This sounds like a planted story where Facebook plants the expectation of being a neutral, unbiased source of news, and there's great rending of garments and theater when discovered this may not be the case.
Facebook is a profit-making entity devoted to increasing the fortunes of its top executives and itself. This story is an attempt to create the expectation that Facebook is some kind of source of unbiased news. It certainly can be a news outlet, like any other media outlet, but to suggest it's unbiased is like suggesting Fox or MSNBC is unbiased or any other person or groups of person are unbiased in their reporting.
However, pretending to be unbiased, and then reporting biased stories as unbiased gives one a tremendous amount of political power. Heck, simply being a source of information to people gives the disseminator a great deal of power.
Every dollar you receive is taxed. And you have to pay estimated taxes every quarter. And then you gotta pay the self-employment tax.
It makes me much more keenly aware of the difference between pre-tax dollars and post-tax dollars. When I have to pay say, 100 dollars for something, I know how much I have to make in order to net 100 dollars, after tax.
There is at least one exception (of which I'm aware, I'm sure there are more): house flipping. The first 250K (500K if married) of profit is tax free (exclusions apply). And then it's taxed as a capital gain (at a 15% rate). Tax rules are a big source of politicians' power, and are thus heavily influenced by donations and lobbying.
Recursion is not a simple concept to someone who has never heard "recursive case" and "base case" and "function". It's not a simple concept even to those who have. So, no snobbishness I think.
They're like engineering jokes: "What do you get when you cross an elephant and a grape? Elephant grape sin theta." No one who doesn't know what a cross product is, is going to get that.
This speaks to the weakness of the jury system. It worked well enough in agrarian times for simple concepts. But this is not a jury of (programming) peers. So they're not being judged by jury of their peers.
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
White papers by economists at the NBER are not scientific evidence.
White papers aren't peer-reviewed. That allows authors to get away with any bullshit that the reviewers and editors of a peer-reviewed paper would challenge.
Economists aren't scientists.
So... the people who created the study(s) to advance that position that harsher sentences do not reduce crime are almost certainly social scientists. Economics is typically seen as the crunchiest (most observational/mathematical) of the social sciences. By casting aspersions at economists, it seems a bit hypocritical to suggest that sociologists and criminologists, the ones behind the evidence you like, somehow are legitimate scientists.
They find association and accept it as causation, as they do with this study. Scientists find associations all the time, but when they do a controlled study, about half the time the association doesn't hold up and there is no causation.
The only way to study impacts of stimuli on populations is to identify correlations and seek to exclude all other possible factors which might be driving the response. You can't put a population in a petri dish or a isolation chamber. That's how social science is supposed to work.
The hard sciences actually seek mechanisms of causation - like why does a material behave as it does, why does a drug behave as it does, etc. They don't need to rely on correlations (which can certainly be useful in some applications, regardless).
Social scientists can seek a mechanism of causation in an individual. But in a population, there are varied individuals which may not respond as the single individual. Thus, the reliance on correlation when studying populations.
Indeed. "Tough on crime" does not work, or rather it has the opposite of the intended effect. That has been known reliably for a long, long time. Criminals do not expect to be caught, and hence penalties do not figure in their motivation.
Here's a simple thought experiment on deterrence. In each of the following scenarios, do we get a) More crime, b) less crime, c) no change?: 1) If we actively rewarded crime? 2) If crime had no state-imposed penalty? 3) If crime had state-imposed minimally inconveniencing penalties? 4) If crime had harsh state-imposed penalties?
You're suggesting deterrence doesn't work because no offender thinks he'll be caught. I don't think that's true. The possibility of capture likely has some place in the offender's risk analysis. Hence many criminals' actions to minimize their possibility of capture.
I admit that deterrence will not deter everyone. But it is safe to say it will deter at least some. And we should take what we can get.
So, I know a felon, a guy who incarcerated for felony theft. He was a real treacherous shitbag before he went in, but now, he's quite polite (I'm sure he's still quite treacherous but I have no interest in finding out). No more late night parties, his house (yes, there is money in his family, so he has a house) is lights out relatively early in the evening. I think prison had quite the correct effect on this guy. It seems to have deterred him from future criminality.
Prison should deter people, both those who have committed crimes so they don't want to return, and those who don't with to have a stay in the first place.
This nonsense about 'everyone is a criminal - you're committing crimes right now' - is nonsense. I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support such a thing (which I how I make decisions on the accuracy of claims).
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
Are there bad cops? Of course. Do they make up more than a tiny minority of cops? No. I haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Lionizing criminals, which I remember in the 70s and 80s only leads to a lot of innocent people suffering. Criminals should be held to account for their actions.
This underlying universal drive which created life needs replication and death to gather information. An immortal cell gathers no more information. But in humans, we've developed the ability to gather and store information outside of ourselves. I don't think that's something any animal can do, create repositories of information. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton
Then we create mechanisms that can deduce and gather even more information than we can (some form of AI?). We're serving this underlying drive even more effectively. Or rather, the underlying drive is becoming more and more effective at gathering information.
Perhaps like a baby trying to learn about the world, the universe is trying to learn what it is.
And what does life do? It replicates, creates entropy - and gathers information. That's why I found this article from a few months ago so interesting:
"To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
The seeds of life - and thus the drive to gather information - is embedded in the fabric of the universe. Why is that?
The universe is a weird place. At one point in time, the whole thing occupied the same amount of space as my mouse. Where did THAT object come from? I know, we're not supposed to bother thinking about it since conventional wisdom says we can't find out about it.
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." -- Douglas Adams
The fact that the seeds of life and consciousness - us - are embedded in the fabric of the universe is interesting. A dust devil starts in space, a gravity well forming in a gas and dust cloud, the solar system starts coalescing. Sub-whirlwinds start in the spinning cloud, coalescing into planets. On the third one from the center, life appears. Let it spin for a few billion years more, and here we are, contemplating the mechanism that spawned us.
"A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself." -- Michio Kaku
I find flights of fancies like Tyson's to be rather interesting.
I think speed reading is a hoax. It *may* be an ability of those with some weird cognitive ability, like photographic memory or some such. But for anyone other than that, I think it's a hoax. My reading speed and comprehension has always been towards the top of the class and I've scored very highly on standardized tests. And I'm not a spring chicken. These are my conclusions on the various types of reading:
1) There's skimming - that's not reading. If I were skimming a document, looking for keywords, I'd miss a lot of meaning but see my keywords. Were I tested on the document I'd "speed-read"/skimmed, I would fail. Apparently some people are referring to skimming as speed reading. Very low comprehension level reading.
2) There's reading for long periods. That's not speed reading, that's just sustained reading. Like I've done when reading thick fiction novels over a weekend.
3) There's pleasure reading, where the concepts are not complex and one is not tested on comprehension, one is doing it for pleasure. This is a faster rate of reading.
4) Then finally there's dense academic reading. Reading the Dragon book, for example, or some other information-dense tome. That's the slowest pace, and the pace at which one attempts to uptake the most detail and absorb complex concepts.
As best as I can make out, skimming is being sold as speed reading, in a most generous scenario. And it's not really even reading, other than scanning for keywords or scanning every third sentence or some such. Information uptake in such a scenario would be absolutely minimal.
The ability to uptake information at a pleasure reading level, while moving through the document at skimming speed is what, as best as I can tell, supposed to be speed reading. And that is simply not possible for anyone, perhaps barring those with some very unusual cognitive capability along the lines of photographic memory and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to get a visceral appreciation for the complexity of medical billing today, check out the Medicare Claims Processing Manual.
It almost seems like you can't merely get an administrative assistant, but you need someone with an A.A. in medical billing.
The thing that really left me aghast was the move from ICD 9 to ICD 10 (diagnosis codes and descriptions). Those #$&!!?! policy geniuses completely abandoned the ICD 9 codes and instituted all new ICD 10 codes. There was a big infrastructure around ICD 9. There is plenty of overlap in the codes, so it's a recipe for mass confusion. It's stunning that there was not even any attempt to have even a scintilla of backward compatibility.
It is almost like there are no senior database or programming architects involved in any of these decisions regarding medical IT. From what I've seen, it seems to me that it's purely non-technical policy staff driving this stuff. You have to get senior database and programming and UI architects in some of these decisions to reintroduce some sanity and control over the complexity of the solutions.
So you've got this encrypted system that's kind of like a Usenet for transactions. I make a change locally, eventually it propagates across the world. The databases are on everyone's computers versus on several hundred servers like Usenet.
The "distributed ledger" is supposed to be the Next Big Thing. And I don't mean that with any sarcasm or negativity. But how well will it scale really, if the ledgers/databases are on people's computers instead of a network of several powerful servers connected by a fast backbone?
I'm a total tyro when it comes to the distributed ledger. I've never used Bitcoin. But it - the distributed ledger - seems hackable, with no recourse if you lose your stash. And its scalability seems limited.
In the past, Microsoft used to piss off other businesses by crushing them, ruthlessly.
Now, they are gratuitously fucking with their non-captive PAID UP customer base. That's just bizarre. Incomprehensible. Smells like poor management.
If you think your customer is captive, sure, you can squeeze them, if they have limited other choices, as the typical person does with an operating system. But with non-captive customers? Smells like poor management. It seems like a management philosophy that permeates the Windows and Office divisions is spreading to the non-captive-customer divisions.
"When I was a young man, they told me if I voted for Goldwater, I'd get sent to Vietnam. I voted for Goldwater and sure enough, I got sent to Vietnam."
People say he did it out of conviction or stayed true to his principles. Well, so does a suicide bomber.
But here's the difference: The suicide bomber is expecting a reward - 72 virgins or some other heavenly reward. Snowden knew he would throw away his life but he didn't do it for a personal reward. He did it for others, for his country.
I haven't made up my mind whether Snowden was misguided, stupid or justified. But I have concluded that the man is principled and a selfless patriot. He might be stupid and misguided, but he felt he did the right thing, at great personal cost to himself, for no personal reward.
Though the individual dies, the life "virus" (DNA, genetic material) leaps from host to host. From what I've seen and read, it seems that the individual's behavior and its life and death itself are designed, by the "virus", to maximize the health and size of the herd. In that context, it could well be mechanisms are then activated to quickly break down the individual body back into its components for re-use, which maximizes herd health in some way.
However, that could be driven to maximize not merely the population of the individual's species but the overall presence of life itself, from its most minute forms and larger. Again driven by the desire of the underlying "life virus" to maximize the incidence of lifeforms, for whatever reason.
Money is a measure of effort required to get a unit of it. It is also like a claim on goods and services. It is a logical construct, but it is not meaningless. The construct has persisted for millennia as a result of the benefits it provides to individuals.
To a central bank which can have it printed, it can seem meaningless. And the effort required to obtain a unit of it by an agricultural field hand versus the CEO of a financial services company are obviously very different. Central banks can distribute it to desired companies via bond purchases and other enticements.
An extra 1500 years before catching the attention of aliens is probably not a bad thing. That's more time to prepare defenses. It's hard to guess the nature of the extremophiles which live in space, or the space-faring races which navigate it.
We shockingly might not be perceived as peers or equals by space-faring races, but as an inferior species. And the history of superior species meeting inferior ones is not all rainbows and unicorns.
Trump is a vote for "something different" versus "more of the same." Recall Deez Nuts getting 9% of the vote in the August 19th, 2015 North Carolina presidential poll.
Now... if The Bern runs on the Green Party ticket with Jill Stein, in a 3-way race, he could actually become president. At a minimum, he could accuse Hillary of siphoning votes from him instead of vice versa, if he gets a larger percentage of national votes.
Yeah but why off the ex-girlfriend too?
It just sounds like Sarkar got the killing fever.
Platitudes get more votes than hard, accusatory solutions.
Platitudes make the speaker and listener feel good in the moment.
So, platitudes is what they (we) are going to get.
I'll tell you the primary power difference between Christianity and Islam:
1) Jesus said, "Render to Caesar what is Caesar and to God what is God's". This cleaves the core religion from government. Jesus was a single, poor itinerant preacher who was crucified between thieves. One can be a good Christian and accept a separation of church and state.
2) Muhammad was a political and military leader who created a religion which also was a system of government. There can be no separation of church and state in Islam. One cannot be a good Muslim and accept a separation of mosque and state.
Henry VIII was sick of being pushed around by the Catholic Church, a competing power center to his own. So he formed the Anglican church and set himself as the head of it.
The Founders said, in the First Amendment, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". They too understood organized religion as a competing power center and knew not to allow one to spread its roots to take hold of the government. Such a dichotomy is nonsensical in Islam.
It is quite amusing that Facebook is trying to pretend to be a source of unbiased news. I heard this story and thought, what kind of halfwit would expect even the pretense of unbiased news from Facebook? This sounds like a planted story where Facebook plants the expectation of being a neutral, unbiased source of news, and there's great rending of garments and theater when discovered this may not be the case.
Facebook is a profit-making entity devoted to increasing the fortunes of its top executives and itself. This story is an attempt to create the expectation that Facebook is some kind of source of unbiased news. It certainly can be a news outlet, like any other media outlet, but to suggest it's unbiased is like suggesting Fox or MSNBC is unbiased or any other person or groups of person are unbiased in their reporting.
However, pretending to be unbiased, and then reporting biased stories as unbiased gives one a tremendous amount of political power. Heck, simply being a source of information to people gives the disseminator a great deal of power.
Corporations are logical constructs. Legal constructs. Bernanke called them 'legal fictions'.
When one thinks of a corporation doing something, they should think of one (or a few) people doing it under the flag of the corporation.
So, lesser punishments like incarceration and fines are deterrents, yet the harsher sentence of capital punishment is not? That's not credible.
Every dollar you receive is taxed. And you have to pay estimated taxes every quarter. And then you gotta pay the self-employment tax.
It makes me much more keenly aware of the difference between pre-tax dollars and post-tax dollars. When I have to pay say, 100 dollars for something, I know how much I have to make in order to net 100 dollars, after tax.
There is at least one exception (of which I'm aware, I'm sure there are more): house flipping. The first 250K (500K if married) of profit is tax free (exclusions apply). And then it's taxed as a capital gain (at a 15% rate). Tax rules are a big source of politicians' power, and are thus heavily influenced by donations and lobbying.
Recursion is not a simple concept to someone who has never heard "recursive case" and "base case" and "function". It's not a simple concept even to those who have. So, no snobbishness I think.
They're like engineering jokes: "What do you get when you cross an elephant and a grape? Elephant grape sin theta." No one who doesn't know what a cross product is, is going to get that.
This speaks to the weakness of the jury system. It worked well enough in agrarian times for simple concepts. But this is not a jury of (programming) peers. So they're not being judged by jury of their peers.
That's not "settled science":
1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
White papers by economists at the NBER are not scientific evidence.
White papers aren't peer-reviewed. That allows authors to get away with any bullshit that the reviewers and editors of a peer-reviewed paper would challenge.
Economists aren't scientists.
So... the people who created the study(s) to advance that position that harsher sentences do not reduce crime are almost certainly social scientists. Economics is typically seen as the crunchiest (most observational/mathematical) of the social sciences. By casting aspersions at economists, it seems a bit hypocritical to suggest that sociologists and criminologists, the ones behind the evidence you like, somehow are legitimate scientists.
They find association and accept it as causation, as they do with this study. Scientists find associations all the time, but when they do a controlled study, about half the time the association doesn't hold up and there is no causation.
The only way to study impacts of stimuli on populations is to identify correlations and seek to exclude all other possible factors which might be driving the response. You can't put a population in a petri dish or a isolation chamber. That's how social science is supposed to work.
The hard sciences actually seek mechanisms of causation - like why does a material behave as it does, why does a drug behave as it does, etc. They don't need to rely on correlations (which can certainly be useful in some applications, regardless).
Social scientists can seek a mechanism of causation in an individual. But in a population, there are varied individuals which may not respond as the single individual. Thus, the reliance on correlation when studying populations.
That's not "settled science":
1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime
2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
Here's a simple thought experiment on deterrence. In each of the following scenarios, do we get a) More crime, b) less crime, c) no change?:
1) If we actively rewarded crime?
2) If crime had no state-imposed penalty?
3) If crime had state-imposed minimally inconveniencing penalties?
4) If crime had harsh state-imposed penalties?
You're suggesting deterrence doesn't work because no offender thinks he'll be caught. I don't think that's true. The possibility of capture likely has some place in the offender's risk analysis. Hence many criminals' actions to minimize their possibility of capture.
I admit that deterrence will not deter everyone. But it is safe to say it will deter at least some. And we should take what we can get.
So, I know a felon, a guy who incarcerated for felony theft. He was a real treacherous shitbag before he went in, but now, he's quite polite (I'm sure he's still quite treacherous but I have no interest in finding out). No more late night parties, his house (yes, there is money in his family, so he has a house) is lights out relatively early in the evening. I think prison had quite the correct effect on this guy. It seems to have deterred him from future criminality.
Prison should deter people, both those who have committed crimes so they don't want to return, and those who don't with to have a stay in the first place.
This nonsense about 'everyone is a criminal - you're committing crimes right now' - is nonsense. I haven't seen a shred of evidence to support such a thing (which I how I make decisions on the accuracy of claims).
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
Are there bad cops? Of course. Do they make up more than a tiny minority of cops? No. I haven't seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Lionizing criminals, which I remember in the 70s and 80s only leads to a lot of innocent people suffering. Criminals should be held to account for their actions.
This underlying universal drive which created life needs replication and death to gather information. An immortal cell gathers no more information. But in humans, we've developed the ability to gather and store information outside of ourselves. I don't think that's something any animal can do, create repositories of information. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton
Then we create mechanisms that can deduce and gather even more information than we can (some form of AI?). We're serving this underlying drive even more effectively. Or rather, the underlying drive is becoming more and more effective at gathering information.
Perhaps like a baby trying to learn about the world, the universe is trying to learn what it is.
Asimov wrote "Childhood's End", hinting at this.
And what does life do? It replicates, creates entropy - and gathers information. That's why I found this article from a few months ago so interesting:
"To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
The seeds of life - and thus the drive to gather information - is embedded in the fabric of the universe. Why is that?
The universe is a weird place. At one point in time, the whole thing occupied the same amount of space as my mouse. Where did THAT object come from? I know, we're not supposed to bother thinking about it since conventional wisdom says we can't find out about it.
"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." -- Douglas Adams
The fact that the seeds of life and consciousness - us - are embedded in the fabric of the universe is interesting. A dust devil starts in space, a gravity well forming in a gas and dust cloud, the solar system starts coalescing. Sub-whirlwinds start in the spinning cloud, coalescing into planets. On the third one from the center, life appears. Let it spin for a few billion years more, and here we are, contemplating the mechanism that spawned us.
"A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself." -- Michio Kaku
I find flights of fancies like Tyson's to be rather interesting.
Arrows, shapes and symbols are much easier to execute with handwritten notes rather than typed. So I prefer the handwritten.
I think speed reading is a hoax. It *may* be an ability of those with some weird cognitive ability, like photographic memory or some such. But for anyone other than that, I think it's a hoax. My reading speed and comprehension has always been towards the top of the class and I've scored very highly on standardized tests. And I'm not a spring chicken. These are my conclusions on the various types of reading:
1) There's skimming - that's not reading. If I were skimming a document, looking for keywords, I'd miss a lot of meaning but see my keywords. Were I tested on the document I'd "speed-read"/skimmed, I would fail. Apparently some people are referring to skimming as speed reading. Very low comprehension level reading.
2) There's reading for long periods. That's not speed reading, that's just sustained reading. Like I've done when reading thick fiction novels over a weekend.
3) There's pleasure reading, where the concepts are not complex and one is not tested on comprehension, one is doing it for pleasure. This is a faster rate of reading.
4) Then finally there's dense academic reading. Reading the Dragon book, for example, or some other information-dense tome. That's the slowest pace, and the pace at which one attempts to uptake the most detail and absorb complex concepts.
As best as I can make out, skimming is being sold as speed reading, in a most generous scenario. And it's not really even reading, other than scanning for keywords or scanning every third sentence or some such. Information uptake in such a scenario would be absolutely minimal.
The ability to uptake information at a pleasure reading level, while moving through the document at skimming speed is what, as best as I can tell, supposed to be speed reading. And that is simply not possible for anyone, perhaps barring those with some very unusual cognitive capability along the lines of photographic memory and the like.