Instead of spending billions on Wall Street, the government should be supporting the sciences, by providing patronage for things like physics Phds and the like.
Much higher return methinks.
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ” Richard P. Feynman
The rest of society benefits when government and society puts money into the sciences instead of financial hustles.
The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.
And the problem if mankind dies on the vine? Are we that critical to the universe that the universe will suffer if the human race is no longer here?
Of course our existence doesn't matter to the universe, it matters to us. Why not make the best of it??
The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.
Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.
We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.
The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.
I ignored the login stuff, just clicked through to get to the images. There is a primer on what they're looking for in that initial part, but also some login stuff that I just clicked through. The page initially didn't load once I got to the blank page, but a couple of reloads and it finally loaded and I could start moving the viewfinder through the search area.
It might take a try or two to get it to load correctly. After a couple-three tries, it worked correctly for me and I spent about 30 minutes perusing the area. Saw one unusually red spot but it could have been a trick of light. I marked two "items of interest" in about 10+ square kilometer area. The more votes an item gets the more likely it is to be something.
The Endurance became trapped on January 19, 1915. The crew was rescued, after Shackleton and his lieutenants' heroics, on August 30, 1916. Nineteen months in Antarctica.
I was struck the other day with the similarities between bitcoin and a savings account: Both are digital representations of a logical construct.
The most basic logical construct of the financial world is currency. Slips of paper to which people ascribe value. When stored in a savings account, they become digital representations of the currency logical construct.
Tractors in Farmville are digital representations of a logical construct.
Stocks (shares of ownership), bonds (promises to pay), synthetic CDO's (a bet which a US district court judge called "gibberish") are other logical constructs. These are typically represented digitally as well. But, at some point, these constructs can (hopefully) be converted into currency and exchanged for goods, services and financial products.
Gold, beanie babies, art are stores of value. Any store of value, even though it might have a physical representation, is a logical construct. The value is the logical construct. Typically, the value is measured by the amount of currency for which it can be exchanged. There can be other measures too, but currency is a common unit.
Whether people accept this logical construct (bitcoin) remains to be seen. If people directly accept it as currency - meaning they will accept it as payment - or value it for its convertibility into currency remains to be seen. If it's the former, it could become valuable. If it's the latter, it's going to have a lot of competition from other logical constructs to which people ascribe value.
Ultimately, a "thing" - physical or virtual - is valuable in that it helps people get what they want, whatever that want may be.
We think in terms of programming languages. The language abstracts away the complexity of manually generating the instructions. Then we build APIs to abstract away even more. So we can program a ball bouncing across a screen in just a few lines rather than generating tens of thousands of instructions manually, because of abstraction built upon abstraction.
In hardware, they build more complex circuits and give us more instructions. Perhaps one day mathematicians will come up yet a different device which can "do what we want", whatever that may be. The early computers were created to facilitate computation - calculation. Then people came up with programming languages (aka compilers) to generate the instructions automatically. The hardware was extended to do more things - draw a dot on a monitor for example. People discovered they could represent abstract concepts in programming languages. Then it was off to the races.
I think all complex systems are built evolutionarily. From single-celled organisms to eventually man. And it's done by taking the basic building blocks and building more and more complex systems from those building blocks. The basic stored instruction computer is settled (right?). We're doing all sorts of weird and interesting things with it, from playing Tetris, to emailing cat videos, to modeling hurricanes. And of course porn. Looking at porn.
Where does it end? Well, man can manage a certain amount of complexity (not much). He uses tools (in this case computers) to leverage his ability to manage complexity, as the device can represent all sorts of abstract concepts in code.
And that's a juvenile orca skull (image at bottom of page). Googling "killer whale skull" leads to a lot of results showing very large skulls, and it's unclear whether they're prehistoric. This was clearly labeled in that link so I linked to it.
The killer whale can weigh up to 22,000 lbs for males and 16,000 lbs for females, and be up to 32 feet and 28 feet long respectively. A great white shark can reach up to 5,000 lbs and 20 feet long.
I saw a PBS video showing great whites feeding on seals at a beach. Suddenly the great whites fled and shortly thereafter, orcas showed up to begin feeding. The narrator noted that orcas can kill great whites.
I'd much prefer a "Set and Forget" solution. It's much more reliable:
1) Lugging a device, mounting and unmounting it whenever I get in and out of the car is tedious. And I won't do it all the time as a result. 2) Thieves see mounts and will be more inclined to investigate the vehicle.
I'm certainly not advocating for more distractions in the car. All I'm saying is, I'd prefer a hidden system, theft-resistant, integrated with the car. Which requires minimal attention. THAT I'd buy.
I would love to have a hidden 360 degree camera, or even a hidden dash cam. However, in the DC-Baltimore metro area, leaving any electronic device in the car is an open invitation to a smash and grab theft. As a result, I keep almost nothing in my car.
I've been in two accidents, solely the fault of the other driver, where both denied responsibility. Cameras would have been fantastic in each case to capture what was going on.
I have to say, I was impressed people didn't get slaughtered over the border dispute they had with China recently. Both countries avoided people getting slaughtered over literally a few hundred yards of frozen ground. Something humans thought was normal until quite recently.
That scenario was based on the Ford Pinto. Ford made a decision that it would be cheaper to pay damages than it would be rework the Pinto design, so it went ahead with the Pinto:
"But at the time, management's attitude was to get the product out the door as fast as possible. So, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis. To fix the problems would cost an additional $11 per vehicle, and Ford weighed that $11 against the projected injury claims for severe burns, repair-costs claim rate and mortality. The total would have been approximately $113 million (including the engineering, the production delays and the parts for tens of thousands of cars), but damage payouts would cost only about $49 million, according to Ford's math. So the fix was nixed, and the Pinto went into production in September 1970."
Personal experience: When I first started working, my diet went to crap, eating candy bars for lunch and such. I remember being tired, really tired all the time. A friend suggested a vitamin regimen. And the difference was night and day. I guess I know what meth is like. The night I started, I only slept a few hours. And managed to do so for an entire week, getting up early and jogging, something I never do.
However, there were side effects too. I'd been taking a megadose of B complex and a large dose of vitamin E plus a daily multi-vitamin/mineral. When I went off the B-complex, all of my joints hurt. Anyway, fast forward to today, I take a multi-mineral/vitamin pill a couple-three times a week. I feel like that's probably the top of the cost/benefit function, at the top of the bell curve.
Grisly, grotesque, dripping reality. It's the thing that science strives to accurately describe.
Reality is a multi-faceted thing, like a diamond.
Reality ranges from whimsical and happy, to joyous, to mournful, to horrific to grisly. The Internet just allows you to see what you previously could not. If you don't want to look at the whole of it, don't. But don't force it to be hidden from the rest of us. That would be deceptive.
Psychopaths + semiautomatic weapons = mass murder. If we're not going to do anything about the weapons then we goddamn well better do something about the psychopaths.
And who knows, maybe this research will save some future classroom full of 6 year olds and their teachers. The incredible, incomprehensible reality is that we haven't done shit to address Newtown. Or Virginia Tech. Or Columbine. Or Aurora. Or San Ysidro. Or Oak Creek. Or Tuscon. And on and on.
We might not like the thought of rattlesnakes in the back yard. But we ignore it at our peril. We don't like the thought of getting cancer. But we ignore it at our peril. We don't like the thought of our aging parents inevitably dying. But it's reality.
Some truths are very unpleasant. But they're accurate descriptions of reality nonetheless. Scientific research should not be stifled by politics, lest it lead us back into the Dark Ages. Galileo encountered this kind of thing. Stem cell research encountered this kind of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of spending billions on Wall Street, the government should be supporting the sciences, by providing patronage for things like physics Phds and the like.
Much higher return methinks.
“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ” Richard P. Feynman
The rest of society benefits when government and society puts money into the sciences instead of financial hustles.
The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. We've got about 300-500 million years before it becomes uninhabitable for us. So, 90 percent of the megafauna era has passed. Mankind needs to look up now if he wants more time.
The elements in our bodies come from exploding stars.
The earth coalesced from a swirling ball of gas and dust. Which had various quantities of these elements. Then yadda yadda, lifeorms started popping up. Of which man was one of the later variants.
Man needs this fishbowl of earth to survive in the universe, just like goldfish need a fishbowl to survive in our living room. Imagine if the goldfish could get to the refrigerator.
We're just trying to get to the refrigerator. Or maybe even go outside.
The earth is not the center of the universe. It's a smallish planet in the solar system. It's part of the universe. Just like man. Eventually the sun will red giant. If we don't go outside - leave the womb - we're finished. A fruit that died on the vine. Seems like we should be working on that problem now.
Possible sail? (4 inches from right, 2 inches from top): http://tomnod.com/nod/challenge/ninarescue2/map/207355
I ignored the login stuff, just clicked through to get to the images. There is a primer on what they're looking for in that initial part, but also some login stuff that I just clicked through. The page initially didn't load once I got to the blank page, but a couple of reloads and it finally loaded and I could start moving the viewfinder through the search area.
It might take a try or two to get it to load correctly. After a couple-three tries, it worked correctly for me and I spent about 30 minutes perusing the area. Saw one unusually red spot but it could have been a trick of light. I marked two "items of interest" in about 10+ square kilometer area. The more votes an item gets the more likely it is to be something.
The HMS Endurance and Shackleton.
The Endurance became trapped on January 19, 1915. The crew was rescued, after Shackleton and his lieutenants' heroics, on August 30, 1916. Nineteen months in Antarctica.
I was struck the other day with the similarities between bitcoin and a savings account: Both are digital representations of a logical construct.
The most basic logical construct of the financial world is currency. Slips of paper to which people ascribe value. When stored in a savings account, they become digital representations of the currency logical construct.
Tractors in Farmville are digital representations of a logical construct.
Stocks (shares of ownership), bonds (promises to pay), synthetic CDO's (a bet which a US district court judge called "gibberish") are other logical constructs. These are typically represented digitally as well. But, at some point, these constructs can (hopefully) be converted into currency and exchanged for goods, services and financial products.
Gold, beanie babies, art are stores of value. Any store of value, even though it might have a physical representation, is a logical construct. The value is the logical construct. Typically, the value is measured by the amount of currency for which it can be exchanged. There can be other measures too, but currency is a common unit.
Whether people accept this logical construct (bitcoin) remains to be seen. If people directly accept it as currency - meaning they will accept it as payment - or value it for its convertibility into currency remains to be seen. If it's the former, it could become valuable. If it's the latter, it's going to have a lot of competition from other logical constructs to which people ascribe value.
Ultimately, a "thing" - physical or virtual - is valuable in that it helps people get what they want, whatever that want may be.
FYI: Link to Bloomberg video. Seems like Musk was vacillating but now is going to build a prototype.
So, we know what the computer does. It's this: List of x86 instructions. It executes those instructions. The device stores and executes instructions.
We think in terms of programming languages. The language abstracts away the complexity of manually generating the instructions. Then we build APIs to abstract away even more. So we can program a ball bouncing across a screen in just a few lines rather than generating tens of thousands of instructions manually, because of abstraction built upon abstraction.
In hardware, they build more complex circuits and give us more instructions. Perhaps one day mathematicians will come up yet a different device which can "do what we want", whatever that may be. The early computers were created to facilitate computation - calculation. Then people came up with programming languages (aka compilers) to generate the instructions automatically. The hardware was extended to do more things - draw a dot on a monitor for example. People discovered they could represent abstract concepts in programming languages. Then it was off to the races.
I think all complex systems are built evolutionarily. From single-celled organisms to eventually man. And it's done by taking the basic building blocks and building more and more complex systems from those building blocks. The basic stored instruction computer is settled (right?). We're doing all sorts of weird and interesting things with it, from playing Tetris, to emailing cat videos, to modeling hurricanes. And of course porn. Looking at porn.
Where does it end? Well, man can manage a certain amount of complexity (not much). He uses tools (in this case computers) to leverage his ability to manage complexity, as the device can represent all sorts of abstract concepts in code.
And that's a juvenile orca skull (image at bottom of page). Googling "killer whale skull" leads to a lot of results showing very large skulls, and it's unclear whether they're prehistoric. This was clearly labeled in that link so I linked to it.
Secondly, there are different types of killer whales, ocean-going ("transients") and near-coastline ("resident") types. The ocean-going ones are the classical wolves of the sea, highly intelligent pack hunters devouring whales and other marine mammals, while the near-coastline ones typically dine on mostly fish.
1) Killer whale teeth.
2) Killer whale skull.
The killer whale can weigh up to 22,000 lbs for males and 16,000 lbs for females, and be up to 32 feet and 28 feet long respectively. A great white shark can reach up to 5,000 lbs and 20 feet long.
I saw a PBS video showing great whites feeding on seals at a beach. Suddenly the great whites fled and shortly thereafter, orcas showed up to begin feeding. The narrator noted that orcas can kill great whites.
The male killer whales at Seaworld weigh 5-6 tons. It's quite remarkable that these orcas have not killed more trainers.
I'd much prefer a "Set and Forget" solution. It's much more reliable:
1) Lugging a device, mounting and unmounting it whenever I get in and out of the car is tedious. And I won't do it all the time as a result.
2) Thieves see mounts and will be more inclined to investigate the vehicle.
I'm certainly not advocating for more distractions in the car. All I'm saying is, I'd prefer a hidden system, theft-resistant, integrated with the car. Which requires minimal attention. THAT I'd buy.
I would love to have a hidden 360 degree camera, or even a hidden dash cam. However, in the DC-Baltimore metro area, leaving any electronic device in the car is an open invitation to a smash and grab theft. As a result, I keep almost nothing in my car.
I've been in two accidents, solely the fault of the other driver, where both denied responsibility. Cameras would have been fantastic in each case to capture what was going on.
I have to say, I was impressed people didn't get slaughtered over the border dispute they had with China recently. Both countries avoided people getting slaughtered over literally a few hundred yards of frozen ground. Something humans thought was normal until quite recently.
So, that's real progress.
But yeah, they have nukes too.
That scenario was based on the Ford Pinto. Ford made a decision that it would be cheaper to pay damages than it would be rework the Pinto design, so it went ahead with the Pinto:
"But at the time, management's attitude was to get the product out the door as fast as possible. So, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis. To fix the problems would cost an additional $11 per vehicle, and Ford weighed that $11 against the projected injury claims for severe burns, repair-costs claim rate and mortality. The total would have been approximately $113 million (including the engineering, the production delays and the parts for tens of thousands of cars), but damage payouts would cost only about $49 million, according to Ford's math. So the fix was nixed, and the Pinto went into production in September 1970."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/industry/top-automotive-engineering-failures-ford-pinto-fuel-tanks
Too much is bad, too little is bad.
Personal experience: When I first started working, my diet went to crap, eating candy bars for lunch and such. I remember being tired, really tired all the time. A friend suggested a vitamin regimen. And the difference was night and day. I guess I know what meth is like. The night I started, I only slept a few hours. And managed to do so for an entire week, getting up early and jogging, something I never do.
However, there were side effects too. I'd been taking a megadose of B complex and a large dose of vitamin E plus a daily multi-vitamin/mineral. When I went off the B-complex, all of my joints hurt. Anyway, fast forward to today, I take a multi-mineral/vitamin pill a couple-three times a week. I feel like that's probably the top of the cost/benefit function, at the top of the bell curve.
About. Goddamn. Time.
Try tracing the calcium in your bones to their origin. It's a very interesting flight of fancy:
"Calcium comes from stars. In fact, all of the elements that make up your body and the planet Earth itself, other than hydrogen and helium, were made in stars or during during explosions of massive stars." -- http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/teachers/calcium/got_calcium_litho.html
Grisly, grotesque, dripping reality. It's the thing that science strives to accurately describe.
Reality is a multi-faceted thing, like a diamond.
Reality ranges from whimsical and happy, to joyous, to mournful, to horrific to grisly. The Internet just allows you to see what you previously could not. If you don't want to look at the whole of it, don't. But don't force it to be hidden from the rest of us. That would be deceptive.
There are some very unpleasant truths out there.
No kidding. Here's a pic of Kroah-Hartman sitting next to Linus. He looks like Andre The Giant crossed with Clancy Brown.
Psychopaths + semiautomatic weapons = mass murder. If we're not going to do anything about the weapons then we goddamn well better do something about the psychopaths.
And who knows, maybe this research will save some future classroom full of 6 year olds and their teachers. The incredible, incomprehensible reality is that we haven't done shit to address Newtown. Or Virginia Tech. Or Columbine. Or Aurora. Or San Ysidro. Or Oak Creek. Or Tuscon. And on and on.
We might not like the thought of rattlesnakes in the back yard. But we ignore it at our peril.
We don't like the thought of getting cancer. But we ignore it at our peril.
We don't like the thought of our aging parents inevitably dying. But it's reality.
Some truths are very unpleasant. But they're accurate descriptions of reality nonetheless. Scientific research should not be stifled by politics, lest it lead us back into the Dark Ages. Galileo encountered this kind of thing. Stem cell research encountered this kind of thing.
Linus talking about this very thing in a talk at Aalt University in Helsinki (video: 02:50 minutes).
FYI, the entire video here (video, 01:03:57 hours).
It's a cartoon video, but it sums up the situation pretty well IMO: "The High End Store"