Trying to do things by making gestures in the air is a huge pain. Without tactile feedback, it's tiring and inaccurate.
Apple confronted this with the iPhone touch screen, IIRC, and solved it by having the phone vibrate ever so briefly when a touch was registered. This gave the sensory impression of a button clicking without actually doing so.
I don't see why a developer couldn't do something like this with VR gloves, then. Using JLC's approach, you'd have "Minority Report"-style gloves that had infrared reflectors in the fingertips but also a small, light motor that would fire for a few milliseconds whenever a "touch" was registered. You'd still have the issue of arm strain, of course, and wouldn't want to use this solution for long-term work, but it would almost certainly improve the usability.
EyeClops is a cheap $40 US / $60 Cdn gift that your nephew or nerdy niece would probably freak over
I couldn't help but notice that the submitter is working under the assumption that all Slashdot readers are unable to get girls*, let alone have children of their own.
* The idea that Slashdot readers might be feminine themselves is practically a violation of dogma.
Google has anything but a monopoly. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better. Google has most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searches.
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
A good point. However, I would argue that as Google (or Yahoo or MS) users employ more and more web services, it becomes harder to separate oneself from their respective search tools. Gmail has a Google search box right at the top; Yahoo Mail has one for their engine as well. Neither can be rigged to search the other's web database, and it's usually impractical to have more than one primary email.
Likewise, it's relatively easy (if time-consuming) to pop in a CD-ROM and crossgrade one's OS from Windows to Ubuntu or vice versa, and not much harder to install both on the same computer. But one or the other has to be the primary OS, and the more Windows software you use to do your job or to play games, the less incentive there is to switch over just for web browsing.
Still, most species will understand basic math, MORE and LESS. They will recognize two bananas as MORE than one banana. They will recognize three offspring as LESS than four offspring. That's pretty much all the math you need when you are an animal, living by the law of the jungle.
This isn't math -- it's counting ("numerosity" to the sesquipedalians). Mathematics implies, for instance, being able to add one and two and know that it equals three and not one. It implies an ability to manipulate the numbers, not just know which one is larger than the other.
music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts
Respectfully disagree. Matching a sound you can hear is simply a matter of listening closely to the "beats" that occur when the frequencies don't quite match up in tune.
Similarly, chords and harmonies sound pleasant because the frequency ratios are small. The twelve-tone scale develops neatly from this fact.
It's like catching a ball: nobody is projecting a parabolic arc through three-dimensional space to compute the precise point where the ball will arrive. The brain takes an educated guess, based on previous balls caught, and keeps adjusting that guess in real-time. When an uneducated singer is trying to match a tone, they're doing the same thing.
Seriously, why wouldn't a brain, which exists to process data in one form or another, respond to math positively at some level?
Because it's not, from an evolutionary perspective, necessary -- not beyond something like "I'm hungry, he has more berries than I do, therefore I should drop my food and take all of his."
Try something sometime: see how many randomy-arranged objects you can count in a split-second glance. Most people do well up to five. After that it gets tricky, unless, for example, six objects are grouped into two groups of three. But if you'd never learned your multiplication tables, you'd have trouble with that one, too.
Rain Man notwithstanding, the human brain isn't designed to count very high. Bearing that in mind, the fact that we developed abstract mathematics at all is truly amazing.
A number, for example, is the property that is common to all sets that are isomorphic in the category of sets (to spell it out: what is common to 'five apples', 'five oranges', 'five cows',...? The number 5, of course).
True, but that's not the impressive thing. The article points out:
The small study of two rhesus monkeys reveals that cells in their brains respond selectively to specific number values - regardless of whether the amount is represented by dots on a screen or an Arabic numeral.
The "numeral" aspect is significant. It's one thing to recognize the one-to-one correspondence between five dots and five apples, but quite another to identify the written digit "5" as representing five of anything.
Abstracting numbers into digits, or phonetic sounds into letters, is a complicated leap that isn't necessarily built-in to the brain. Humans do it all the time, but many cultures in the past and present do just fine without developing written language or numbers, suggesting it's not innate to the brain.
I take exception to this, though:
Nieder, meanwhile, believes that the monkeys can count to far higher numbers. "I'm convinced that they could go to infinity," he says.
Counting to nine is one thing, since each number has a unique digit. Grasping the concepts behind multi-digit base-ten numbers is one of the first steps toward real mathematics, and I imagine monkeys would need a lot more training to handle that.
Interested parties should check out The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin, who points out that many higher mammals have a kind of number sense (lions seem to be able to tell by the number of roars whether another pride has more or fewer members than their own). Gorillas and chimps can be taught to do single-digit arithmetic, although it takes much longer than it does with humans. And infant humans can definitely recognize, for instance, that one-ball plus one-ball should equal two-balls and that something's wrong when it becomes three-balls instead.
Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots." Once you get beyond three or four, mathematics becomes something that has to be invented.
I find this interesting, personally -- all animal brains are built as a kind of pattern-recognition system, something computers are very bad at. All human cultures have a kind of language with a fully-recognized grammar for communicating past, present and future ideas. But counting, clearly, isn't innate to the brain. It has to be deliberately learned, like writing. And like writing, it's not something that's really useful except in more advanced money-using societies.
But they'll have to cut corners, meet dates, add legacy support, and all the things a behemoth like Microsoft always thinks they have to do.
Legacy support is important to many business Windows customers; some of them are still using 16-years-old custom software that needs to run on whatever desktop OS their employees are running.
IAAMN (I am a math nerd), but when I was in junior high I found the book "Algebra The Easy Way" by Douglas Downing to be a remarkably readable and enjoyable introduction to the subject. I still recommend it to people who are struggling with the subject using textbooks. Definitely start here, even if you go another route.
The same publisher is responsible for "Geometry The Easy Way", "Trigonometry The Easy Way", and so forth, although not all are by the same author.
It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.
Than any other non-written language, maybe.
It's fairly obvious that once you begin to write a language down, and even take the step of codifying it in grammar texts and dictionaries, its rate of evolution slows dramatically.
It would have been nice for him to be able to finish the series. True, a certain amount of foot-dragging in the middle of the series got him into this fix, but still I think somebody undertaking such a large venture, and mostly sucessfully, should have the satisfaction of seeing it finished.
I certainly hope George R.R. Martin is reading this. If he doesn't finish up "A Song of Ice and Fire" before he dies, I'm going to be profusely upset.
On the other hand, at least he's (mostly) keeping himself on track the way he started.
JMS learned in making "Babylon 5" why television doesn't usually bother with stories that last more than one season at a time; namely, your actors and/or network contracts can disappear in the middle of a story. Novelists likewise need to keep in mind the perils of creating stories that can take decades to finish writing.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
In the PC market, this is true.
However, Apple's scored a coup in the portable media market with the iPod, and they're leveraging that slowly but surely. The iPhone and iPod Touch have everything they need to be the ultimate "handheld Mac", except for storage space.
Right now the WiFi iTunes store just sells music, but if you could download video and games directly through the thing... if you could use that pop-up keyboard to edit basic word-processor files or send instant messages to your friends... well, your average teenager wouldn't bother using a laptop anymore. And the only reason you can't do those things with an iPod Touch is that Apple hasn't turned it on.
My opinion? Don't mess around with this unless you've got your head screwed on real tight. This to the anime aficionados is like Star Wars.
Pffft. You must not have been following the debate in the Transformers community before that movie was released this summer.
Unlike, say, G.I. Joe, Transformers has been in more-or-less continuous toy production since Beast Wars. Several of the recent comics are considered near-canon, and several collectible toys have been made just based on "The War Within" comics. Debate over the "authenticity" of the so-called exploding-metal "Bayformers" was polarized to say the least.
And way, way too many fans would jump into the forums arguing that the Generation 1 cartoon was the be-all and end-all of Transformers storytelling, despite the numerous animation gaffes, plot contradictions (did Megatron build the Constructicons, or vice versa?), and other assorted nonsense such as you would expect from an 80s kids cartoon.
The "Transformers" movie, despite its huge separation from previous Transformers generations and obvious popcorn-movie plot, was a blockbuster hit for fans and non-fans alike. Because, surprise!-- the fans constituted only a small percentage of the actual box office receipts. The rest was made up of Americans and non-Americans who just wanted to watch a bunch of giant robots beating the crap out of each other on a movie screen the size of a junior high school.
Any, ANY "Robotech" that does anything less than strictly reinterpret the original Japanese story is going to be controversial. But you know what? Those fans, frankly, aren't important enough to the movie studio. The director and the writer will do their best to appeal to the fans because, to be frank, they need the fans' knowledge of continuity and history to make the story work well. But you can't please all of the fans all of the time.
You missed "spontaneously offering up other little details in conversation" like he was interested in, and wanted to talk about the subject. I am sure it's on Youtube somewhere, the one when he's eating corn and they have a conversation about it.
"Alex, would you like some corn?" *squawk* "Why do you want to talk about some corn?" "Well, we could talk about something else." *squawk* "Does it please you to believe we could talk about something else?"
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to do things by making gestures in the air is a huge pain. Without tactile feedback, it's tiring and inaccurate.
Apple confronted this with the iPhone touch screen, IIRC, and solved it by having the phone vibrate ever so briefly when a touch was registered. This gave the sensory impression of a button clicking without actually doing so.
I don't see why a developer couldn't do something like this with VR gloves, then. Using JLC's approach, you'd have "Minority Report"-style gloves that had infrared reflectors in the fingertips but also a small, light motor that would fire for a few milliseconds whenever a "touch" was registered. You'd still have the issue of arm strain, of course, and wouldn't want to use this solution for long-term work, but it would almost certainly improve the usability.
This guy deserves a medal.
I guess he'll have to settle for a PhD from Carnegie Mellon instead.
Soon we'll have auto update functions in the movies.
Dude, will you shut up? George Lucas could be anywhere close by right now!
You gotta watch out for that, or this might happen...
EyeClops is a cheap $40 US / $60 Cdn gift that your nephew or nerdy niece would probably freak over
I couldn't help but notice that the submitter is working under the assumption that all Slashdot readers are unable to get girls*, let alone have children of their own.
* The idea that Slashdot readers might be feminine themselves is practically a violation of dogma.
The movie came out in 1984. It's the end of 2007 now. Are they hurting that badly for material?
One word: Transformers.
Google has anything but a monopoly. The search business can easily go to an engine that performs better. Google has most of the market share because they are quite simply the best at performing searches.
Microsoft on the other hand plays in a completely different arena. Switching from one OS to another is nearly impossible for many users and at least difficult for most.
A good point. However, I would argue that as Google (or Yahoo or MS) users employ more and more web services, it becomes harder to separate oneself from their respective search tools. Gmail has a Google search box right at the top; Yahoo Mail has one for their engine as well. Neither can be rigged to search the other's web database, and it's usually impractical to have more than one primary email.
Likewise, it's relatively easy (if time-consuming) to pop in a CD-ROM and crossgrade one's OS from Windows to Ubuntu or vice versa, and not much harder to install both on the same computer. But one or the other has to be the primary OS, and the more Windows software you use to do your job or to play games, the less incentive there is to switch over just for web browsing.
Still, most species will understand basic math, MORE and LESS. They will recognize two bananas as MORE than one banana. They will recognize three offspring as LESS than four offspring. That's pretty much all the math you need when you are an animal, living by the law of the jungle.
This isn't math -- it's counting ("numerosity" to the sesquipedalians). Mathematics implies, for instance, being able to add one and two and know that it equals three and not one. It implies an ability to manipulate the numbers, not just know which one is larger than the other.
At last, they no longer have an excuse for not including an FM radio in the iPod.
My monkey goes to 11.
Your ex-girlfriend begs to differ.
music depends on very specific ratios of frequencies to be gauged and produced accurately real time. You are in effect doing a Fourier transform of the music, finding the strongest peaks, and reproducing them and/or scaling them by fairly exact amounts
Respectfully disagree. Matching a sound you can hear is simply a matter of listening closely to the "beats" that occur when the frequencies don't quite match up in tune.
Similarly, chords and harmonies sound pleasant because the frequency ratios are small. The twelve-tone scale develops neatly from this fact.
It's like catching a ball: nobody is projecting a parabolic arc through three-dimensional space to compute the precise point where the ball will arrive. The brain takes an educated guess, based on previous balls caught, and keeps adjusting that guess in real-time. When an uneducated singer is trying to match a tone, they're doing the same thing.
Seriously, why wouldn't a brain, which exists to process data in one form or another, respond to math positively at some level?
Because it's not, from an evolutionary perspective, necessary -- not beyond something like "I'm hungry, he has more berries than I do, therefore I should drop my food and take all of his."
Try something sometime: see how many randomy-arranged objects you can count in a split-second glance. Most people do well up to five. After that it gets tricky, unless, for example, six objects are grouped into two groups of three. But if you'd never learned your multiplication tables, you'd have trouble with that one, too.
Rain Man notwithstanding, the human brain isn't designed to count very high. Bearing that in mind, the fact that we developed abstract mathematics at all is truly amazing.
True, but that's not the impressive thing. The article points out: The "numeral" aspect is significant. It's one thing to recognize the one-to-one correspondence between five dots and five apples, but quite another to identify the written digit "5" as representing five of anything.
Abstracting numbers into digits, or phonetic sounds into letters, is a complicated leap that isn't necessarily built-in to the brain. Humans do it all the time, but many cultures in the past and present do just fine without developing written language or numbers, suggesting it's not innate to the brain.
I take exception to this, though: Counting to nine is one thing, since each number has a unique digit. Grasping the concepts behind multi-digit base-ten numbers is one of the first steps toward real mathematics, and I imagine monkeys would need a lot more training to handle that.
Interested parties should check out The Math Instinct by Keith Devlin, who points out that many higher mammals have a kind of number sense (lions seem to be able to tell by the number of roars whether another pride has more or fewer members than their own). Gorillas and chimps can be taught to do single-digit arithmetic, although it takes much longer than it does with humans. And infant humans can definitely recognize, for instance, that one-ball plus one-ball should equal two-balls and that something's wrong when it becomes three-balls instead.
Further, there are tribal and hunter-gatherer cultures still alive on earth whose entire grasp of counting is "one, two, lots" or "one, two, three, lots" -- but, interestingly enough, never "one, two, three, four, lots." Once you get beyond three or four, mathematics becomes something that has to be invented.
I find this interesting, personally -- all animal brains are built as a kind of pattern-recognition system, something computers are very bad at. All human cultures have a kind of language with a fully-recognized grammar for communicating past, present and future ideas. But counting, clearly, isn't innate to the brain. It has to be deliberately learned, like writing. And like writing, it's not something that's really useful except in more advanced money-using societies.
As with most automated technologies it will make some mistakes, but less than a human per day on average.
There, fixed that for you.
IAAMN (I am a math nerd), but when I was in junior high I found the book "Algebra The Easy Way" by Douglas Downing to be a remarkably readable and enjoyable introduction to the subject. I still recommend it to people who are struggling with the subject using textbooks. Definitely start here, even if you go another route.
The same publisher is responsible for "Geometry The Easy Way", "Trigonometry The Easy Way", and so forth, although not all are by the same author.
The Ringworld engineers called. They have a patent for something called "scrith" and a half-dozen of the ugliest lawyers you've ever seen.
It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.
Than any other non-written language, maybe.
It's fairly obvious that once you begin to write a language down, and even take the step of codifying it in grammar texts and dictionaries, its rate of evolution slows dramatically.
It would have been nice for him to be able to finish the series. True, a certain amount of foot-dragging in the middle of the series got him into this fix, but still I think somebody undertaking such a large venture, and mostly sucessfully, should have the satisfaction of seeing it finished.
I certainly hope George R.R. Martin is reading this. If he doesn't finish up "A Song of Ice and Fire" before he dies, I'm going to be profusely upset.
On the other hand, at least he's (mostly) keeping himself on track the way he started.
JMS learned in making "Babylon 5" why television doesn't usually bother with stories that last more than one season at a time; namely, your actors and/or network contracts can disappear in the middle of a story. Novelists likewise need to keep in mind the perils of creating stories that can take decades to finish writing.
Why are people attributing that to Jordan, as if he made it up?
Maybe because it was never credited as being Japanese in the Wheel of Time books? Just a guess.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
In the PC market, this is true.
However, Apple's scored a coup in the portable media market with the iPod, and they're leveraging that slowly but surely. The iPhone and iPod Touch have everything they need to be the ultimate "handheld Mac", except for storage space.
Right now the WiFi iTunes store just sells music, but if you could download video and games directly through the thing... if you could use that pop-up keyboard to edit basic word-processor files or send instant messages to your friends... well, your average teenager wouldn't bother using a laptop anymore. And the only reason you can't do those things with an iPod Touch is that Apple hasn't turned it on.
My opinion? Don't mess around with this unless you've got your head screwed on real tight. This to the anime aficionados is like Star Wars.
Pffft. You must not have been following the debate in the Transformers community before that movie was released this summer.
Unlike, say, G.I. Joe, Transformers has been in more-or-less continuous toy production since Beast Wars. Several of the recent comics are considered near-canon, and several collectible toys have been made just based on "The War Within" comics. Debate over the "authenticity" of the so-called exploding-metal "Bayformers" was polarized to say the least.
And way, way too many fans would jump into the forums arguing that the Generation 1 cartoon was the be-all and end-all of Transformers storytelling, despite the numerous animation gaffes, plot contradictions (did Megatron build the Constructicons, or vice versa?), and other assorted nonsense such as you would expect from an 80s kids cartoon.
The "Transformers" movie, despite its huge separation from previous Transformers generations and obvious popcorn-movie plot, was a blockbuster hit for fans and non-fans alike. Because, surprise!-- the fans constituted only a small percentage of the actual box office receipts. The rest was made up of Americans and non-Americans who just wanted to watch a bunch of giant robots beating the crap out of each other on a movie screen the size of a junior high school.
Any, ANY "Robotech" that does anything less than strictly reinterpret the original Japanese story is going to be controversial. But you know what? Those fans, frankly, aren't important enough to the movie studio. The director and the writer will do their best to appeal to the fans because, to be frank, they need the fans' knowledge of continuity and history to make the story work well. But you can't please all of the fans all of the time.
You missed "spontaneously offering up other little details in conversation" like he was interested in, and wanted to talk about the subject. I am sure it's on Youtube somewhere, the one when he's eating corn and they have a conversation about it.
"Alex, would you like some corn?"
*squawk* "Why do you want to talk about some corn?"
"Well, we could talk about something else."
*squawk* "Does it please you to believe we could talk about something else?"