I am going to interpret the question as the cry for help that it seems to be. It's not that tabs are bad for kids per se, but I'd you are so fucking addicted to your tablet that you can't turn it off when you pick up a baby, you need to get rid of it. Now. If it is your dev platform, leave it at work. Otherwise, open the nearest window and toss it out.
I'm not a physician or a scientist, but I spent years on a team with both in a cancer research lab, and everything in the book is consistent with the science I have picked up along the way. It's also very readable. I give a copy to everyone I know who has to confront a cancer diagnosis.
1. sex 2. networking with other people who will be in your profession (try not to mix with #1) 3. learning something from a genuine authority on a subject (try not to mix with #1) 4. learning something that is hard to teach to yourself (music performance, foreign languages)
If you are having trouble finding a job, it is probably where you live or your soft/social skills.
A little comp sci theory is a good companion to the stuff (you say) you already know, but it can be self-teachable.
I find the I Ching good for this stuff. Like the coin flip, it helps you find out what you want to hear.
Also, it's kind of a cultural thing to say fun > money, but when I picture myself sitting down to write a check for a thousand dollars a month to make work more fun, I realize I it does not seem like a really great bargain. (Escaping complete misery might be worth that much, but that doesn't sound like the choice in front of you.)
If this kind of research is interesting to you, check out http://mindlesseating.org/... it's not a diet book, but I definitely lost a lot of weight after I read it.
A few years ago, I set a simple rule for myself: I only turn on the TV to watch something I know I want to watch before I turn it on. I didn't impose my rule on anybody else in the house.
Less than six months later I cancelled the cable when I couldn't remember the last time anyone had watched it. No one noticed it was gone.
I do watch cartoons with my older son, mostly for the pleasure of his company. As much as I dislike everything about iTunes, it is most fun for him to sit with me on the couch and watch stuff on an iPad. I just buy season passes to the things he likes... A few series a year are much cheaper than cable.
Important follow up: "I like that one because [Spock's beard is funny | Tribbles are cuddly | Jean Luc is cuddly | <your reason here> ]"
(If your favorite part of your favorite episode of your favorite series is when the big robot played by Ted Cassidy speaks in a woman's voice, maybe keep that to yourself.)
Yeah, I was disappointed in the same way when I first saw it. I practically slept with a copy of Ubik under my pillow. But I let myself like the movie on its own merits. All I meant by quoting "yet another" was the look of the movie was anything but a cliche at the time. And faithfulness aside, it was real science fiction, not space opera.
I can see how younger people might see it that way, but for scifi loving kids growing up in the 70s, the pickings were pretty slim other than the Star Wars franchise. Lots of things look like Blade Runner now but it was like nothing I had ever seen. (Yeah, Metropolis and other antecedents had been made, but there weren't even VCRs back in the day, so no one had seen that stuff.)
Blade Runner is a pretty good movie but not a good adaptation in any sense.
Scanner is right on the money in my opinion. Even casting stars with drug histories was an inspired touch.
Strangely, the movies that best capture the PKD spirit for me are Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which have no PKD connection at all.
I just looked at a few wikipedia pages and saw this thing that he wrote about a transistor radio in the 1950s. It is exactly the way you might describe someone talking on a cell phone if you walked outside your door right now:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
No, he didn't predict cell phones or anything like that, but he recognized one of the first victims of the epidemic that went on to swallow us all.
I know you are trying to help and will frame stuff as ideas or suggestions or whatever, but I have been there with two wives and I can tell you from having done it both ways that what she needs is your confidence, not some clever ideas (especially ideas from some random bozos on teh internet.) She is the one who should me having the ideas and doing the talking, and you are the one who should be doing the listening and smiling. If she freaks out and says she doesn't know what to do, the right answer is "I know you'll figure it out."
And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
I have always suspected that terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for *anybody*, including the author, making them perfectly safe to use because they can be retroactively redefined as needed.
At your age, I would think that you would have figured out that you should do what you like to do. (I am 48 myself.) It may be true that people in certain specialties might have better career paths, but the people who have good careers in a specialty are the ones who are good at it, and the best bet is that they are good because they are motivated because they like it. In any case, making more money to do something you hate is a sucker's game. You will just spend the extra money on booze.
As a new parent, you are going to be barraged with a constant stream of "you're doing it wrong" messages. Advertising leverages your anxiety to sell you things, and new parents are a goldmine of anxiety. "Wouldn't you do everything possible for your baby?" is a hard sales pitch to decline...nobody wants to be the materialistic asshole who values money over a safety net, even for a very extreme edge case. But it's still a sales pitch for something not worth the price. If you donate, maybe you will still be able use it, or maybe the person who did use it will pull your kid out from in front of a truck some day. You can't make yourself responsible for every future contingency.
Unless you have unlimited funds, there are better things to spend your money on. And if you do have unlimited funds, hire someone to figure it out for you.
The best thing you can do right now is get used to the ideas of gray areas and imperfect decisions. You have several thousand more to make in the next year or two.
Many years ago when I gave up smoking, I asked for a receipt every time I bought a pack of cigarettes and did the math every week. It was a really good incentive.
Certainly not forgotten, but currently underrepresented in print and best-of lists.
There have been some ginormous (non-Ellison) anthologies at my local library recently that look like they have been compiled by real scifi scholars. This one, for instance:
In 1995, most consumers buying hardware wouldn't think twice about buying a box without an ethernet card. Home computers were for games, and maybe a checkbook-balancing application or office-style apps. And even if you had networking gear on your computer, residential broadband was practically unheard of. Nowadays, most consumers buy the computer *for* the network stuff.
The great thing about modern boxes is that they make the web browser as platform possible. Yeah, it's just the same stuff on a bigger scale, but genuinely portable applications couldn't have happened without browsers that can spare the memory, cpu and threads to run the app. (There were other problems, too...in 1995 Netscape and Microsoft were releasing alphas of their web browsers as fast as they could compile them, and the css and javascript implementations changed with every release.)
There is a very real use case for genomics in the treatment of disease: drug-gene interaction. Just as certain mutations suggest a higher risk for certain diseases, certain mutations also reduce the probability that certain drugs don't work. For example, plavix must be metabolized, so the 15% (or so, can't remember) of people who can't metabolize it should take something else. And there's a well known genetic marker for that.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the test should happen in a doctor's office, and it doesn't require the whole genome. But there are treatment (rather than epidemiological) applications of genomics, too.
There are cases where you can see where being on top gives you an advantage for staying on top. (There is an interesting essay about such distributions here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/follow-the-money.) But I am not sure how that would work for bandwidth usage distribution. Not saying it doesn't, but I don't see an intuitive explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
You get that you are making an "old == irrelevant" argument on the ancient forum of slashdot, right?
I am going to interpret the question as the cry for help that it seems to be. It's not that tabs are bad for kids per se, but I'd you are so fucking addicted to your tablet that you can't turn it off when you pick up a baby, you need to get rid of it. Now. If it is your dev platform, leave it at work. Otherwise, open the nearest window and toss it out.
If you are science-minded and are interested in the history of cancer research and the state of the art, I can't recommend this book highly enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439170916
I'm not a physician or a scientist, but I spent years on a team with both in a cancer research lab, and everything in the book is consistent with the science I have picked up along the way. It's also very readable. I give a copy to everyone I know who has to confront a cancer diagnosis.
1. sex
2. networking with other people who will be in your profession (try not to mix with #1)
3. learning something from a genuine authority on a subject (try not to mix with #1)
4. learning something that is hard to teach to yourself (music performance, foreign languages)
If you are having trouble finding a job, it is probably where you live or your soft/social skills.
A little comp sci theory is a good companion to the stuff (you say) you already know, but it can be self-teachable.
I find the I Ching good for this stuff. Like the coin flip, it helps you find out what you want to hear.
Also, it's kind of a cultural thing to say fun > money, but when I picture myself sitting down to write a check for a thousand dollars a month to make work more fun, I realize I it does not seem like a really great bargain. (Escaping complete misery might be worth that much, but that doesn't sound like the choice in front of you.)
If this kind of research is interesting to you, check out http://mindlesseating.org/ ... it's not a diet book, but I definitely lost a lot of weight after I read it.
More importantly, proper left handed scissors are inscribed "L E F T Y".
A few years ago, I set a simple rule for myself: I only turn on the TV to watch something I know I want to watch before I turn it on. I didn't impose my rule on anybody else in the house.
Less than six months later I cancelled the cable when I couldn't remember the last time anyone had watched it. No one noticed it was gone.
I do watch cartoons with my older son, mostly for the pleasure of his company. As much as I dislike everything about iTunes, it is most fun for him to sit with me on the couch and watch stuff on an iPad. I just buy season passes to the things he likes... A few series a year are much cheaper than cable.
First episode to watch: your favorite episode.
Important follow up: "I like that one because [Spock's beard is funny | Tribbles are cuddly | Jean Luc is cuddly | <your reason here> ]"
(If your favorite part of your favorite episode of your favorite series is when the big robot played by Ted Cassidy speaks in a woman's voice, maybe keep that to yourself.)
Yeah, I was disappointed in the same way when I first saw it. I practically slept with a copy of Ubik under my pillow. But I let myself like the movie on its own merits. All I meant by quoting "yet another" was the look of the movie was anything but a cliche at the time. And faithfulness aside, it was real science fiction, not space opera.
yet another flawed Hollywood masterpiece
I can see how younger people might see it that way, but for scifi loving kids growing up in the 70s, the pickings were pretty slim other than the Star Wars franchise. Lots of things look like Blade Runner now but it was like nothing I had ever seen. (Yeah, Metropolis and other antecedents had been made, but there weren't even VCRs back in the day, so no one had seen that stuff.)
Blade Runner is a pretty good movie but not a good adaptation in any sense.
Scanner is right on the money in my opinion. Even casting stars with drug histories was an inspired touch.
Strangely, the movies that best capture the PKD spirit for me are Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which have no PKD connection at all.
Is Stephenson going to write a new ending for the movie? As I recall the book didn't really have one in the first place.
I just looked at a few wikipedia pages and saw this thing that he wrote about a transistor radio in the 1950s. It is exactly the way you might describe someone talking on a cell phone if you walked outside your door right now:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
No, he didn't predict cell phones or anything like that, but he recognized one of the first victims of the epidemic that went on to swallow us all.
I know you are trying to help and will frame stuff as ideas or suggestions or whatever, but I have been there with two wives and I can tell you from having done it both ways that what she needs is your confidence, not some clever ideas (especially ideas from some random bozos on teh internet.) She is the one who should me having the ideas and doing the talking, and you are the one who should be doing the listening and smiling. If she freaks out and says she doesn't know what to do, the right answer is "I know you'll figure it out."
And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
I have always suspected that terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for *anybody*, including the author, making them perfectly safe to use because they can be retroactively redefined as needed.
At your age, I would think that you would have figured out that you should do what you like to do. (I am 48 myself.) It may be true that people in certain specialties might have better career paths, but the people who have good careers in a specialty are the ones who are good at it, and the best bet is that they are good because they are motivated because they like it. In any case, making more money to do something you hate is a sucker's game. You will just spend the extra money on booze.
As a new parent, you are going to be barraged with a constant stream of "you're doing it wrong" messages. Advertising leverages your anxiety to sell you things, and new parents are a goldmine of anxiety. "Wouldn't you do everything possible for your baby?" is a hard sales pitch to decline...nobody wants to be the materialistic asshole who values money over a safety net, even for a very extreme edge case. But it's still a sales pitch for something not worth the price. If you donate, maybe you will still be able use it, or maybe the person who did use it will pull your kid out from in front of a truck some day. You can't make yourself responsible for every future contingency.
Unless you have unlimited funds, there are better things to spend your money on. And if you do have unlimited funds, hire someone to figure it out for you.
The best thing you can do right now is get used to the ideas of gray areas and imperfect decisions. You have several thousand more to make in the next year or two.
Many years ago when I gave up smoking, I asked for a receipt every time I bought a pack of cigarettes and did the math every week. It was a really good incentive.
Certainly not forgotten, but currently underrepresented in print and best-of lists.
There have been some ginormous (non-Ellison) anthologies at my local library recently that look like they have been compiled by real scifi scholars. This one, for instance:
http://www.amazon.com/Space-Opera-Renaissance-Kathryn-Cramer/dp/0765306182/ref=cm_lmf_img_13
In 1995, most consumers buying hardware wouldn't think twice about buying a box without an ethernet card. Home computers were for games, and maybe a checkbook-balancing application or office-style apps. And even if you had networking gear on your computer, residential broadband was practically unheard of. Nowadays, most consumers buy the computer *for* the network stuff.
The great thing about modern boxes is that they make the web browser as platform possible. Yeah, it's just the same stuff on a bigger scale, but genuinely portable applications couldn't have happened without browsers that can spare the memory, cpu and threads to run the app. (There were other problems, too...in 1995 Netscape and Microsoft were releasing alphas of their web browsers as fast as they could compile them, and the css and javascript implementations changed with every release.)
I am not a biologist or a roboticist, but as a programmer I suspect regression testing on altered proteins is going to be a bitch.
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
There is a very real use case for genomics in the treatment of disease: drug-gene interaction. Just as certain mutations suggest a higher risk for certain diseases, certain mutations also reduce the probability that certain drugs don't work. For example, plavix must be metabolized, so the 15% (or so, can't remember) of people who can't metabolize it should take something else. And there's a well known genetic marker for that.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the test should happen in a doctor's office, and it doesn't require the whole genome. But there are treatment (rather than epidemiological) applications of genomics, too.
There are cases where you can see where being on top gives you an advantage for staying on top. (There is an interesting essay about such distributions here: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/follow-the-money .) But I am not sure how that would work for bandwidth usage distribution. Not saying it doesn't, but I don't see an intuitive explanation.