I always like articles like this. Mostly because the only heresy in science is parochialism (in the third sense re: dictionary.com). Come up with an interesting idea, support it, research it, and answer criticism. This is especially fun for this hypothetical stuff beyond the edges of the singularities.
Of course it isn't that elegant in real life but, hey, I can dream can't I?
"The Lord of The Rings: The fellowship of the ring won four awards, including Cinematography, Makeup, Music (Score), and Visual Effects. "
In other words, it won all the meaningless ones. Sure, they're nice but does anyone actually remember who won any of those awards last year? 5 years ago? And it isn't like they are going to put that on any of the DVD boxes. FOTR was just a good fantasy movie and there is no way they could get around that.
Of course it wasn't like they came even close to choosing the best nominees. Denzel, in Training Day? Penn in I am Sam? WTF! They aren't even pretending to nominate favorite sons for good movies anymore (although their acting was suspect at least when Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds won they were for two good films). And don't get me started on the sham of a remake that was A Beautiful Mind (let's just say I know there is a special place in Hell for Opie now).
The Oscars are a sham. Does anyone remember Forrest Gump anymore? And what lost to it: Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, and Hoop Dreams.
What didn't get nominated this year for best picture or directing? Memento, Bully, Chopper, Ghost World, Monster's Ball, Mulholland Drive, Sexy Beast, Faithless... on and on. Any of which are deeper, more stylistic, more satisfying, and infinitely more memorable than any of the crappola that won or was nominated.
In truth they never meant anything. On the Waterfront lost and from that point on the Academy has been living a lie ever since.
I guess so but what the hell does this quote mean? I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '
Verb?
"I just musiced the mutherfuckers!"?
How the hell would you use it as a verb... well as a verb and not sound like a schwanz? Or is this just some cute language mangling that looks good but is devoid of meaning (ala Annie Proulx)?
The tech industry should follow the lead of television? A device that, until the last 20 years, was operated with TWO interfaces: volume, and channel selection (three if you count fiddling with the antenna which doesn't count in these days)?
What about a modern TV then? Everyone whined for the V-chip and many have it, but how many "concerned" parents know how to even use it? Please be careful about making broad statements that end up being tenuous at best.
And I would also like to see some correlative data on the nationality/tech use statistics. I have a strong feeling that age and (gasp) household income probably play a larger part than anything. Just spouting off a statistic like "53 percent of Asian Americans are 'Net users!" is like saying "African American males commit more crimes than any other social group!" In the later case insensitivity forces people to reevaluate the statement. Personally I think the same should go for the former. Be objective, objective, objective.
And I'll probably get modded down -1 flamebait. But anyway: what is the problem with this? In the democratic world at large we have many standard freedoms including chosing who we do business with.
I cringe when I read these posts that say "how the hell can they do this?" and "this is just another example of big business...".
Frankly that is the result of allowing all people to act as they wish. This is not a thought socialist state: you cannot command someone to act a certain way with their freedoms. Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this? I saw someone comparing these companies to BMW et al during the Nazi years in Germany. Um, as far as I know Cisco isn't using "subhumans" as slavelabor here.
Personally there are many things about the Chinese government that I don't like and I'm kind of sad that these companies helped them out. But with or without their help the same paranoia state regime will still be in charge.
Heck probably the "revolution" that everyone asks for will happen without any one of us knowing. The Chinese middle class will expand, they will wish for a) more leisure and b) more freedom to spend their money. And the government will comply to them because they are the sweet tax center. Hell, that's how all of the US Terrorism law got passed.
I wonder if the Amish could then legally use these then? I know some of the local Amish (mid-east Ohio) are allowed to use compressor powered tools and can even have one business related outlet. Heck they are even sold wind-up radios (hey when the lady friend drags you antiquing you see some of these things). It seemed that they were already skirting their technology ban. Why not just take it to the next ludicrous level?
when the m-16 was first introduced, there was some controversy over the design. a bullet, when fired from an m-16, would tend to wobble as it flew, making it more messy when it hit a target.
... early in vietnam, but i don't recall the outcome. they might have redesigned the ballistics, but i don't recall.
Snippets from the above:
The landwar convention from The Hague doesn't allow fragmenting bullets for purposes of war, so every army in the world uses FMJ bullets. Usually a hit from a conventional FMJ doesn't kill, but leaves a clean hole. No hunter will use FMJ, since they want to kill, not to wound.
[snip]
This, in theory is better for two reasons -- one, it creates a situation where instead of creating a dead enemy soldier it creates a wounded one, which must be cared for by his buddy, thus taking two men out of action with each hit. The second reason behind the idea is that it is more humane to wound than to kill. This type of ammunition was agreed upon by the Geneva convention, and both sides of the vietnam war agreed to it's use.
[snip]
So I think the difference is between temporary wounding (the above) and permanent scaring (say from blinding lasers, mustard gas, biological agents, dirty nukes). The Geneva Convention is for the former and against the latter.
I forget the exact numbers but something like 15 of the last 20 Best Actor winners have played characters with mental illness or physical handicap. Shine, As Good As it Gets, My Left Foot, on and on.
Who cares about controlling a mouse?
on
Think And Click
·
· Score: 1
I wanna braintap to a roof mounted machinegun so I can kill damn hippie protesters!
Maybe its just me but I think they should take a clue from William Gibson's Idoru where the decks were in all sorts of odd cases: hand-carved hollowed-out nuts and clear plastic gel.
I'm compute from one desk anyway and I don't move much so I want something that is decoratively interesting: tesla coils, neon, blinking lights, smoke effects, lasers, and gysers of flame!
Please review the following AT&T Broadband Internet migration schedule to find out when your high-speed cable Internet service will be available on the AT&T network.
Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to move this Monday and Tuesday
Customers in Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah are scheduled for Wednesday
Customers in Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California and the Majority of the Rocky Mountain region are scheduled to move on Thursday
Customers in Michigan will be moved on Friday
You will be contacted by AT&T Broadband with further instructions when the transition of your high-speed cable Internet service is complete.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with the best high-speed cable Internet service possible.
Nothing like losing connectivity to your home box which doubles as your testing rig during the last two weeks of the semester. Guess my advisor ain't getting those results for a while!
Snipped from the NYTimes:
December 3, 2001
Excite to Reach Net Pact
By SAUL HANSELL
Excite@Home reached a tentative agreement yesterday with a group of
cable companies, including Cox Communications and the Comcast
Corporation , to keep their customers connected to Excite's high-speed
Internet service, according to several people involved in the
negotiations.
But not all of the creditors of Excite, which has filed for bankruptcy
protection, have decided whether to support the agreement. That means it
may not be clear for days whether 2.7 million people in North America
will have their cable Internet service cut off.
About 850,000 customers of AT&T , the nation's largest cable company,
were cut off by Excite early Saturday morning after AT&T said it would
not pay the price Excite demanded to keep them connected. As of
yesterday, AT&T had switched about 226,000 of them [in Washington and
Oregon, according to USA Today] to a new Internet access network it has
been building to replace Excite@Home. The remainder will be converted
over the next week, AT&T said.
Actually CNN has had several roundtable discussions on the secret military tribunals featuring several members (usually those from the ACLU).
Also remember that CNN is the MacDonalds of news: fast, cheap, and everywhere.
Most people who give a damn usually get their info from better sources (NYTimes, Salon, Frontline, the alternative press, etc) many of which bring up these issues all the time.
Don't badmouth the whole of American media when all you see of it is through the CNN keyhole.
Why? Because the perception of the business world is that CS Ph.D.'s have studied obscure topics that have no bearing on the real world, as they know it. That is very true and, as a grad, I wouldn't have it any other way (If you want to boost the viability of your CS undergrad never ever become a CS grad... get an MBA).
Getting a PhD means knowing full well that you are sacrificing something for the love of adding to the state of the art. Not many corps higher PhDs and so the job field is limited mostly to academia (hell, even if they wanted Dr.s to work on something they'd just whore out a grant to some prof at a uni).
I'm in AI. There are maybe three jobs out there for AI PhDs in industry and they are all in image rec (something I don't do). I'll probably end up as a mediocre prof at some mediocre school that all the kids hate. But when I finally retire hopefully I'll be able to say "I added to the sum of human knowledge and the world is better for it."
If you want the beemer and the mansion, get your MBA. If you want your name in a textbook, get a PhD. If you are really smart, don't go to school and do both anyway:p.
What about Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut? Of course the reason they don't seem to be considered is that, unlike Heinlein or Asimov, they escaped genrification. Too be seen as an SF author is instant cred death and banshies you to the specialist author ghetto.
But works like Fahrenheit 451 or Slaugherhouse 5 are more widely regarded. That's why you find them in the general Fiction section at Barnes & Noble. Having works that are highly respected yet aren't SF works helps too (e.g. Mother Night).
Interesting this same reason seems to have eliminated them from this competition here as they aren't "real" SF authors.
And we still wonder why Linux isn't catching on
on
Mount Rainier for Linux
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
From the article: Mount Rainier is needed because CD-RWs "are still too complicated to use for most users," says Philips' Eggert Gudmundsson.
This is frustrating because either:
a) End users are actually this technologically primitive or...
b) End users aren't but the Big Heads think they are and so we still get screwed!
I TA a CS course for freshman non-CS engineers at a Big Ten and, in my humble experience, the biggest problem is the perceived learning curve hurdle these kids have. Most just too easily throw their hands up in defeat and spout some slogan ("I'll never get these things" or "Only like ten people will need this stuff anyway"). But then you find that after they can break through the first through layers of syntax the class becomes pretty much hands off.
You know what? I think my Mom could use Debian.
Ok Ok. I know this post is OT as all get out but, c'mon, its 9:30 in the morning and I can't sleep!
I know this is OT but since it comes up so often I thought we would all benefit by knowing that the idea "We only use 10% of our brain!" is a myth.
The two points snipped from the article:
1.) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2.) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
As the article says "For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999]"
Postponed? Considered modifying? Hell, I'm jazzed! For a long time it just seems that we/.'ers are long on the talk, short on the walk. But this changes everything!
Nice Job guys! Keep up the good work! (whoever the contributers may be...)
"The layoff used to only happen for the working class?" Excuse me? Katz seems to have forgotten the last, oh I don't know, THIRTY years of recessions. A lot of industries moved out of the US (for example) taking MANY of their research groups with them. Hell, I should know. My family lives in the Akron OH area. Layoffs happened to Katz's Technical Elite about 11 years ago when all the rubber companies abandoned ship. This has happened all over. The automobile industry, the aerospace industry. Katz should try to get into his vapid head that a lot of engineers are End Users.
That the US, for all of its amount of turbulence between its component minorities, has taken the topic of culture clash pretty well. Just looking at the Turks in Germany, the Pakistanis in the UK, or the Palestinians in Israel pale the US topics of black and white.
And I don't think that any nation would really want for the US to become a "21st century" military. Which would you rather have? A superpower with a large uniformed army? Or a nation funding 200 billion dollars a year in terrorist activities against the nations that it doesn't like?
The CIA has done some terrorist actions in its history? Do we want them to become the long arm of the US?
Actually I heard that there are 10^12 neurons in the human brain that are able to perform 10^3 pulses per second (leaving us with 10^15 tics/sec or a petaflop). This is what John Koza (Mr. Genetic Programming) calls a Brain Second (or 1 BS).
Interestingly he has found in his research that there seems to be a problem convergence in his evolving of circuits where the processor time needed to evolve a circuit takes roughly 1 BS computation.
He's worked his way up to a 1000 node Beowulf cluster for his work over the years and has seen this 1 BS ratio maintained (i.e. the faster his computative guns, the lower the total evolution time for an optimal result).
He charted the growth of his testbed and found that in something like 2004 a 1 BS per second should be achievable in industry and privately available by 2010.
All in all very interesting stuff. Actually it should all be lain out in his upcoming book (appropriately titled Genetic Programming IV) and should make for some killer reading...
Slashdot Mirror
I always like articles like this. Mostly because the only heresy in science is parochialism (in the third sense re: dictionary.com). Come up with an interesting idea, support it, research it, and answer criticism. This is especially fun for this hypothetical stuff beyond the edges of the singularities.
Of course it isn't that elegant in real life but, hey, I can dream can't I?
"The Lord of The Rings: The fellowship of the ring won four awards, including Cinematography, Makeup, Music (Score), and Visual Effects. "
In other words, it won all the meaningless ones. Sure, they're nice but does anyone actually remember who won any of those awards last year? 5 years ago? And it isn't like they are going to put that on any of the DVD boxes. FOTR was just a good fantasy movie and there is no way they could get around that.
Of course it wasn't like they came even close to choosing the best nominees. Denzel, in Training Day? Penn in I am Sam? WTF! They aren't even pretending to nominate favorite sons for good movies anymore (although their acting was suspect at least when Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds won they were for two good films). And don't get me started on the sham of a remake that was A Beautiful Mind (let's just say I know there is a special place in Hell for Opie now).
The Oscars are a sham. Does anyone remember Forrest Gump anymore? And what lost to it: Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, and Hoop Dreams.
What didn't get nominated this year for best picture or directing? Memento, Bully, Chopper, Ghost World, Monster's Ball, Mulholland Drive, Sexy Beast, Faithless... on and on. Any of which are deeper, more stylistic, more satisfying, and infinitely more memorable than any of the crappola that won or was nominated.
In truth they never meant anything. On the Waterfront lost and from that point on the Academy has been living a lie ever since.
Ok, that's it. I'm done.
1. Come up with a inline code documentation standard (for the files themselves) and a general standard (for any other supplementary files).
2. As I assume you are coding right now, only edit those files you are currently working on and on all future files via your standard.
3. When time permits (or when you re-edit old code), document your old files.
4. Tweak documentation with every change.
This was is an easy incremental way of getting around to document everything without resorting to a big system.
I guess so but what the hell does this quote mean?
I like the quote 'With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again. '
Verb?
"I just musiced the mutherfuckers!"?
How the hell would you use it as a verb... well as a verb and not sound like a schwanz? Or is this just some cute language mangling that looks good but is devoid of meaning (ala Annie Proulx)?
The tech industry should follow the lead of television? A device that, until the last 20 years, was operated with TWO interfaces: volume, and channel selection (three if you count fiddling with the antenna which doesn't count in these days)?
What about a modern TV then? Everyone whined for the V-chip and many have it, but how many "concerned" parents know how to even use it? Please be careful about making broad statements that end up being tenuous at best.
And I would also like to see some correlative data on the nationality/tech use statistics. I have a strong feeling that age and (gasp) household income probably play a larger part than anything. Just spouting off a statistic like "53 percent of Asian Americans are 'Net users!" is like saying "African American males commit more crimes than any other social group!" In the later case insensitivity forces people to reevaluate the statement. Personally I think the same should go for the former. Be objective, objective, objective.
If any of you get/read the New York Times, they have an article on the same topic:
T OX I.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/25/technology/25
NYTimes registration yadda-yadda-yadda.
And I'll probably get modded down -1 flamebait. But anyway: what is the problem with this? In the democratic world at large we have many standard freedoms including chosing who we do business with.
I cringe when I read these posts that say "how the hell can they do this?" and "this is just another example of big business...".
Frankly that is the result of allowing all people to act as they wish. This is not a thought socialist state: you cannot command someone to act a certain way with their freedoms. Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this? I saw someone comparing these companies to BMW et al during the Nazi years in Germany. Um, as far as I know Cisco isn't using "subhumans" as slavelabor here.
Personally there are many things about the Chinese government that I don't like and I'm kind of sad that these companies helped them out. But with or without their help the same paranoia state regime will still be in charge.
Heck probably the "revolution" that everyone asks for will happen without any one of us knowing. The Chinese middle class will expand, they will wish for a) more leisure and b) more freedom to spend their money. And the government will comply to them because they are the sweet tax center. Hell, that's how all of the US Terrorism law got passed.
I wonder if the Amish could then legally use these then? I know some of the local Amish (mid-east Ohio) are allowed to use compressor powered tools and can even have one business related outlet. Heck they are even sold wind-up radios (hey when the lady friend drags you antiquing you see some of these things). It seemed that they were already skirting their technology ban. Why not just take it to the next ludicrous level?
when the m-16 was first introduced, there was some controversy over the design. a bullet, when fired from an m-16, would tend to wobble as it flew, making it more messy when it hit a target.
... early in vietnam, but i don't recall the outcome. they might have redesigned the ballistics, but i don't recall.
Here you go, an article talking about FMJ and the M-16
Snippets from the above:
The landwar convention from The Hague doesn't allow fragmenting bullets for purposes of war, so every army in the world uses FMJ bullets. Usually a hit from a conventional FMJ doesn't kill, but leaves a clean hole. No hunter will use FMJ, since they want to kill, not to wound.
[snip]
This, in theory is better for two reasons -- one, it creates a situation where instead of creating a dead enemy soldier it creates a wounded one, which must be cared for by his buddy, thus taking two men out of action with each hit. The second reason behind the idea is that it is more humane to wound than to kill. This type of ammunition was agreed upon by the Geneva convention, and both sides of the vietnam war agreed to it's use.
[snip]
So I think the difference is between temporary wounding (the above) and permanent scaring (say from blinding lasers, mustard gas, biological agents, dirty nukes). The Geneva Convention is for the former and against the latter.
I forget the exact numbers but something like 15 of the last 20 Best Actor winners have played characters with mental illness or physical handicap. Shine, As Good As it Gets, My Left Foot, on and on.
I wanna braintap to a roof mounted machinegun so I can kill damn hippie protesters!
*Ratta tat tat!*
"Take THAT counter-culture!"
Maybe its just me but I think they should take a clue from William Gibson's Idoru where the decks were in all sorts of odd cases: hand-carved hollowed-out nuts and clear plastic gel.
I'm compute from one desk anyway and I don't move much so I want something that is decoratively interesting: tesla coils, neon, blinking lights, smoke effects, lasers, and gysers of flame!
From the broadband.att.com support site:
Please review the following AT&T Broadband Internet migration schedule to find out when your high-speed cable Internet service will be available on the AT&T network.
Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to move this Monday and Tuesday
Customers in Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah are scheduled for Wednesday
Customers in Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California and the Majority of the Rocky Mountain region are scheduled to move on Thursday
Customers in Michigan will be moved on Friday
You will be contacted by AT&T Broadband with further instructions when the transition of your high-speed cable Internet service is complete.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with the best high-speed cable Internet service possible.
Nothing like losing connectivity to your home box which doubles as your testing rig during the last two weeks of the semester. Guess my advisor ain't getting those results for a while!
Snipped from the NYTimes:
December 3, 2001
Excite to Reach Net Pact
By SAUL HANSELL
Excite@Home reached a tentative agreement yesterday with a group of
cable companies, including Cox Communications and the Comcast
Corporation , to keep their customers connected to Excite's high-speed
Internet service, according to several people involved in the
negotiations.
But not all of the creditors of Excite, which has filed for bankruptcy
protection, have decided whether to support the agreement. That means it
may not be clear for days whether 2.7 million people in North America
will have their cable Internet service cut off.
About 850,000 customers of AT&T , the nation's largest cable company,
were cut off by Excite early Saturday morning after AT&T said it would
not pay the price Excite demanded to keep them connected. As of
yesterday, AT&T had switched about 226,000 of them [in Washington and
Oregon, according to USA Today] to a new Internet access network it has
been building to replace Excite@Home. The remainder will be converted
over the next week, AT&T said.
Actually CNN has had several roundtable discussions on the secret military tribunals featuring several members (usually those from the ACLU).
Also remember that CNN is the MacDonalds of news: fast, cheap, and everywhere.
Most people who give a damn usually get their info from better sources (NYTimes, Salon, Frontline, the alternative press, etc) many of which bring up these issues all the time.
Don't badmouth the whole of American media when all you see of it is through the CNN keyhole.
Why? Because the perception of the business world is that CS Ph.D.'s have studied obscure topics that have no bearing on the real world, as they know it.
:p.
That is very true and, as a grad, I wouldn't have it any other way (If you want to boost the viability of your CS undergrad never ever become a CS grad... get an MBA).
Getting a PhD means knowing full well that you are sacrificing something for the love of adding to the state of the art. Not many corps higher PhDs and so the job field is limited mostly to academia (hell, even if they wanted Dr.s to work on something they'd just whore out a grant to some prof at a uni).
I'm in AI. There are maybe three jobs out there for AI PhDs in industry and they are all in image rec (something I don't do). I'll probably end up as a mediocre prof at some mediocre school that all the kids hate. But when I finally retire hopefully I'll be able to say "I added to the sum of human knowledge and the world is better for it."
If you want the beemer and the mansion, get your MBA. If you want your name in a textbook, get a PhD. If you are really smart, don't go to school and do both anyway
What about Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut? Of course the reason they don't seem to be considered is that, unlike Heinlein or Asimov, they escaped genrification. Too be seen as an SF author is instant cred death and banshies you to the specialist author ghetto.
But works like Fahrenheit 451 or Slaugherhouse 5 are more widely regarded. That's why you find them in the general Fiction section at Barnes & Noble. Having works that are highly respected yet aren't SF works helps too (e.g. Mother Night).
Interesting this same reason seems to have eliminated them from this competition here as they aren't "real" SF authors.
From the article: Mount Rainier is needed because CD-RWs "are still too complicated to use for most users," says Philips' Eggert Gudmundsson.
This is frustrating because either:
a) End users are actually this technologically primitive or...
b) End users aren't but the Big Heads think they are and so we still get screwed!
I TA a CS course for freshman non-CS engineers at a Big Ten and, in my humble experience, the biggest problem is the perceived learning curve hurdle these kids have. Most just too easily throw their hands up in defeat and spout some slogan ("I'll never get these things" or "Only like ten people will need this stuff anyway"). But then you find that after they can break through the first through layers of syntax the class becomes pretty much hands off.
You know what? I think my Mom could use Debian.
Ok Ok. I know this post is OT as all get out but, c'mon, its 9:30 in the morning and I can't sleep!
I know this is OT but since it comes up so often I thought we would all benefit by knowing that the idea "We only use 10% of our brain!" is a myth.
The two points snipped from the article:
1.) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading Skeptical Inquirer, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2.) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
As the article says "For a much more thorough and detailed analysis of the subject, see Barry Beyerstein's chapter in the new book Mind Myths: Exploring Everyday Mysteries of the Mind [1999]"
Postponed? Considered modifying? Hell, I'm jazzed! For a long time it just seems that we /.'ers are long on the talk, short on the walk. But this changes everything!
Nice Job guys! Keep up the good work! (whoever the contributers may be...)
Great - now I'll have to put up with co-workers that say stuff like: "Shit bizatch, that muther-fuckin' Linux be phat!" ;-)
What, you don't already?
"The layoff used to only happen for the working class?" Excuse me? Katz seems to have forgotten the last, oh I don't know, THIRTY years of recessions. A lot of industries moved out of the US (for example) taking MANY of their research groups with them. Hell, I should know. My family lives in the Akron OH area. Layoffs happened to Katz's Technical Elite about 11 years ago when all the rubber companies abandoned ship. This has happened all over. The automobile industry, the aerospace industry. Katz should try to get into his vapid head that a lot of engineers are End Users.
That the US, for all of its amount of turbulence between its component minorities, has taken the topic of culture clash pretty well. Just looking at the Turks in Germany, the Pakistanis in the UK, or the Palestinians in Israel pale the US topics of black and white.
And I don't think that any nation would really want for the US to become a "21st century" military. Which would you rather have? A superpower with a large uniformed army? Or a nation funding 200 billion dollars a year in terrorist activities against the nations that it doesn't like?
The CIA has done some terrorist actions in its history? Do we want them to become the long arm of the US?
Re: Can Cable Really be Slower Than 56K? Can I get an amen from all Optel subscribers in the house?
Actually I heard that there are 10^12 neurons in the human brain that are able to perform 10^3 pulses per second (leaving us with 10^15 tics/sec or a petaflop). This is what John Koza (Mr. Genetic Programming) calls a Brain Second (or 1 BS).
Interestingly he has found in his research that there seems to be a problem convergence in his evolving of circuits where the processor time needed to evolve a circuit takes roughly 1 BS computation.
He's worked his way up to a 1000 node Beowulf cluster for his work over the years and has seen this 1 BS ratio maintained (i.e. the faster his computative guns, the lower the total evolution time for an optimal result).
He charted the growth of his testbed and found that in something like 2004 a 1 BS per second should be achievable in industry and privately available by 2010.
All in all very interesting stuff. Actually it should all be lain out in his upcoming book (appropriately titled Genetic Programming IV) and should make for some killer reading...