but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.
Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill.
We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
On the other hand it seems to me that the challenges of building a Hyperloop track aren't quite as unbeatable as you suggest. We've been building pipelines for years, some of which have diameters in excess of 2m. In fact if that weren't SpaceX wouldn't be able to hold this competition -- their track is just stock large diameter welded steel pipe. Of course the Hyperloop would have to be man-rated, but then building a 42 inch diameter natural gas pipeline that will be pressurized to 1500 psi is no picnic either, but that has been done and at those pressures you'd better not have the thing fail catastrophically in an earthquake.
Syre, Hyperloop sounds ridiculous. But when you look closer at it... well, I grant you it still sounds ridiculous. But less ridiculous. And that makes it interesting.
Yeah, I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when they ran this past their lawyers. If they did run it past them, because I can't imagine a lawyer who would turn apoplectic at a client doing something with so much risk.
All it'd take is one false negative -- or even a credible-ish sounding report of a false negative -- and they could be on the hook for a lifetime of nursing home bills.
As the Lawrence KS police department tweeted: If you have to blow into a Tostitos bag to know if you're intoxicated, for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT DRIVE.
Humans trying to live on unpreocessed corn get pellagra -- a chronic vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency -- the symptoms of which include emotional disturbance and aggressiveness. Corn is naturally rich in B3, but it's not bioavailable. So living on corn is a bad idea unless you're a ruminant.
Of course sometimes we do sometimes engage in cannibalism, both for symbolic cultural purposes and survival.
From an evolutionary standpoint, you might frame the question like this: what is the optimal rate of cannibalism in a species? Well there are plenty species where it is common, but they're species that have reproductive strategies that involve large numbers of offspring -- more than can typically be carried by their environment. That gives them the advantage of being able to exploit unusually favorable conditions, and when things are less than favorable cannibalism keeps those limited nutrients in the family, so to speak.
Humans most often have small litter sizes (one is overwhelmingly prevalent), and are extraordinarily expensive in evolutionary terms to raise to reproductive age. It makes sense that the optimal rate of cannibalism for a species like ours is close to zero. But not quite zero.
The thing is, smart people are no exception to the rule that "people are morons".
A friend of mine who's a management consultant puts it this way: Every action you take has both intended and unintended consequences. Once a group of people become committed to a certain course of action, the intended consequences seem much more real to them and the unintended consequences seem unreal.
It's emotional involvement that makes you blind to unintended consequences, even if you're very smart. That's why the old Stoic philosophers taught their students to consider things like wealth and reputation as "indifferent". It's not that these things are bad or shouldn't be pursued, but feeling you can't live without them leads to irrationality.
And I'm not sure "object" and "motion" exactly apply here.
There are three types of perpetual motion machines, each of which is impossible for different reasons. A perpetual motion machine of the first type is impossible because it violates conservation of energy. A perpetual motion machine of the second type is impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics (e.g. by extracting thermal energy from a reservoir without having a cooler reservoir to dump waste heat). A perpetual motion of the third type is impossible because you can't build a machine that doesn't have friction.
Notice how the third type is impossible for a different kind of reason. A system which is perpetually changing in a periodic manner doesn't necessarily violate any physical laws, unless the motion characterizes something you can characterize as a bearing.
The crux of people's objections here is that a "time crystal" sounds a lot like a perpetual motion machine of the third type. But it's not a "machine" of any kind: it's a crystal structure. And motion on that kind of physical scale is a squirrelly concept. Is the electronic resonance of a benzene ring "motion", and an election an "object"? If so then a benzene molecule is a perpetual motion machine.
The Earth radiates energy through gravity waves, which means that its orbit is slowly decaying. The operative word here is "slowly": the power is about 200 watts, or roughly the power output of a mediocre Tour de France rider over a four hour stage. At that rate the Sun will go nova well before there is any measurable difference in orbit.
Well, clearly their spending priorities are wrong. Police are not a paramilitary organization; they don't exist to fight battles although that happens sometimes. Their primary function is to bring miscreants to justice, along with the evidence needed to obtain a conviction. If they can't do that there's no reason to spend money on police at all; you could just put the money into the National Guard instead.
Look, even Bernie Sanders says he'll work with Trump, and it's not because Sanders has changed his feelings about the "billionaire class". It's because Bernie has cynically sized up Trump as a selfish putz who wouldn't hesitate to stab is Republican "friends" in the back if it flattered his ego. That's a good thing from Sanders' point of view.
You don't have to like or even respect someone to use them; you just have to be wary of getting used yourself.
As you've no doubt experienced when you've done a Google Search on a word which has multiple meanings. For example, suppose you google "How do I get rid of a mole?" Are you worried about a skin condition or a small burrowing mammal? It so happens that Google tries to give you a mix of both answers, which I suspect may reflect the result of some ad hoc result tweaking.
So you do sometimes have to know how to rephrase a query, e.g. "pictures of a flying crane" to "pictures of an aerial crane".
The problem is when you cross languages, words don't have a simple one-to-one relationship. For example the Latin world "sacer" can mean either "holy" or "unholy"; in a sense English treats the concepts as antonyms whereas Latin treats them as two kinds of the same thing. And there's idioms, like the Arabic "Ya'aburnee" (unicode redacted), which literally means "you bury me" but usually means "I love you" (i.e., I can't live without you). Of course you can program idioms like that into your translator, but your'e still going to have to accept either lots of false positives or false negatives. If you're a native speaker of Arabic you can tell from context whether the document you're looking at is talking about love or burial; if you're looking at a machine translation you won't be as sure.
But of course just as false positives don't make Google useless, false positives wouldn't make a multi-language search engine useless. You just have to be aware of the limitations. But what concerns me is the tendency of people to think this stuff works like magic.
The system is as it is precisely to make it possible for a president to be elected where the majority of people don't want him.
If you are claiming that that is not really a significant possibility, then you should have no problem going to a straight popular vote. If you object to a straight popular vote, then it means that you believe such a vote would generate different results.
Imagine you're a billionaire, and you decide to drop what for you is pocket change on your own personal, private slice of paradise. Your lawyer inform you that there's a problem with isolated plots inside your new land, but he can make it go away. And he's right, from a strictly legal point of view. You bring a quiet title action, pay everyone fair market compensation and as far as the law is concerned everything is settled.
What your lawyer isn't telling you is that you've just stuck your foot into a generations-long controversy stretching back to a coup by white planters and missionaries against the islands' native rulers. It's potentially toxic to your reputation, which for a man who can afford anything is the easiest thing to lose.
Oh, you'd be surprised. I've worked many places that consider employee time to be "free". We can buy a library that will solve problem X or just build it ourselves. The library costs money, but building it ourselves is free! After all, we're paying our programmers anyway!
That's a more complicated question, because it's not just about staff time spending vs. license fees. When you build dependencies on a closed source library into your work that's an act of faith in the vendor's future support policies. Once I had a vendor who raised the distribution fees on downstream licensees from $5/seat to $1000/seat. Oh, and don't forget the vendors who simply abandon products that aren't making money and leave their customers dangling.
Even if you don't buy into the ideology of Free/Libre software, the risk of being tied to a vendor's future goodwill is a sufficient reason never to buy proprietary libraries. If you do buy a proprietary library you need to protect yourself both contractually (if possible) and architecturally.
Now as for using "free" staff time, at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself, intelligent and creative use of slack developer time is one of the most important things you can do for your long-term success. Far from treating slack time as "free", however, I see it as treating slack time as too valuable to squander. You should set aside time to do things purely for extending the capabilities of the team. That might involve reinventing the wheel, if you have good reason to believe you can make a better one.
One thing that has characterized Apple as a business over the decades is that it doesn't stay in businesses where it can't charge a premium for design qualities that other companies can't match. It has no interest in engaging in price competition with other companies providing similar products.
This drives a mania for novelty and differentiation which is great when it works out, but it also means you can't count on Apple in the long term. They're like a boxer with a massive punch and a glass jaw.
I worked for years as a contractor developing software for government agencies, and in my experience they're often running software that is years out-of-date. This is a result of government budgets operating in a cash rather than accrual mentality -- i.e. that a penny saved is a penny earned. Taken to the extreme "a penny saved is a penny earned" is false.
Can you make do with a version of software that's EOL? Sure, but it'll cause problems. How can we solve those problems? Well, throw staff time at them. Would that be new hires? No, they're people whose salaries we're already paying. So the view you can minimize the immediate cash outlay by running obsolete software. This would not be reckoned by a private enterprise as a legitimate cost savings, but that's why the IT guys in government have to contend with.
So you have to look at government platform decisions like they were being made 10 years ago. Then allow for the development time for the project and this is how the calculation goes: 2017,minus three years for project development time, minus ten years for government lag time, and this is like a corporate in-house developer choosing applets as a platform in 2004.
Government IT guys run the gamut from incompetent to high competent, just like their private sector counterparts. But if you were to give them a letter grade (ABCDF) you have to deduct one letter grade from their ability to perform to account for the irrational financial incentives they have to deal with.
... and every idiot in the world thinks he's an artist.
People associate lots of white space with "modern" and "clean", but in fact the key is to use white space intelligently to help guide the user's attention. The question isn't whether you have a lot or a little, the question is how much mental work does it take for a user to accomplish his task?
It's easy to ape interfaces that work well, but that's cargo-cult design. Design should be as much evidence-driven as it is fashion-driven. First (design) principles are only a starting point.
Recently I was using a smart TV app and when the content I requested took too long to buffer I decided to quit the app. I was presented with a dialog warning me that I was leaving the app, and asking me whether I wanted to "cancel" or "continue". This gave me a moment's pause, because I didn't want to "continue" waiting for the content to load. However as a developer myself I understood the programmer's mindset: "cancel" and "continue" referred to the event the dialog was responding to: a request to exit the app.
This division of responsibilities is backwards: the user shouldn't have to get into the mind of the designer, the designer needs to get into the mind of the user. And that's hard. UI guidelines help, but there's no substitute for watching actual users struggle with your design. Any time you find something that makes them pause, even for a moment, you should file that bump down. That'd catch problems like confusion between text and controls, or inscrutable state widgets.
In one of the greatest instances of marketing serendipity ever, a popular film called The China Syndrome depicting a nuclear meltdown opened two weeks before the TMI incident. So the potential for nuclear meltdown had filtered into the popular consciousness enough to catch the attention of a screenwriter.
But that said, I think it is doubtful that even today we really "understand the risks." I think the public tends to have a simplistic view of the risks, and that's true for the pro- and anti-nuclear camps.
Leaving aside decommissioning, the risks associated with operating a nuclear plant come from the intersection of design and management: the trickier the safe operation of a plant is, the better the management of the plant has to be.
I don't see what is so intrinsically different about sharing the planet with a different intelligent species. For most of H. sapiens' existence we shared it with other human species. In our fantasies of places like Middle Earth we share it with other intelligent species... not to mention Narnia.
We're not exactly doing a terrific job coexisting with other people of our species that have different opinions from us. That suggests our problems are cultural, not biological.
No, the doomsday clock is very much meaningless. Basically it does nothing except signifies how unhappy the people who run it are with the current political climate.
Close, but not quite right. The Doomsday Clock represents the opinion of a commitee of scholars drawn from scientific and international relations fields about risk of some kind of destabilizing event, such as the use of nuclear weapons. It does not reflect the state of happiness of the board with respect to politics in general, although perhaps inevitably the assessment of global risk and happiness with the political climate are somewhat correlated.
It is true that the assessment of the board is somewhat subjective. But something being a judgment call isn't necessarily the same as "meaningless". It depends on who is doing the judging, which you can weigh for yourself looking at the board bios contained in this year's statement.
I was surprised to find out I actually know one of the board members. Herb Lin and I were both at MIT around the same time. He's not somebody I'd characterize as given to hysterics.
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but at that point it's probably more worthwhile/realistic to brainstorm to see if we can build a cheaper maglev track.
Well, that's a tall order, given that people have been noodling about maglev for decades, and working systems have even been built. People have been brainstorming; we're at the stage of needing more practical experience as grist for the brainstorming mill.
We know that maglev physically works, it just doesn't work economically yet.
On the other hand it seems to me that the challenges of building a Hyperloop track aren't quite as unbeatable as you suggest. We've been building pipelines for years, some of which have diameters in excess of 2m. In fact if that weren't SpaceX wouldn't be able to hold this competition -- their track is just stock large diameter welded steel pipe. Of course the Hyperloop would have to be man-rated, but then building a 42 inch diameter natural gas pipeline that will be pressurized to 1500 psi is no picnic either, but that has been done and at those pressures you'd better not have the thing fail catastrophically in an earthquake.
Syre, Hyperloop sounds ridiculous. But when you look closer at it... well, I grant you it still sounds ridiculous. But less ridiculous. And that makes it interesting.
Yeah, I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when they ran this past their lawyers. If they did run it past them, because I can't imagine a lawyer who would turn apoplectic at a client doing something with so much risk.
All it'd take is one false negative -- or even a credible-ish sounding report of a false negative -- and they could be on the hook for a lifetime of nursing home bills.
As the Lawrence KS police department tweeted: If you have to blow into a Tostitos bag to know if you're intoxicated, for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT DRIVE.
Humans trying to live on unpreocessed corn get pellagra -- a chronic vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency -- the symptoms of which include emotional disturbance and aggressiveness. Corn is naturally rich in B3, but it's not bioavailable. So living on corn is a bad idea unless you're a ruminant.
Of course sometimes we do sometimes engage in cannibalism, both for symbolic cultural purposes and survival.
From an evolutionary standpoint, you might frame the question like this: what is the optimal rate of cannibalism in a species? Well there are plenty species where it is common, but they're species that have reproductive strategies that involve large numbers of offspring -- more than can typically be carried by their environment. That gives them the advantage of being able to exploit unusually favorable conditions, and when things are less than favorable cannibalism keeps those limited nutrients in the family, so to speak.
Humans most often have small litter sizes (one is overwhelmingly prevalent), and are extraordinarily expensive in evolutionary terms to raise to reproductive age. It makes sense that the optimal rate of cannibalism for a species like ours is close to zero. But not quite zero.
The thing is, smart people are no exception to the rule that "people are morons".
A friend of mine who's a management consultant puts it this way: Every action you take has both intended and unintended consequences. Once a group of people become committed to a certain course of action, the intended consequences seem much more real to them and the unintended consequences seem unreal.
It's emotional involvement that makes you blind to unintended consequences, even if you're very smart. That's why the old Stoic philosophers taught their students to consider things like wealth and reputation as "indifferent". It's not that these things are bad or shouldn't be pursued, but feeling you can't live without them leads to irrationality.
And I'm not sure "object" and "motion" exactly apply here.
There are three types of perpetual motion machines, each of which is impossible for different reasons. A perpetual motion machine of the first type is impossible because it violates conservation of energy. A perpetual motion machine of the second type is impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics (e.g. by extracting thermal energy from a reservoir without having a cooler reservoir to dump waste heat). A perpetual motion of the third type is impossible because you can't build a machine that doesn't have friction.
Notice how the third type is impossible for a different kind of reason. A system which is perpetually changing in a periodic manner doesn't necessarily violate any physical laws, unless the motion characterizes something you can characterize as a bearing.
The crux of people's objections here is that a "time crystal" sounds a lot like a perpetual motion machine of the third type. But it's not a "machine" of any kind: it's a crystal structure. And motion on that kind of physical scale is a squirrelly concept. Is the electronic resonance of a benzene ring "motion", and an election an "object"? If so then a benzene molecule is a perpetual motion machine.
The Earth radiates energy through gravity waves, which means that its orbit is slowly decaying. The operative word here is "slowly": the power is about 200 watts, or roughly the power output of a mediocre Tour de France rider over a four hour stage. At that rate the Sun will go nova well before there is any measurable difference in orbit.
Well, clearly their spending priorities are wrong. Police are not a paramilitary organization; they don't exist to fight battles although that happens sometimes. Their primary function is to bring miscreants to justice, along with the evidence needed to obtain a conviction. If they can't do that there's no reason to spend money on police at all; you could just put the money into the National Guard instead.
This comes from an unwillingness to fund police through taxes.
Well, it's hard to tell these days when someone is being ironic without an explicit disclaimer.
Still pretty impressive.
Which specific regulation do you have in mind? And does it have a larger impact than the competition with natural gas?
Look, even Bernie Sanders says he'll work with Trump, and it's not because Sanders has changed his feelings about the "billionaire class". It's because Bernie has cynically sized up Trump as a selfish putz who wouldn't hesitate to stab is Republican "friends" in the back if it flattered his ego. That's a good thing from Sanders' point of view.
You don't have to like or even respect someone to use them; you just have to be wary of getting used yourself.
As you've no doubt experienced when you've done a Google Search on a word which has multiple meanings. For example, suppose you google "How do I get rid of a mole?" Are you worried about a skin condition or a small burrowing mammal? It so happens that Google tries to give you a mix of both answers, which I suspect may reflect the result of some ad hoc result tweaking.
So you do sometimes have to know how to rephrase a query, e.g. "pictures of a flying crane" to "pictures of an aerial crane".
The problem is when you cross languages, words don't have a simple one-to-one relationship. For example the Latin world "sacer" can mean either "holy" or "unholy"; in a sense English treats the concepts as antonyms whereas Latin treats them as two kinds of the same thing. And there's idioms, like the Arabic "Ya'aburnee" (unicode redacted), which literally means "you bury me" but usually means "I love you" (i.e., I can't live without you). Of course you can program idioms like that into your translator, but your'e still going to have to accept either lots of false positives or false negatives. If you're a native speaker of Arabic you can tell from context whether the document you're looking at is talking about love or burial; if you're looking at a machine translation you won't be as sure.
But of course just as false positives don't make Google useless, false positives wouldn't make a multi-language search engine useless. You just have to be aware of the limitations. But what concerns me is the tendency of people to think this stuff works like magic.
The system is as it is precisely to make it possible for a president to be elected where the majority of people don't want him.
If you are claiming that that is not really a significant possibility, then you should have no problem going to a straight popular vote. If you object to a straight popular vote, then it means that you believe such a vote would generate different results.
I dunno, it sounds pretty plausible to me.
Imagine you're a billionaire, and you decide to drop what for you is pocket change on your own personal, private slice of paradise. Your lawyer inform you that there's a problem with isolated plots inside your new land, but he can make it go away. And he's right, from a strictly legal point of view. You bring a quiet title action, pay everyone fair market compensation and as far as the law is concerned everything is settled.
What your lawyer isn't telling you is that you've just stuck your foot into a generations-long controversy stretching back to a coup by white planters and missionaries against the islands' native rulers. It's potentially toxic to your reputation, which for a man who can afford anything is the easiest thing to lose.
It's getting difficult to be a billionaire prick these day..."
Maybe, but I think I could manage it.
Oh, you'd be surprised. I've worked many places that consider employee time to be "free". We can buy a library that will solve problem X or just build it ourselves. The library costs money, but building it ourselves is free! After all, we're paying our programmers anyway!
That's a more complicated question, because it's not just about staff time spending vs. license fees. When you build dependencies on a closed source library into your work that's an act of faith in the vendor's future support policies. Once I had a vendor who raised the distribution fees on downstream licensees from $5/seat to $1000/seat. Oh, and don't forget the vendors who simply abandon products that aren't making money and leave their customers dangling.
Even if you don't buy into the ideology of Free/Libre software, the risk of being tied to a vendor's future goodwill is a sufficient reason never to buy proprietary libraries. If you do buy a proprietary library you need to protect yourself both contractually (if possible) and architecturally.
Now as for using "free" staff time, at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself, intelligent and creative use of slack developer time is one of the most important things you can do for your long-term success. Far from treating slack time as "free", however, I see it as treating slack time as too valuable to squander. You should set aside time to do things purely for extending the capabilities of the team. That might involve reinventing the wheel, if you have good reason to believe you can make a better one.
One thing that has characterized Apple as a business over the decades is that it doesn't stay in businesses where it can't charge a premium for design qualities that other companies can't match. It has no interest in engaging in price competition with other companies providing similar products.
This drives a mania for novelty and differentiation which is great when it works out, but it also means you can't count on Apple in the long term. They're like a boxer with a massive punch and a glass jaw.
I worked for years as a contractor developing software for government agencies, and in my experience they're often running software that is years out-of-date. This is a result of government budgets operating in a cash rather than accrual mentality -- i.e. that a penny saved is a penny earned. Taken to the extreme "a penny saved is a penny earned" is false.
Can you make do with a version of software that's EOL? Sure, but it'll cause problems. How can we solve those problems? Well, throw staff time at them. Would that be new hires? No, they're people whose salaries we're already paying. So the view you can minimize the immediate cash outlay by running obsolete software. This would not be reckoned by a private enterprise as a legitimate cost savings, but that's why the IT guys in government have to contend with.
So you have to look at government platform decisions like they were being made 10 years ago. Then allow for the development time for the project and this is how the calculation goes: 2017,minus three years for project development time, minus ten years for government lag time, and this is like a corporate in-house developer choosing applets as a platform in 2004.
Government IT guys run the gamut from incompetent to high competent, just like their private sector counterparts. But if you were to give them a letter grade (ABCDF) you have to deduct one letter grade from their ability to perform to account for the irrational financial incentives they have to deal with.
... and every idiot in the world thinks he's an artist.
People associate lots of white space with "modern" and "clean", but in fact the key is to use white space intelligently to help guide the user's attention. The question isn't whether you have a lot or a little, the question is how much mental work does it take for a user to accomplish his task?
It's easy to ape interfaces that work well, but that's cargo-cult design. Design should be as much evidence-driven as it is fashion-driven. First (design) principles are only a starting point.
Recently I was using a smart TV app and when the content I requested took too long to buffer I decided to quit the app. I was presented with a dialog warning me that I was leaving the app, and asking me whether I wanted to "cancel" or "continue". This gave me a moment's pause, because I didn't want to "continue" waiting for the content to load. However as a developer myself I understood the programmer's mindset: "cancel" and "continue" referred to the event the dialog was responding to: a request to exit the app.
This division of responsibilities is backwards: the user shouldn't have to get into the mind of the designer, the designer needs to get into the mind of the user. And that's hard. UI guidelines help, but there's no substitute for watching actual users struggle with your design. Any time you find something that makes them pause, even for a moment, you should file that bump down. That'd catch problems like confusion between text and controls, or inscrutable state widgets.
In one of the greatest instances of marketing serendipity ever, a popular film called The China Syndrome depicting a nuclear meltdown opened two weeks before the TMI incident. So the potential for nuclear meltdown had filtered into the popular consciousness enough to catch the attention of a screenwriter.
But that said, I think it is doubtful that even today we really "understand the risks." I think the public tends to have a simplistic view of the risks, and that's true for the pro- and anti-nuclear camps.
Leaving aside decommissioning, the risks associated with operating a nuclear plant come from the intersection of design and management: the trickier the safe operation of a plant is, the better the management of the plant has to be.
I don't see what is so intrinsically different about sharing the planet with a different intelligent species. For most of H. sapiens' existence we shared it with other human species. In our fantasies of places like Middle Earth we share it with other intelligent species... not to mention Narnia.
We're not exactly doing a terrific job coexisting with other people of our species that have different opinions from us. That suggests our problems are cultural, not biological.
No, the doomsday clock is very much meaningless. Basically it does nothing except signifies how unhappy the people who run it are with the current political climate.
Close, but not quite right. The Doomsday Clock represents the opinion of a commitee of scholars drawn from scientific and international relations fields about risk of some kind of destabilizing event, such as the use of nuclear weapons. It does not reflect the state of happiness of the board with respect to politics in general, although perhaps inevitably the assessment of global risk and happiness with the political climate are somewhat correlated.
It is true that the assessment of the board is somewhat subjective. But something being a judgment call isn't necessarily the same as "meaningless". It depends on who is doing the judging, which you can weigh for yourself looking at the board bios contained in this year's statement.
I was surprised to find out I actually know one of the board members. Herb Lin and I were both at MIT around the same time. He's not somebody I'd characterize as given to hysterics.
It'll bring everything you love about Windows to the Cloud.