There are no essential features in any word processor that aren't covered by a linotype machine. That doesn't mean that you'd expect people to be equally productive with both.
I think you're missing something important here. It's not just about doing the old things more efficiently -- in this case preparing a high quality hard copy document. Sometimes it's doing things you never thought of doing, e.g. "thinking out loud" at your keyboard; or group editing a document with people who are on the other side of the country from you. Once you can do those things, they become "essential" -- not to typesetting hard copy, but to a new standard of "essential" consisting of things you'd never imagined being able to do.
I've been in this business for a long, long time, from before the time of the personal computer. Many times I've had to convince people they "needed" things they've gotten along fine with all their lives, such as email (isn't it more *complicated* to send letters using computers?) to business Internet connections (the killer argument: all the cool businesses are starting to do this). One thing I've learned is that people are very bad at imagining doing things differently; that's why you need to get prototypes in their hands as soon as possible.
The most successful technology introductions are ones that transform work so it becomes unrecognizable. I can't count the number of times clients have handed me huge, imposing looking stacks of "reports" a system "has to" generate, where almost none of those reports will be needed again once the new system is working. What clients imagine doing is pushing more of the same kinds of paper, faster; not eliminating the need for those papers and redistributing that labor to things that matter more.
Of course there's a flip side to this, which is that developers are constantly pushing new features on users that users don't want and won't ever be happy about using. Sometimes as a developer your brainstorms are just baloney. But you do have to think beyond doing the same old thing more efficiently.
One simple and useful missing feature that lots of people use is Word's outline view, which has been a perennial feature request in OpenOffice for over a decade now. And every year it's always dismissed with some variation of "you can accomplish the same thing with the Navigator" -- which is true, but it shows a profound misunderstanding of user interfaces. Doing it that way doesn't feel the same, and feeling is really important.
An external outliner doesn't provide the same direct manipulation experience an internal outliner; in an internal outline (aka an "outline view") the user manipulates the document directly; with Navigator he manipulates the document indirectly, through a simulacrum in a separate window. This not only works poorly on a smaller screen, it just feels different -- like having to eat a bowl of nuts with chopsticks instead of your fingers.
Microsoft did something analogous with its early touch interfaces. Rather than creating the illusion of manipulating the document directly with your fingers, you manipulated a virtual mouse onscreen using your finger. On paper there's a lot of convincing sounding reasons for why this would be a good approach. It makes things easier for developers who already have a desktop app, because that app will work on the touchscreen without modification. And users are used to manipulating documents and apps through the mouse pointer... except no matter how much you practice, it never feels as natural as manipulating the document directly. In fact operating a virtual mouse with your finger on the screen feels *less* intuitive than using an actual mouse. I think it's an uncanny valley type effect. The continual sense of dealing with an extraneous piece of UI mechanics saps the flow out of your work.
The Navigator is not that bad, but its shortcomings to someone used to using an internal outliner are similar. It does get the job done, but it feels awkward when you're familiar with a superior UI for those tasks.
Exactly. Given that a jump of 8.36% yields a statewide figure of 37,600, that means that Minnesota added about 2,900 jobs last year. That's not nothing, but in absolute terms it's not that much. California added 32,800 tech jobs last year; Texas 20,100; Florida 12,500; Massachusetts 8,700; and Michigan 8,100.
An old trick is to write the email and not send it, or send it to yourself. That way you get some catharsis, and can send a more civil email later (or no email at all, handle it politely in person).
I don't believe that kind of catharsis actually exists. People conflate the relief from the momentary impulse to do something with relief from the underlying anger. They're not the same thing. I think writing the angry email reviewing all the reasons the other guy is a contemptible, bad person is actually practicing being angry at him. And anything you practice comes more and more naturally with time.
Let's say someone cuts you off while you're driving, and lets say you start venting at the other driver -- maybe you chase him for a bit, yelling at him. Does that, in your experience, actually make you calmer and more rational toward the other driver? *I* think you're actually prolonging the fear and anger of a momentary encounter that would be best put behind you. It also reinforces the underlying irrational assumptions that turn ordinarily rational people into aggressive, reactive drivers. What you *should* do when you get cut off is immediately remind yourself that everybody, even good, considerate drivers, have bad days. All it takes is a single instant where your attention lapses -- and that happens to everyone occasionally, even you. And even if the other guy's a bad driver, by the time you realized what happened the encounter was already over. Chances are you'll never encounter that guy again.
In other words deal with the fallacious belief that very momentary negative interaction calls for immediate and aggressive response. Then you can make a rational decision about what the optimal response would be. You can't reason with an angry person, and when that angry person is you you can't reason, period.
So I'd change the old trick to this: write a conciliatory email and then sleep on it before sending the real one. The reason for not sending the conciliatory email right away is that you don't want to do anything irreversible under the influence of strong emotion. Once you've dealt with the anger you can do a better job of being reasonably assertive; you don't have to let people walk all over you buy you do need some perspective when pushing back.
A diet isn't inherently bad when you're expending that energy through physical exertion.
This is true in one sense; untrue in most others.
It's absolutely true that if a person's energy intake is perfectly balanced with his energy output, that he won't gain weight -- or at least not much. Your body composition might be changing a little bit so your weight might not be 100% stable, but let's say this is true as a first approximation. The thing is, a human body isn't an insulated laboratory reactor; it has interfaces to the outside world that take in and expel energy and matter. The problem with sugary drinks is that in absence of fiber, protein and fat is that they derange the systems that are supposed to regulate your calorie intake and output.
If you drink a 20 oz Coke for lunch your blood sugar levels will rise rapidly, unless you immediately run for a mile and a half (roughly what it'd take an average person to run off 140 calories). Since your endocrine system tries to keep blood sugar in a very narrow range it will immediately begin storing that excess sugar as fat. Because the sugar syrup you just consumed enters the bloodstream with unnatural rapidity, your body will overshoot and you'll very soon experience *low* blood sugar -- which makes you hungry and irritable. This explains why people who are gaining weight are eating more calories than they need BUT are feeling hungry.
Contrast this with eating, say, 20 cups of raw spinach. If you can manage to choke it down, that much spinach has exactly as many calories (140) as the soda, and what's more those calories are almost entirely carbohydrates -- just like the soda. But you aren't going to be hungry for a long, long time. That's because the carbohydrates in the spinach are locked up in plant tissues that take a long time to digest, so they enter the bloodstream very gradually.
The "calorie is a calorie" hypothesis is based on a gross misapplication of thermodynamic theory to the human body. The "calorie" figures in food are determined by burning a measured quantity of food inside a calorimeter. For a calorimeter it's absolutely true that a "calorie is a calorie"; that's because a calorimeter isn't a self-regulating system which manages its exchange of matter and energy with the outside world by getting hungry and tired. A human body is.
According to the "calorie is a calorie" hypothesis, it's worse to eat two hard boiled eggs for lunch than it is to drink a coke, because the eggs have 16 more calories. That's obviously ridiculous.
Drinking a coke instead of eating real food is like putting gasoline in a diesel engine. A scientific sounding argument could be made that you should get more power out of your diesel engine that way: gasoline and diesel fuel are both liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and gasoline has a higher energy content per volume than diesel. This of course is only convincing if you have no idea of how a diesel engine works.
But apparently does nothing for our education system.:(
Compared to what? Voluntary education?
In most of the 19th Century America had a voluntary private education system. Most people attended a few years of church school for a few hours a week (read Mark Twain to see how that worked). As of 1870, only one state had universal compulsory education resembling : Massachusetts. And in 1870 20% of Americans were totally illiterate. We're not talking "functional illiteracy"; maybe 14% of Americans are "functionally illiterate". We're talking *total* illiteracy, a condition that applies to about half of one percent of modern Americans. I'd say that literacy is "something".
We built what was for a long time the most advanced economy in the world, largely with government-schooled labor. The Wright brothers went to public school. So did most American scientists and engineers of the 20th C. The problem with American public schools today is that in so many places they're more interested in returning school to something like you'd read about in Twain. They're more interested in indoctrinating than empowering students.
Seriously the Moon is crazy large relative to the Earth. The Earth-Moon doesn't currently meet the most commonly accepted definition of "binary planet", although it will in a hundred million years or so. On the other hand Isaac Asimov proposed a very reasonable definition of "binary planet" which the Earth/Moon system meets; you can read about it in the link above. I think it figured in one of the Foundation stories.
Well, we can take a lesson from what happened when RAM became larger. People found more uses for it because it was there.
My favorite laptop of all time was the old PowerBook 540c "Blackbird". On the evolutionary scale it's right at the mid-point between the very first portable computer, the Osbourne 1, and the laptop I'm writing this on now. If you plot the amount of memory on these computers on a *logarithmic* scale, the Osbourne has order of magnitude 4 memory; the 540c has oom 7 memory, and the laptop I'm using now has oom 10 -- three orders of magnitude between each. But if you plot the difference on a *linear* scale, it's clear that in absolute terms the gap between my 8GB RAM laptop and my old 12 MB RAM Blackbird is far greater than between the Blackbird and the Osbourne.
I think it is no accident that in terms of supporting mundane tasks like office automation (as opposed to stuff like weather prediction where you never have enough resource), advances in capabilities take roughly logarithmically more resources. When resources are scarce designers use them carefully, for only the most critical tasks. But there's usually a next use, it's just something that wasn't cost-justified before. In the Osbourne days people reckoned it wasn't worth paying to see a representation of a document as it would actually print, fonts in all; that came in when memory available was an order of magnitude greater.
People *will* find a use for petabyte thumb drives. But they'll be marginally less important on a per byte basis. Going from 1TB to 2TB will feel like going from 1GB to 2GB. Of course there may be totally new uses for spaces nobody has thought of yet when we get into the PB range for mobile storage -- perhaps in encryption, or compressing telecommunication.
... that anyone would expect this to be particularly hard to do. After all you're just reading bits off a magnetic stripe.
Vendors like to talk as if the security of a system is determined by the toughest component in the system, because then they can simply buy some whiz-bang encryption chip, slap it in their product, and claim their product is nigh unbreakable by ordinary mortals. But the truth is the security of a system is determined by its *weakest* component, and in this case that starts with the card itself. Trying to secure that is like trying to secure your butter by nailing it to the butter dish.
The problem is not want to buy but can afford to buy. Tesla is at the high end of what I would consider the car pricing range if you leave out the super premium and exotics. As a result, many people who might preferentially buy one simply can't afford one.
Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.
It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.
What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.
Indeed. But it's also true that change per se puts more stress on less innovative or agile companies, especially companies that have massive investments sunk into older technologies. No matter what rules you set it'll benefit some companies over others; rules that are very favorable to GMC would be unfavorable to Tesla and vice versa. They'll both argue that rules that benefit them the most are best for the country.
I'll say this for Tesla's position, though: the notion that it's physically impossible to build fuel efficient cars that people will want to buy is balderdash.
3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...
Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.
When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?
I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.
Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.
We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.
So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.
Contrariwise show me a form of telecommunication that does *not* involve computers. Even plain old telephone service. Even if you discount the digital switching equipment, the PBXs at business locations are computers.
The overriding principle in any encounter between vehicles should be safety; after that efficiency. A cyclist should make way for a motorist to pass , but *only when doing so poses no hazard*. The biggest hazard presented by operation of any kind of vehicle is unpredictability. For a bike this is swerving in and out of a lane a car presents the greatest danger to himself and others on the road.
The correct, safe, and courteous thing to do is look for the earliest opportunity where it is safe to make enough room for the car to pass, move to the side, then signal the driver it is OK to pass. Note this doesn't mean *instantaneously* moving to the side, which might lead to an equally precipitous move *back* into the lane.
Bikes are just one of the many things you need to deal with in the city, and if the ten or fifteen seconds you're waiting to put the accelerator down is making you late for where you're going then you probably should leave a few minutes earlier, because in city driving if it's not one thing it'll be another. In any case if you look at the video the driver was not being significantly delayed by the cyclist, and even if that is so that is no excuse for driving in an unsafe manner, although in his defense he probably doesn't know how to handle the encounter with the cyclist correctly.
The cyclist of course ought to know how to handle an encounter with a car though, and for that reason it's up to the cyclist to manage an encounter with a car to the greatest degree possible. He should have more experience and a lot more situational awareness. I this case the cyclist's mistake was that he was sorta-kinda to one side in the lane, leaving enough room so the driver thought he was supposed to squeeze past him. The cyclist ought to have clearly claimed the entire lane, acknowledging the presence of the car; that way when he moves to the side it's a clear to the driver it's time to pass.
The motorist in the video committed a crime -- several actually. But the cyclist committed an indiscretion by chasing down the motorist to give him a piece of his mind. That's not illegal, it's just a very bad idea.
Many years ago I heard an interviewer ask the great race driver Jackie Stewart what it takes to be a great driver. He said that a driver ought to be emotionless. I think this is very true for any kind of driving -- or cycling. Never prolong your reaction to anything that anyone does on the road beyond the split second it takes to deal with it. Let your attention move on to the next thing. Never direct it to a driver because of something he *did*. Keep focused on what's happening now.
Actually, I don't think it'll be as common as automobile road rage. The reason is that exercise is an excellent stress control mechanism. You just tend to take things in stride more readily when you're biking than when you're driving -- at least in my experience.
If I see a coin come up heads nine out of ten times, I'm expecting it to come up heads on the eleventh toss.
You exactly demonstrated the problem with common sense reasoning. People assume that because they have what feels like to them (and may actually be) extensive experience with something they automatically understand it. But most people who haven't been trained in mathematics have plenty of misconceptions about what mathematicians call the "Bernoulli Process" (coin flipping).
Not really. The judge simply ruled she was bound by precedent that her court did not have sufficient authority to overturn. That's actually a good call, but it has nothing to do with the issue or arguments.
In any case appeals to "common sense" aren't worth squat when that common sense is based on ignorance or inexperience. It's common sense to talk about "the dark side of the Moon" or to think that the next flip of a coin is affected by prior flips.
For 80% of the existence of our species we coexisted with at least one other species that would pass any reasonable philosophical criteria for "person": the Neanderthals. If we were able to use biotechnology to recreate Neanderthals, Jurassic park style, there's no question that if successful the experiment would create people. But would they be legal persons?
It's an important philosophical question because it potentially colors a lot of mundane ethical questions. Do we recognize the rights of others as a kind of tribal convention? Or are we compelled to do so because of something in human nature? If the latter presumably non-human entities would have an equal ethical claim to personhood.
Note to executive producers: hire PAs with mixed martial arts experience. Bonus points if they're Mexican or Argentinian. Come to think of it, keep the cameras rolling too because that's something I'd pay to watch.
Technically it's giving smaller amounts of something, not taking anything away. Nonetheless marginally it makes perfect sense to talk about "doling out cuts". It means starting with a total net cut and dividing the marginal impact among several parties.
Yes, it will raise a few eyebrows among editorial prigs, but it's perfectly clear what "doling out cuts" means.
If you add up all the auxiliary stuff you need to power with electricity and round up generously, it's maybe 2000 watts load. The very best commercially available technology of today can run that load for 45 hours. So the impact of the auxiliary system load is marginal. That means it's only a concern if you're contemplating using close to the maximum range of your car. If you're traveling 15 miles each way in an 84 mile range Leaf, or 80 miles each way in a 250 mile range Tesla S, you don't really need to worry about running the heater and lights, even counting diminished battery capacity.
The average American spends 25 minutes each way commuting; even in NYC the average figure is 34.6. Even double or tripling that commute time due to bad weather and halfing the range due to cold, that's still easy for the Tesla. It's a bit of challenge for the Leaf with its 24 kwh battery and 84 mile range.
If the typical electric cars of ten years from now perform close to the high end of today, then the vast majority of people won't have to worry about cold weather's effect on range. But a sizable minority of Americans are what the US Census characterizes as "extreme commuters": people whose commute takes more than 90 minutes or fifty miles each way. Even at the low end of that spectrum cold weather range won't be an issue, but if you commute from Fargo to Bismarck ND every day it's safe to say you aren't going to be going electric any time soon.
In general anything that creates a hazard for bystanders would be a bad idea. So even if there isn't a specific ordinance against shooting bows-and-arrows in the city limits, I'm sure the authorities would take a dim view of your clout shooting into your neighbors' yards.
What there should be is a legally mandated remote radio kill switch anyone can trigger that will cause the drone to land, or in the case of the more sophisticated models to return to base. If the switch worked within say a 50' radius it'd pretty much only work on drones buzzing your residence.
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There are no essential features in any word processor that aren't covered by a linotype machine. That doesn't mean that you'd expect people to be equally productive with both.
I think you're missing something important here. It's not just about doing the old things more efficiently -- in this case preparing a high quality hard copy document. Sometimes it's doing things you never thought of doing, e.g. "thinking out loud" at your keyboard; or group editing a document with people who are on the other side of the country from you. Once you can do those things, they become "essential" -- not to typesetting hard copy, but to a new standard of "essential" consisting of things you'd never imagined being able to do.
I've been in this business for a long, long time, from before the time of the personal computer. Many times I've had to convince people they "needed" things they've gotten along fine with all their lives, such as email (isn't it more *complicated* to send letters using computers?) to business Internet connections (the killer argument: all the cool businesses are starting to do this). One thing I've learned is that people are very bad at imagining doing things differently; that's why you need to get prototypes in their hands as soon as possible.
The most successful technology introductions are ones that transform work so it becomes unrecognizable. I can't count the number of times clients have handed me huge, imposing looking stacks of "reports" a system "has to" generate, where almost none of those reports will be needed again once the new system is working. What clients imagine doing is pushing more of the same kinds of paper, faster; not eliminating the need for those papers and redistributing that labor to things that matter more.
Of course there's a flip side to this, which is that developers are constantly pushing new features on users that users don't want and won't ever be happy about using. Sometimes as a developer your brainstorms are just baloney. But you do have to think beyond doing the same old thing more efficiently.
One simple and useful missing feature that lots of people use is Word's outline view, which has been a perennial feature request in OpenOffice for over a decade now. And every year it's always dismissed with some variation of "you can accomplish the same thing with the Navigator" -- which is true, but it shows a profound misunderstanding of user interfaces. Doing it that way doesn't feel the same, and feeling is really important.
An external outliner doesn't provide the same direct manipulation experience an internal outliner; in an internal outline (aka an "outline view") the user manipulates the document directly; with Navigator he manipulates the document indirectly, through a simulacrum in a separate window. This not only works poorly on a smaller screen, it just feels different -- like having to eat a bowl of nuts with chopsticks instead of your fingers.
Microsoft did something analogous with its early touch interfaces. Rather than creating the illusion of manipulating the document directly with your fingers, you manipulated a virtual mouse onscreen using your finger. On paper there's a lot of convincing sounding reasons for why this would be a good approach. It makes things easier for developers who already have a desktop app, because that app will work on the touchscreen without modification. And users are used to manipulating documents and apps through the mouse pointer... except no matter how much you practice, it never feels as natural as manipulating the document directly. In fact operating a virtual mouse with your finger on the screen feels *less* intuitive than using an actual mouse. I think it's an uncanny valley type effect. The continual sense of dealing with an extraneous piece of UI mechanics saps the flow out of your work.
The Navigator is not that bad, but its shortcomings to someone used to using an internal outliner are similar. It does get the job done, but it feels awkward when you're familiar with a superior UI for those tasks.
Exactly. Given that a jump of 8.36% yields a statewide figure of 37,600, that means that Minnesota added about 2,900 jobs last year. That's not nothing, but in absolute terms it's not that much. California added 32,800 tech jobs last year; Texas 20,100; Florida 12,500; Massachusetts 8,700; and Michigan 8,100.
An old trick is to write the email and not send it, or send it to yourself. That way you get some catharsis, and can send a more civil email later (or no email at all, handle it politely in person).
I don't believe that kind of catharsis actually exists. People conflate the relief from the momentary impulse to do something with relief from the underlying anger. They're not the same thing. I think writing the angry email reviewing all the reasons the other guy is a contemptible, bad person is actually practicing being angry at him. And anything you practice comes more and more naturally with time.
Let's say someone cuts you off while you're driving, and lets say you start venting at the other driver -- maybe you chase him for a bit, yelling at him. Does that, in your experience, actually make you calmer and more rational toward the other driver? *I* think you're actually prolonging the fear and anger of a momentary encounter that would be best put behind you. It also reinforces the underlying irrational assumptions that turn ordinarily rational people into aggressive, reactive drivers. What you *should* do when you get cut off is immediately remind yourself that everybody, even good, considerate drivers, have bad days. All it takes is a single instant where your attention lapses -- and that happens to everyone occasionally, even you. And even if the other guy's a bad driver, by the time you realized what happened the encounter was already over. Chances are you'll never encounter that guy again.
In other words deal with the fallacious belief that very momentary negative interaction calls for immediate and aggressive response. Then you can make a rational decision about what the optimal response would be. You can't reason with an angry person, and when that angry person is you you can't reason, period.
So I'd change the old trick to this: write a conciliatory email and then sleep on it before sending the real one. The reason for not sending the conciliatory email right away is that you don't want to do anything irreversible under the influence of strong emotion. Once you've dealt with the anger you can do a better job of being reasonably assertive; you don't have to let people walk all over you buy you do need some perspective when pushing back.
A diet isn't inherently bad when you're expending that energy through physical exertion.
This is true in one sense; untrue in most others.
It's absolutely true that if a person's energy intake is perfectly balanced with his energy output, that he won't gain weight -- or at least not much. Your body composition might be changing a little bit so your weight might not be 100% stable, but let's say this is true as a first approximation. The thing is, a human body isn't an insulated laboratory reactor; it has interfaces to the outside world that take in and expel energy and matter. The problem with sugary drinks is that in absence of fiber, protein and fat is that they derange the systems that are supposed to regulate your calorie intake and output.
If you drink a 20 oz Coke for lunch your blood sugar levels will rise rapidly, unless you immediately run for a mile and a half (roughly what it'd take an average person to run off 140 calories). Since your endocrine system tries to keep blood sugar in a very narrow range it will immediately begin storing that excess sugar as fat. Because the sugar syrup you just consumed enters the bloodstream with unnatural rapidity, your body will overshoot and you'll very soon experience *low* blood sugar -- which makes you hungry and irritable. This explains why people who are gaining weight are eating more calories than they need BUT are feeling hungry.
Contrast this with eating, say, 20 cups of raw spinach. If you can manage to choke it down, that much spinach has exactly as many calories (140) as the soda, and what's more those calories are almost entirely carbohydrates -- just like the soda. But you aren't going to be hungry for a long, long time. That's because the carbohydrates in the spinach are locked up in plant tissues that take a long time to digest, so they enter the bloodstream very gradually.
The "calorie is a calorie" hypothesis is based on a gross misapplication of thermodynamic theory to the human body. The "calorie" figures in food are determined by burning a measured quantity of food inside a calorimeter. For a calorimeter it's absolutely true that a "calorie is a calorie"; that's because a calorimeter isn't a self-regulating system which manages its exchange of matter and energy with the outside world by getting hungry and tired. A human body is.
According to the "calorie is a calorie" hypothesis, it's worse to eat two hard boiled eggs for lunch than it is to drink a coke, because the eggs have 16 more calories. That's obviously ridiculous.
Drinking a coke instead of eating real food is like putting gasoline in a diesel engine. A scientific sounding argument could be made that you should get more power out of your diesel engine that way: gasoline and diesel fuel are both liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and gasoline has a higher energy content per volume than diesel. This of course is only convincing if you have no idea of how a diesel engine works.
But apparently does nothing for our education system. :(
Compared to what? Voluntary education?
In most of the 19th Century America had a voluntary private education system. Most people attended a few years of church school for a few hours a week (read Mark Twain to see how that worked). As of 1870, only one state had universal compulsory education resembling : Massachusetts. And in 1870 20% of Americans were totally illiterate. We're not talking "functional illiteracy"; maybe 14% of Americans are "functionally illiterate". We're talking *total* illiteracy, a condition that applies to about half of one percent of modern Americans. I'd say that literacy is "something".
We built what was for a long time the most advanced economy in the world, largely with government-schooled labor. The Wright brothers went to public school. So did most American scientists and engineers of the 20th C. The problem with American public schools today is that in so many places they're more interested in returning school to something like you'd read about in Twain. They're more interested in indoctrinating than empowering students.
Donald Trump it is.
... "It's a binary planet."
Seriously the Moon is crazy large relative to the Earth. The Earth-Moon doesn't currently meet the most commonly accepted definition of "binary planet", although it will in a hundred million years or so. On the other hand Isaac Asimov proposed a very reasonable definition of "binary planet" which the Earth/Moon system meets; you can read about it in the link above. I think it figured in one of the Foundation stories.
Well, we can take a lesson from what happened when RAM became larger. People found more uses for it because it was there.
My favorite laptop of all time was the old PowerBook 540c "Blackbird". On the evolutionary scale it's right at the mid-point between the very first portable computer, the Osbourne 1, and the laptop I'm writing this on now. If you plot the amount of memory on these computers on a *logarithmic* scale, the Osbourne has order of magnitude 4 memory; the 540c has oom 7 memory, and the laptop I'm using now has oom 10 -- three orders of magnitude between each. But if you plot the difference on a *linear* scale, it's clear that in absolute terms the gap between my 8GB RAM laptop and my old 12 MB RAM Blackbird is far greater than between the Blackbird and the Osbourne.
I think it is no accident that in terms of supporting mundane tasks like office automation (as opposed to stuff like weather prediction where you never have enough resource), advances in capabilities take roughly logarithmically more resources. When resources are scarce designers use them carefully, for only the most critical tasks. But there's usually a next use, it's just something that wasn't cost-justified before. In the Osbourne days people reckoned it wasn't worth paying to see a representation of a document as it would actually print, fonts in all; that came in when memory available was an order of magnitude greater.
People *will* find a use for petabyte thumb drives. But they'll be marginally less important on a per byte basis. Going from 1TB to 2TB will feel like going from 1GB to 2GB. Of course there may be totally new uses for spaces nobody has thought of yet when we get into the PB range for mobile storage -- perhaps in encryption, or compressing telecommunication.
... that anyone would expect this to be particularly hard to do. After all you're just reading bits off a magnetic stripe.
Vendors like to talk as if the security of a system is determined by the toughest component in the system, because then they can simply buy some whiz-bang encryption chip, slap it in their product, and claim their product is nigh unbreakable by ordinary mortals. But the truth is the security of a system is determined by its *weakest* component, and in this case that starts with the card itself. Trying to secure that is like trying to secure your butter by nailing it to the butter dish.
The problem is not want to buy but can afford to buy. Tesla is at the high end of what I would consider the car pricing range if you leave out the super premium and exotics. As a result, many people who might preferentially buy one simply can't afford one.
Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.
It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.
What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.
Indeed. But it's also true that change per se puts more stress on less innovative or agile companies, especially companies that have massive investments sunk into older technologies. No matter what rules you set it'll benefit some companies over others; rules that are very favorable to GMC would be unfavorable to Tesla and vice versa. They'll both argue that rules that benefit them the most are best for the country.
I'll say this for Tesla's position, though: the notion that it's physically impossible to build fuel efficient cars that people will want to buy is balderdash.
3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...
Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.
When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?
I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.
Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.
We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.
So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.
Contrariwise show me a form of telecommunication that does *not* involve computers. Even plain old telephone service. Even if you discount the digital switching equipment, the PBXs at business locations are computers.
The overriding principle in any encounter between vehicles should be safety; after that efficiency. A cyclist should make way for a motorist to pass , but *only when doing so poses no hazard*. The biggest hazard presented by operation of any kind of vehicle is unpredictability. For a bike this is swerving in and out of a lane a car presents the greatest danger to himself and others on the road.
The correct, safe, and courteous thing to do is look for the earliest opportunity where it is safe to make enough room for the car to pass, move to the side, then signal the driver it is OK to pass. Note this doesn't mean *instantaneously* moving to the side, which might lead to an equally precipitous move *back* into the lane.
Bikes are just one of the many things you need to deal with in the city, and if the ten or fifteen seconds you're waiting to put the accelerator down is making you late for where you're going then you probably should leave a few minutes earlier, because in city driving if it's not one thing it'll be another. In any case if you look at the video the driver was not being significantly delayed by the cyclist, and even if that is so that is no excuse for driving in an unsafe manner, although in his defense he probably doesn't know how to handle the encounter with the cyclist correctly.
The cyclist of course ought to know how to handle an encounter with a car though, and for that reason it's up to the cyclist to manage an encounter with a car to the greatest degree possible. He should have more experience and a lot more situational awareness. I this case the cyclist's mistake was that he was sorta-kinda to one side in the lane, leaving enough room so the driver thought he was supposed to squeeze past him. The cyclist ought to have clearly claimed the entire lane, acknowledging the presence of the car; that way when he moves to the side it's a clear to the driver it's time to pass.
The motorist in the video committed a crime -- several actually. But the cyclist committed an indiscretion by chasing down the motorist to give him a piece of his mind. That's not illegal, it's just a very bad idea.
Many years ago I heard an interviewer ask the great race driver Jackie Stewart what it takes to be a great driver. He said that a driver ought to be emotionless. I think this is very true for any kind of driving -- or cycling. Never prolong your reaction to anything that anyone does on the road beyond the split second it takes to deal with it. Let your attention move on to the next thing. Never direct it to a driver because of something he *did*. Keep focused on what's happening now.
Actually, I don't think it'll be as common as automobile road rage. The reason is that exercise is an excellent stress control mechanism. You just tend to take things in stride more readily when you're biking than when you're driving -- at least in my experience.
No it is not. A question.
Legal personhood can not be based on ethics.
If it were, a society could "legally" give kids and comatose people all the rights that a sane adult has.
This is certainly not the case.
If I see a coin come up heads nine out of ten times, I'm expecting it to come up heads on the eleventh toss.
You exactly demonstrated the problem with common sense reasoning. People assume that because they have what feels like to them (and may actually be) extensive experience with something they automatically understand it. But most people who haven't been trained in mathematics have plenty of misconceptions about what mathematicians call the "Bernoulli Process" (coin flipping).
Not really. The judge simply ruled she was bound by precedent that her court did not have sufficient authority to overturn. That's actually a good call, but it has nothing to do with the issue or arguments.
In any case appeals to "common sense" aren't worth squat when that common sense is based on ignorance or inexperience. It's common sense to talk about "the dark side of the Moon" or to think that the next flip of a coin is affected by prior flips.
For 80% of the existence of our species we coexisted with at least one other species that would pass any reasonable philosophical criteria for "person": the Neanderthals. If we were able to use biotechnology to recreate Neanderthals, Jurassic park style, there's no question that if successful the experiment would create people. But would they be legal persons?
It's an important philosophical question because it potentially colors a lot of mundane ethical questions. Do we recognize the rights of others as a kind of tribal convention? Or are we compelled to do so because of something in human nature? If the latter presumably non-human entities would have an equal ethical claim to personhood.
Note to executive producers: hire PAs with mixed martial arts experience. Bonus points if they're Mexican or Argentinian. Come to think of it, keep the cameras rolling too because that's something I'd pay to watch.
Technically it's giving smaller amounts of something, not taking anything away. Nonetheless marginally it makes perfect sense to talk about "doling out cuts". It means starting with a total net cut and dividing the marginal impact among several parties.
Yes, it will raise a few eyebrows among editorial prigs, but it's perfectly clear what "doling out cuts" means.
If you add up all the auxiliary stuff you need to power with electricity and round up generously, it's maybe 2000 watts load. The very best commercially available technology of today can run that load for 45 hours. So the impact of the auxiliary system load is marginal. That means it's only a concern if you're contemplating using close to the maximum range of your car. If you're traveling 15 miles each way in an 84 mile range Leaf, or 80 miles each way in a 250 mile range Tesla S, you don't really need to worry about running the heater and lights, even counting diminished battery capacity.
The average American spends 25 minutes each way commuting; even in NYC the average figure is 34.6. Even double or tripling that commute time due to bad weather and halfing the range due to cold, that's still easy for the Tesla. It's a bit of challenge for the Leaf with its 24 kwh battery and 84 mile range.
If the typical electric cars of ten years from now perform close to the high end of today, then the vast majority of people won't have to worry about cold weather's effect on range. But a sizable minority of Americans are what the US Census characterizes as "extreme commuters": people whose commute takes more than 90 minutes or fifty miles each way. Even at the low end of that spectrum cold weather range won't be an issue, but if you commute from Fargo to Bismarck ND every day it's safe to say you aren't going to be going electric any time soon.
In general anything that creates a hazard for bystanders would be a bad idea. So even if there isn't a specific ordinance against shooting bows-and-arrows in the city limits, I'm sure the authorities would take a dim view of your clout shooting into your neighbors' yards.
What there should be is a legally mandated remote radio kill switch anyone can trigger that will cause the drone to land, or in the case of the more sophisticated models to return to base. If the switch worked within say a 50' radius it'd pretty much only work on drones buzzing your residence.