for about five years i commuted 87 kilometers a day - it took me about 40-45 minutes.
then for another two years i travelled 113 kilometers a day to toronto - it took me about 70-75 minutes each way. that's about 2.5 to 3 hours stuck in traffic ontop of a minimum 8hr workday - that's 10.5 to 11 hours before you even get started on saying hi to the family, thinking about dinner, etc.
so after seven years of this nonsense, i found an apartment about a couple blocks away from where i work, sold the car, and started riding bike - best thing i've ever done in my life. i started having a life again, i started getting fit and healthy. i started to enjoy the morning commute.
fifteen-twenty minutes on a bike in the spring is the bees knees. now winter is a little tougher - but you've got about three cold months in the year, and nine generally beautiful months for cycling - but you've got to dress for it. ever since i sold my car, moved and got a bike, my life has been happier.
after a couple years on a bike, i was lucky enough to live on toronto island - one of the largest car-free communities in north america. i witnessed sixty year old women wrapped in scarves and hats - grandly riding thier bikes through the snow in the middle of january - people ask how they got so healthy. there was almost nowhere you couldn't get to in downtown toronto in under 40 minutes by bike - several years without ever paying for parking or gas. but it requires a change in your way of thinking about thinking about things - need groceries - get a cart. got kids? get a bakfiet (yes!). its not so hard once you try it - and its enjoyable.
ii) Steve Jobs on Bicycles: So then finally, what is the last piece of technology
that he [Steve Jobs] acquired - not made by Apple - that really delighted him?
He pauses for long seconds, looks down, puts his hands on his knees, looks away.
"I actually bought a bicycle recently. It's just... wonderful."
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus... [not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
(Goethe, Scientific Studies, Suhrkamp ed., vol 12, p. 121; trans. Douglas Miller)
the ones who would suffer most from such a move are those least able to afford new hardware -- kid you not -- i was at a school in march 2009 -- with old donated machines that were still running windows 98 (yes 98!!) and the 'new' machine was running windows 2000. i was trying to login to get my.mac webmail - which requires at least safari 3, mozilla 2, or ie7 - fat chance to get my webmail if i'm running on win2k - ugh. but i was able to DL & install (using win98) a copy of mozilla2 for win98 and get access to my webmail -- mozilla was the only link that made it possible to keep that old machine useful for a modern webmail app. cutting support kills old machines and puts them into dumpsters and landfills.
The most effective kind of education is that
a child should play amongst lovely things. (Plato)
Human beings are the most imitative of all animals. This is especially true of the child before the change of teeth. Everything is imitated during this time, and as whatever enters the child through its senses as light and sound works formatively on the organs, it is of utmost importance that what surrounds the child should act beneficially.
At this age nothing is achieved by admonition; commands and prohibitions have no effect whatever. But of greatest significance is the EXMAPLE. What the child sees, what happens around him, he feels must be imitated. For instance: the parents of a well-behaved child were astonished to discover that he had taken money from a cashbox; greatly distrubed, they thought the child had inclinations to steal. Questioning brought to light that the child had simply imitated what he had seen his parents do everyday.
It is important that the examples the child sees and imitates are of a kind that awaken inner forces. Exhortations have no effect, but the way a person behaves in the child's presence matters greatly. It is far more important to refrain from doing what the child is not permitted to do than to fobid the child to imitate it.
(Rudolf Steiner, Lecture VI, Cologne, December 1, 1906, "Education...", p.96)
i don't want a Flash Player on my iPhone - just a waste of annoying blinking bandwidth wasters. what we really need is a good text editor. there are several dozen note taking, doc-opening type utilities on the iphone - none of them are any good or even remotely useful (no - Text Guru doesn't even come close).
it was back in 1984 that MacWrite still couldn't swap its files to disk, and we were stuck with smaller than 32k text files. now, with the iphone -- its back to the future -- still cant open a basic text file (averages anywhere from 200k - 2Mb) -- i had this on my palm pilot back in 1998 with QED -- forget the friggin sharks with lasers on thier head -- all I want is a decent TEXT EDITOR.
Text Editor 1.0:
> Must Have: - opens text files (must open files up to 2Mb in size) - copy and paste between files - both regular 'Finger Scroll' (drag text) AND 'Index Scroll' (drag edge for lengh of document) - user can permanently set Background & Foreground Text Colours - multi-file search and replace (i.e. search the content of all text files in a directory) - user settable global font (set it once to MONACO 10, and never touch it!) - every file must open at the same scroll and cursor location as when it was saved. - ability to 'Bookmark' up to 256 scroll settings per text file
*even if it means adding a search string like  into the text.
> Should NOT Have: - Should NOT Open IMAGES or Pictures - Should NOT have FONTS / Sizes / Styles > NO RTF / Rich Text!! - Should NOT Open PDF or Word Docs
if we can do software synths and video - why o why cant we even get a basic text editor!?!?
if you give them more bandwidth - the p2p freeloaders will use that all up too - at extra cost to you for getting a bigger pipe - throttle them until they self regulate to 80% of thier monthly limit. dont throttle them if they show some self-restraint.
"The human being himself, to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist." (Goethe, Scientific Studies)
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus...[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
here's a couple semi-long term anecdotal pieces of evidence that should give sober pause for anyone thinking this could be so easy.
i) back in 1965, my father bought a top-of the line Grundig reel-to-reel recorder. i remember him using that thing through the 1970's. it was pulled out from time to time in the 1980's -- still working after fifteen years, and built like a tank. then i remember him pulling it out and firing it up back 1990's - probably about 1992 -- well it wouldn't work. like good geeks, we opened it up to try and fix 'er. well, i was quite surprised that some of the plastic gears in there were still functioning, but one of the gears had been made out of a lead-alloy composite... and had crumbled to DUST.. after not even two decades.. there is NOWHERE that would still make that gear.
ii) in the late 1980's i managed to get my first really good stereo system -- a pair of $400 speakers, with 'specially engineered acoustic resonance foam' in the woofers -- well the special foam that made them sound better and cost more only lasted abotu twelve years, and they too -- CRUMBLED TO DUST. the paper cone speakers lasted longer.
iii) around 1994, i went out and got myself a top-of-the-line Sony VHS Stereo VCR, thinking i wanted to invest in a good one that would last. well, at christmas 2007, i wanted to digitize some old family video from 1995 -- hooked up the VCR -- and the video the logic for the tape mechanisms and the video out electronics is shot -- so much for longevity. the same is true of my sony 8mm handycam -- tape and electronics are self-destructing in less then 10-15 years.
this gives great pause to my childhood aspirations of expecting old electronics to last at least for a couple decades. the old tube radios and record players - despite thier great limitations, were inherently simpler devices, and with constant care could last an order of magnitude longer than modern minitiature micro-electromechanical devices. we still have some 1940's and 1950's stereo tube equipment that has moved with us from house to house, and still works fine -- never even had to change the tubes in over 40 years -- so it makes me think that old audio gear (amps and radio) generally outlasts new (1980's and 1990's) video electronics. this confirms my suspicions that the smaller and finer they make the electronics -- the less long they last (in decades).
now to expect modern drives with their much finer tolerances to simply 'boot up' after fifty years sitting there -- that seems a bit of a fairy tale, given my experience..:-^
the study contains no new research - just a rehash of existing studies - therefore the jury's still out until we finally get someone to do a proper and rigourous experiment .
as a dvorak user for ten years myself, and a qwerty user for many years before that - i find less rsi pain in my wrists, and a speed boast from 55 to 65 wpm using dvorak - glad i switched.:-)
aaargh -- sorry for the OT post -- but it has to be said somewhere...
am i the only one that is frusterated that we can store gigs of photos and music, and do smooth zoomy streetviews over terrain data -- but we are unable to have even one basic basic text editor that can do the following:
i) load 700k - 2Mb text files (i edit books) ii) bookmarks & text files open back at the last place you were iii) really good clean search/replace iv) user definable background & text colour v) does not read microsoft word or jpeg files.
even the best text editor applications for are worse than macwrite 1.0 right now.:-P
i have a friend who's a professional story writer for film -- to keep track of all the plots and sub-plots -- he makes (for example) three rows of coloured posty notes -- one for each plot along a timeline that extends the width of the wall -- this is the master overview for everything that goes on in the 2hrs -- it works better than anything he's used on a computer.
i have another friend, who's a renaissance scholar - she independently uses, and swears by the same method for when she's writing her books.
Andy Hertzfeld, engineer on the original Macintosh team:
Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know, how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well, that's five seconds times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster. (PBS, Revenge of the Nerds, Part 3)
if jobs goes -- apple would still have jon ive -- the designer who made the products so sweet. they would still have the staff of hand-picked engineers that make it go. the talent would still be there to sustain it. they'll probably do very well -- you can bet jobs is busy cultivating a successor scenario. he kept upping the ante by listening to the designers, and by thinking of how they were used and mattered in people's lives.
in the unlikely case that apple ever really went bust -- perhaps i could see jobs openSourcing OSX in a dying gesture rather than go to the grave thinking of the world being permeated by microsoft software which lacks 'any real sense of taste'.:-P
sow the good taste of the apple seeds everywhere...:-)
just like new Orleans - the public reserve was squandered on trillions of dollars of a war started 'to rid saddam of weapons of mass destruction he was immenently going to use on us' - when we needed the balance of trillions of dollars of taxes to keep things humming (after living decadently on mass credit) - those trillions and soldiers couldn't help us or new Orleans because some darn numbskul squandered it all on his religious war barkin saddam possums up an Iraqi tree - when the American economy tanked due to this - the robots in the other countries - since our fates are all interconnected - dutifuly tanked along,and made the crisis a global one.
> A much more interesting top ten would be the myriad ways that civilization could end...
ya -- like consider the following... (burning humour karma indescriminately...)
It will be quite possible for the men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of intellect â" but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay even in the human kingdom itself â" all these thoughts which have no reality will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.
This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.
The earth will be surrounded â" as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts â" with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter.
at two years old -- just up from crawling, and now babling away, and lookin fer cookie jars -- he's just getting pinged by anything that blinks and beeps -- at that age, they learn anything you do by imitation -- i can't imagine why ANY baby would possibly need a computer at two years old...!?!? he needs much more to play 'catch the ball' with you and how to tie his shoelaces.
There is a lot in computer science that has long ago been worked out in philosophy, but for which most computer scientists have but a fuzzy grasp.
Computer Science operates under certain philosophical assumptions which have consequences -- but if you don't even know that you're operating under a DUALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS -- you will not be able to deal with those.
For example, Cognitive Scientists are often are not very precise in their use of the words 'knowledge' and 'understanding', as John Searle so brilliantly explains:
(Exerpted from 'Minds Brains and Programs')
"First I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': in many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding." My critics point out that there are many different degrees of understanding; that "understanding" is not a simple two-place predicate; that there are even different kinds and levels of understanding, and often the law of excluded middle doesn-t even apply in a straightforward way to statements of the form "x understands y; that in many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on. To all of these points I want to say: of course, of course. But they have nothing to do with the points at issue. There are clear cases in which "understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument 2 I understand stories in English; to a lesser degree I can understand stories in French; to a still lesser degree, stories in German; and in Chinese, not at all. My car and my adding machine, on the other hand, understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. We often attribute "under standing" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. We say, "The door knows when to open because of its photoelectric cell," "The adding machine knows how) (understands how to, is able) to do addition and subtraction but not division," and "The thermostat perceives chances in the temperature."
The reason we make these attributions is quite interesting, and it has to do with the fact that in artifacts we extend our own intentionality;3 our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English. If the sense in which Schank's programmed computers understand stories is supposed to be the metaphorical sense in which the door understands, and not the sense in which I understand English, the issue would not be worth discussing. But Newell and Simon (1963) write that the kind of cognition they claim for computers is exactly the same as for human beings. I like the straightforwardness of this claim, and it is the sort of claim I will be considering. I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. The computer understanding is not just (like my understanding of German) partial or incomplete; it is zero.
[This has certain consequences...]
IN MUCH OF AI THERE IS A RESIDUAL BEHAVIOURISM OR OPERATIONALISM. Since appropriately programmed computers can have input-output patterns similar to those of human beings, we are tempted to postulate mental states in the computer similar to human mental states. But once we see that it is both conceptually and empirically possible for a system to have human capacities in some realm without having any intentionality at all, we should be able to overcome this impulse. My desk adding machine has calculating capacities, but no intentionality, and in this paper I have tried to show that a system could have input and output capabilities that duplicated those
1) if you look at the songbird UI - they have obviously tried to imitate itunes in layout and functionality - only they haven't done it as well as itunes - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
2) itunes works well, and is solid solid solid - never lost anything with it - ever. that my friend is the #1 feature.
3) it works with iPhone and all iPods, and it syncs calendars & contacts with outlook & apple addressbook - does songbird or amarok do this? no - thus, they aren't even viable for these uses.
for what iTunes doesnt do -- OS X 10.5 includes a command line audio player (in/usr/bin) called afplay. This is very useful if you want to play a sound file from the command line, shell script, Automator action, etc. The/usr/bin directory is in your path by default, so you can just type afplay file.mp3 to play that file.
if they were really smart - instead of designing everything for cars from the outset, they would design everything to be accessible by bicycle - an eco-friendly bike village. if you're worried about winter - make bike tunnels - they would still be cheaper per mile than the cost of roads for automobile traffic.
cambridge and oxford allow for a really well developed bike transit around campus - it would be a shame if they forced everyone to use cars just because of a design descision at the outset.
the original clock was when the sun actually rose and set on the horizon of the earth.
but we wanted to know exactly how far through that period we were.
so when clocks were invented - we very linearly divided the day up into 24 parts, and then (based on ancient sumerian base 60) -- divided the 24 hours into 60 smaller parts.
we still linearly divide our day (despite the fact that every day changes sunrise / sunset times), and we still use ancient sumerian base 60 in our measurement of time (minutes) today -- omg, its amazing we don't still use Cubits & Fathoms to measure things...!
so, we can carry on with using base 60 for minutes, and medieval linear ideas of time, or we can take advantage of our understandings of science to create something more rational. so here are two proposals to take time measurement out of the medieval dark ages:
1) 0:00 HOURS = SUNRISE. everything has a chip in it nowadays - you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it. and if you have a chip in it -- computation is easy. we no longer have to use the medieval linear way of dividing up the day -- finally, we are able to have clocks that dynamically adjust for sunrise and sunset -- like SOL. the length of a day continually gets longer & shorter -- so should our watches. since all our watches have a chip in them already -- the sunrise/sunset computation should not be an obstacle. we propose the elimination of the terms of 'noon' and 'midnight' -- and always start counting 0:00 hours at sunrise.
2) DECIMAL TIME. we no longer want to use 24 hours (why 24!?!?) and 60 minutes (base 60!!) -- instead, we use decimal time -- 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour. the resulting 'minute' will be 1.44 of our existing old-style minutes.
so there you have it -- no half-way medieval measures -- sunrise = 0:00 hours, there are 10 hours in a day, and 100 minutes in an hour. businesses always start at 2pm (2 hours after sunrise) -- ALWAYS, and people go home when it gets dark ALWAYS -- the business day will grow and shrink with the seasons, and all will be much more sensible, and in acccord with the natural rhythms of nature, while being easier to measure, because its all measured in decimal.
Slashdot Mirror
for about five years i commuted 87 kilometers a day - it took me about 40-45 minutes.
then for another two years i travelled 113 kilometers a day to toronto - it took me about 70-75 minutes each way. that's about 2.5 to 3 hours stuck in traffic ontop of a minimum 8hr workday - that's 10.5 to 11 hours before you even get started on saying hi to the family, thinking about dinner, etc.
so after seven years of this nonsense, i found an apartment about a couple blocks away from where i work, sold the car, and started riding bike - best thing i've ever done in my life. i started having a life again, i started getting fit and healthy. i started to enjoy the morning commute.
fifteen-twenty minutes on a bike in the spring is the bees knees. now winter is a little tougher - but you've got about three cold months in the year, and nine generally beautiful months for cycling - but you've got to dress for it. ever since i sold my car, moved and got a bike, my life has been happier.
after a couple years on a bike, i was lucky enough to live on toronto island - one of the largest car-free communities in north america. i witnessed sixty year old women wrapped in scarves and hats - grandly riding thier bikes through the snow in the middle of january - people ask how they got so healthy. there was almost nowhere you couldn't get to in downtown toronto in under 40 minutes by bike - several years without ever paying for parking or gas. but it requires a change in your way of thinking about thinking about things - need groceries - get a cart. got kids? get a bakfiet (yes!). its not so hard once you try it - and its enjoyable.
i'll leave you with two gems:
i) Yehuda Moon (Bicycle Comic Strip):
http://www.yehudamoon.com/index.php?date=2008-01-22
ii) Steve Jobs on Bicycles: So then finally, what is the last piece of technology
that he [Steve Jobs] acquired - not made by Apple - that really delighted him?
He pauses for long seconds, looks down, puts his hands on his knees, looks away. ... wonderful."
"I actually bought a bicycle recently. It's just
(Steve Jobs: The Guru Behind Apple, Charles Arthur; October 29, 2005)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article323133.ece
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus... [not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
(Goethe, Scientific Studies, Suhrkamp ed., vol 12, p. 121; trans. Douglas Miller)
on the other hand - those who run win98 deserve thier fate - cut the chord... (muhaha) :-)
the ones who would suffer most from such a move are those least able to afford new hardware -- kid you not -- i was at a school in march 2009 -- with old donated machines that were still running windows 98 (yes 98!!) and the 'new' machine was running windows 2000. i was trying to login to get my .mac webmail - which requires at least safari 3, mozilla 2, or ie7 - fat chance to get my webmail if i'm running on win2k - ugh. but i was able to DL & install (using win98) a copy of mozilla2 for win98 and get access to my webmail -- mozilla was the only link that made it possible to keep that old machine useful for a modern webmail app. cutting support kills old machines and puts them into dumpsters and landfills.
2cents from toronto
j
The most effective kind of education is that
a child should play amongst lovely things. (Plato)
Human beings are the most imitative of all animals. This is especially true of
the child before the change of teeth. Everything is imitated during this time,
and as whatever enters the child through its senses as light and sound works
formatively on the organs, it is of utmost importance that what surrounds the
child should act beneficially.
At this age nothing is achieved by admonition; commands and prohibitions have
no effect whatever. But of greatest significance is the EXMAPLE. What the
child sees, what happens around him, he feels must be imitated. For instance:
the parents of a well-behaved child were astonished to discover that he had
taken money from a cashbox; greatly distrubed, they thought the child had
inclinations to steal. Questioning brought to light that the child had simply
imitated what he had seen his parents do everyday.
It is important that the examples the child sees and imitates are of a kind
that awaken inner forces. Exhortations have no effect, but the way a person
behaves in the child's presence matters greatly. It is far more important to
refrain from doing what the child is not permitted to do than to fobid the
child to imitate it.
(Rudolf Steiner, Lecture VI, Cologne, December 1, 1906, "Education...", p.96)
if you'd consider the original mission -- it looks like its the new old VW Volkswagen...
yeah - USB mass storage support - is probably the best thing they could add (back) to the ipod.
i don't want a Flash Player on my iPhone - just a waste of annoying blinking bandwidth wasters.
what we really need is a good text editor. there are several dozen note taking, doc-opening type utilities on the iphone - none of them are any good or even remotely useful (no - Text Guru doesn't even come close).
it was back in 1984 that MacWrite still couldn't swap its files to disk, and we were stuck with smaller than 32k text files. now, with the iphone -- its back to the future -- still cant open a basic text file (averages anywhere from 200k - 2Mb) -- i had this on my palm pilot back in 1998 with QED -- forget the friggin sharks with lasers on thier head -- all I want is a decent TEXT EDITOR.
Text Editor 1.0:
> Must Have:
- opens text files (must open files up to 2Mb in size)
- copy and paste between files
- both regular 'Finger Scroll' (drag text) AND 'Index Scroll' (drag edge for lengh of document)
- user can permanently set Background & Foreground Text Colours
- multi-file search and replace (i.e. search the content of all text files in a directory)
- user settable global font (set it once to MONACO 10, and never touch it!)
- every file must open at the same scroll and cursor location as when it was saved.
- ability to 'Bookmark' up to 256 scroll settings per text file
*even if it means adding a search string like  into the text.
> Should NOT Have:
- Should NOT Open IMAGES or Pictures
- Should NOT have FONTS / Sizes / Styles > NO RTF / Rich Text!!
- Should NOT Open PDF or Word Docs
if we can do software synths and video - why o why cant we even get a basic text editor!?!?
aaaarrrgggghhh!!!
2cents from toronto island
j
if you give them more bandwidth - the p2p freeloaders will use that all up too - at extra cost to you for getting a bigger pipe - throttle them until they self regulate to 80% of thier monthly limit. dont throttle them if they show some self-restraint.
"The human being himself, to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist." (Goethe, Scientific Studies)
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus...[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies)
here's a couple semi-long term anecdotal pieces of evidence that should give sober pause for anyone thinking this could be so easy.
i) back in 1965, my father bought a top-of the line Grundig reel-to-reel recorder. i remember him using that thing through the 1970's. it was pulled out from time to time in the 1980's -- still working after fifteen years, and built like a tank. then i remember him pulling it out and firing it up back 1990's - probably about 1992 -- well it wouldn't work. like good geeks, we opened it up to try and fix 'er. well, i was quite surprised that some of the plastic gears in there were still functioning, but one of the gears had been made out of a lead-alloy composite... and had crumbled to DUST.. after not even two decades.. there is NOWHERE that would still make that gear.
ii) in the late 1980's i managed to get my first really good stereo system -- a pair of $400 speakers, with 'specially engineered acoustic resonance foam' in the woofers -- well the special foam that made them sound better and cost more only lasted abotu twelve years, and they too -- CRUMBLED TO DUST. the paper cone speakers lasted longer.
iii) around 1994, i went out and got myself a top-of-the-line Sony VHS Stereo VCR, thinking i wanted to invest in a good one that would last. well, at christmas 2007, i wanted to digitize some old family video from 1995 -- hooked up the VCR -- and the video the logic for the tape mechanisms and the video out electronics is shot -- so much for longevity. the same is true of my sony 8mm handycam -- tape and electronics are self-destructing in less then 10-15 years.
this gives great pause to my childhood aspirations of expecting old electronics to last at least for a couple decades. the old tube radios and record players - despite thier great limitations, were inherently simpler devices, and with constant care could last an order of magnitude longer than modern minitiature micro-electromechanical devices. we still have some 1940's and 1950's stereo tube equipment that has moved with us from house to house, and still works fine -- never even had to change the tubes in over 40 years -- so it makes me think that old audio gear (amps and radio) generally outlasts new (1980's and 1990's) video electronics. this confirms my suspicions that the smaller and finer they make the electronics -- the less long they last (in decades).
now to expect modern drives with their much finer tolerances to simply 'boot up' after fifty years sitting there -- that seems a bit of a fairy tale, given my experience.. :-^
2cents from toronto
jp
the study contains no new research - just a rehash of existing studies - therefore the jury's still out until we finally get someone to do a proper and rigourous experiment .
as a dvorak user for ten years myself, and a qwerty user for many years before that - i find less rsi pain in my wrists, and a speed boast from 55 to 65 wpm using dvorak - glad i switched. :-)
aaargh -- sorry for the OT post -- but it has to be said somewhere...
am i the only one that is frusterated that we can store gigs of photos and music, and do smooth zoomy streetviews over terrain data -- but we are unable to have even one basic basic text editor that can do the following:
i) load 700k - 2Mb text files (i edit books)
ii) bookmarks & text files open back at the last place you were
iii) really good clean search/replace
iv) user definable background & text colour
v) does not read microsoft word or jpeg files.
even the best text editor applications for are worse than macwrite 1.0 right now. :-P
2cents
i have a friend who's a professional story writer for film -- to keep track of all the plots and sub-plots -- he makes (for example) three rows of coloured posty notes -- one for each plot along a timeline that extends the width of the wall -- this is the master overview for everything that goes on in the 2hrs -- it works better than anything he's used on a computer.
i have another friend, who's a renaissance scholar - she independently uses, and swears by the same method for when she's writing her books.
2cents
Andy Hertzfeld, engineer on the original Macintosh team:
Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know, how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well, that's five seconds
times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster. (PBS, Revenge of the Nerds, Part 3)
if jobs goes -- apple would still have jon ive -- the designer who made the products so sweet. they would still have the staff of hand-picked engineers that make it go. the talent would still be there to sustain it. they'll probably do very well -- you can bet jobs is busy cultivating a successor scenario. he kept upping the ante by listening to the designers, and by thinking of how they were used and mattered in people's lives.
in the unlikely case that apple ever really went bust -- perhaps i could see jobs openSourcing OSX in a dying gesture rather than go to the grave thinking of the world being permeated by microsoft software which lacks 'any real sense of taste'. :-P
sow the good taste of the apple seeds everywhere... :-)
j
just like new Orleans - the public reserve was squandered on trillions of dollars of a war started 'to rid saddam of weapons of mass destruction he was immenently going to use on us' - when we needed the balance of trillions of dollars of taxes to keep things humming (after living decadently on mass credit) - those trillions and soldiers couldn't help us or new Orleans because some darn numbskul squandered it all on his religious war barkin saddam possums up an Iraqi tree - when the American economy tanked due to this - the robots in the other countries - since our fates are all interconnected - dutifuly tanked along,and made the crisis a global one.
2cents from Toronto
> A much more interesting top ten would be the myriad ways that civilization could end...
ya -- like consider the following... (burning humour karma indescriminately...)
It will be quite possible for the men of earth, if they so wish, to develop a more and more automatic form of intellect â" but that can also happen amid conditions of barbarism. Full and complete manhood, however, cannot come to expression in such a form of intellect, and men will have no relationship to the Beings who would fain come towards them in earth-existence. And all those Beings of whom men have such an erroneous conception because the shadowy intellect can only grasp the mineral nature, the crudely material nature in the minerals, plants and animals, nay even in the human kingdom itself â" all these thoughts which have no reality will in a trice become substantial realities when the moon unites again with the earth. And from the earth there will spring forth a terrible brood of beings, a brood of automata of an order of existence lying between the mineral and the plant kingdoms, and possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect.
This swarm will seize upon the earth, will spread over the earth like a network of ghastly, spider-like creatures, of an order lower than that of plant-existence, but possessed of overpowering wisdom. These spidery creatures will be all interlocked with one another, and in their outward movements they will imitate the thoughts that men have spun out of the shadowy intellect that has not allowed itself to be quickened by the new form of Imaginative Knowledge by Spiritual Science. All the thoughts that lack substance and reality will then be endowed with being.
The earth will be surrounded â" as it is now with air and as it sometimes is with swarms of locusts â" with a brood of terrible spider-like creatures, half-mineral, half-plant, interweaving with masterly intelligence, it is true, but with intensely evil intent. And in so far as man has not allowed his shadowy intellectual concepts to be quickened to life, his existence will be united not with the Beings who have been trying to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but with this ghastly brood of half-mineral, half-plantlike creatures. He will have to live together with these spider-like creatures and to continue his cosmic existence within the order of evolution into which this brood will then enter.
(A Picture of Earth-Evolution in the Future, R. Steiner, Dornach, May 13th, 1921; GA 204)
> Yes, I want it to reverse current and shock me so my heart pulses out jingle bells!
> Whilst the readout shows vectored pine trees!!!
rotfl - mod parent up - that's the funniest thing i've read all week!! :-)
at two years old -- just up from crawling, and now babling away, and lookin fer cookie jars -- he's just getting pinged by anything that blinks and beeps -- at that age, they learn anything you do by imitation -- i can't imagine why ANY baby would possibly need a computer at two years old...!?!? he needs much more to play 'catch the ball' with you and how to tie his shoelaces.
There is a lot in computer science that has long ago been worked out in philosophy, but for which most computer scientists have but a fuzzy grasp.
Computer Science operates under certain philosophical assumptions which have consequences -- but if you don't even know that you're operating under a DUALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS -- you will not be able to deal with those.
For example, Cognitive Scientists are often are not very precise in their use of the words 'knowledge' and 'understanding', as John Searle so brilliantly explains:
(Exerpted from 'Minds Brains and Programs')
"First I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': in many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding." My critics point out that there are many different degrees of understanding; that "understanding" is not a simple two-place predicate; that there are even different kinds and levels of understanding, and often the law of excluded middle doesn-t even apply in a straightforward way to statements of the form "x understands y; that in many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on. To all of these points I want to say: of course, of course. But they have nothing to do with the points at issue. There are clear cases in which "understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument 2 I understand stories in English; to a lesser degree I can understand stories in French; to a still lesser degree, stories in German; and in Chinese, not at all. My car and my adding machine, on the other hand, understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. We often attribute "under standing" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. We say, "The door knows when to open because of its photoelectric cell," "The adding machine knows how) (understands how to, is able) to do addition and subtraction but not division," and "The thermostat perceives chances in the temperature."
The reason we make these attributions is quite interesting, and it has to do with the fact that in artifacts we extend our own intentionality;3 our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English. If the sense in which Schank's programmed computers understand stories is supposed to be the metaphorical sense in which the door understands, and not the sense in which I understand English, the issue would not be worth discussing. But Newell and Simon (1963) write that the kind of cognition they claim for computers is exactly the same as for human beings. I like the straightforwardness of this claim, and it is the sort of claim I will be considering. I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. The computer understanding is not just (like my understanding of German) partial or incomplete; it is zero.
[This has certain consequences...]
IN MUCH OF AI THERE IS A RESIDUAL BEHAVIOURISM OR OPERATIONALISM. Since appropriately programmed computers can have input-output patterns similar to those of human beings, we are tempted to postulate mental states in the computer similar to human mental states. But once we see that it is both conceptually and empirically possible for a system to have human capacities in some realm without having any intentionality at all, we should be able to overcome this impulse. My desk adding machine has calculating capacities, but no intentionality, and in this paper I have tried to show that a system could have input and output capabilities that duplicated those
1) if you look at the songbird UI - they have obviously tried to imitate itunes in layout and functionality - only they haven't done it as well as itunes - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
2) itunes works well, and is solid solid solid - never lost anything with it - ever. that my friend is the #1 feature.
3) it works with iPhone and all iPods, and it syncs calendars & contacts with outlook & apple addressbook - does songbird or amarok do this? no - thus, they aren't even viable for these uses.
for what iTunes doesnt do -- OS X 10.5 includes a command line audio player (in /usr/bin) called afplay. This is very useful if you want to play a sound file from the command line, shell script, Automator action, etc. The /usr/bin directory is in your path by default, so you can just type afplay file.mp3 to play that file.
if they were really smart - instead of designing everything for cars from the outset, they would design everything to be accessible by bicycle - an eco-friendly bike village. if you're worried about winter - make bike tunnels - they would still be cheaper per mile than the cost of roads for automobile traffic.
cambridge and oxford allow for a really well developed bike transit around campus - it would be a shame if they forced everyone to use cars just because of a design descision at the outset.
2cents
j
the original clock was when the sun actually rose and set on the horizon of the earth.
but we wanted to know exactly how far through that period we were.
so when clocks were invented - we very linearly divided the day up into 24 parts,
and then (based on ancient sumerian base 60) -- divided the 24 hours into 60 smaller parts.
we still linearly divide our day (despite the fact that every day changes sunrise / sunset times), and we still use ancient sumerian base 60 in our measurement of time (minutes) today -- omg, its amazing we don't still use Cubits & Fathoms to measure things...!
so, we can carry on with using base 60 for minutes, and medieval linear ideas of time, or we can take advantage of our understandings of science to create something more rational. so here are two proposals to take time measurement out of the medieval dark ages:
1) 0:00 HOURS = SUNRISE. everything has a chip in it nowadays - you can't find a watch that doesn't have a chip in it. and if you have a chip in it -- computation is easy. we no longer have to use the medieval linear way of dividing up the day -- finally, we are able to have clocks that dynamically adjust for sunrise and sunset -- like SOL. the length of a day continually gets longer & shorter -- so should our watches. since all our watches have a chip in them already -- the sunrise/sunset computation should not be an obstacle. we propose the elimination of the terms of 'noon' and 'midnight' -- and always start counting 0:00 hours at sunrise.
2) DECIMAL TIME. we no longer want to use 24 hours (why 24!?!?) and 60 minutes (base 60!!) -- instead, we use decimal time -- 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour. the resulting 'minute' will be 1.44 of our existing old-style minutes.
so there you have it -- no half-way medieval measures -- sunrise = 0:00 hours, there are 10 hours in a day, and 100 minutes in an hour. businesses always start at 2pm (2 hours after sunrise) -- ALWAYS, and people go home when it gets dark ALWAYS -- the business day will grow and shrink with the seasons, and all will be much more sensible, and in acccord with the natural rhythms of nature, while being easier to measure, because its all measured in decimal.
2cents from toronto
j