Sailors and fishermen sometimes prefer analog sonar depth sounders to the digital ones because the analog ones show a qualitative picture of the shape of the bounce, rather than just its peak. This means that they can help you to guess what the seabed is made of--the bounce from mud looks different from that from stones, from sand, from a shoal of fish. And the digital ones are getting more sophisticated, and giving more information than just the peak of the reflection, allowing them to make those guesses for you. So yes, active sonar absolutely could do this. However, I really doubt they are doing it. Seems overkill.
When your theory is defined such that it includes both sides of interpretation of any given piece of data, it is hard to argue against. (e.g., I heard on the news that it was getting colder and certain ice caps or something were growing, not shrinking, and that that is "exactly what is expected with global warming, because with something like global warming, the unexpected is going to occur."
If that is actually what the "scientist" said, that is indeed moronic. Can you provide a reference? What do you mean by "the news"? Sounds more like some anti-global-warming moron trying to create a straw man.
OTOH, last I looked, there were good (ie. they have made accurate predictions) climate models that predict increasing average global temperatures while simultaneously predicting cooling around the poles. This is good science: show that your model fits some data and then try to understand what's going on. If your model does not make correct predictions (give it (today-n) years of data, and see if it can predict the last n years correctly), you need to change your model. That is exactly what science is.
Evolution is harder, since the physics is infinitely more complex--there are no precise predictive models of evolution in the physics sense, so whatever we see has to be incorporated into the theory without predictive testing. Evolution is thus more useful as a series of observations and a way of explaining them, rather than a proof in any mathematical sense. That doesn't make it wrong.
Elementary evolution theory does make a claim like "All complex life evolved from simpler life." If you now find a fossil of something complex that has no simpler ancestors, then evolution is wrong. Not that you can easily prove the bit about ancestors, but you get the idea. Finding that some complex life has simpler ancestors doesn't prove evolution, but it certainly makes it more plausible. Excuse the very shallow example, but you get the point.
But there certainly is a market for complex games. Chess is still popular (isn't it?), and weiqi is far more so. Sudoku is (are?) new and already ubiquitous, and I seem to recall that there are several hundred acres of crossword puzzles published daily in the USA. Other examples abound.
It seems that there ought to be plenty of demand for complex computer games. Is there something about the target market for puzzle games that makes them hate having to use a computer? Is it novelty (new sudoku in the newspaper every day)? Is it scope (10 minutes or an hour and you solve it and are done)? I'm pretty sure I've seen research showing that we learn better from paper than from a monitor--I haven't seen any mechanism proposed, but that could affect this as well (note the early popularity of computer chess programs that included a real board and real pieces).
Yes, it's a bit of a niche market (most people would rather be told they're smart than be challenged), but I suspect that niche markets are the only really exciting ones to develop for. If I can stay afloat while writing for one, I'm probably going to have a better life than someone who gets rich catering to the plebes.
While science can help determine how feasible a given proposal is (and even then, it's more in the realm of engineering than science), it's silent on which solution is best.
Wrong. Give me a cost function and I'll tell you which policy is best. Yes, I gave you all the hard work there, but a scientist--and apparently no politician--will clearly see that the costs are arbitrary (or axiomatic, perhaps), but that the probability distribution of various outcomes can be measured, integrated, and the plan with the best chance of success pulled out. It's not rocket science--it's rather more complex than that--but it is well enough understood to be very powerful.
I don't think the general public has the delusion you describe. I would say rather that the general public seems to think that God provides the One True Way, that science is the enemy of God, and that therefore science must claim the same thing and be wrong. Am I nit-picking? The result is about the same...
All to often, academics is too far removed from the real reality of things that they can at times be detrimental to sound policy.
Almost by definition, academics are the people who look at evidence before coming to decisions, and revise their decisions when they receive new information. Sorry if that's removed from your reality--it's certainly alien to Bush's. And what do manuals have to do with academics?
Carter's failure is a good point--if you ask people to act intelligently, they will resent it (I assume that's what you're referring to?). I have no doubt that Obama is quite aware of the parallels; I think that he is a more careful politician, but time will tell whether this country is worthy of him.
Apparently what this country needs is a gangsta president.
Where are my mod points? Your final paragraph cut to the heart of the matter. Here's hoping you're right!
Not that scientists are clueless about politics, or immune to the sweet charms of petty backstabbing. But I suspect that a Nobel laureate would be (or at least feel) mostly above politics within a domain that is still, whatever else it is, a meritocracy first. I hope he realises that government politics isn't, and finds a way to be intelligent without being an idiot.
For example, it is a travisty that the 'Happy Birthday' song is still under copyright.
I think you mean "it is a travesty that copyright law is not strong enough to allow the 'Happy Birthday' copyright holders to sue everyone who sings that insufferable piece of dreck into the poorhouse."
If we move very soon and are very lucky, letting the elderly die naturally, without replacement, might just get us to sustainability.
However, it is far from a sure thing--it's more likely that many of us will die in wars due to resource exhaustion. Even something as ancillary as oil has already led to a few minor wars. When there simply isn't enough potable water, do you think those who have poisoned their own are just going to lie down and die?
This is a symptom of a more general problem: there are more people than the resources necessary to support them. If there were plenty of copper, this would not be a problem. But we need lots of it, and we don't have lots of it, so the price rises, and the incentive to steal rises. We will see the same thing with wood, potable water, topsoil,..., in our lifetimes.
The ultimate solution, obviously, is to remember that the planet really can't support 7 billion people who all want to use copper or air, and that we need to figure out how to build a sustainable society in which we have enough resources to go around.
Do you? Are they? If the Chinese government violated the GPL, what do you suppose the consequences would be? There was some question as to whether the license was enforceable in the USA; is it in China?
Having taught a few different subsets of C and C++ and Java and a couple of other things, it is my considered opinion that while Stroustrup's quotation is reasonable, C++ is a terrible language for teaching programming. What's needed is something with a simple syntax. C++ can have that if the programmer is disciplined, which means that C++ would be a passable learning language for teaching expert, disciplined programmers. Useful.
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
All the people I know whose first language was C++ get mired in syntax and can't write pseudocode or explain an algorithm. Those who continue for long enough can become good, but it does take some profound re-education.
There is a strong correlation between those in scientific fields and those with certain political persuasions. There is also a strong tendency for science to weed out people who seek out information solely to validate already-existing views, rather than being open to absorbing a variety of pieces of information and reaching the best-supported conclusion.
If you take a group of people who can be shown to be better than average at incorporating new information and re-evaluating preconceived notions, and demonstrate what their opinions are generally (in this example, perhaps where they are in a political spectrum), then you have a piece of evidence that wherever they are on that spectrum is based on reason rather than on confirmation bias.
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of those on the left of the political spectrum.
People with average confirmation bias show up on "both" sides, but people with less confirmation bias tend to show up mostly on one side. I find this most interesting.
It might also be worth mentioning that confirmation bias is obviously stronger than average among certain (large!) subsets of religious people, and that they tend to be (coincidence?) on the other side of the political spectrum in the USA. Finding out which side that is may be another interesting commentary on the logical consistency and credibility of that end of the spectrum...
On the impossibility of wattage upgrades
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
So convince us. Or just keep bitching (ie. GOTO NatasRevol).
I too am shocked and dismayed at the result of the last election. The Democrats think that was a victory, but the Republicans still took about half the vote. Apparently there are plenty of morons out there yet, and they're not going away anytime soon.
If the brilliant could convince the stupid, then we wouldn't be in most of the messes we're in--for example, we have understood the essence of global warming for well over a century and had the evidence in hand for many decades, but some morons still think it's made up. We've understood the consequences of overpopulation for many generations, and yet only China is even attempting to address that mess. The brilliant can convince the brilliant and sometimes the apathetic, but convincing a moron is unreliable at best. Even if you can, the moron has no means by which to tell good logic from bad, so the "logic" with the most charismatic or familiar-sounding delivery mechanism will tend to win out.
I'm not one to shun a history lesson, but I think the important thing here is that acknowledgment that the work of brilliant people should be free to all.
Here's an amusing thought: in a purely anarchist or capitalist "society" (too strong a word, really), each person's brain belongs to only that person (assuming autodidacts everywhere). In a somewhat socialist society (such as here in the USA where society chips in to protect and educate people), your brilliance is partially a product of the freedom and education that society has given you--for example if you went to public school, watched PBS, got a government scholarship, spent time thinking rather than protecting yourself from predators or farming, etc. Therefore your brilliant work literally belongs--to some degree--to society. Society invested in you, and it expects dividends.
Perhaps the reversion of your work to the public domain after 237 years is sufficient?
Excellent! I knew some things were being done; it sounds like there's more going on than I realised. Do they have utilisation targets? I should look into this.
simply put, biking isn't a solution for the entire area because it is too spread out.
I was vague, but I didn't mean to propose just biking. I forgot to mention that one other reason the Bay Area is ideal is its strip-mall layout: to a first approximation, an extended high-speed congestion-free 24/7 BART could get you to up and down the bay in no time, and 30 minutes of biking would cover between a 6-mile swath (3 miles on each side (where BART isn't right on the water)) on each end for the fatties (avg. 12mph), and easily a 10-mile swath for the habitual commuters like myself. That's a huge chunk of the bay!
Then of course you can bring some of the interesting stuff in closer to BART as you reduce mandated parking lot sizes and tear down all those car dealerships and hospitals you don't need anymore because so many people are healthy now.
Of course, the rich kids live in the hills and many of them will be too wimpy to bike home. As more and more of the population learns to value the finest transportation system this side of Amsterdam, people will want to live near the best bike routes and the McMansions' value will plummet. Haha, suckers! They'll probably put in chair lifts to give cyclists a quick boost of potential energy, all on the BART card.
Yeah, I was thinking of large areas around the south bay. If the fat people loaded their bikes onto buses for the steep bits in SF (and if they created more bus routes everywhere), we'd all win.
Maybe. Over long distances of open highway during non-rush-hour, absolutely. Around town, false. In city, at distances under 5 miles or so, I'm usually faster than a car. Some of that is that a car might not be able to park very close to the destination...
require your wmployer have a place to change
Does your employer not provide a restroom?
require you don't need to carry much
Of course--but you should define "much". Panniers carry what I need most of the time, and some people use trailers for the really big stuff.
are more dangerous*
Completely, absolutely wrong. Or check the numbers yourself, but making claims that go against the evidence just makes you look like an idiot.
can't pick up very many people
Have you ever counted how many trips see no more than one person in the car? So use a car for the 10% of trips in which you need to pick up someone who doesn't have his own transportation. Would you like to drive and park on roads with 10% of the traffic that you see now?
can't get groceries
Bullshit. Where do you get these half-baked ideas? 95% of my grocery runs are by bike, to a store about 5 miles away. The only reason I tend to take longer than I do when driving is that I take a scenic route because biking is fun.
impracticable in an emergency
Can you be any more specific? Also, please take into account the fact that the more people bike instead of driving, the fewer emergencies there are.
require good health.
They also create it, in a bunch of ways, while cars destroy it both passively (no exercise) and actively (pollution, stress, accidents). How is this a problem? Also, as I noted, the Bay Area is largely flat, and therefore biking does not require especially good health after all.
The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...
I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.
I had a bunch of conversations leading up to the election, I've had a bunch of conversations with religious folks, I've talked to people about all kinds of things. Getting people to understand something that conflicts with what they've already decided is very, very difficult. We don't tend to absorb information that suggests that we're wrong, period.
Soldiers are just an executive arm of foreign policy. If you replace them with more logical machines, that's great, but it would be far more effective to replace the people actually making the big decisions.
Of course, this sounds funny, but it is serious. If you assume that robots can make more logical decisions than humans can, why let a human make any important decision, ever?
You can use it, but if you have a question or a problem then you need to pay.
This would seem to suggest that all efforts to make software easier to use will hurt the company's bottom line. I know it's more complex than that--since simpler software then becomes, essentially, less expensive and therefore more popular--but there is still a feedback loop in a direction with which I'm not entirely happy. In a sense it's still an "opposite" of the more traditional (but waning) model of an up-front cost for "the software" with some "free support", in which the incentives are clearer. I'll be curious to see where this goes.
Exactly. The issue here is that Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization, but Google clearly is not. Presumably IRS could be interested in exactly how close ties they have.
Yeah, but doesn't Google qualify for tax-exempt status as a religious organisation?
Yes, I know it's not ideal. In the pair programming course I taught, we randomly generated pairings for in-lab exercises that would last an hour, so each person in the class worked with 14 others at different points. Collaborating with a moron is also a useful skill:) But longer collaborative projects seem to work best when people have the opportunity of exchanging (or booting) team members partway through. Ass-kissing and firing people are also useful skills:) There is a vast middle ground, and I know some people are studying it, and I hope that they make some progress.
Some friends (several of them women in computer science, physics, chemistry, etc) and I were discussing this a while back. I was pondering my perception that there are more women in hard sciences/engineering at good schools than at bad.
Women tend to under-estimate their own ability. Men tend to over-estimate theirs. This is shown in a wide variety of contexts.
My theory is this: in hard sciences, you are told that you are wrong very frequently. Because men tend to believe that they're good even when they're provably not, they stick with it, and vice versa. In good schools, the women (and the men) are actually better and better at accurate self-assessment, leading to less discouragement.
It has also been pointed out that the nature of hard-science curricula frequently makes collaboration ("cheating") impossible--and the bar to discussing ideas is much higher than in fuzzy subjects. Women tend to prefer collaborative endeavours, while men prefer to establish a hierarchy (again, wide variety of research backing this up), although to what extent that is nature vs. nurture I know not.
An obvious solution for computer science is to teach pair programming, emphasise collaborative projects, give students the tools to discuss ideas early on... I taught one such class, but the sample was too small to be interesting. Anyone have more data on this?
Slashdot Mirror
Sailors and fishermen sometimes prefer analog sonar depth sounders to the digital ones because the analog ones show a qualitative picture of the shape of the bounce, rather than just its peak. This means that they can help you to guess what the seabed is made of--the bounce from mud looks different from that from stones, from sand, from a shoal of fish. And the digital ones are getting more sophisticated, and giving more information than just the peak of the reflection, allowing them to make those guesses for you. So yes, active sonar absolutely could do this. However, I really doubt they are doing it. Seems overkill.
When your theory is defined such that it includes both sides of interpretation of any given piece of data, it is hard to argue against. (e.g., I heard on the news that it was getting colder and certain ice caps or something were growing, not shrinking, and that that is "exactly what is expected with global warming, because with something like global warming, the unexpected is going to occur."
If that is actually what the "scientist" said, that is indeed moronic. Can you provide a reference? What do you mean by "the news"? Sounds more like some anti-global-warming moron trying to create a straw man.
OTOH, last I looked, there were good (ie. they have made accurate predictions) climate models that predict increasing average global temperatures while simultaneously predicting cooling around the poles. This is good science: show that your model fits some data and then try to understand what's going on. If your model does not make correct predictions (give it (today-n) years of data, and see if it can predict the last n years correctly), you need to change your model. That is exactly what science is.
Evolution is harder, since the physics is infinitely more complex--there are no precise predictive models of evolution in the physics sense, so whatever we see has to be incorporated into the theory without predictive testing. Evolution is thus more useful as a series of observations and a way of explaining them, rather than a proof in any mathematical sense. That doesn't make it wrong.
Elementary evolution theory does make a claim like "All complex life evolved from simpler life." If you now find a fossil of something complex that has no simpler ancestors, then evolution is wrong. Not that you can easily prove the bit about ancestors, but you get the idea. Finding that some complex life has simpler ancestors doesn't prove evolution, but it certainly makes it more plausible. Excuse the very shallow example, but you get the point.
But there certainly is a market for complex games. Chess is still popular (isn't it?), and weiqi is far more so. Sudoku is (are?) new and already ubiquitous, and I seem to recall that there are several hundred acres of crossword puzzles published daily in the USA. Other examples abound.
It seems that there ought to be plenty of demand for complex computer games. Is there something about the target market for puzzle games that makes them hate having to use a computer? Is it novelty (new sudoku in the newspaper every day)? Is it scope (10 minutes or an hour and you solve it and are done)? I'm pretty sure I've seen research showing that we learn better from paper than from a monitor--I haven't seen any mechanism proposed, but that could affect this as well (note the early popularity of computer chess programs that included a real board and real pieces).
Yes, it's a bit of a niche market (most people would rather be told they're smart than be challenged), but I suspect that niche markets are the only really exciting ones to develop for. If I can stay afloat while writing for one, I'm probably going to have a better life than someone who gets rich catering to the plebes.
While science can help determine how feasible a given proposal is (and even then, it's more in the realm of engineering than science), it's silent on which solution is best.
Wrong. Give me a cost function and I'll tell you which policy is best. Yes, I gave you all the hard work there, but a scientist--and apparently no politician--will clearly see that the costs are arbitrary (or axiomatic, perhaps), but that the probability distribution of various outcomes can be measured, integrated, and the plan with the best chance of success pulled out. It's not rocket science--it's rather more complex than that--but it is well enough understood to be very powerful.
I don't think the general public has the delusion you describe. I would say rather that the general public seems to think that God provides the One True Way, that science is the enemy of God, and that therefore science must claim the same thing and be wrong. Am I nit-picking? The result is about the same...
All to often, academics is too far removed from the real reality of things that they can at times be detrimental to sound policy.
Almost by definition, academics are the people who look at evidence before coming to decisions, and revise their decisions when they receive new information. Sorry if that's removed from your reality--it's certainly alien to Bush's. And what do manuals have to do with academics?
Carter's failure is a good point--if you ask people to act intelligently, they will resent it (I assume that's what you're referring to?). I have no doubt that Obama is quite aware of the parallels; I think that he is a more careful politician, but time will tell whether this country is worthy of him.
Apparently what this country needs is a gangsta president.
Where are my mod points? Your final paragraph cut to the heart of the matter. Here's hoping you're right!
Not that scientists are clueless about politics, or immune to the sweet charms of petty backstabbing. But I suspect that a Nobel laureate would be (or at least feel) mostly above politics within a domain that is still, whatever else it is, a meritocracy first. I hope he realises that government politics isn't, and finds a way to be intelligent without being an idiot.
I like how the first five bullet points are about the styling.
But the Republicans already redefined real negatives as positives. Or maybe that was just a rotation by -pi/2?
For example, it is a travisty that the 'Happy Birthday' song is still under copyright.
I think you mean "it is a travesty that copyright law is not strong enough to allow the 'Happy Birthday' copyright holders to sue everyone who sings that insufferable piece of dreck into the poorhouse."
Other than that, good points!
Depends on the timescale.
If we move very soon and are very lucky, letting the elderly die naturally, without replacement, might just get us to sustainability.
However, it is far from a sure thing--it's more likely that many of us will die in wars due to resource exhaustion. Even something as ancillary as oil has already led to a few minor wars. When there simply isn't enough potable water, do you think those who have poisoned their own are just going to lie down and die?
This is a symptom of a more general problem: there are more people than the resources necessary to support them. If there were plenty of copper, this would not be a problem. But we need lots of it, and we don't have lots of it, so the price rises, and the incentive to steal rises. We will see the same thing with wood, potable water, topsoil, ..., in our lifetimes.
The ultimate solution, obviously, is to remember that the planet really can't support 7 billion people who all want to use copper or air, and that we need to figure out how to build a sustainable society in which we have enough resources to go around.
Or die.
Do you? Are they? If the Chinese government violated the GPL, what do you suppose the consequences would be? There was some question as to whether the license was enforceable in the USA; is it in China?
Having taught a few different subsets of C and C++ and Java and a couple of other things, it is my considered opinion that while Stroustrup's quotation is reasonable, C++ is a terrible language for teaching programming. What's needed is something with a simple syntax. C++ can have that if the programmer is disciplined, which means that C++ would be a passable learning language for teaching expert, disciplined programmers. Useful.
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
All the people I know whose first language was C++ get mired in syntax and can't write pseudocode or explain an algorithm. Those who continue for long enough can become good, but it does take some profound re-education.
Next time I teach, it'll be in FLOOP.
There is a strong correlation between those in scientific fields and those with certain political persuasions. There is also a strong tendency for science to weed out people who seek out information solely to validate already-existing views, rather than being open to absorbing a variety of pieces of information and reaching the best-supported conclusion.
If you take a group of people who can be shown to be better than average at incorporating new information and re-evaluating preconceived notions, and demonstrate what their opinions are generally (in this example, perhaps where they are in a political spectrum), then you have a piece of evidence that wherever they are on that spectrum is based on reason rather than on confirmation bias.
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of those on the left of the political spectrum.
People with average confirmation bias show up on "both" sides, but people with less confirmation bias tend to show up mostly on one side. I find this most interesting.
It might also be worth mentioning that confirmation bias is obviously stronger than average among certain (large!) subsets of religious people, and that they tend to be (coincidence?) on the other side of the political spectrum in the USA. Finding out which side that is may be another interesting commentary on the logical consistency and credibility of that end of the spectrum...
So convince us. Or just keep bitching (ie. GOTO NatasRevol).
I too am shocked and dismayed at the result of the last election. The Democrats think that was a victory, but the Republicans still took about half the vote. Apparently there are plenty of morons out there yet, and they're not going away anytime soon.
If the brilliant could convince the stupid, then we wouldn't be in most of the messes we're in--for example, we have understood the essence of global warming for well over a century and had the evidence in hand for many decades, but some morons still think it's made up. We've understood the consequences of overpopulation for many generations, and yet only China is even attempting to address that mess. The brilliant can convince the brilliant and sometimes the apathetic, but convincing a moron is unreliable at best. Even if you can, the moron has no means by which to tell good logic from bad, so the "logic" with the most charismatic or familiar-sounding delivery mechanism will tend to win out.
I'm not one to shun a history lesson, but I think the important thing here is that acknowledgment that the work of brilliant people should be free to all.
Here's an amusing thought: in a purely anarchist or capitalist "society" (too strong a word, really), each person's brain belongs to only that person (assuming autodidacts everywhere). In a somewhat socialist society (such as here in the USA where society chips in to protect and educate people), your brilliance is partially a product of the freedom and education that society has given you--for example if you went to public school, watched PBS, got a government scholarship, spent time thinking rather than protecting yourself from predators or farming, etc. Therefore your brilliant work literally belongs--to some degree--to society. Society invested in you, and it expects dividends.
Perhaps the reversion of your work to the public domain after 237 years is sufficient?
Excellent! I knew some things were being done; it sounds like there's more going on than I realised. Do they have utilisation targets? I should look into this.
simply put, biking isn't a solution for the entire area because it is too spread out.
I was vague, but I didn't mean to propose just biking. I forgot to mention that one other reason the Bay Area is ideal is its strip-mall layout: to a first approximation, an extended high-speed congestion-free 24/7 BART could get you to up and down the bay in no time, and 30 minutes of biking would cover between a 6-mile swath (3 miles on each side (where BART isn't right on the water)) on each end for the fatties (avg. 12mph), and easily a 10-mile swath for the habitual commuters like myself. That's a huge chunk of the bay!
Then of course you can bring some of the interesting stuff in closer to BART as you reduce mandated parking lot sizes and tear down all those car dealerships and hospitals you don't need anymore because so many people are healthy now.
Of course, the rich kids live in the hills and many of them will be too wimpy to bike home. As more and more of the population learns to value the finest transportation system this side of Amsterdam, people will want to live near the best bike routes and the McMansions' value will plummet. Haha, suckers! They'll probably put in chair lifts to give cyclists a quick boost of potential energy, all on the BART card.
Yes we can!!!!! Um, let me check my notes.
Yeah, I was thinking of large areas around the south bay. If the fat people loaded their bikes onto buses for the steep bits in SF (and if they created more bus routes everywhere), we'd all win.
They require more time
Maybe. Over long distances of open highway during non-rush-hour, absolutely. Around town, false. In city, at distances under 5 miles or so, I'm usually faster than a car. Some of that is that a car might not be able to park very close to the destination...
require your wmployer have a place to change
Does your employer not provide a restroom?
require you don't need to carry much
Of course--but you should define "much". Panniers carry what I need most of the time, and some people use trailers for the really big stuff.
are more dangerous*
Completely, absolutely wrong. Or check the numbers yourself, but making claims that go against the evidence just makes you look like an idiot.
can't pick up very many people
Have you ever counted how many trips see no more than one person in the car? So use a car for the 10% of trips in which you need to pick up someone who doesn't have his own transportation. Would you like to drive and park on roads with 10% of the traffic that you see now?
can't get groceries
Bullshit. Where do you get these half-baked ideas? 95% of my grocery runs are by bike, to a store about 5 miles away. The only reason I tend to take longer than I do when driving is that I take a scenic route because biking is fun.
impracticable in an emergency
Can you be any more specific? Also, please take into account the fact that the more people bike instead of driving, the fewer emergencies there are.
require good health.
They also create it, in a bunch of ways, while cars destroy it both passively (no exercise) and actively (pollution, stress, accidents). How is this a problem? Also, as I noted, the Bay Area is largely flat, and therefore biking does not require especially good health after all.
Just how fat are you, anyway??
The Bay Area would be perfect for bikes. They are far more energy-efficient than EVs (by like 2 orders of magnitude), the Bay Area is largely flat, it suffers from massive congestion (EVs don't even begin to address that), it doesn't get too warm, it doesn't rain much all summer long, the societal cost of maintaining the facilities to park a few million cars are devastating, a few of the people who live there could use some exercise...
I like bikes even in hilly, rainy country, but there they have some disadvantages. It's utterly absurd that somewhere as perfect as the Bay Area doesn't encourage cycling.
I had a bunch of conversations leading up to the election, I've had a bunch of conversations with religious folks, I've talked to people about all kinds of things. Getting people to understand something that conflicts with what they've already decided is very, very difficult. We don't tend to absorb information that suggests that we're wrong, period.
Soldiers are just an executive arm of foreign policy. If you replace them with more logical machines, that's great, but it would be far more effective to replace the people actually making the big decisions.
Of course, this sounds funny, but it is serious. If you assume that robots can make more logical decisions than humans can, why let a human make any important decision, ever?
You can use it, but if you have a question or a problem then you need to pay.
This would seem to suggest that all efforts to make software easier to use will hurt the company's bottom line. I know it's more complex than that--since simpler software then becomes, essentially, less expensive and therefore more popular--but there is still a feedback loop in a direction with which I'm not entirely happy. In a sense it's still an "opposite" of the more traditional (but waning) model of an up-front cost for "the software" with some "free support", in which the incentives are clearer. I'll be curious to see where this goes.
Exactly. The issue here is that Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization, but Google clearly is not. Presumably IRS could be interested in exactly how close ties they have.
Yeah, but doesn't Google qualify for tax-exempt status as a religious organisation?
Yes, I know it's not ideal. In the pair programming course I taught, we randomly generated pairings for in-lab exercises that would last an hour, so each person in the class worked with 14 others at different points. Collaborating with a moron is also a useful skill :) But longer collaborative projects seem to work best when people have the opportunity of exchanging (or booting) team members partway through. Ass-kissing and firing people are also useful skills :) There is a vast middle ground, and I know some people are studying it, and I hope that they make some progress.
Some friends (several of them women in computer science, physics, chemistry, etc) and I were discussing this a while back. I was pondering my perception that there are more women in hard sciences/engineering at good schools than at bad.
Women tend to under-estimate their own ability. Men tend to over-estimate theirs. This is shown in a wide variety of contexts.
My theory is this: in hard sciences, you are told that you are wrong very frequently. Because men tend to believe that they're good even when they're provably not, they stick with it, and vice versa. In good schools, the women (and the men) are actually better and better at accurate self-assessment, leading to less discouragement.
It has also been pointed out that the nature of hard-science curricula frequently makes collaboration ("cheating") impossible--and the bar to discussing ideas is much higher than in fuzzy subjects. Women tend to prefer collaborative endeavours, while men prefer to establish a hierarchy (again, wide variety of research backing this up), although to what extent that is nature vs. nurture I know not.
An obvious solution for computer science is to teach pair programming, emphasise collaborative projects, give students the tools to discuss ideas early on... I taught one such class, but the sample was too small to be interesting. Anyone have more data on this?