From what I can tell, of the few people from Britain that I regularly talk to, is that they really don't care.
There is sort of an epidemic -- perceived or actual, I don't know, and it hardly matters -- of obnoxious, petty crime, mostly committed by youths, in many British cities. There's the whole "happy slapping" thing, but that's just really the tip of the iceberg, it's just a lot of vandalism, shoplifting, street crime, etc. It's the kind of thing that just really gets to people, because it directly degrades the quality of life when you walk around.
In some ways, I think it sort of mirrors feelings that people in the U.S. had back around 10-15 years ago, at the height of the violent crime wave in the inner cities, except in Britain it doesn't seem to really be violent crime. (In fact it seems to be the kind of shit that would probably get you shot by one of the more serious criminals here in America -- maybe we have some sort of natural selection in the ghettos here that keeps this stuff to a minimum? Or maybe everyone with the means to in the U.S. abandoned the inner cities so long ago that we just don't notice.)
But at any rate, the people who have influence -- mostly white, middle income and up -- aren't too bothered, because they're looking rather desperately for any way to knock the "yobs," "chavs," and other varieties of scum in line. There's a sort of (and again, this is just based on the people I've talked with) "well, nothing else has worked, so what the hell" attitude.
To be honest I can't really blame them. Here in the U.S., there were a lot of Generally Bad Ideas being tossed around back in the 90s before the crime wave crested and began to recede (and I don't think even now there's a clear consensus on why that happened -- some people, the authors of Freakonomics in particular, argue that it was actually the echo of Roe v. Wade from a generation earlier reducing the number of potential criminals; feel free to posit your own theory). If the tide hadn't turned when it did, we'd probably be looking at things like this all over the place right now.
Well, although it would never appear in a list like this because it's just too obscure, if you're an audio geek, one of the biggest early-digital flops was the DBX Model 700. (Full disclosure: I wrote the linked WP article.)
It was similar to the Sony PCM F1 in function -- basically a box without any moving parts, that took an audio signal at one end, and put out a composite video signal at the other that you recorded using a VCR. But rather than using PCM recording, it used a system that's a lot more like SACD. It was a very high sample rate (~600 kHz) but with one-bit samples; each sample basically was a "shift up" or "shift down" relative to the last sample. There's a lot more to it than that, but in essence it was digital recording but without many of the downsides to early PCM: the need for "brickwall" filters to eliminate high frequencies, the hard clipping, etc. It was a digital recorder for people who had cut their teeth on analog tape, and it sounded really, really good.
Unfortunately it was much more complex and expensive than PCM, and the rise of CDs as a format was the nail in its coffin (it made a great mixdown format if you were going to vinyl, though, and they even had a special add-on for it that let it interface directly to a vinyl-cutting lathe, to compensate for the fact that you can't 'undercrank' a digital tape directly). But in terms of cool 80s audio technology, IMO it stands alone.
As a plus, it has the coolest switchable peak-reading LED meters on the front of it. I keep one in my rack just for that.
Neat, I didn't know there was a name for it. It's just something I'd seen used a lot as a way of inserting footnotes into plain ASCII that I thought was reasonably elegant.
A lot of the common "plaintext markup" (not necessarily IEEE style) that I've always tried to use in text documents has been de facto formalized by the Markdown text-to-XHTML converter, which I think is the slickest thing since sliced bread. (Except, perhaps, for MultiMarkDown, which adds support for metadata and some other neat features, all while remaining reasonably painless to read in its plain-text form.)
As a slight digression, I think the rise and formalization of these lightweight markup 'languages' (not really languages...conventions?) is interesting to watch, because I remember when HTML was mostly used as a lightweight text-markup language. Somewhere along the line, HTML became a Turing-complete programming language for producing the glue code for web applications, and if all you want to do is write a document with headers, links, and basic formatting, you're better off going to something higher-level and processing it down later.
Don't get too jealous, they're generally leftovers from board meetings; they leave them in the conference rooms so that us peons don't set our coffee cups directly down on the tables and leave rings.
Compatibility with patent-nullification licenses
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RMS Explains GPLv3 Draft 3
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· Score: 4, Interesting
My biggest question is whether GPL3 will be compatible with the many existing "GPL-esque" free licenses [1], which are currently GPL-incompatible, because they contain patent-nullification clauses?
There is a lot of software out there being developed under licenses which aren't compatible with the GPL, because the GPL doesn't allow patent nullification clauses -- this is dangerous, because the purpose of these clauses is to keep someone from slipping code into a major project that they have a patent for, and then torpedoing the whole thing later on when it's crept into wider use. I don't know if this issue just wasn't foreseen when GPL2 was written up, but I can't think of a more pressing issue at the moment.
Yeah, "Tivo-ization" and web services may keep some software out of the hands of the public, but they're not nearly as downright dangerous as submarine patents are.
[1] Examples: IBM Public License 1.0, Common Public License 1.0, Apache License v2, or any of the other licenses where the FSF cheerfully comments "We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL."
I agree, but there are times when data is better represented visually than described in words.
For example, let's say I need to tell you about a new reorganization that's going to take place. I could stand there and talk about who reports to whom, for twenty minutes, and everyone could sit there trying to figure out how the fuck it all adds up (and probably, trying to draw charts on cocktail napkins or in their notes), and where they are in the whole mess, or I could just put up a flowchart.
You don't want to "talk to" the visual, but having it there behind you keeps the audience from going off into la-la land because they are trying to work out the big picture on their own.
I'm quite adamantly against the "bullet point" style of presentations -- I've maybe in my life seen two people who did it well, and they both used physical 35mm slides with an operator whose job it was to click them on cue, and the presentations had been rehearsed into the ground -- but there's no harm and a lot of gain in using visual aids when the alternative is confusing the audience by trying to describe to them a flowchart or graph that they can't see.
PowerPoint should be a controlled item like alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
Nah, we should just have fewer controls on firearms, and make it legal to shoot people who give crappy Powerpoint presentations. Let the market work itself out!
Personally, I don't like the 4-word bullet point style very much, either. When I see a slide that just has a few bullet points on it, my question is "why bother?" You can just say what's on the slide, keep the attention focused on you as the presenter, and save a slide. This idea that all information should be duplicated and presented both on the slide and in the oral presentation is the problem, IMO.
If you try to give the same information in both places then people tend to pay attention to neither, or they get distracted comparing one to the other.
When I present, I make it clear that the major channel for the conveyance of information is my voice, and what I'm saying; the slides are just there to back it up with things that would be too much of a PITA to describe (graphs, data tables, diagrams/flowcharts).
I think the key concept is that the Powerpoint presentation doesn't, and shouldn't, be able to stand on its own. If you can hand someone your Powerpoint deck and they basically get all the same information as they'd get by listening to you talk, then you might as well just email everyone the PP slides and save everyone's time. There's no reason why someone should look at the Powerpoint and see anything that makes sense -- after all, it's just the visuals that were supposed to accompany a presentation, not the presentation itself. (In many cases, I think the driving force behind this is laziness: people, particularly some junior college professors that I've met, don't want to do both visuals and handouts, so they just make terrible visual aids and print them out as handouts.)
Depends on what field you're in. In most business roles, I can see the point of what he's saying. (However, I still think that there's value in learning to cite sources; even in relatively informal communications, I do it all the time, usually with mock footnotes [1], and over the years have done well by it.) But I heartily agree with his assessment about the ability to summarize information being much more important than the ability to fill pages.
Banging out six or seven pages on some crummy topic is trivial; in today's world, even the thickest PHB can probably pull up reams of information on whatever they want to know about. It's condensing that information into compact, easily-understandable (but not too dumbed-down) nuggets that's the real challenge. [2] I remember when I wrote my undergraduate thesis, the absolute hardest part of the whole thing wasn't the research, or writing the paper, it was writing the abstract. How do you cram nine months of research and data analysis into a handful of sentences?
As long as your professor isn't neglecting the importance of sources and citations altogether, I don't think there's really anything to be lost by abandoning the silly cruft of academia and making the writing assignments take on the form of things that exist in real life. Depending on the discipline, I could see computer scientists write whitepapers, while physical scientists write journal briefs for the most part, with the occasional formal lab report or lit review, written to actual journal-submission standards. I don't know what you'd want English and other humanities majors to do, because while academics in those fields do end up doing a lot of writing, statistically very few people who major in those areas actually go into academic fields -- most of them end up doing corporate work. But ultimately, it's not really the format that matters so much as the intent. If you're giving minimum page-number requirements, so that your students are fudging with the margins and typing in garbage in order to bulk up, something's wrong. Far more often in the real world, you end up cutting something down to size, not padding it up.
[1] Like this. [2] Neal Stephenson described intelligence as the act of "condensing fact from the vapor of nuance," a quote that I've always thought was particularly apt.
Education has changed. It used to be difficult to find already answered questions. Not so anymore because of Google. The age of solving problem 1-10 from the book are over and the what of what is what is over.
All that needs to be done to address this is for the teachers to create new unique questions. Students will have pleasure of answering questions not solved by anyone before and also need to adapt all the content they have access to towards a term paper.
Bingo. The only way that students can really plagiarize their term paper is if the question being asked is so banal that thousands of other students have already beaten it to death.
If you make the question unique, then there's really not much of a way to rip off a paper that you find on the internet. At best, all students will be able to do are copy introductory paragraphs, but the critical stuff will all have to be recreated (making the lifted text stand out against the other writing, but more importantly, retaining the more important parts of the exercise).
Ask dried-up, tired questions, and you'll probably get dried-up, tired term papers. Who'da thunk it?
I agree with you that the Rebel is a very odd choice. It's yet another thing on the list which makes me think that the people writing it have very short memories, and/or didn't bother to do any more research besides "hey, what's the first product that comes to mind when I think of $CATEGORY" regardless of any other merits.
Someday someone might even build a DSLR that is as good as a film body.
I think that it's already been made. A few years ago, Kodak made the last in a series of cameras that had begun with the first true DSLR. They were called the "DCS" series, and the last 'real' one was the 760: It started off with a Nikon F5 chassis, which is probably the best SLR body around (and I say this as a Minolta man myself, but the F5...you could literally pound nails with it), and then put a 6MP sensor in (and this was in 2000ish, when that was ridiculous), along with Firewire, and a serial port for interfacing to your GPS for geotagging or to your cellular/satellite phone for remote uploads. I don't know what hardware it actually had inside, but it had a 256MB buffer (again, ridiculously large) and would shoot continuously at 1.5 fps.
It also shot in what was effectively a RAW format, long before that was an option on most cameras. And it had a microphone, so you could do voice annotations; a feature that I just can't believe that more manufacturers, consumer and professional, haven't picked up on. (I can't tell you how many times I've wished my camera did this.)
In short, it marked what I see as a sort of turning point; it was the last digital camera that was made for film photographers, based directly off of a stock film-camera body, to compete in a market where film was still the standard for measurement, even if it was obviously on the way out.
If you trace backwards from the 760, which I see as the last of a breed, you get to the Kodak DCS100, which was the first DSLR (1991, 1.3MP, SCSI, based off of a Nikon F3 -- manual focus!). Some people even claim that it was the first real commercially available "digital camera" in anything like a recognizable form today. (It was several years before consumer cameras started to pop up, e.g. the Apple Quicktake, but those were barely recognizable to most people as cameras.)
So what I find so fascinating about the DCS series, is that the trace an arc across a decade that was really the transition between film and digital for a large part of the professional and consumer market. In 1991, you had the first DSLR, and in 2001 you had the last one that wasn't designed from the ground-up as digital.
As someone who once worked at a Big Box store, those are my favorite kind of customer. You wanna buy some Ethernet? No problem; I got some great Ethernet right over here. Fresh off the truck... it's "deLink" -- that's French, the best kind. Now, you want some tubes with that?
...enough to do things like boot up the machine using alternate media, then the battle is essentially lost, no?
Yep. Now, who wants to type up the memo to Microsoft? Because, see, they keep trying to control your computer from Redmond, even though you're sitting at the console.
Rootkits aren't just for botnet operators anymore. Root/boot kits are the way people are going to take back their computers from Microsoft, so that they can, you know, do stuff with them.
(Although, more seriously, it's only a few people that need to have rooted machines, so that they can rip copy-protected content using kernel-level exploits to bypass the DRM enforcement. Then they can just dump the content onto Bittorrent or some other P2P protocol, which is how the unwashed masses will get it.)
That will really help. Sorry to break it to you but free speech, as it exists in the U.S., is pretty unique in the world.
Well, I'm not sure I would go quite that far, although I do agree with your ultimate analysis. The U.S. seems to be fairly unique among the other would-be superpowers in terms of having both free speech, economic freedom, and intense secularization. However, if you open the field to the entire G8, or to the rest of the First World, there are a bunch of other places that are competitive.
I don't think Canada and Japan have much in the way of overt censorship, although the Canadians do have that weird ISP-censoring thing going on that I'm not sure would be legal in the U.S., and they don't seem to take as hard a line on the absolute sacrosanctity of individual freedoms as we do here (mostly an issue when you're talking about gun control, although the differences in basic principles come up in other areas). But when it comes to the Internet, it's getting close to six of one, half a dozen of the other. The U.K. is pretty close, too; I don't think they've gone down the European path of criminalizing Nazism or Holocaust denial simply as a belief or ideology. Same with Australia.
The Northern European countries as a general rule are also pretty good. I've never quite figured out how one reconciles what's bordering on economic collectivism with free speech, but they seem to do okay at it. I guess Sweden technically has an Established church that has some historical ties to its government, but it's secular in all measurable respects as far as I can tell (and you can opt out of funding the church I think).
You're correct in thinking that there are a lot of places in the world where you can get in a lot of trouble for saying things that wouldn't even get you funny looks on a New York City street corner, but it's not as though the rest of the world are exactly hunting mammoths with pointy sticks. Where the U.S. is unique is only in the particular combination of secularism, freedom of speech, individual libertarianism, and moderate laissez-faire economic policies. You can find examples of virtually all of these in varying combinations elsewhere; none of the ingredients are particularly unique, its only the proportions.
I thought "War on...." was a code phrase meaning "an unsolvable problem we will waste billions of dollars trying unsuccessfully to solve using the same failing methods over and over again." Didn't it start with the war on poverty?
If by "waste," you mean "transfer to our campaign donors," then yes, that's exactly what it means.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
See, that's the glass-half-empty talking. Just look on the bright side: When they were wasting their time turning out this ridiculous waste of time and paper, it meant that they weren't really screwing anything else up!
Please, Congress, do us all a favor: spend your time on things like creating new "National $FOO Week"s. What -- there aren't any free weeks left? Okay, I've got one: why don't you guys try to fix the date of Easter? I'm sure that won't take you too long.
The more idiotic, banal stuff that I know the Congresscritters are doing, the better it makes me feel, because at least I know they're staying out of trouble. It's when they go quiet for a while that I start to worry. The further away they stay from the "real issues," the happier I am. As absolutely fucked as the system we have is, don't you even think for a moment that with hard work and diligence, they couldn't make it at least ten times worse.
Congratulations, Congress, on your brilliant plan. By all means, keep up the great work.
Yeah, that would probably work. I think the attraction to implants would be the resolution and sensitivity; you'd be coupling magnets as directly as possible to the pressure-sensing nerves in the fingers, so it's tough to get closer to direct perception than that.
Something that vibrated in the presence of magnetic fields might definitely give you some gross perception of magnetic fields, but it seems like it might be very hard to get very good resolution out of it, since vibration is usually felt by a whole part of your hand. You really need some sort of sensation that's localizable and could be triggered only across a very small area.
IIRC, the types of nerves found in your skin perceive warmth, cold, pressure, and mechanical trauma (pain) including extreme temperature. Since using pain is probably not the key to user-friendliness in human-interface design (could someone send the inventor of "Clippy" a memo?), the problem is finding a way to map magnetic fields into tactile data and conveying that to someone's skin.
If you could figure out a way to create some sort of sensation electrically (does electricity just trigger the pain receptors? it doesn't feel like pain at low voltages/currents), then you'd probably be able to develop something that could be worn as a glove and would let someone "feel" magnetic fields, via Hall effect senors or similar.
Interesting. Somewhere around I have some rail maps of the Northeast, I'll have to take a better look at them sometime. I know that there are some places where in the 19th century they were remarkably aggressive about laying rail lines "as the crow flies" -- there is a particular old intra-urban line in Connecticut, now a bike path, that looks like it was laid out by a guy with a ruler on a map that didn't bother to note the topography; there are places where it has cuts and fills probably hundreds of feet deep. I think in fact it was originally nicknamed the "Sky Line" or something like that, but I can't find any information on it at the moment.
At any rate, I wonder if that's the case, whether using the right-of-ways already laid out by the Interstate highway network would be of any help?
When I first came down to Washington, DC, I was struck by the simplicity of one of the Metro lines, which runs in the central median of I-66 (one of the major arteries running out into Virginia). I expect that it would require some serious bridgework (or digging) in order to get the clearance required for double-decker trains, but then again that's a problem with existing rail lines that have bridges over them, too. (IIRC Amtrak spent a ridiculous sum raising bridges in order to allow the Acela to run where it currently does.)
There doesn't seem to be a lot of sense in going through all the pain of punching a new straight-line inter-city artery through (taking land by eminent domain, etc.) when it's already been done, in most cases, in order to construct the Interstates. To be honest, I've always been surprised that the Federal government doesn't try to market and generate some revenue from the Interstate right-of-ways: if you're a power or gas company and need a way to run a pipeline from one place to the other, the central median of a highway isn't a bad place to put it (suitably protected against collisions, obviously). Rather than just a highway, the Interstates should be viewed like conduit in a building: vehicular traffic might be its major function, but as long as you have it there, you might as well run inter-city trains, commuter rail and other infrastructure there.
The problem with passenger rail transport is it's very difficult to run it at a profit - especially if the infrastructure isn't there to begin with. Getting people out of cars and onto trains is much harder than the other way around. So it's not particularly attractive to private companies.
This is a problem in any country which has historically shied away from having the government run services.
I think the other issue is that competing modes of transportation get a lot of their infrastructure handed to them, basically for free or with big subsidies, by the Federal government.
If you're a bus company, you don't have to pay to use the roads, the government has already done all the hard work for you. You just drive on them. Same with over-the-road cargo trucking. This is a huge problem for freight railroads, who would otherwise beat the tar out of road trucking: except for UPS and other time-sensitive parcel-deliveries, there's really no reason to haul bulk goods by truck, when you can take the same containers even, and put them on a train and drag them around for a fraction of the fuel cost. But the freight railroads also have to pay, not only for their locomotives and rolling stock, but also for the right-of-ways, maintenance on the track, keeping them clear during the winter, etc. All the trucking industry pays for is whatever the government adds on as a tax to diesel fuel, plus their direct taxes. (And the fuel taxes don't even start to cover the budget for the Interstate system, which is hugely damaged each year by high-axle-weight vehicles like trucks.)
With aircraft, although they admittedly don't require a huge amount of infrastructure when they're in the air (and good thing, too), things like the navigational beacon systems that IFR relies on, plus the Air Traffic Control system/network, are government-run. Sure, some of it's funded with taxes, but I'll bet you it's not 100% self-funding.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
Erm, I think you're neglecting to consider a few factors in your unsupported hunchery.
Consider the forces at work. A train has to keep itself in motion, which requires pushing air out of the way. It also has some rolling resistance.
The airplane, on the other hand, also has to keep itself in forward motion, but there's also a lot of energy being spent keeping that fucker up in the air. The shape of a plane's wings generate lift, but they do so at the cost of creating drag. Lots of drag, compared to a train. There's just no possible way that the plane is ever going to be as efficient, because not only are you moving it horizontally across the earth, you're also putting it (and holding it) some 30,000 feet off the ground. That's much more energy-intensive than overcoming the rolling resistance of a few wheels and bearings, particularly when the wheels are running on steel rail and you can optimize the hell out of the rest of the system. (As a civilization, we're pretty good at making things rotate with minimal resistance. Ironically, it's jet aircraft that have really brought the engineering of high-speed turbobearings to near-perfection.)
It would be pretty easy to run the numbers if you wanted to: just look at the fuel consumption in gallons per hour for a modern locomotive and a jet aircraft, multiply by the energy density of the fuel (aviation kerosene and diesel), and divide by the number of passengers in each. With trains that aren't in fixed trainsets, it would get a little difficult to figure out how many "passengers" to include, but you could get some ballpark numbers.
Anyway, other people have already run the numbers. Here's a comparison done by Eurostar comparing London to Paris by plane and train, in terms of CO2 emissions: link. "The research shows that each passenger on a return flight between London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle generates 122 kilograms of CO2, compared with just 11 kilograms for a traveller on a London-Paris return journey by train."
Now, that's CO2 emissions, not energy consumption (although the two are basically directly proportional when you're getting your power via the combustion of petroleum products), and it's probably made somewhat artificially low because the French generate a lot of electricity from fission, which is CO2-neutral, but that's not enough to explain a tenfold decrease.
Physics just isn't on the side of the airplane in terms of energy efficiency. Anything that stays on the ground is going to have a huge advantage.
The TGV isn't a commuter train. It's point-to-point transportation. We don't really have anything that's quite its equivalent here in the U.S. (anymore -- we did, once, back in the days of effective passenger rail and high-speed inter-urbans) because Amtrak is so fucked up. But you wouldn't be using this to get in and out of the city center to the 'burbs every day; you'd go into the city to get on one, to go to another city.
The infrastructure you'd need around a major intercity train station in the U.S. would be basically the same stuff you need around an airport; lots and lots of parking for people to leave their cars, access to local transportation, etc. The advantage of trains over planes, however, is that you can put the stations right downtown, hopefully maximizing the number of people who can get there without driving, by using existing public transportation, and also minimizing travel time for people who want to get to the city center as a destination.
About the only place in the U.S. where you can approximate this right now, is in the Northeast Corridor, going from say Washington, DC to New York. If you want to fly, you have to get from downtown DC out to one of the airports: if you're lucky, Reagan (practically downtown), if you're unlucky or flying on a discount airline, Dulles or BWI. Then you have to go through the usual security checkpoint rectal-probery, find the gate, board the plane, fly, get off the plane, find your luggage, and get to downtown NYC from JFK or LaGuardia. Total PITA. Amtrak, when it's not running late (granted, almost never), lets you walk into Union Station in downtown DC, walk onto the train, sit down for a few hours, and walk off at Penn Station. Platform to platform, the Acela is about three hours, and it's slower than molasses compared to the European trains.
Now, really the only reason that the Acela is borderline competitive, is because the airlines and the FAA seem to be trying as hard as possible to make the flying experience like getting in a boxcar bound for Auschwicz (but without the efficiency, and probably more lost luggage). If you got rid of all the security checkpoints and just compare travel time, the Acela barely scrapes 100MPH on most days (which is actually slower than the big 8'-driver steam passenger locomotives of a generation ago were capable of), so a jet going 400-500 MPH is obviously going to be faster. But if you can push the train up to 300+MPH, and realize that the airplane is always going to have more "overhead time" because of the distance you have to put airports from cities (to keep them from running into the buildings, noise, etc.), they become a lot more competitive.
Commuter trains are always going to be hobbled by low population density. However, high-speed inter-urban trains operate according to much the same business principles that airlines do. They just need to be much more careful in laying out their routes, because unlike airlines, it's tougher for them to just re-jigger flights when they're not making money. However, there are a number of routes that are probably almost guaranteed to be profitable in the U.S. if you can get the times down to within 100-150% of a plane flight: LA to San Francisco (and then SF to Seattle) is probably a good one on the West Coast, and maybe even LA to Las Vegas. The Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC corridor is already profitable with current technology, and would only get better. Extending it down to Atlanta would complete the "BAMA" corridor, and you could hit the high-tech areas in NC along the way, probably.
While that sucks for him, I don't think it totally invalidates the experiment's results though, just perhaps part of the methodology. There are definitely substances that the human body doesn't seem to reject (titanium, some ceramics, some types of stainless steel, some plastics, etc.) and are already used in medical applications. Perhaps if the magnets had been coated in something nonferrous but inert, the rejection wouldn't have happened. (Maybe ceramic capsules?)
I also wonder if you could do something like tattooing, but with a magnetic dye. Guess you'd probably need a lot of it injected in order to feel any forces produced by it through the receptors in your skin, and there you'd definitely have big rejection possibilities, but it might allow you to add magnetic sensation without implanted hard magnets. (Heck, I wonder if you could use some sort of biocompatible ferrofluid, that would dissipate in a certain amount of time, so that you could have magnetic sensation for a while but not permanently bar yourself from going within 15' of an MRI machine.)
My car doesn't have such a system, so I don't know how helpful they are or aren't.
However, having been once nearly driven over by a garbage truck whose operator didn't bother to use the rear-facing camera that was provided so that he could see what's in back of him, I think there's definitely a market for systems that deliver information in a more subtle manner, if that means that people pay more attention to the information that's provided.
It's not just "bad drivers" that this sort of thing helps. If you had systems like this uniformly installed in all vehicles, it would make it much easier to go from driving one car to another. I don't generally let people unfamiliar with my car parallel-park it, because I don't want them to misjudge the corner and scrub my tires or scrape the wheels against the curb. Likewise, I probably wouldn't hop in a big sedan and try to do anything remotely challenging either, because it's been years since I've driven anything that large. But if you had a standardized system in vehicles to communicate to the driver the vehicle's position relative to any nearby obstacles (in the same way we have de facto standardized controls for steering, acceleration, brake, etc.), going from a VW Golf to an C-350 cargo van wouldn't be so much of a challenge. People would step out of one car and into another without a second thought.
Rather than just looking at new technologies as opportunities for laziness (which they certainly can be), it's more helpful to focus on the new scenarios or activities that they make possible for people of average to moderate skill. An analogy with planes might be someone saying that AInstrument Landing Systems are just for pilots who don't know how to land properly. (I don't know the full story on their introduction but I'll bet you a shiny penny that some old pilots, somewhere, probably said just that.) While that's one way of looking at the technology, another way is to consider the number of places where planes can now land, where they'd otherwise have to be diverted due to poor weather conditions, darkness, etc.
Automotive drivers' aids are the same way. While they will probably be used by some drivers who aren't up to snuff, in order to let them get away with things that they shouldn't, they can also allow good drivers to do things that they just accept as impossible or very difficult today.
I don't see how this is fundamentally different from a 1950's family physician looking a fluoroscope and "seeing" with X-rays. Or, for that matter, an ordinary set of car rear-view and side mirrors, which give us "eyes in the back of our heads." Or a neurophysiologist connecting his electrodes to an amplifier and speaker, as well as watching an oscilloscope trace.
Definitely agreed. For that matter, it's the same sort of plasticity that allows someone who looks at (film) negatives for long enough, to be able to "read" the scene and know what it looked like originally, without thinking or having to even reverse the colors mentally. You just start to know how things look; trees are this shade, wedding dress is that, etc.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
I think this is what a lot of the research is getting into, albeit indirectly. The problem today is that we're bottlenecking, badly. You can only stuff so much information at a time in via someone's visual and auditory circuits, and in today's world we're getting close to maxed out. But some of our other senses are underutilized. Right now, when you're sitting at your computer, you're definitely (unless you're blind and using a Braille terminal or screenreader) using your vision, and possibly your hearing, but you're probably not processing much of the information that's being sent by your tongue, nose, or skin. There's a huge amount of available bandwidth there.
Now, your sense of smell might be a difficult one to work with; if the human body is a computer, it's sort of a "legacy" interface, like a serial port. Useful sometimes, and good to have when you need it, but most of the time it's just ignored. (And if Steve Jobs were God, we'd probably have been shipping without noses for generations now.) But touch...that's like UWB.
So a lot of the research that seems particularly interesting to me, is involved in ways of taking things that we normally would process via our overloaded vision or hearing, and translating them to stimuli that can be routed in through touch. The direction-finding belt and the 'tongue camera' are just two examples, but there's really no limit there.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I can tell, of the few people from Britain that I regularly talk to, is that they really don't care.
There is sort of an epidemic -- perceived or actual, I don't know, and it hardly matters -- of obnoxious, petty crime, mostly committed by youths, in many British cities. There's the whole "happy slapping" thing, but that's just really the tip of the iceberg, it's just a lot of vandalism, shoplifting, street crime, etc. It's the kind of thing that just really gets to people, because it directly degrades the quality of life when you walk around.
In some ways, I think it sort of mirrors feelings that people in the U.S. had back around 10-15 years ago, at the height of the violent crime wave in the inner cities, except in Britain it doesn't seem to really be violent crime. (In fact it seems to be the kind of shit that would probably get you shot by one of the more serious criminals here in America -- maybe we have some sort of natural selection in the ghettos here that keeps this stuff to a minimum? Or maybe everyone with the means to in the U.S. abandoned the inner cities so long ago that we just don't notice.)
But at any rate, the people who have influence -- mostly white, middle income and up -- aren't too bothered, because they're looking rather desperately for any way to knock the "yobs," "chavs," and other varieties of scum in line. There's a sort of (and again, this is just based on the people I've talked with) "well, nothing else has worked, so what the hell" attitude.
To be honest I can't really blame them. Here in the U.S., there were a lot of Generally Bad Ideas being tossed around back in the 90s before the crime wave crested and began to recede (and I don't think even now there's a clear consensus on why that happened -- some people, the authors of Freakonomics in particular, argue that it was actually the echo of Roe v. Wade from a generation earlier reducing the number of potential criminals; feel free to posit your own theory). If the tide hadn't turned when it did, we'd probably be looking at things like this all over the place right now.
Well, although it would never appear in a list like this because it's just too obscure, if you're an audio geek, one of the biggest early-digital flops was the DBX Model 700. (Full disclosure: I wrote the linked WP article.)
It was similar to the Sony PCM F1 in function -- basically a box without any moving parts, that took an audio signal at one end, and put out a composite video signal at the other that you recorded using a VCR. But rather than using PCM recording, it used a system that's a lot more like SACD. It was a very high sample rate (~600 kHz) but with one-bit samples; each sample basically was a "shift up" or "shift down" relative to the last sample. There's a lot more to it than that, but in essence it was digital recording but without many of the downsides to early PCM: the need for "brickwall" filters to eliminate high frequencies, the hard clipping, etc. It was a digital recorder for people who had cut their teeth on analog tape, and it sounded really, really good.
Unfortunately it was much more complex and expensive than PCM, and the rise of CDs as a format was the nail in its coffin (it made a great mixdown format if you were going to vinyl, though, and they even had a special add-on for it that let it interface directly to a vinyl-cutting lathe, to compensate for the fact that you can't 'undercrank' a digital tape directly). But in terms of cool 80s audio technology, IMO it stands alone.
As a plus, it has the coolest switchable peak-reading LED meters on the front of it. I keep one in my rack just for that.
Neat, I didn't know there was a name for it. It's just something I'd seen used a lot as a way of inserting footnotes into plain ASCII that I thought was reasonably elegant.
A lot of the common "plaintext markup" (not necessarily IEEE style) that I've always tried to use in text documents has been de facto formalized by the Markdown text-to-XHTML converter, which I think is the slickest thing since sliced bread. (Except, perhaps, for MultiMarkDown, which adds support for metadata and some other neat features, all while remaining reasonably painless to read in its plain-text form.)
As a slight digression, I think the rise and formalization of these lightweight markup 'languages' (not really languages...conventions?) is interesting to watch, because I remember when HTML was mostly used as a lightweight text-markup language. Somewhere along the line, HTML became a Turing-complete programming language for producing the glue code for web applications, and if all you want to do is write a document with headers, links, and basic formatting, you're better off going to something higher-level and processing it down later.
Don't get too jealous, they're generally leftovers from board meetings; they leave them in the conference rooms so that us peons don't set our coffee cups directly down on the tables and leave rings.
My biggest question is whether GPL3 will be compatible with the many existing "GPL-esque" free licenses [1], which are currently GPL-incompatible, because they contain patent-nullification clauses?
There is a lot of software out there being developed under licenses which aren't compatible with the GPL, because the GPL doesn't allow patent nullification clauses -- this is dangerous, because the purpose of these clauses is to keep someone from slipping code into a major project that they have a patent for, and then torpedoing the whole thing later on when it's crept into wider use. I don't know if this issue just wasn't foreseen when GPL2 was written up, but I can't think of a more pressing issue at the moment.
Yeah, "Tivo-ization" and web services may keep some software out of the hands of the public, but they're not nearly as downright dangerous as submarine patents are.
[1] Examples: IBM Public License 1.0, Common Public License 1.0, Apache License v2, or any of the other licenses where the FSF cheerfully comments "We don't think those patent termination cases are inherently a bad idea, but nonetheless they are incompatible with the GNU GPL."
I agree, but there are times when data is better represented visually than described in words.
For example, let's say I need to tell you about a new reorganization that's going to take place. I could stand there and talk about who reports to whom, for twenty minutes, and everyone could sit there trying to figure out how the fuck it all adds up (and probably, trying to draw charts on cocktail napkins or in their notes), and where they are in the whole mess, or I could just put up a flowchart.
You don't want to "talk to" the visual, but having it there behind you keeps the audience from going off into la-la land because they are trying to work out the big picture on their own.
I'm quite adamantly against the "bullet point" style of presentations -- I've maybe in my life seen two people who did it well, and they both used physical 35mm slides with an operator whose job it was to click them on cue, and the presentations had been rehearsed into the ground -- but there's no harm and a lot of gain in using visual aids when the alternative is confusing the audience by trying to describe to them a flowchart or graph that they can't see.
PowerPoint should be a controlled item like alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
Nah, we should just have fewer controls on firearms, and make it legal to shoot people who give crappy Powerpoint presentations. Let the market work itself out!
Not really.
Personally, I don't like the 4-word bullet point style very much, either. When I see a slide that just has a few bullet points on it, my question is "why bother?" You can just say what's on the slide, keep the attention focused on you as the presenter, and save a slide. This idea that all information should be duplicated and presented both on the slide and in the oral presentation is the problem, IMO.
If you try to give the same information in both places then people tend to pay attention to neither, or they get distracted comparing one to the other.
When I present, I make it clear that the major channel for the conveyance of information is my voice, and what I'm saying; the slides are just there to back it up with things that would be too much of a PITA to describe (graphs, data tables, diagrams/flowcharts).
I think the key concept is that the Powerpoint presentation doesn't, and shouldn't, be able to stand on its own. If you can hand someone your Powerpoint deck and they basically get all the same information as they'd get by listening to you talk, then you might as well just email everyone the PP slides and save everyone's time. There's no reason why someone should look at the Powerpoint and see anything that makes sense -- after all, it's just the visuals that were supposed to accompany a presentation, not the presentation itself. (In many cases, I think the driving force behind this is laziness: people, particularly some junior college professors that I've met, don't want to do both visuals and handouts, so they just make terrible visual aids and print them out as handouts.)
Depends on what field you're in. In most business roles, I can see the point of what he's saying. (However, I still think that there's value in learning to cite sources; even in relatively informal communications, I do it all the time, usually with mock footnotes [1], and over the years have done well by it.) But I heartily agree with his assessment about the ability to summarize information being much more important than the ability to fill pages.
Banging out six or seven pages on some crummy topic is trivial; in today's world, even the thickest PHB can probably pull up reams of information on whatever they want to know about. It's condensing that information into compact, easily-understandable (but not too dumbed-down) nuggets that's the real challenge. [2] I remember when I wrote my undergraduate thesis, the absolute hardest part of the whole thing wasn't the research, or writing the paper, it was writing the abstract. How do you cram nine months of research and data analysis into a handful of sentences?
As long as your professor isn't neglecting the importance of sources and citations altogether, I don't think there's really anything to be lost by abandoning the silly cruft of academia and making the writing assignments take on the form of things that exist in real life. Depending on the discipline, I could see computer scientists write whitepapers, while physical scientists write journal briefs for the most part, with the occasional formal lab report or lit review, written to actual journal-submission standards. I don't know what you'd want English and other humanities majors to do, because while academics in those fields do end up doing a lot of writing, statistically very few people who major in those areas actually go into academic fields -- most of them end up doing corporate work. But ultimately, it's not really the format that matters so much as the intent. If you're giving minimum page-number requirements, so that your students are fudging with the margins and typing in garbage in order to bulk up, something's wrong. Far more often in the real world, you end up cutting something down to size, not padding it up.
[1] Like this.
[2] Neal Stephenson described intelligence as the act of "condensing fact from the vapor of nuance," a quote that I've always thought was particularly apt.
Education has changed. It used to be difficult to find already answered questions. Not so anymore because of Google. The age of solving problem 1-10 from the book are over and the what of what is what is over.
All that needs to be done to address this is for the teachers to create new unique questions. Students will have pleasure of answering questions not solved by anyone before and also need to adapt all the content they have access to towards a term paper.
Bingo. The only way that students can really plagiarize their term paper is if the question being asked is so banal that thousands of other students have already beaten it to death.
If you make the question unique, then there's really not much of a way to rip off a paper that you find on the internet. At best, all students will be able to do are copy introductory paragraphs, but the critical stuff will all have to be recreated (making the lifted text stand out against the other writing, but more importantly, retaining the more important parts of the exercise).
Ask dried-up, tired questions, and you'll probably get dried-up, tired term papers. Who'da thunk it?
I agree with you that the Rebel is a very odd choice. It's yet another thing on the list which makes me think that the people writing it have very short memories, and/or didn't bother to do any more research besides "hey, what's the first product that comes to mind when I think of $CATEGORY" regardless of any other merits.
Someday someone might even build a DSLR that is as good as a film body.
I think that it's already been made. A few years ago, Kodak made the last in a series of cameras that had begun with the first true DSLR. They were called the "DCS" series, and the last 'real' one was the 760: It started off with a Nikon F5 chassis, which is probably the best SLR body around (and I say this as a Minolta man myself, but the F5...you could literally pound nails with it), and then put a 6MP sensor in (and this was in 2000ish, when that was ridiculous), along with Firewire, and a serial port for interfacing to your GPS for geotagging or to your cellular/satellite phone for remote uploads. I don't know what hardware it actually had inside, but it had a 256MB buffer (again, ridiculously large) and would shoot continuously at 1.5 fps.
It also shot in what was effectively a RAW format, long before that was an option on most cameras. And it had a microphone, so you could do voice annotations; a feature that I just can't believe that more manufacturers, consumer and professional, haven't picked up on. (I can't tell you how many times I've wished my camera did this.)
In short, it marked what I see as a sort of turning point; it was the last digital camera that was made for film photographers, based directly off of a stock film-camera body, to compete in a market where film was still the standard for measurement, even if it was obviously on the way out.
If you trace backwards from the 760, which I see as the last of a breed, you get to the Kodak DCS100, which was the first DSLR (1991, 1.3MP, SCSI, based off of a Nikon F3 -- manual focus!). Some people even claim that it was the first real commercially available "digital camera" in anything like a recognizable form today. (It was several years before consumer cameras started to pop up, e.g. the Apple Quicktake, but those were barely recognizable to most people as cameras.)
So what I find so fascinating about the DCS series, is that the trace an arc across a decade that was really the transition between film and digital for a large part of the professional and consumer market. In 1991, you had the first DSLR, and in 2001 you had the last one that wasn't designed from the ground-up as digital.
The heck you can't.
As someone who once worked at a Big Box store, those are my favorite kind of customer. You wanna buy some Ethernet? No problem; I got some great Ethernet right over here. Fresh off the truck... it's "deLink" -- that's French, the best kind. Now, you want some tubes with that?
...enough to do things like boot up the machine using alternate media, then the battle is essentially lost, no?
Yep. Now, who wants to type up the memo to Microsoft? Because, see, they keep trying to control your computer from Redmond, even though you're sitting at the console.
Rootkits aren't just for botnet operators anymore. Root/boot kits are the way people are going to take back their computers from Microsoft, so that they can, you know, do stuff with them.
(Although, more seriously, it's only a few people that need to have rooted machines, so that they can rip copy-protected content using kernel-level exploits to bypass the DRM enforcement. Then they can just dump the content onto Bittorrent or some other P2P protocol, which is how the unwashed masses will get it.)
That will really help. Sorry to break it to you but free speech, as it exists in the U.S., is pretty unique in the world.
Well, I'm not sure I would go quite that far, although I do agree with your ultimate analysis. The U.S. seems to be fairly unique among the other would-be superpowers in terms of having both free speech, economic freedom, and intense secularization. However, if you open the field to the entire G8, or to the rest of the First World, there are a bunch of other places that are competitive.
I don't think Canada and Japan have much in the way of overt censorship, although the Canadians do have that weird ISP-censoring thing going on that I'm not sure would be legal in the U.S., and they don't seem to take as hard a line on the absolute sacrosanctity of individual freedoms as we do here (mostly an issue when you're talking about gun control, although the differences in basic principles come up in other areas). But when it comes to the Internet, it's getting close to six of one, half a dozen of the other. The U.K. is pretty close, too; I don't think they've gone down the European path of criminalizing Nazism or Holocaust denial simply as a belief or ideology. Same with Australia.
The Northern European countries as a general rule are also pretty good. I've never quite figured out how one reconciles what's bordering on economic collectivism with free speech, but they seem to do okay at it. I guess Sweden technically has an Established church that has some historical ties to its government, but it's secular in all measurable respects as far as I can tell (and you can opt out of funding the church I think).
You're correct in thinking that there are a lot of places in the world where you can get in a lot of trouble for saying things that wouldn't even get you funny looks on a New York City street corner, but it's not as though the rest of the world are exactly hunting mammoths with pointy sticks. Where the U.S. is unique is only in the particular combination of secularism, freedom of speech, individual libertarianism, and moderate laissez-faire economic policies. You can find examples of virtually all of these in varying combinations elsewhere; none of the ingredients are particularly unique, its only the proportions.
I thought "War on ...." was a code phrase meaning "an unsolvable problem we will waste billions of dollars trying unsuccessfully to solve using the same failing methods over and over again." Didn't it start with the war on poverty?
If by "waste," you mean "transfer to our campaign donors," then yes, that's exactly what it means.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
See, that's the glass-half-empty talking. Just look on the bright side: When they were wasting their time turning out this ridiculous waste of time and paper, it meant that they weren't really screwing anything else up!
Please, Congress, do us all a favor: spend your time on things like creating new "National $FOO Week"s. What -- there aren't any free weeks left? Okay, I've got one: why don't you guys try to fix the date of Easter? I'm sure that won't take you too long.
The more idiotic, banal stuff that I know the Congresscritters are doing, the better it makes me feel, because at least I know they're staying out of trouble. It's when they go quiet for a while that I start to worry. The further away they stay from the "real issues," the happier I am. As absolutely fucked as the system we have is, don't you even think for a moment that with hard work and diligence, they couldn't make it at least ten times worse.
Congratulations, Congress, on your brilliant plan. By all means, keep up the great work.
Yeah, that would probably work. I think the attraction to implants would be the resolution and sensitivity; you'd be coupling magnets as directly as possible to the pressure-sensing nerves in the fingers, so it's tough to get closer to direct perception than that.
Something that vibrated in the presence of magnetic fields might definitely give you some gross perception of magnetic fields, but it seems like it might be very hard to get very good resolution out of it, since vibration is usually felt by a whole part of your hand. You really need some sort of sensation that's localizable and could be triggered only across a very small area.
IIRC, the types of nerves found in your skin perceive warmth, cold, pressure, and mechanical trauma (pain) including extreme temperature. Since using pain is probably not the key to user-friendliness in human-interface design (could someone send the inventor of "Clippy" a memo?), the problem is finding a way to map magnetic fields into tactile data and conveying that to someone's skin.
If you could figure out a way to create some sort of sensation electrically (does electricity just trigger the pain receptors? it doesn't feel like pain at low voltages/currents), then you'd probably be able to develop something that could be worn as a glove and would let someone "feel" magnetic fields, via Hall effect senors or similar.
Interesting. Somewhere around I have some rail maps of the Northeast, I'll have to take a better look at them sometime. I know that there are some places where in the 19th century they were remarkably aggressive about laying rail lines "as the crow flies" -- there is a particular old intra-urban line in Connecticut, now a bike path, that looks like it was laid out by a guy with a ruler on a map that didn't bother to note the topography; there are places where it has cuts and fills probably hundreds of feet deep. I think in fact it was originally nicknamed the "Sky Line" or something like that, but I can't find any information on it at the moment.
At any rate, I wonder if that's the case, whether using the right-of-ways already laid out by the Interstate highway network would be of any help?
When I first came down to Washington, DC, I was struck by the simplicity of one of the Metro lines, which runs in the central median of I-66 (one of the major arteries running out into Virginia). I expect that it would require some serious bridgework (or digging) in order to get the clearance required for double-decker trains, but then again that's a problem with existing rail lines that have bridges over them, too. (IIRC Amtrak spent a ridiculous sum raising bridges in order to allow the Acela to run where it currently does.)
There doesn't seem to be a lot of sense in going through all the pain of punching a new straight-line inter-city artery through (taking land by eminent domain, etc.) when it's already been done, in most cases, in order to construct the Interstates. To be honest, I've always been surprised that the Federal government doesn't try to market and generate some revenue from the Interstate right-of-ways: if you're a power or gas company and need a way to run a pipeline from one place to the other, the central median of a highway isn't a bad place to put it (suitably protected against collisions, obviously). Rather than just a highway, the Interstates should be viewed like conduit in a building: vehicular traffic might be its major function, but as long as you have it there, you might as well run inter-city trains, commuter rail and other infrastructure there.
I think the other issue is that competing modes of transportation get a lot of their infrastructure handed to them, basically for free or with big subsidies, by the Federal government.
If you're a bus company, you don't have to pay to use the roads, the government has already done all the hard work for you. You just drive on them. Same with over-the-road cargo trucking. This is a huge problem for freight railroads, who would otherwise beat the tar out of road trucking: except for UPS and other time-sensitive parcel-deliveries, there's really no reason to haul bulk goods by truck, when you can take the same containers even, and put them on a train and drag them around for a fraction of the fuel cost. But the freight railroads also have to pay, not only for their locomotives and rolling stock, but also for the right-of-ways, maintenance on the track, keeping them clear during the winter, etc. All the trucking industry pays for is whatever the government adds on as a tax to diesel fuel, plus their direct taxes. (And the fuel taxes don't even start to cover the budget for the Interstate system, which is hugely damaged each year by high-axle-weight vehicles like trucks.)
With aircraft, although they admittedly don't require a huge amount of infrastructure when they're in the air (and good thing, too), things like the navigational beacon systems that IFR relies on, plus the Air Traffic Control system/network, are government-run. Sure, some of it's funded with taxes, but I'll bet you it's not 100% self-funding.
I think we can go either way -- either have the government pick up the tab for maintaining the nation's rail network, and make it available to anyone who wants to use it, in the same way that the Interstate highway system and the Air Traffic Control network is, or make users of the ATC network and the Interstate highways pay for their entire budgets so that they're self-funding without any support (and have them pay back over time the cost already contributed) -- but we're only hurting ourselves with the current arrangement. Anything that encourages an inefficiency to continue is inherently bad, and we suffer as a result of it due to higher gas prices, and geopolitical conflicts that arise due to petroleum supplies.
Erm, I think you're neglecting to consider a few factors in your unsupported hunchery.
Consider the forces at work. A train has to keep itself in motion, which requires pushing air out of the way. It also has some rolling resistance.
The airplane, on the other hand, also has to keep itself in forward motion, but there's also a lot of energy being spent keeping that fucker up in the air. The shape of a plane's wings generate lift, but they do so at the cost of creating drag. Lots of drag, compared to a train. There's just no possible way that the plane is ever going to be as efficient, because not only are you moving it horizontally across the earth, you're also putting it (and holding it) some 30,000 feet off the ground. That's much more energy-intensive than overcoming the rolling resistance of a few wheels and bearings, particularly when the wheels are running on steel rail and you can optimize the hell out of the rest of the system. (As a civilization, we're pretty good at making things rotate with minimal resistance. Ironically, it's jet aircraft that have really brought the engineering of high-speed turbobearings to near-perfection.)
It would be pretty easy to run the numbers if you wanted to: just look at the fuel consumption in gallons per hour for a modern locomotive and a jet aircraft, multiply by the energy density of the fuel (aviation kerosene and diesel), and divide by the number of passengers in each. With trains that aren't in fixed trainsets, it would get a little difficult to figure out how many "passengers" to include, but you could get some ballpark numbers.
Anyway, other people have already run the numbers. Here's a comparison done by Eurostar comparing London to Paris by plane and train, in terms of CO2 emissions:
link. "The research shows that each passenger on a return flight between London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle generates 122 kilograms of CO2, compared with just 11 kilograms for a traveller on a London-Paris return journey by train."
Now, that's CO2 emissions, not energy consumption (although the two are basically directly proportional when you're getting your power via the combustion of petroleum products), and it's probably made somewhat artificially low because the French generate a lot of electricity from fission, which is CO2-neutral, but that's not enough to explain a tenfold decrease.
Physics just isn't on the side of the airplane in terms of energy efficiency. Anything that stays on the ground is going to have a huge advantage.
The TGV isn't a commuter train. It's point-to-point transportation. We don't really have anything that's quite its equivalent here in the U.S. (anymore -- we did, once, back in the days of effective passenger rail and high-speed inter-urbans) because Amtrak is so fucked up. But you wouldn't be using this to get in and out of the city center to the 'burbs every day; you'd go into the city to get on one, to go to another city.
The infrastructure you'd need around a major intercity train station in the U.S. would be basically the same stuff you need around an airport; lots and lots of parking for people to leave their cars, access to local transportation, etc. The advantage of trains over planes, however, is that you can put the stations right downtown, hopefully maximizing the number of people who can get there without driving, by using existing public transportation, and also minimizing travel time for people who want to get to the city center as a destination.
About the only place in the U.S. where you can approximate this right now, is in the Northeast Corridor, going from say Washington, DC to New York. If you want to fly, you have to get from downtown DC out to one of the airports: if you're lucky, Reagan (practically downtown), if you're unlucky or flying on a discount airline, Dulles or BWI. Then you have to go through the usual security checkpoint rectal-probery, find the gate, board the plane, fly, get off the plane, find your luggage, and get to downtown NYC from JFK or LaGuardia. Total PITA. Amtrak, when it's not running late (granted, almost never), lets you walk into Union Station in downtown DC, walk onto the train, sit down for a few hours, and walk off at Penn Station. Platform to platform, the Acela is about three hours, and it's slower than molasses compared to the European trains.
Now, really the only reason that the Acela is borderline competitive, is because the airlines and the FAA seem to be trying as hard as possible to make the flying experience like getting in a boxcar bound for Auschwicz (but without the efficiency, and probably more lost luggage). If you got rid of all the security checkpoints and just compare travel time, the Acela barely scrapes 100MPH on most days (which is actually slower than the big 8'-driver steam passenger locomotives of a generation ago were capable of), so a jet going 400-500 MPH is obviously going to be faster. But if you can push the train up to 300+MPH, and realize that the airplane is always going to have more "overhead time" because of the distance you have to put airports from cities (to keep them from running into the buildings, noise, etc.), they become a lot more competitive.
Commuter trains are always going to be hobbled by low population density. However, high-speed inter-urban trains operate according to much the same business principles that airlines do. They just need to be much more careful in laying out their routes, because unlike airlines, it's tougher for them to just re-jigger flights when they're not making money. However, there are a number of routes that are probably almost guaranteed to be profitable in the U.S. if you can get the times down to within 100-150% of a plane flight: LA to San Francisco (and then SF to Seattle) is probably a good one on the West Coast, and maybe even LA to Las Vegas. The Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-DC corridor is already profitable with current technology, and would only get better. Extending it down to Atlanta would complete the "BAMA" corridor, and you could hit the high-tech areas in NC along the way, probably.
Ouch.
While that sucks for him, I don't think it totally invalidates the experiment's results though, just perhaps part of the methodology. There are definitely substances that the human body doesn't seem to reject (titanium, some ceramics, some types of stainless steel, some plastics, etc.) and are already used in medical applications. Perhaps if the magnets had been coated in something nonferrous but inert, the rejection wouldn't have happened. (Maybe ceramic capsules?)
I also wonder if you could do something like tattooing, but with a magnetic dye. Guess you'd probably need a lot of it injected in order to feel any forces produced by it through the receptors in your skin, and there you'd definitely have big rejection possibilities, but it might allow you to add magnetic sensation without implanted hard magnets. (Heck, I wonder if you could use some sort of biocompatible ferrofluid, that would dissipate in a certain amount of time, so that you could have magnetic sensation for a while but not permanently bar yourself from going within 15' of an MRI machine.)
cf. Instrument Landing System
My car doesn't have such a system, so I don't know how helpful they are or aren't.
However, having been once nearly driven over by a garbage truck whose operator didn't bother to use the rear-facing camera that was provided so that he could see what's in back of him, I think there's definitely a market for systems that deliver information in a more subtle manner, if that means that people pay more attention to the information that's provided.
It's not just "bad drivers" that this sort of thing helps. If you had systems like this uniformly installed in all vehicles, it would make it much easier to go from driving one car to another. I don't generally let people unfamiliar with my car parallel-park it, because I don't want them to misjudge the corner and scrub my tires or scrape the wheels against the curb. Likewise, I probably wouldn't hop in a big sedan and try to do anything remotely challenging either, because it's been years since I've driven anything that large. But if you had a standardized system in vehicles to communicate to the driver the vehicle's position relative to any nearby obstacles (in the same way we have de facto standardized controls for steering, acceleration, brake, etc.), going from a VW Golf to an C-350 cargo van wouldn't be so much of a challenge. People would step out of one car and into another without a second thought.
Rather than just looking at new technologies as opportunities for laziness (which they certainly can be), it's more helpful to focus on the new scenarios or activities that they make possible for people of average to moderate skill. An analogy with planes might be someone saying that AInstrument Landing Systems are just for pilots who don't know how to land properly. (I don't know the full story on their introduction but I'll bet you a shiny penny that some old pilots, somewhere, probably said just that.) While that's one way of looking at the technology, another way is to consider the number of places where planes can now land, where they'd otherwise have to be diverted due to poor weather conditions, darkness, etc.
Automotive drivers' aids are the same way. While they will probably be used by some drivers who aren't up to snuff, in order to let them get away with things that they shouldn't, they can also allow good drivers to do things that they just accept as impossible or very difficult today.
I don't see how this is fundamentally different from a 1950's family physician looking a fluoroscope and "seeing" with X-rays. Or, for that matter, an ordinary set of car rear-view and side mirrors, which give us "eyes in the back of our heads." Or a neurophysiologist connecting his electrodes to an amplifier and speaker, as well as watching an oscilloscope trace.
Definitely agreed. For that matter, it's the same sort of plasticity that allows someone who looks at (film) negatives for long enough, to be able to "read" the scene and know what it looked like originally, without thinking or having to even reverse the colors mentally. You just start to know how things look; trees are this shade, wedding dress is that, etc.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
I think this is what a lot of the research is getting into, albeit indirectly. The problem today is that we're bottlenecking, badly. You can only stuff so much information at a time in via someone's visual and auditory circuits, and in today's world we're getting close to maxed out. But some of our other senses are underutilized. Right now, when you're sitting at your computer, you're definitely (unless you're blind and using a Braille terminal or screenreader) using your vision, and possibly your hearing, but you're probably not processing much of the information that's being sent by your tongue, nose, or skin. There's a huge amount of available bandwidth there.
Now, your sense of smell might be a difficult one to work with; if the human body is a computer, it's sort of a "legacy" interface, like a serial port. Useful sometimes, and good to have when you need it, but most of the time it's just ignored. (And if Steve Jobs were God, we'd probably have been shipping without noses for generations now.) But touch...that's like UWB.
So a lot of the research that seems particularly interesting to me, is involved in ways of taking things that we normally would process via our overloaded vision or hearing, and translating them to stimuli that can be routed in through touch. The direction-finding belt and the 'tongue camera' are just two examples, but there's really no limit there.