I think that private industry will kill a number of astronauts. But those astronauts will die taking chances to advance the state of the art, and die knowing the risks and having decided that they were worth the risk, just like so many aviation pioneers did in the twentieth century.
We've simply stopped taking chances with space, as a government enterprise. As much as I loved the American space program, it's time to move on to the next phase.
Seconded. I just bought a nice (second) 27" monitor for coding, got it home, hooked it up, and realized...this really is bigger than I need. Coding is really electronic reading as opposed to the viewing of images (with some exceptions), and anything bigger than 24" causes big time saccading (eye jumps) across the space. It will be great for gaming, I suppose, but I overbought for coding.
Lactose intolerance will kill you in a primitive society through anemia (blood in the GI). And it would be sufficiently unpleasant that people would figure it out quickly, and simply not consume dairy.
Being able to consume milk products drastically increases the survival advantage of mammalian animal husbandry. Fowl have the natural ability to concentrate calories from vegetation in a form which doesn't kill the animal (eggs), but mammals (outside of milk) don't.
So if you have a population which is LI, the only way they can reap calories in animal form is slaughter. The LT population can milk them. From milk, it's a short hop to yogurt when you store the milk and it's contaminated with the relevant bacillus. From there, it's a short hop to cheese when you cook the milk with diced up intestine (rennet).
It's like the question "how quickly after civilization arose did man start making beer"? The answer is "about three months after he started storing grain in a vat. Also, I agree with above poster - LI is an adaptation to reserve the milk for the portion of the population below the reproductive age. Wikipedia has the LI map you asked for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance.
Latitudinally oriented continents...paging Jared Diamond.
Let's really embrace the nerdiness - how would a tool that the Doctor uses in such a wide varieties of ways have to work?
First, jettison any baggage you have with the term "screwdriver"...clearly, the word is used to be synonymous with "tool". I've always kind of imagined that what the SS is, first and foremost, is a technological scanner and classifier. When the Doctor points it at something, the SS scans the technology and presents the Doctor with an (invisible to everyone else) visual representation of its internals. Probably an abstract representation. Then, the Doctor is able to telepathically use the SS to manipulate those internals in whatever way he wants.
So, if you point it at an actual lock, you would see a representation of the tumblers, and you can "will" the tumblers into place with it. If you point it at a cell phone, you'll see a circuit diagram, etc.
Add to that a galactic size library of all software algorithms ever written, and the ability to write them remotely. With a few thousand or so years for the Time Lords to develop progressive layers of software abstraction, you'd have a tool a well-trained user could do anything with.
I don't want to undermine the lesson that you've taken from the experience, that you need perseverance and patience, but you should also consider that sometimes the ingredients are just not there for the success of a product, no matter what you do. What I mean to say is that sometimes what you need to succeed at a certain time in a certain place with a certain product is beyond your control. That's just life.
Don't sweat your disappointment. Entrepreneurs, for better or worse, never settle down and become employees - you'll be back out there on your own again eventually, says the voice of experience. I'm coming off of another "valuable experience", unfortunately. The lesson I learned from it? Don't plan for your thousandth customer, plan for your first.
Resident Freakonomist: the median age of gamers has risen over time. Everyone agreed?
As you move from your teenage years into early adulthood, not merely the amount of time that can be devoted to gaming changes, but the distribution of it, i.e., it will come in shorter periods. That means that a marathon gaming session to beat a boss or solve a puzzle is less likely to happen.
So why haven't games adjusted to this new median? For the same reason that average serving size has risen. Nobody DOESN'T buy a game because it's too long, just as nobody doesn't go to a restaurant because the serving sizes are too large. Making either one smaller threatens to alienate a segment of the market, for no gain. Furthermore, increasing the size of either one tends to be relatively cheap compared to, for example, upgrading a graphics engine (or upgrading your chef, on the other hand).
I'm exactly this demographic - Gamer-Dad, and I was pretty ticked when the single-player campaign for Modern Warfare 1 took me six hours to complete.
Liberals are generally supportive of legalising cannabis. Which is the more logical in this case?
False. It may have been true at one time, but even Sarah Palin is pro-decriminalization, if not outright legalization:
If somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody harm, then perhaps there are other things our copy should be looking at..."
William F. Buckley advocated famously for legalization of marijuana. Glenn Beck. About the only prominent conservative I can think of who is opposed to it is Limbaugh.
I think what you mean is "Republican politicians".
There is a bottom line - people left to make their own choices freely wouldn't have created Amtrak. It required coercion. I oppose coercion (or at least, I seek to minimize it). There are good reasons the government has to use coercion; public transport is not a defensible one.
The whole stimulus thing is a "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" proposition.
If you're a typical high school graduate, deficit spending in a downturn seems like a bad idea. If you're a college graduate (in something other than economics), it seems like a good idea. If you've got an Economics degree, you're not sure.
Here's the thing - all of so-called Keynesian economics revolves around an idea called "The Paradox of Thrift" - an error of composition that says while it may be good for an individual to save in hard times, if everyone does it, the aggregate demand curve shifts leftward and you sink ever deeper into a depression. "Stimulus" spending is a measure to thwart this.
If we accept all of this so far, there are still problems - a high marginal propensity to consume, like the American people have, means that the effect was minimal, i.e., the money would have been spent anyway. Will the money be spent in an economically stimulating way, or will it merely clean out the wish list of the politicians in power? Does the spending create perverse incentives? Does the marginal cost of borrowing outweigh the stimulus as compared to the marginal propensity to consume?
Like I said, these are all open questions IF YOU ACCEPT THE PARADOX OF THRIFT. But the Paradox of Thrift relies on a situation where people are literally, and not figuratively, sticking their money in mattresses. At least, they are neither consuming nor investing - they are holding cash. If you stick in a savings account at the bank - no POT. If you buy gold - no POT. If you invest in your 401k - no POT. This is all because the money is continuing to circulate as capital formation.
You can't fault Keynes for this - in his time, people really, literally, stuck money in their mattresses. This is just one of those things we continue to believe academically because it is INCREDIBLY politically expedient, just like ALL tax cuts pay for themselves (some might, under certain circumstances, at certain times). As an economist, I can stipulate conditions under which stimulus spending might work - but those conditions are not the conditions of the 21st century Western world.
And don't get me started about health care. The problem with health care is insurance, and the bill makes the provision of health care more reliant on insurance. It does something - it makes things far worse. The whole problem is that American refuse to save. Insuring certainties is a sure road to financial ruin - you're not going to outguess the actuaries.
Well, I think the "good reason" is getting his name on CNN, and getting a lot of attention. Having said that...
Burning a Quran is an obscenity, even if you're not a Muslim. I would argue that burning any book is an obscenity, or at the very least un-American. But here's the thing...when freedom of speech is in question, perhaps obscenity is called for to re-establish those boundaries. I think we, as a country, have largely learned from the flag-burning debate...as long as it is in fact legal to burn a flag, then there's not really any reason to burn one.
If we're afraid that individuals are going to commit acts of violence (in America) as a consequence of this (jackass's) act of freedom of speech, our problem really should be with the individuals who commit the violence, not with the jackass.
So, with a lot of mixed feelings for a lot of different reasons, I have to make that old Voltairian hairsplit of "I may disagree with what this guy is doing, but I will defend to the death his right to do it."
Last two items:
Of course Rackspace has a right to kick this guy to the curb. Why are we talking about it?
I have a real problem with the head of the military weighing in on this. Take a look at the big picture - freedom of speech is what you're in charge of protecting.
It is not necessary to sustain it...eventually the economic pressures feedback and the system reaches equilibrium. Note that "equilibrium" does not necessarily imply zero growth on either side. That's what we're trying to get through to everybody here. Everyone predicts disaster, and fails to appreciate the feedback pressures of economic forces.
That's Malthusianism for you. There's an inherent appeal to disaster scenarios - I think that it stems from people wanting the world to pay for its perceived sins - so this concept is very hard to get through to people.
I think this is a perfect example of Pope's dictum "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Malthus is notable in economics because the particular way in which he was wrong serves as a powerful example of failing to appreciate incentives.
It is, however, useful, in quickly exposing people as knowing just a little, but not enough, about economics.
You are correct that it is not (necessarily) exponential. The important point, however, is that it is not constrained to be linear - that's the core fallacy of Malthusianism.
The key missed insight that we have, that Malthus didn't, is that supplies of things that are highly constrained in the short run are subject to economic pressures that may make them less constrained in the long run.
So as soil quality and aquifer levels decline, their portion of the price of food will rise (because supplies are more scarce). This will create enormous demand for good soil and better aquifers, i.e., the prize for doing things differently becomes enormous, and only then do people change their behavior.
But people can and do change their behavior when the incentives are right - if I call you Malthusian, I'm generally implying that you're failing to realize this.
So, you can absolutely believe that there are problems in the way we produce food, and still realize that Malthus was wrong, wrong, wrong. If you still think Malthus was right, then it's simply because I have failed to communicate what the word "Malthusianism" means in an economics context.
We're talking 19th century economist Thomas Malthus here. His main point was that the food supply only grew linearly, while the population could grow exponentially. Thus, there were only three restraints on population growth:
Misery, i.e., war, plague and starvation.
Vice - birth control - Malthus was Catholic,
Moral Restraint - keeping it in your pants.
Millibrain here seems to have got it exactly backwards (http://tmz.vo.llnwd.net/o28/newsdesk/tmz_documents/0901_demands.pdf):
Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the
overpopulation of the Human race.
I was wondering for a while whether this dumbass was going to make an unexpectedly personal contribution to the zero population growth movement with the help of the local police. At any rate, "Malthusianism" is a perjorative in economics, as in "that's nothing more than warmed over Malthusianism". Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially. His reasoning, per se, isn't wrong - but he starts from a false premise.
It's nice to know that people at Crytek (or any other game developer) take this business seriously, and are putting thought into it. I would read a regular blog on this kind of stuff...I hope that somebody over there gives you an attaboy for the article - it represents the company well.
I remember a while back when it was announced that Tennant was leaving, I was chatting with a couple of friends, and I mentioned a rumor of a black Doctor. Everyone grumbled about political correctness. Then I said that it was Chiwetel Ejiofor from Serenity and Redbelt, and their reactions spun 180 degrees into enthusiasm.
To paraphrase Ratatouille, not everyone could be a great Doctor, but a great Doctor could come from anywhere. Patterson Joseph would be okay...I think Lennie James would be my choice. Having said all of this kumbahya stuff, the Doctor absolutely must be U.K. I won't say "British", because Tennant was Scottish anyhow. Lest anyone accuse my of nativism, I'm actually Texan.
For the love of God, can you lock these actors into three year contracts, please? Tennant did right by the role, but Eccleston and Smith have burned up their regenerations wastefully...
That's a very interesting analogy, vis a vis, the Bugatti Veyron. Competing only in that space also means that there's a lot of useful ground unexplored - you're never going to worry much about gas mileage, or fitting a lot of people into the car, or producing the car very efficiently.
That last one is a particularly interesting topic to me...I don't have any personal experience in the space, but by all accounts working for game companies is an absolute grind. The death march is standard operating procedure, and management seems actively hostile towards its employees. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that seems to be the standard.
What if you focused on creating a company and a team where everyone felt good about the work, worked forty hours a week and went home? What if you could build up a wealth of experience and insight gained from past projects, good established communication between longstanding colleagues? What could they produce?
I always looked at the whole Duke Nukem thing as a matter of utter managerial incompetence. Once the project ran 100% over schedule, cancel it and license the material to a company that is able to find their ass with both hands. Of course, the schedule was always "when it's done", which was probably the problem. That kind of schedule is project management malpractice.
Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here...I think what we're talking about here is an industry shift towards the kind of behavior that Dubner and Levitt talked about in Freakonomics, whereby a few hypersuccesses are underlied by the vast majority of brutal, grinding, near-failures. The particular industries that they were looking at in that case were illegal drugs and Hollywood, so I think there's a good joke / simile to be made there.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one absolute way to prevent aging. But it's hardly better than cancer. Agreed with peer - don't poke the hippie.
I think that private industry will kill a number of astronauts. But those astronauts will die taking chances to advance the state of the art, and die knowing the risks and having decided that they were worth the risk, just like so many aviation pioneers did in the twentieth century.
We've simply stopped taking chances with space, as a government enterprise. As much as I loved the American space program, it's time to move on to the next phase.
No good game is too long, no bad game is too short.
Or that the rate of adding new younger gamers has decreased.
Seconded. I just bought a nice (second) 27" monitor for coding, got it home, hooked it up, and realized...this really is bigger than I need. Coding is really electronic reading as opposed to the viewing of images (with some exceptions), and anything bigger than 24" causes big time saccading (eye jumps) across the space. It will be great for gaming, I suppose, but I overbought for coding.
Lactose intolerance will kill you in a primitive society through anemia (blood in the GI). And it would be sufficiently unpleasant that people would figure it out quickly, and simply not consume dairy.
Being able to consume milk products drastically increases the survival advantage of mammalian animal husbandry. Fowl have the natural ability to concentrate calories from vegetation in a form which doesn't kill the animal (eggs), but mammals (outside of milk) don't.
So if you have a population which is LI, the only way they can reap calories in animal form is slaughter. The LT population can milk them. From milk, it's a short hop to yogurt when you store the milk and it's contaminated with the relevant bacillus. From there, it's a short hop to cheese when you cook the milk with diced up intestine (rennet).
It's like the question "how quickly after civilization arose did man start making beer"? The answer is "about three months after he started storing grain in a vat. Also, I agree with above poster - LI is an adaptation to reserve the milk for the portion of the population below the reproductive age. Wikipedia has the LI map you asked for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance.
Latitudinally oriented continents...paging Jared Diamond.
I read that as "great hunting boat", and thought you were talking about Vikings. I was really lost there for a minute.
Let's really embrace the nerdiness - how would a tool that the Doctor uses in such a wide varieties of ways have to work?
First, jettison any baggage you have with the term "screwdriver"...clearly, the word is used to be synonymous with "tool". I've always kind of imagined that what the SS is, first and foremost, is a technological scanner and classifier. When the Doctor points it at something, the SS scans the technology and presents the Doctor with an (invisible to everyone else) visual representation of its internals. Probably an abstract representation. Then, the Doctor is able to telepathically use the SS to manipulate those internals in whatever way he wants.
So, if you point it at an actual lock, you would see a representation of the tumblers, and you can "will" the tumblers into place with it. If you point it at a cell phone, you'll see a circuit diagram, etc.
Add to that a galactic size library of all software algorithms ever written, and the ability to write them remotely. With a few thousand or so years for the Time Lords to develop progressive layers of software abstraction, you'd have a tool a well-trained user could do anything with.
I don't want to undermine the lesson that you've taken from the experience, that you need perseverance and patience, but you should also consider that sometimes the ingredients are just not there for the success of a product, no matter what you do. What I mean to say is that sometimes what you need to succeed at a certain time in a certain place with a certain product is beyond your control. That's just life.
Don't sweat your disappointment. Entrepreneurs, for better or worse, never settle down and become employees - you'll be back out there on your own again eventually, says the voice of experience. I'm coming off of another "valuable experience", unfortunately. The lesson I learned from it? Don't plan for your thousandth customer, plan for your first.
Resident Freakonomist: the median age of gamers has risen over time. Everyone agreed?
As you move from your teenage years into early adulthood, not merely the amount of time that can be devoted to gaming changes, but the distribution of it, i.e., it will come in shorter periods. That means that a marathon gaming session to beat a boss or solve a puzzle is less likely to happen.
So why haven't games adjusted to this new median? For the same reason that average serving size has risen. Nobody DOESN'T buy a game because it's too long, just as nobody doesn't go to a restaurant because the serving sizes are too large. Making either one smaller threatens to alienate a segment of the market, for no gain. Furthermore, increasing the size of either one tends to be relatively cheap compared to, for example, upgrading a graphics engine (or upgrading your chef, on the other hand).
I'm exactly this demographic - Gamer-Dad, and I was pretty ticked when the single-player campaign for Modern Warfare 1 took me six hours to complete.
Liberals are generally supportive of legalising cannabis. Which is the more logical in this case?
False. It may have been true at one time, but even Sarah Palin is pro-decriminalization, if not outright legalization:
If somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody harm, then perhaps there are other things our copy should be looking at..."
William F. Buckley advocated famously for legalization of marijuana. Glenn Beck. About the only prominent conservative I can think of who is opposed to it is Limbaugh.
I think what you mean is "Republican politicians".
There is a bottom line - people left to make their own choices freely wouldn't have created Amtrak. It required coercion. I oppose coercion (or at least, I seek to minimize it). There are good reasons the government has to use coercion; public transport is not a defensible one.
The whole stimulus thing is a "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" proposition.
If you're a typical high school graduate, deficit spending in a downturn seems like a bad idea. If you're a college graduate (in something other than economics), it seems like a good idea. If you've got an Economics degree, you're not sure.
Here's the thing - all of so-called Keynesian economics revolves around an idea called "The Paradox of Thrift" - an error of composition that says while it may be good for an individual to save in hard times, if everyone does it, the aggregate demand curve shifts leftward and you sink ever deeper into a depression. "Stimulus" spending is a measure to thwart this.
If we accept all of this so far, there are still problems - a high marginal propensity to consume, like the American people have, means that the effect was minimal, i.e., the money would have been spent anyway. Will the money be spent in an economically stimulating way, or will it merely clean out the wish list of the politicians in power? Does the spending create perverse incentives? Does the marginal cost of borrowing outweigh the stimulus as compared to the marginal propensity to consume?
Like I said, these are all open questions IF YOU ACCEPT THE PARADOX OF THRIFT. But the Paradox of Thrift relies on a situation where people are literally, and not figuratively, sticking their money in mattresses. At least, they are neither consuming nor investing - they are holding cash. If you stick in a savings account at the bank - no POT. If you buy gold - no POT. If you invest in your 401k - no POT. This is all because the money is continuing to circulate as capital formation.
You can't fault Keynes for this - in his time, people really, literally, stuck money in their mattresses. This is just one of those things we continue to believe academically because it is INCREDIBLY politically expedient, just like ALL tax cuts pay for themselves (some might, under certain circumstances, at certain times). As an economist, I can stipulate conditions under which stimulus spending might work - but those conditions are not the conditions of the 21st century Western world.
And don't get me started about health care. The problem with health care is insurance, and the bill makes the provision of health care more reliant on insurance. It does something - it makes things far worse. The whole problem is that American refuse to save. Insuring certainties is a sure road to financial ruin - you're not going to outguess the actuaries.
So he can't put his computer inside a tomb. They didn't say anything about encipherment.
Burning a Quran is an obscenity, even if you're not a Muslim. I would argue that burning any book is an obscenity, or at the very least un-American. But here's the thing...when freedom of speech is in question, perhaps obscenity is called for to re-establish those boundaries. I think we, as a country, have largely learned from the flag-burning debate...as long as it is in fact legal to burn a flag, then there's not really any reason to burn one.
If we're afraid that individuals are going to commit acts of violence (in America) as a consequence of this (jackass's) act of freedom of speech, our problem really should be with the individuals who commit the violence, not with the jackass.
So, with a lot of mixed feelings for a lot of different reasons, I have to make that old Voltairian hairsplit of "I may disagree with what this guy is doing, but I will defend to the death his right to do it."
Last two items:
It is not necessary to sustain it...eventually the economic pressures feedback and the system reaches equilibrium. Note that "equilibrium" does not necessarily imply zero growth on either side. That's what we're trying to get through to everybody here. Everyone predicts disaster, and fails to appreciate the feedback pressures of economic forces.
That's Malthusianism for you. There's an inherent appeal to disaster scenarios - I think that it stems from people wanting the world to pay for its perceived sins - so this concept is very hard to get through to people.
Amen.
I think this is a perfect example of Pope's dictum "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Malthus is notable in economics because the particular way in which he was wrong serves as a powerful example of failing to appreciate incentives.
It is, however, useful, in quickly exposing people as knowing just a little, but not enough, about economics.
One proviso: the government can absolutely step in and pervert those incentives, and then you're back to misery, vice and moral restraint.
You are correct that it is not (necessarily) exponential. The important point, however, is that it is not constrained to be linear - that's the core fallacy of Malthusianism.
The key missed insight that we have, that Malthus didn't, is that supplies of things that are highly constrained in the short run are subject to economic pressures that may make them less constrained in the long run.
So as soil quality and aquifer levels decline, their portion of the price of food will rise (because supplies are more scarce). This will create enormous demand for good soil and better aquifers, i.e., the prize for doing things differently becomes enormous, and only then do people change their behavior.
But people can and do change their behavior when the incentives are right - if I call you Malthusian, I'm generally implying that you're failing to realize this.
So, you can absolutely believe that there are problems in the way we produce food, and still realize that Malthus was wrong, wrong, wrong. If you still think Malthus was right, then it's simply because I have failed to communicate what the word "Malthusianism" means in an economics context.
Millibrain here seems to have got it exactly backwards (http://tmz.vo.llnwd.net/o28/newsdesk/tmz_documents/0901_demands.pdf):
Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race.
I was wondering for a while whether this dumbass was going to make an unexpectedly personal contribution to the zero population growth movement with the help of the local police. At any rate, "Malthusianism" is a perjorative in economics, as in "that's nothing more than warmed over Malthusianism". Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially. His reasoning, per se, isn't wrong - but he starts from a false premise.
A new meme is born...
It's nice to know that people at Crytek (or any other game developer) take this business seriously, and are putting thought into it. I would read a regular blog on this kind of stuff...I hope that somebody over there gives you an attaboy for the article - it represents the company well.
I remember a while back when it was announced that Tennant was leaving, I was chatting with a couple of friends, and I mentioned a rumor of a black Doctor. Everyone grumbled about political correctness. Then I said that it was Chiwetel Ejiofor from Serenity and Redbelt, and their reactions spun 180 degrees into enthusiasm.
To paraphrase Ratatouille, not everyone could be a great Doctor, but a great Doctor could come from anywhere. Patterson Joseph would be okay...I think Lennie James would be my choice. Having said all of this kumbahya stuff, the Doctor absolutely must be U.K. I won't say "British", because Tennant was Scottish anyhow. Lest anyone accuse my of nativism, I'm actually Texan.
For the love of God, can you lock these actors into three year contracts, please? Tennant did right by the role, but Eccleston and Smith have burned up their regenerations wastefully...
That's a very interesting analogy, vis a vis, the Bugatti Veyron. Competing only in that space also means that there's a lot of useful ground unexplored - you're never going to worry much about gas mileage, or fitting a lot of people into the car, or producing the car very efficiently.
That last one is a particularly interesting topic to me...I don't have any personal experience in the space, but by all accounts working for game companies is an absolute grind. The death march is standard operating procedure, and management seems actively hostile towards its employees. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that seems to be the standard.
What if you focused on creating a company and a team where everyone felt good about the work, worked forty hours a week and went home? What if you could build up a wealth of experience and insight gained from past projects, good established communication between longstanding colleagues? What could they produce?
I always looked at the whole Duke Nukem thing as a matter of utter managerial incompetence. Once the project ran 100% over schedule, cancel it and license the material to a company that is able to find their ass with both hands. Of course, the schedule was always "when it's done", which was probably the problem. That kind of schedule is project management malpractice.
Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here...I think what we're talking about here is an industry shift towards the kind of behavior that Dubner and Levitt talked about in Freakonomics, whereby a few hypersuccesses are underlied by the vast majority of brutal, grinding, near-failures. The particular industries that they were looking at in that case were illegal drugs and Hollywood, so I think there's a good joke / simile to be made there.