E.D. Hirsch coined the term "cultural literacy" to describe aspects of culture which have meaning that goes beyond the basic words.
An example from his book is the phrase "there is a tide".
Those four words carried not only a lot of complex information, but also the persuasive force of a proverb. In addition to the basic practical meaning, "act now!" what came across was a lot of implicit reasons why immediate action was important.
For some of my younger readers who may not recognize the allusion, the passage from Julius Caesar is:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The phrase "A Scanner Darkly" was the title of a book (and movie) by Phillip K. Dick. It's part of the cultural literacy of science fiction, something that nerds might recognize. As in Hirsch's example, a few words convey a great deal of complex information.
The story title comes from the bible, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.", which artfully describes a system that identifies and footnotes faces seen through Google glass.
Cultural literacy references come into and go out of style, and Phillip K. Dick may be a bit dated for today's audience.
If you're interested, there are a few online "Cultural Literacy" tests, such as this one.
I come to Slashdot and post stuff because I'm bored and to stroke my pathetic little ego - and when I get moded +5 it really inflates my shitty little self-esteem. Especially since I'm an AC and we're Slashdot niggers here - see, most of you are abusive arrogant pricks who think because you lay down a few lines of code, you're better than everyone else on the planet.
Apropos of nothing, do you like yourself?
I ask because your post appears to be a carefully-crafted insult to the readers of this board.
People who insult tend to base their self-worth on the opinions of others. They wage a constant battle for the little bits of esteem they can get by counting coup on others.
People like that usually have a difficult time saying "I like myself" while believing it at a deep level. There's always someone better to impress, always other people to push down while you make your way to the top. You're never satisfied with yourself until you're the pinnacle of esteem.
How's that working out for you?
If you've got a minute, please answer my original question. I'm honestly curious if you can claim, with deep agreement, that you like yourself.
While the subject matter is not very interesting, this is a another fine example of a good Slashdot story.
Do people come to Slashdot for articles on politics when you can get those anywhere? Also common are "Oh! the humanity!" articles that stoke indignation while leaving the reader no way to help - every news outlet has them.
News such as this, an interesting effect scientifically explained, is Slashdot's distinguishing feature.
A story worthy of slashdot. Please post more of these (not being sarcastic).
I second this.
I'm adequately supplied with political stories, you can get those anywhere. Stories that raise the indignation level are also common - "oh! how unjust that is!".
When you have stuff that nerds find interesting that you don't see everywhere else, nerds will come here to see it.
If only we had large machines that monitored the production products of matter-antimatter reactions in detail millions of times a second.
In order to test the OP's conjecture, you have to actually look for effects he is talking about. None of the big-iron systems have been looking for this effect.
Do you have a paper or citation link? I'd be very interested in any study that looked for effects due to the non-homogenoius distribution of dark matter.
I could empty an AR-15 w/30 rounds from inside an airliner flying at 30K feet, reload, do it again, and still not depressurize the cabin to any serious extent as long as no windows were blown out. I serviced/repaired aircraft for a living.
I designed and coded the software for cabin pressurization systems used in commercial aircraft. BlueStrat is correct in all details, and if you know a little engineering you can easily convince yourself.
The cabin pressurization valve is an inflatable balloon (of sorts) sitting in an 8" diameter hole, and there are two of them. The system will easily compensate for even a large number of bullet holes in the body - 1" holes are much smaller than the area the valve system has to work with.
The pressure differential between the inside and outside can be at most 15 pounds per square inch(*). That means that a 1" hole would only present 15 lbs of force pressure on an object pressing against it, which can be easily overcome by a person. Bullet holes are much smaller than 1" diameter. Further away and the effect is negligible.
A window being shot out would not suck out a passenger. From experience, when an 8" diameter hole (the pressurization valve) is suddenly uncovered, it doesn't pull very hard on people standing near it and the pull ends almost instantly. Force isn't present for any length of time, and since F=M*A and V = A*T, you end up with very little velocity.
(*) To reduce stress on the airframe, the cabin is depressurized as the aircraft reaches cruising altitude.This reduces the maximum differential by about 1/3.
But of course, the server and client sides have to work together to deliver what people actually want.
You mean, like Slashdot?
Like, automatically refreshing every x minutes, jumping the page even while I'm in the middle of reading it?
Or refusing to let us link to a specific comment? (Pick any comment and try to come up with a link you can send to someone.)
Or like adding new styles and layouts that, at each iteration, reduce the information a visitor sees per page? (Reading Slashdot through an ever-dwindling portal - sort of like reading a newspaper through a straw.)
I'd mention "friends, foes, freaks, and journals, but there may be a compelling need to "unfriend" someone. I wonder how many millions of Skashdot accounts there are, and the number who actually write in their journals. You can't delete your account, because theres no need to (of course!).
Useability experts exist for a reason. Software experts don't seem to realize that other experts exist and that good systems have multiple facets of "good". Instead, it's "good software is all you need, and the more features the better."
(Tooltip: "Documentation is boring! I'll just pit up a wiki and let the users fill in pages for me.")
Jeff Hawkins pointed out that the game "twenty questions" is popular and significant. In twenty yes/no questions you can identify one million objects or concepts (2^20 = 1024*1024).
He conjectured that the reason the game isn't "twenty five questions" or any other number is that the data capacity of the human brain is about this much. By the anthropic principle, we use twenty questions because a game with any other number would be too easy or hard.
(Perhaps the game is interesting because our brains hold 2 million concepts, giving the game a 50% chance of success. While arguable, this is still predicts a range of "about a million" concepts for the fully loaded brain.)
This number (and the conjecture) has stuck with me. The idea that you can build a culturally literate mind - with the ability to understand a political speech, read a newspaper article, apply for a job - would take an understanding of only about a million concepts.
The method by which neuromorphic processors handle problems varies with the way they're linked together, as is the case with neurons in the brain.
First of all, no one knows how neurons are linked together in the brain(*).
Second of all, as far as anyone can tell, the cerebral cortex is a repeated pattern of small structures ("Cortical Columns") which are, again - as far as anyone can tell, wired identically.
There's some variation: The afferent and efferent layers have thicker neuronal sections which correspond to "amplifiers" needed to send and receive signals to the rest of the body, the pre-frontal cortex is an endpoint layer, and there's lots of organelles with connections from place to place...
But so far as anyone can tell, the seat of intelligence (cerebral cortex) is just a repeating pattern of sub-processors, functioning in a way that we haven't been able to yet fully understand.
(*) To the level of detail needed to link simulated neurons together as a program.
When will product managers understand that trying to compete by stuffing features into products does not a better product make? Has the tech design industry learnt *nothing* from the likes of Apple?
You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface.
A non-smart phone had many features, but was complex to use. You had to memorize which keys enabled which feature, and the unit was stuffed with things that the programmers felt were easy-to-program such as a calculator, timer, and texting.
In contrast, an iPhone has two or three orders of magnitude *more* features than a typical non-smart phone, but presents these with a much-simplified interface. For example, Icons are visually mnemonic to their function, and navigating the virtual display space (paging through lists of applications) is intuitive.
That the new hardware has better capabilities than Google glass means that people have an incentive to purchase the new hardware. It says nothing about the feature-set or complexity of the unit.
I've been thinking of changing my party affiliation recently (and no, not making this up).
Which party do you recommend? I'd like to see if your party votes in the interests of the republic. Do you know any accomplishments that you think are noteworthy? Excluding health care, since everyone already knows about that.
Even attempted accomplishments would be a good indicator of intent, even if they came to naught. I want to throw my weight and online debating skills behind an organization I can believe in.
You think you don't care about food, but when you've had nothing but tasteless sludge for a month or so you'll most likely realize that you actually do care about food. You care about texture, you care about taste, you care about the things that the act of eating does to your body. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.
Wow, you know more about me than I do.
Here's some info: not only don't I care about food, I don't even *taste* food except in extremely broad categories. Mashed potatoes and veggies and non-beef meat all taste the same to me, I can only distinguish between them by texture (and other attributes, such as "crunchy"). All coffee tastes the same, all wines of specific classes taste the same, and I can't tell the difference between most beers, or between liqueurs.
Not only do I dream in black & white, I *remember* things in black & white. I can recognize colors when I see them, but it doesn't go into memory. If I don't mentally label things with their colors as a separate fact, as in "John owns a blue car", I'll have no recollection of what color something is.
Tell me again what I'll be missing in a month. It sounds interesting.
Because I don't care about food, never did, and I have a handful of minor medical issues which might be fixed by eating soylent?
Because Soylent costs about half as much as regular food?
Because drinking Soylent takes 5 min, while making and eating a meal (best case scenario) takes a half an our of preparation and fifteen minutes of cleanup?
Because Soylent requires no time spent shopping, and no refrigeration needed, while the alternative takes a 2-hour trip to the supermarket each week?
Is it so hard to believe that some people think that these benefits outweigh the alternatives?
There's the remote possibility that eating soylent might be good for you.
If you look into nutrition studies, you find lots of little anecdote studies (meaning: one-off scientific studies) that look like a small piece of a larger puzzle. Beef and chicken contain antibiotics which can trigger mild allergic reactions, glutin (from wheat) is a mild poison made by the plant to discourage predators, bread is now made with Bromine instead of Iodine (which the body needs)...
There's just a zillion different ways in which our diet is non-optimal, and a zillion little ailments with no known cause.
(Vitamins typically use Magnesium Oxide as a supplement - but this form isn't bio-available. Is Fibromyalgia caused by low Magnesium?)
A diet consisting of a everything you need without all the additives might just cure some of these diseases; though, I wonder whether lack of roughage will cause problems.
Still, it might be an interesting impromptu experiment. The effects of eating Soylent will be something to watch.
The game master would give XP for making an impressive joke, or figuring out a difficult puzzle, or whatnot. We also used to refer to the "Detect Magic" spell by the initials "D.M." (as in "I cast D.M.")
After we had finished cleaning the room, a female player casually remarked: "Ok, now I'm going to blow my D.M". To which he replied: "you get 1,000 XP".
We were rolling on the floor for at least 30 minutes...
The problem with Bitcoin is once a Bitcoin is lost, it's gone forever and can never be replaced. There's no provision in the system to void a coin and then mine a new one.
Therefore if bitcoins are lost at a rate > 0 the probability there will be zero bitcoins is 100% over time.
Is that the problem?
I thought it was volatility. No, wait... it was a pyramid scheme. Or rather, because the US won't accept it for taxes. Or was it because it's deflationary? Heck, I just don't know any more.
Economists will demonstrate something by telling stories, let's demonstrate something by showing value.
1) BitCoin has very small per-transaction fees. There are a whopping-big number of credit card transactions each day, each with fees of about 5%. Bitcoin will eliminate most of these, for a whopping-big cost savings.
2) BitCoin increases the market to people who don't have a bank account. That essentially doubles the potential customer base.
3) BitCoin allows for micro-payments. This increases the number and type of sales possible.
4) BitCoin almost eliminates counter-party risk. No authority in the financial chain (PayPal, payment clearing center, credit card company, bank, US government) can affect the transfer. No one can be "banned" (like Wikileaks), no one can be threatened with bad credit.
Assign value to each of these points and total them up (there's some subjectivity), then compare that value with the negative utility from losing coins over time.
Which is worth more?
All the other potential problems are just that - potential problems, and appeals to these problems are merely guesswork and rhetoric.
BitCoin will bring enormous cost savings, and that's why people will use it.,
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
How the heck does someone stutter using a keyboard?
Here's some data points, and a question for the economists:
1) Productivity has been rising for decades. US productivity per capita is about $51,000 this year. That's $50,000 per person, including kids and non-working spouses.
2) Human needs follow a "priority queue"; meaning, that once a level of need is satisfied there is no further demand. Population needs will plateau and become steady - there is no "infinite demand" for more goods. If you have all the food you need, you don't consume more even if it's free &c.
2a) And population is stabilizing in all industrialized nations. Birth rate less than 2.0 per woman in the US, our population only grows due to immigration. Similar in other industrialized nations.
Given this data, here's a hypothetical question: Suppose efficiency grows so that the infrastructure could produce all the needs of the population using only 90% of the current workforce.
Q: What happens to the unneeded 10% workforce?
For a follow-on, consider Google's self-driving car. There are currently around 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, which is about 2% of the total work force. This doesn't count delivery vehicles such as FedEx, UPS, or USPS. Very soon this ~3% of the workforce will no longer be needed.
Q2: Are we already in this "10% is unneeded" situation?
If there are "data scientists" who don't understand what the standard deviation is, then they certainly shouldn't be calling themselves "data scientists," and quite possibly not scientists at all. What subjects are their PhDs in, I wonder?
The problem isn't with highly-educated people, it people who are not highly educated, or who are highly educated but in a different field.
If a particular intersection attracts a lot of accidents, we consider the accidents to be the fault of the drivers involved. But at the same time, we recognize that aspects of the intersection might be a contributing factor as well.
Expert drivers would never have such accidents, but if we spend some effort reblocking the intersection we could get improved safety, and sometimes there is value in doing this.
Like the roadway intersection, if a term is so confusing that average people make mistakes because of it, there may well be value in changing to easier-to-understand terms.
Slashdot Mirror
E.D. Hirsch coined the term "cultural literacy" to describe aspects of culture which have meaning that goes beyond the basic words.
An example from his book is the phrase "there is a tide".
Those four words carried not only a lot of complex information, but also the persuasive force of a proverb. In addition to the basic practical meaning, "act now!" what came across was a lot of implicit reasons why immediate action was important.
For some of my younger readers who may not recognize the allusion, the passage from Julius Caesar is:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The phrase "A Scanner Darkly" was the title of a book (and movie) by Phillip K. Dick. It's part of the cultural literacy of science fiction, something that nerds might recognize. As in Hirsch's example, a few words convey a great deal of complex information.
The story title comes from the bible, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.", which artfully describes a system that identifies and footnotes faces seen through Google glass.
Cultural literacy references come into and go out of style, and Phillip K. Dick may be a bit dated for today's audience.
If you're interested, there are a few online "Cultural Literacy" tests, such as this one.
I come to Slashdot and post stuff because I'm bored and to stroke my pathetic little ego - and when I get moded +5 it really inflates my shitty little self-esteem. Especially since I'm an AC and we're Slashdot niggers here - see, most of you are abusive arrogant pricks who think because you lay down a few lines of code, you're better than everyone else on the planet.
Apropos of nothing, do you like yourself?
I ask because your post appears to be a carefully-crafted insult to the readers of this board.
People who insult tend to base their self-worth on the opinions of others. They wage a constant battle for the little bits of esteem they can get by counting coup on others.
People like that usually have a difficult time saying "I like myself" while believing it at a deep level. There's always someone better to impress, always other people to push down while you make your way to the top. You're never satisfied with yourself until you're the pinnacle of esteem.
How's that working out for you?
If you've got a minute, please answer my original question. I'm honestly curious if you can claim, with deep agreement, that you like yourself.
While the subject matter is not very interesting, this is a another fine example of a good Slashdot story.
Do people come to Slashdot for articles on politics when you can get those anywhere? Also common are "Oh! the humanity!" articles that stoke indignation while leaving the reader no way to help - every news outlet has them.
News such as this, an interesting effect scientifically explained, is Slashdot's distinguishing feature.
Can we have more like this?
A story worthy of slashdot. Please post more of these (not being sarcastic).
I second this.
I'm adequately supplied with political stories, you can get those anywhere. Stories that raise the indignation level are also common - "oh! how unjust that is!".
When you have stuff that nerds find interesting that you don't see everywhere else, nerds will come here to see it.
If only we had large machines that monitored the production products of matter-antimatter reactions in detail millions of times a second.
In order to test the OP's conjecture, you have to actually look for effects he is talking about. None of the big-iron systems have been looking for this effect.
Do you have a paper or citation link? I'd be very interested in any study that looked for effects due to the non-homogenoius distribution of dark matter.
I could empty an AR-15 w/30 rounds from inside an airliner flying at 30K feet, reload, do it again, and still not depressurize the cabin to any serious extent as long as no windows were blown out. I serviced/repaired aircraft for a living.
I designed and coded the software for cabin pressurization systems used in commercial aircraft. BlueStrat is correct in all details, and if you know a little engineering you can easily convince yourself.
The cabin pressurization valve is an inflatable balloon (of sorts) sitting in an 8" diameter hole, and there are two of them. The system will easily compensate for even a large number of bullet holes in the body - 1" holes are much smaller than the area the valve system has to work with.
The pressure differential between the inside and outside can be at most 15 pounds per square inch(*). That means that a 1" hole would only present 15 lbs of force pressure on an object pressing against it, which can be easily overcome by a person. Bullet holes are much smaller than 1" diameter. Further away and the effect is negligible.
A window being shot out would not suck out a passenger. From experience, when an 8" diameter hole (the pressurization valve) is suddenly uncovered, it doesn't pull very hard on people standing near it and the pull ends almost instantly. Force isn't present for any length of time, and since F=M*A and V = A*T, you end up with very little velocity.
Sorry folks, Goldfinger doesn't get sucked across the cabin and forced through the blown-out window, and Pussy Galore doesn't have to pull the plane out of a tailspin.
(*) To reduce stress on the airframe, the cabin is depressurized as the aircraft reaches cruising altitude.This reduces the maximum differential by about 1/3.
But of course, the server and client sides have to work together to deliver what people actually want.
You mean, like Slashdot?
Like, automatically refreshing every x minutes, jumping the page even while I'm in the middle of reading it?
Or refusing to let us link to a specific comment? (Pick any comment and try to come up with a link you can send to someone.)
Or like adding new styles and layouts that, at each iteration, reduce the information a visitor sees per page? (Reading Slashdot through an ever-dwindling portal - sort of like reading a newspaper through a straw.)
I'd mention "friends, foes, freaks, and journals, but there may be a compelling need to "unfriend" someone. I wonder how many millions of Skashdot accounts there are, and the number who actually write in their journals. You can't delete your account, because theres no need to (of course!).
Useability experts exist for a reason. Software experts don't seem to realize that other experts exist and that good systems have multiple facets of "good". Instead, it's "good software is all you need, and the more features the better."
(Tooltip: "Documentation is boring! I'll just pit up a wiki and let the users fill in pages for me.")
Jeff Hawkins pointed out that the game "twenty questions" is popular and significant. In twenty yes/no questions you can identify one million objects or concepts (2^20 = 1024*1024).
He conjectured that the reason the game isn't "twenty five questions" or any other number is that the data capacity of the human brain is about this much. By the anthropic principle, we use twenty questions because a game with any other number would be too easy or hard.
(Perhaps the game is interesting because our brains hold 2 million concepts, giving the game a 50% chance of success. While arguable, this is still predicts a range of "about a million" concepts for the fully loaded brain.)
This number (and the conjecture) has stuck with me. The idea that you can build a culturally literate mind - with the ability to understand a political speech, read a newspaper article, apply for a job - would take an understanding of only about a million concepts.
The method by which neuromorphic processors handle problems varies with the way they're linked together, as is the case with neurons in the brain.
First of all, no one knows how neurons are linked together in the brain(*).
Second of all, as far as anyone can tell, the cerebral cortex is a repeated pattern of small structures ("Cortical Columns") which are, again - as far as anyone can tell, wired identically.
There's some variation: The afferent and efferent layers have thicker neuronal sections which correspond to "amplifiers" needed to send and receive signals to the rest of the body, the pre-frontal cortex is an endpoint layer, and there's lots of organelles with connections from place to place...
But so far as anyone can tell, the seat of intelligence (cerebral cortex) is just a repeating pattern of sub-processors, functioning in a way that we haven't been able to yet fully understand.
(*) To the level of detail needed to link simulated neurons together as a program.
I hope he wins. Having an independent source of income will remove a lot of stress from his life.
Prof. Farnsworth: "... that may well win me the Nobel Prize!"
Leela: "In what field?"
Prof. Farnsworth"I don't care! They all pay the same!"
"First secure an independent income, then practice virtue."
-- Old Greek Proverb
When will product managers understand that trying to compete by stuffing features into products does not a better product make? Has the tech design industry learnt *nothing* from the likes of Apple?
You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface.
A non-smart phone had many features, but was complex to use. You had to memorize which keys enabled which feature, and the unit was stuffed with things that the programmers felt were easy-to-program such as a calculator, timer, and texting.
In contrast, an iPhone has two or three orders of magnitude *more* features than a typical non-smart phone, but presents these with a much-simplified interface. For example, Icons are visually mnemonic to their function, and navigating the virtual display space (paging through lists of applications) is intuitive.
That the new hardware has better capabilities than Google glass means that people have an incentive to purchase the new hardware. It says nothing about the feature-set or complexity of the unit.
Oh, the irony: From the party that brought us the PATRIOT act.
Oh, the data!
Here's the roll-call vote for the Patriot act.
tl;dr: Democrats: 145 yea, 62 Nay (with 4 abstentions).
I've been thinking of changing my party affiliation recently (and no, not making this up).
Which party do you recommend? I'd like to see if your party votes in the interests of the republic. Do you know any accomplishments that you think are noteworthy? Excluding health care, since everyone already knows about that.
Even attempted accomplishments would be a good indicator of intent, even if they came to naught. I want to throw my weight and online debating skills behind an organization I can believe in.
Who can you recommend?
Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like
Why all the hate for Google?
Here in New Hampshire we have to choose between Fairpoint or Comcast.
Would you like to know what *that* feels like?
This is the sort of thing that gives ammunition to climate change deniers.
How can congress formulate national policies to deal with impending issues like this when the timeframes keep changing?
At least now they won't have to rush things. Another 100 million years or so of inaction shouldn't make much difference.
You think you don't care about food, but when you've had nothing but tasteless sludge for a month or so you'll most likely realize that you actually do care about food. You care about texture, you care about taste, you care about the things that the act of eating does to your body. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.
Wow, you know more about me than I do.
Here's some info: not only don't I care about food, I don't even *taste* food except in extremely broad categories. Mashed potatoes and veggies and non-beef meat all taste the same to me, I can only distinguish between them by texture (and other attributes, such as "crunchy"). All coffee tastes the same, all wines of specific classes taste the same, and I can't tell the difference between most beers, or between liqueurs.
Not only do I dream in black & white, I *remember* things in black & white. I can recognize colors when I see them, but it doesn't go into memory. If I don't mentally label things with their colors as a separate fact, as in "John owns a blue car", I'll have no recollection of what color something is.
Tell me again what I'll be missing in a month. It sounds interesting.
And eating heavily processed sludge will be better for you?
You think you could wait until we get some evidence before you frame it as "sludge"?
We are supposed to be scientists, aren't we?
Why would you never want to eat food again?
Because I don't care about food, never did, and I have a handful of minor medical issues which might be fixed by eating soylent?
Because Soylent costs about half as much as regular food?
Because drinking Soylent takes 5 min, while making and eating a meal (best case scenario) takes a half an our of preparation and fifteen minutes of cleanup?
Because Soylent requires no time spent shopping, and no refrigeration needed, while the alternative takes a 2-hour trip to the supermarket each week?
Is it so hard to believe that some people think that these benefits outweigh the alternatives?
There's the remote possibility that eating soylent might be good for you.
If you look into nutrition studies, you find lots of little anecdote studies (meaning: one-off scientific studies) that look like a small piece of a larger puzzle. Beef and chicken contain antibiotics which can trigger mild allergic reactions, glutin (from wheat) is a mild poison made by the plant to discourage predators, bread is now made with Bromine instead of Iodine (which the body needs)...
There's just a zillion different ways in which our diet is non-optimal, and a zillion little ailments with no known cause.
(Vitamins typically use Magnesium Oxide as a supplement - but this form isn't bio-available. Is Fibromyalgia caused by low Magnesium?)
A diet consisting of a everything you need without all the additives might just cure some of these diseases; though, I wonder whether lack of roughage will cause problems.
Still, it might be an interesting impromptu experiment. The effects of eating Soylent will be something to watch.
The game master would give XP for making an impressive joke, or figuring out a difficult puzzle, or whatnot. We also used to refer to the "Detect Magic" spell by the initials "D.M." (as in "I cast D.M.")
After we had finished cleaning the room, a female player casually remarked: "Ok, now I'm going to blow my D.M". To which he replied: "you get 1,000 XP".
We were rolling on the floor for at least 30 minutes...
BTW, your sig: would that be "Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat"?
I loved that series...
The problem with Bitcoin is once a Bitcoin is lost, it's gone forever and can never be replaced. There's no provision in the system to void a coin and then mine a new one.
Therefore if bitcoins are lost at a rate > 0 the probability there will be zero bitcoins is 100% over time.
Is that the problem?
I thought it was volatility. No, wait... it was a pyramid scheme. Or rather, because the US won't accept it for taxes. Or was it because it's deflationary? Heck, I just don't know any more.
Economists will demonstrate something by telling stories, let's demonstrate something by showing value.
1) BitCoin has very small per-transaction fees. There are a whopping-big number of credit card transactions each day, each with fees of about 5%. Bitcoin will eliminate most of these, for a whopping-big cost savings.
2) BitCoin increases the market to people who don't have a bank account. That essentially doubles the potential customer base.
3) BitCoin allows for micro-payments. This increases the number and type of sales possible.
4) BitCoin almost eliminates counter-party risk. No authority in the financial chain (PayPal, payment clearing center, credit card company, bank, US government) can affect the transfer. No one can be "banned" (like Wikileaks), no one can be threatened with bad credit.
Assign value to each of these points and total them up (there's some subjectivity), then compare that value with the negative utility from losing coins over time.
Which is worth more?
All the other potential problems are just that - potential problems, and appeals to these problems are merely guesswork and rhetoric.
BitCoin will bring enormous cost savings, and that's why people will use it.,
Warning: This is another of those annoying website articles that describe a visually fascinating thing, but don't actually include any pictures or videos of said fascinating thing. Not even the the spectrograph, though that seems to be in the paper behind the paywall. The only picture is of some earlier lab-made ball lightning.
How the heck does someone stutter using a keyboard?
Here's some data points, and a question for the economists:
1) Productivity has been rising for decades. US productivity per capita is about $51,000 this year. That's $50,000 per person, including kids and non-working spouses.
2) Human needs follow a "priority queue"; meaning, that once a level of need is satisfied there is no further demand. Population needs will plateau and become steady - there is no "infinite demand" for more goods. If you have all the food you need, you don't consume more even if it's free &c.
2a) And population is stabilizing in all industrialized nations. Birth rate less than 2.0 per woman in the US, our population only grows due to immigration. Similar in other industrialized nations.
Given this data, here's a hypothetical question: Suppose efficiency grows so that the infrastructure could produce all the needs of the population using only 90% of the current workforce.
Q: What happens to the unneeded 10% workforce?
For a follow-on, consider Google's self-driving car. There are currently around 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the US, which is about 2% of the total work force. This doesn't count delivery vehicles such as FedEx, UPS, or USPS. Very soon this ~3% of the workforce will no longer be needed.
Q2: Are we already in this "10% is unneeded" situation?
Everyone understands the US Measures? How many pottles are there in a firkin? Or how many nails in a chain?
Everyone else understands what I meant.
What are you going on about?
If there are "data scientists" who don't understand what the standard deviation is, then they certainly shouldn't be calling themselves "data scientists," and quite possibly not scientists at all. What subjects are their PhDs in, I wonder?
The problem isn't with highly-educated people, it people who are not highly educated, or who are highly educated but in a different field.
If a particular intersection attracts a lot of accidents, we consider the accidents to be the fault of the drivers involved. But at the same time, we recognize that aspects of the intersection might be a contributing factor as well.
Expert drivers would never have such accidents, but if we spend some effort reblocking the intersection we could get improved safety, and sometimes there is value in doing this.
Like the roadway intersection, if a term is so confusing that average people make mistakes because of it, there may well be value in changing to easier-to-understand terms.