Interesting, but one doesn't have to resort to theory/philosophy/etc -- there IS a correct answer. The ball is in, or it's out.
The other interesting thing is that in tennis in particular, it's actually "either the ball is definitely without a doubt out, otherwise assume it's in and continue on"
In that sense, I agree with the article. We (the rules, the general public) assume the technology is perfect. Maybe we should adjust the use of Hawkeye in tennis so that it only overrules a non-call of a possibly out ball if the ball is out more than the tolerance of the system.
The fact that Hawkeye has a margin of error (even if measured in millimeters) doesn't currently enter into the equation.
It's a little silly to see the Hawkeye system overrule balls that are a millimeter in or out... I've always wondered how good the system really is. We treat it, and award and take away points, with the assumption that it's infallible, which of course it's not.
The video proclaims that the gas *is* heated to 6000 Kelvin.
"as hot as the surface of the sun" the guy from the company proclaims. "which is why the spectrum looks like the spectrum from the sun".
The excited gas that produces all of the light seems to be of the same volume as a tic-tac -- insanely small.
Also, to the posters above, the whole light pollution thing is completely irrelevant -- old luminaries (probably the bulk of the installed base in American cities) spilled light upwards, above the horizontal. The dark skies initiative (from what I've seen) puts limits the light that you accidentally spills upwards from street lights (among other things), how bright the lights you use that point upward can be (and limits the use of the same to special cases: airports, etc.), and provides guidelines as to how bright that parking lot really needs to be at 3 am... which has zero to do with how efficient the bulbs doing the polluting need to be.
Not only that, but I've seen some data showing (from a vendor, so salt taken) that shows that the closer to the spectrum of natural light is, the lower ambient light we need to see well... so we can turn those light-polluters down if they're better tuned to the spectrum our eyes evolved to detect...
(It'd be sad to see a discussion on better efficiency get derailed by a complete non sequitur)
It seems that there's a group of us fan-boys, but the first thing I thought about is the eee pc that I'm writing this comment on:).
I've only had it a few days, but the keyboard already feels completely usable, and the ridiculous boot times and portability (and cost) can't be beat IMHO.
The touchpad is as usable as the touchpad on my thinkpad (though I am a fan of the IBM nipple pointing device when you have to make do without a mouse), but it does work well (I guess if touchpads fundamentally sucked Macintosh laptops wouldn't ship with them).
I'm not sure about installing XP personally, unless there's a compelling reason to do so, when you can get Ubuntu with that 3D visual bling that seems to run great on this little machine based on youtube videos floating around. I'm holding out to the base software mostly because boot times would suffer with anything else, and it comes with just about anything you would actually need to get work done with a portable computer. Firefox, flash, MS Office Docs, and multimedia all just work with less (zero) tweaking than with a windows computer...
I was impressed with the OQO (had a chance to play with one extensively) for portable computing, but the price difference makes it a no-brainer for me. In fact, work would have paid for either of the two, but I'm a Linux (GNU OS really?) fan, so a workable command line meant that my job will refund me 400 bucks instead of a couple of grand...
If your work is mostly Photoshop (or Gimp) then a tablet might make more sense.... as for me, my 15 inch Thinkpad already feels ridiculously enormous in comparison... (yeah, I know, weird - I wasn't ready for how small and usable this little computer is despite extensively reading reviews and watching videos of it in in action before buying).
YMMV, of course, but I'm happy as a clam with the eee pc... for transcoding or ripping/burning video or the occasional Windows game, the fire-breathing massive and noisy Ubuntu/XP desktop is still there... mostly unused 5 feet away, but it's still there...
I think you highlight the difference; neither one of your examples is considered acceptable. There's something wrong with your car, and you should be able to get it fixed -- we have lemon laws so there are legal limits to hiding behind "that's just the way it is" from the car manufacturer. What's more, there's regulation and testing for car safety, emissions, etc. You will be legally and financially penalized for selling a death trap and/or a lemon that breaks down all the time.
Your civil example too -- that's not considered acceptable. A licensed professional engineer (likely several) literally put their signature on the plans and took responsibility for the engineering work. Their registration number is printed on the plan set. The public can do searches on licenses held by professional engineers. Your license (and your ability to do civil or civil-related engineering work) can be revoked for negligence, corruption, incompetence, etc. "That's just the way it is" is not acceptable when you build a road and something is wrong. If there was a boneheaded mistake / corruption/etc. in the example you cite, then there was an investigation and someone or many lost their license and can no longer practice engineering.
Those are rigors.
Of course, there are rigors *because* mistakes/glitches/design flaws/implementation issues can happen when you design cars or roads, and we expect consequences.
For me, the first thing that came to mind after reading the article was tennis (and other racquet sports). It's cliche to talk about the racquet becoming an extension of your arm.
"Companies will pay for the system, either hosted remotely or on an internal server, at a discount to Microsoft's licensed technology."
Okay, that's fucking stupid.
Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. You know, I actually had the opposite reaction -- if the apps are run as an internal service then it's no different from the corporate email client. If email *ever* goes down work comes to a screeching halt, so having the office apps hosted the same way would not imply another productivity vulnerability. The intranet already better just keep on ticking, with zero downtime or you have a building(s) full of people twiddling their thumbs*.
By the same token, work doesn't buy me copies of MS Office to run at home: if I want to work on spreadsheets at home then I'm on my own already (for me, that means Openoffice). As long as the network apps let me save files locally to take home, then I don't actually see any problem...
* not to mention network licenses of CAD programs, etc.
In fact, I imagine this might give me the option of using the software license work paid for me from home -- again, just like the corporate email client I can use from a web browser right now...
I am not aware of other (presumably false) predictions of when peak oil will occur other than the Hubert Peak Theory, which seems pretty well grounded.
The real debate seems to be whether we're at the peak now, or will be in another 10-20 years, and whether the effects will be catastrophic or underwhelming.
Of course, peak oil has zero to do with the topic at hand...
Is the problem with CF also that you have delamination an additional failure mechanism?
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I can see how crack propagation on a single layer might be mitigated by dislocations, but crack propagation between the layers would be the real issue.
Add to the fact that this failure mechanism is harder to inspect for than fatigue crack formation and propagation in aluminum... In fact, something I worked on in grad school was trying to develop a better method to detect delamination in composite airplane parts. I can tell you that as of the early 90s (wow, I'm getting old) there was no practical solution -- especially for large commercial aircraft.
Back THEN at any rate, it was pretty much established fact that composite materials were good for military and high-perfomance stunt aircraft, but not safe enough for commercial aircraft.
Presumably, something has changed in the last decade or decade and a half. Hopefully:)
If you're taught Spanish in the US, you're likely taught Mexican (or Latin American -- not actually sure as some South American Spanish sounds a lot like Spanish -er Spanish to me) pronunciation.
One of the biggest differences is that the letters 'c' and 'z' don't sound like the 's' in Spain though they do in Mexico; Spaniards pronounce them like the English "th". For instance, the Spanish word for shoe is "zapato".
a Mexican person pronounces it sort of like: "saw-paw-toe" a Spanish person pronounces it sort of like: "thaw-paw-toe"
Both pronounce "santa" as we would with the normal English 's' sound.
Not sure if that means that Spaniards (or maybe other Latin Americans) speak with a lisp:) though I can see why a Mexican person (for instance) might describe it that way, though it only applies to those two letters.
Incidentally, though it is an interesting (IMHO) question posed by the Spanish TV networks (how well and how quickly, if at all, does the self-correcting mechanism on Wikipedia work), there seems to be understandable condemnation on Barrapunto for basically defacing the website to test it out, along with suggestions on how they could have done things better, references to Stephen Colbert, etc.
Hey, it IS just like Slashdot, but in Spanish!:)
Admittedly I didn't see anything about Cowboy Neal, goatse.cx, hot grits, complaints about a "lefty/liberal bias", Stephen King's death, posts interchanging "your" with "you're" or posts about woman-on-dog action -- though I did try browsing at -1:)
Your post might be true but it's still irrelevant: how is it a "trial" if you're screwed over into buying the product to see your old e-mail?
Even if there were sirens and nag bubbles ever 5 seconds saying "you won't be able to go back to the previous version! We've made it impossible for the non tech savvy" it'd still be disingenuous to call it a trial.
It amounts to blackmail, plain and simple: -- give me money or you can't access your data, sucker!
Just to echo -- I haven't had 5 minutes of downtime in about two years of DirecTV service. Until the grandparent's post, I assumed the Comcast commercials were all fiction! I do live in California, but the "about once a year thundering storm" never bothered my service.
The picture is much better, though maybe Comcast has cleaned up their act since the time that I switched. When I had their "digital cable service" there were obvious artifacts visible on a 27" old-fashioned tube! Drove me nuts that their digital service looked noticeably worse than the cheaper downgrade.
The internet connection was also not as reliable as DSL (though for me, admittedly faster), it'd go down every couple of months (usually fixable in ~10 min. so not a big deal but still sub par).
Also, the comcast DVR sucks serious balls compared to the DirectTV DVR -- the menu is sluggish, cluttered and there is no convenient way to zap through commercials....
It's not a perfect vacuum, but to the degree that they influence (finance, staff) the government itself (esp. in the US, maybe things aren't as broken elsewhere) I'd say the person you're replying to does paint a more accurate picture.
The things that are done (like what you point out) tend to be pretty superficial; more PR than substance.
RPN is great, once you get the hang of taking advantage of the stack you can really zip through convoluted equations. However, I recently got a new HP calculator with RPN, but the stack is still only 4 deep (AFAIK it's been this way for a while).
Anyone know why the stack is limited to four places?
I know that having 100 would be too much (there's no way I'd be able to keep track myself), however in certain calculations I've found that I could have used at least 8 places and it sucked to stop to write down (I think I saved to a variable) an intermediate step.
that's what I was thinking -- you can already get (and have been able for 20+ yrs.) "3d" printers that let you do quick prototyping. I've seen models that are even fairly small that can sit on your desk, and use plastic resins (that is, much more useful than paper).
Not only that, but you're severely limited in the geometry that you can produce if all you can do is fold paper....
There might be a use for self-folding paper *pseudo* 3D printer like this, but I can't think of one of the top of my head...
I know of two friends who bought the PS3 because it was a cheap Blue-Ray player and now are hooked (HOOKED) on Resistance:Fall of Man. One of these friends hadn't played video games since he and I were kids playing Super Mario Bros on the NES.
He used to tease me for being a grown up who played video games, but now he races home to play his PS3 online during his lunch hour.
I tried the game, and thought it was pretty good, for a console FPS (the same reaction I had to Halo -- "meh"), but I did spend a lot of hours many years ago playing Counter Strike and Half-Life (and others on the PC) so neither game seemed that great to *me* in comparison. That doesn't mean that others don't think these games are fundamentally new and ground-breaking fun.
But you posted to a toy guitar with four fret buttons! Guitar Hero guitars have *five* fret buttons, clearly defining the game as entertainment for the mature, sophisticated and worldly gamer!
As a side note, my brother's friend, when he heard about the concept of Guitar Hero his only comment was "hell no!". Then he saw the guitar controllers he said "oh HELL no!". He even tried it for two minutes and gave up on it ("stupid"). He eventually tried it again, got hooked, and now asks if he can "hang" out when my brother and I get together for beers and Guitar Hero.
Yesterday night we were making fun of him because he was so adamantly against it for so long, only to come to love the game.
I recently spent some time watching old TNG episodes (and I'm sort of familiar with the other Star Trek spin offs), and I realized that according to Star Trek lore, there are no Latin Americans in the future!*
Forget a captain Emiliano Zapata, or whomever, at this point I'd be happy with a simple proof of existence!
What's amazing is that, IMHO, putting a Russian character and a Black woman in the bridge of a ship was probably a very liberated thing to do in a main stream American show of the 60s, but things didn't seem to move much forward from there (Janeway and Sisko being the two exceptions, as you noted).
* I caught what I think was the very first TNG episode -- the very first random Federation death was a person with a Latin American sounding name, but I'm not sure he had any lines other than "arrrg!". So, technically, there was some representation but only as cannon fodder, and this doesn't count!
prominent occipital buns even among Europeans are now relatively infrequent. They are still found fairly often among Lapp and Finn individuals. Bushmen from South Africa and Australian aborigines often have occipital buns also.
So is this the same thing? Wikipedia makes it sounds like occipital buns are actually most common with Bushmen and Australian Aborigines (with Lancashire the one European exception where it is also common).
The article is talking about some gene they found which 70% of humanity carries. They don't know where this gene came from and whether it affects the brain in any way, gives you a hairy butt, or just gives you a predilection to grunting.
Also, we *all* have supra-orbital ridges (brow ridges). They're just more pronounced with Neanderthals. You don't look like the guy from the Geico commercials, do you?:)
Funny, if you read the article, it does sound like wild speculation. They have this gene which is common in Europe and rare in Africa. Neanderthals were common in Europe and rare in Africa. That seems to be about it, as they're not even sure if the gene does anything to the brain. They suspect it may or may not have any effect on brain size, and it may or may not have an effect on intelligence:
"The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function," Lahn said."
It might be totally wrong, but it's not a copout; the argument is that intelligence, despite what CS students who haven't thought about it long enough might assume, turns out to be innnately biological.
It's not a sentiment I agreed with, personally, until I thought about it a *lot*, since my gut reaction was that it'll only take more computing power and neural nets (or something else fluffy that gets around our lack of understanding how our own minds work).
You're right in one sense that I agree -- it isn't known (primarily, how our own human mind works; that's the tough question to answer, not how to simply increase computing power so that it happens on its own).
Honestly (and, I became an engineer by training and not an philosopher, so I'm sure that means something) I'm not sure that I understand your post well enough to reply to, other to agree with you on the basic premise of the Chinese room: it shows how you could appear to speak Chinese without understanding it at all, and as thus is an argument for how "real" AI isn't as "simple" as someone who's only looking at the technical problems might assume.
I do agree that, more than just not constituting intelligence, it doesn't even constitute understanding a conversation, no matter how perfect it might be at passing a Turing Test for intelligence...
I have a collection of comics from the 70s (some are very political, mostly they're hilarious) by an Argentine comic named Quino.
One of the strips shows the desperation in Latin America in decades past: a little girl looks at her radio and there's a stamp that says "Made in the USA". She then looks at a portable radio on her table and there's a stamp that says "Made in the USA". She then looks at her TV and there's a stamp "Made in the USA". Worried, she lifts up her shirt and examines her belly button. "Whew!" she says, "it's different!".
Of course, now it's the whole world and now the stamp says "Made in China".
Recently reading that strip sort of made me think of how much things change (and how much things stay the same).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, but one doesn't have to resort to theory/philosophy/etc -- there IS a correct answer. The ball is in, or it's out.
The other interesting thing is that in tennis in particular, it's actually "either the ball is definitely without a doubt out, otherwise assume it's in and continue on"
In that sense, I agree with the article. We (the rules, the general public) assume the technology is perfect. Maybe we should adjust the use of Hawkeye in tennis so that it only overrules a non-call of a possibly out ball if the ball is out more than the tolerance of the system.
The fact that Hawkeye has a margin of error (even if measured in millimeters) doesn't currently enter into the equation.
It's a little silly to see the Hawkeye system overrule balls that are a millimeter in or out ... I've always wondered how good the system really is. We treat it, and award and take away points, with the assumption that it's infallible, which of course it's not.
The video proclaims that the gas *is* heated to 6000 Kelvin.
... which has zero to do with how efficient the bulbs doing the polluting need to be.
... so we can turn those light-polluters down if they're better tuned to the spectrum our eyes evolved to detect ...
"as hot as the surface of the sun" the guy from the company proclaims. "which is why the spectrum looks like the spectrum from the sun".
The excited gas that produces all of the light seems to be of the same volume as a tic-tac -- insanely small.
Also, to the posters above, the whole light pollution thing is completely irrelevant -- old luminaries (probably the bulk of the installed base in American cities) spilled light upwards, above the horizontal. The dark skies initiative (from what I've seen) puts limits the light that you accidentally spills upwards from street lights (among other things), how bright the lights you use that point upward can be (and limits the use of the same to special cases: airports, etc.), and provides guidelines as to how bright that parking lot really needs to be at 3 am
Not only that, but I've seen some data showing (from a vendor, so salt taken) that shows that the closer to the spectrum of natural light is, the lower ambient light we need to see well
(It'd be sad to see a discussion on better efficiency get derailed by a complete non sequitur)
It seems that there's a group of us fan-boys, but the first thing I thought about is the eee pc that I'm writing this comment on :).
...
...
.... as for me, my 15 inch Thinkpad already feels ridiculously enormous in comparison ... (yeah, I know, weird - I wasn't ready for how small and usable this little computer is despite extensively reading reviews and watching videos of it in in action before buying).
... for transcoding or ripping/burning video or the occasional Windows game, the fire-breathing massive and noisy Ubuntu/XP desktop is still there ... mostly unused 5 feet away, but it's still there ...
I've only had it a few days, but the keyboard already feels completely usable, and the ridiculous boot times and portability (and cost) can't be beat IMHO.
The touchpad is as usable as the touchpad on my thinkpad (though I am a fan of the IBM nipple pointing device when you have to make do without a mouse), but it does work well (I guess if touchpads fundamentally sucked Macintosh laptops wouldn't ship with them).
I'm not sure about installing XP personally, unless there's a compelling reason to do so, when you can get Ubuntu with that 3D visual bling that seems to run great on this little machine based on youtube videos floating around. I'm holding out to the base software mostly because boot times would suffer with anything else, and it comes with just about anything you would actually need to get work done with a portable computer. Firefox, flash, MS Office Docs, and multimedia all just work with less (zero) tweaking than with a windows computer
I was impressed with the OQO (had a chance to play with one extensively) for portable computing, but the price difference makes it a no-brainer for me. In fact, work would have paid for either of the two, but I'm a Linux (GNU OS really?) fan, so a workable command line meant that my job will refund me 400 bucks instead of a couple of grand
If your work is mostly Photoshop (or Gimp) then a tablet might make more sense
YMMV, of course, but I'm happy as a clam with the eee pc
I think you highlight the difference; neither one of your examples is considered acceptable. There's something wrong with your car, and you should be able to get it fixed -- we have lemon laws so there are legal limits to hiding behind "that's just the way it is" from the car manufacturer. What's more, there's regulation and testing for car safety, emissions, etc. You will be legally and financially penalized for selling a death trap and/or a lemon that breaks down all the time.
/etc. in the example you cite, then there was an investigation and someone or many lost their license and can no longer practice engineering.
Your civil example too -- that's not considered acceptable. A licensed professional engineer (likely several) literally put their signature on the plans and took responsibility for the engineering work. Their registration number is printed on the plan set. The public can do searches on licenses held by professional engineers. Your license (and your ability to do civil or civil-related engineering work) can be revoked for negligence, corruption, incompetence, etc. "That's just the way it is" is not acceptable when you build a road and something is wrong. If there was a boneheaded mistake / corruption
Those are rigors.
Of course, there are rigors *because* mistakes/glitches/design flaws/implementation issues can happen when you design cars or roads, and we expect consequences.
For me, the first thing that came to mind after reading the article was tennis (and other racquet sports). It's cliche to talk about the racquet becoming an extension of your arm.
Okay, that's fucking stupid.
Office apps that REQUIRE a working network/internet connection to function are something that any sane IT department would stay FAR FAR away from. You know, I actually had the opposite reaction -- if the apps are run as an internal service then it's no different from the corporate email client. If email *ever* goes down work comes to a screeching halt, so having the office apps hosted the same way would not imply another productivity vulnerability. The intranet already better just keep on ticking, with zero downtime or you have a building(s) full of people twiddling their thumbs*.
By the same token, work doesn't buy me copies of MS Office to run at home: if I want to work on spreadsheets at home then I'm on my own already (for me, that means Openoffice). As long as the network apps let me save files locally to take home, then I don't actually see any problem
* not to mention network licenses of CAD programs, etc.
In fact, I imagine this might give me the option of using the software license work paid for me from home -- again, just like the corporate email client I can use from a web browser right now
Did I misunderstand your objection?
"M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970."
...
Are you confusing the correct prediction of peak domestic oil production vs. peak world oil production? (Of course, the latter comes later).
In either case, we won't have long to see how well the prediction scales world-wide.
You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
I am not aware of other (presumably false) predictions of when peak oil will occur other than the Hubert Peak Theory, which seems pretty well grounded.
The real debate seems to be whether we're at the peak now, or will be in another 10-20 years, and whether the effects will be catastrophic or underwhelming.
Of course, peak oil has zero to do with the topic at hand
congrats, keep it up. Physical withdrawal is supposed to peak in the first 3 days or so, and should get easier after that. :)
Before you know it, you'll be amazed that you smoked at all (as is, "why the hell did I do it for so long?! Why didn't I quit before?")
personal stories aside (I've got a few of my own), there's this retirement community with a wii bowling league and tournament:
http://www.ericksonblog.com/ericksonsports/
I'm pretty sure these folks are not and will not ever be in the market for an XBOX nor a PS3, so yeah, I'd say Nintendo is reaching new markets.
Is the problem with CF also that you have delamination an additional failure mechanism?
... In fact, something I worked on in grad school was trying to develop a better method to detect delamination in composite airplane parts. I can tell you that as of the early 90s (wow, I'm getting old) there was no practical solution -- especially for large commercial aircraft.
:)
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I can see how crack propagation on a single layer might be mitigated by dislocations, but crack propagation between the layers would be the real issue.
Add to the fact that this failure mechanism is harder to inspect for than fatigue crack formation and propagation in aluminum
Back THEN at any rate, it was pretty much established fact that composite materials were good for military and high-perfomance stunt aircraft, but not safe enough for commercial aircraft.
Presumably, something has changed in the last decade or decade and a half. Hopefully
in case anyone cares:
:) though I can see why a Mexican person (for instance) might describe it that way, though it only applies to those two letters.
:)
:)
If you're taught Spanish in the US, you're likely taught Mexican (or Latin American -- not actually sure as some South American Spanish sounds a lot like Spanish -er Spanish to me) pronunciation.
One of the biggest differences is that the letters 'c' and 'z' don't sound like the 's' in Spain though they do in Mexico; Spaniards pronounce them like the English "th". For instance, the Spanish word for shoe is "zapato".
a Mexican person pronounces it sort of like: "saw-paw-toe"
a Spanish person pronounces it sort of like: "thaw-paw-toe"
Both pronounce "santa" as we would with the normal English 's' sound.
Not sure if that means that Spaniards (or maybe other Latin Americans) speak with a lisp
Incidentally, though it is an interesting (IMHO) question posed by the Spanish TV networks (how well and how quickly, if at all, does the self-correcting mechanism on Wikipedia work), there seems to be understandable condemnation on Barrapunto for basically defacing the website to test it out, along with suggestions on how they could have done things better, references to Stephen Colbert, etc.
Hey, it IS just like Slashdot, but in Spanish!
Admittedly I didn't see anything about Cowboy Neal, goatse.cx, hot grits, complaints about a "lefty/liberal bias", Stephen King's death, posts interchanging "your" with "you're" or posts about woman-on-dog action -- though I did try browsing at -1
which is a half-assed solution, isn't it?
It's deceptive no matter how you try to spin it.
Your post might be true but it's still irrelevant: how is it a "trial" if you're screwed over into buying the product to see your old e-mail?
Even if there were sirens and nag bubbles ever 5 seconds saying "you won't be able to go back to the previous version! We've made it impossible for the non tech savvy" it'd still be disingenuous to call it a trial.
It amounts to blackmail, plain and simple: -- give me money or you can't access your data, sucker!
Just to echo -- I haven't had 5 minutes of downtime in about two years of DirecTV service. Until the grandparent's post, I assumed the Comcast commercials were all fiction! I do live in California, but the "about once a year thundering storm" never bothered my service.
....
The picture is much better, though maybe Comcast has cleaned up their act since the time that I switched. When I had their "digital cable service" there were obvious artifacts visible on a 27" old-fashioned tube! Drove me nuts that their digital service looked noticeably worse than the cheaper downgrade.
The internet connection was also not as reliable as DSL (though for me, admittedly faster), it'd go down every couple of months (usually fixable in ~10 min. so not a big deal but still sub par).
Also, the comcast DVR sucks serious balls compared to the DirectTV DVR -- the menu is sluggish, cluttered and there is no convenient way to zap through commercials
YMMV
It's not a perfect vacuum, but to the degree that they influence (finance, staff) the government itself (esp. in the US, maybe things aren't as broken elsewhere) I'd say the person you're replying to does paint a more accurate picture.
The things that are done (like what you point out) tend to be pretty superficial; more PR than substance.
I agree with your post, I just wanted to add that the advice basically advocates spending more time outdoors -- hardly controversial health-wise.
RPN is great, once you get the hang of taking advantage of the stack you can really zip through convoluted equations. However, I recently got a new HP calculator with RPN, but the stack is still only 4 deep (AFAIK it's been this way for a while).
Anyone know why the stack is limited to four places?
I know that having 100 would be too much (there's no way I'd be able to keep track myself), however in certain calculations I've found that I could have used at least 8 places and it sucked to stop to write down (I think I saved to a variable) an intermediate step.
that's what I was thinking -- you can already get (and have been able for 20+ yrs.) "3d" printers that let you do quick prototyping. I've seen models that are even fairly small that can sit on your desk, and use plastic resins (that is, much more useful than paper).
....
...
Not only that, but you're severely limited in the geometry that you can produce if all you can do is fold paper
There might be a use for self-folding paper *pseudo* 3D printer like this, but I can't think of one of the top of my head
for every apocryphal anectode ... :)
I know of two friends who bought the PS3 because it was a cheap Blue-Ray player and now are hooked (HOOKED) on Resistance:Fall of Man. One of these friends hadn't played video games since he and I were kids playing Super Mario Bros on the NES.
He used to tease me for being a grown up who played video games, but now he races home to play his PS3 online during his lunch hour.
I tried the game, and thought it was pretty good, for a console FPS (the same reaction I had to Halo -- "meh"), but I did spend a lot of hours many years ago playing Counter Strike and Half-Life (and others on the PC) so neither game seemed that great to *me* in comparison. That doesn't mean that others don't think these games are fundamentally new and ground-breaking fun.
But you posted to a toy guitar with four fret buttons! Guitar Hero guitars have *five* fret buttons, clearly defining the game as entertainment for the mature, sophisticated and worldly gamer!
As a side note, my brother's friend, when he heard about the concept of Guitar Hero his only comment was "hell no!". Then he saw the guitar controllers he said "oh HELL no!". He even tried it for two minutes and gave up on it ("stupid"). He eventually tried it again, got hooked, and now asks if he can "hang" out when my brother and I get together for beers and Guitar Hero.
Yesterday night we were making fun of him because he was so adamantly against it for so long, only to come to love the game.
I recently spent some time watching old TNG episodes (and I'm sort of familiar with the other Star Trek spin offs), and I realized that according to Star Trek lore, there are no Latin Americans in the future!*
Forget a captain Emiliano Zapata, or whomever, at this point I'd be happy with a simple proof of existence!
What's amazing is that, IMHO, putting a Russian character and a Black woman in the bridge of a ship was probably a very liberated thing to do in a main stream American show of the 60s, but things didn't seem to move much forward from there (Janeway and Sisko being the two exceptions, as you noted).
* I caught what I think was the very first TNG episode -- the very first random Federation death was a person with a Latin American sounding name, but I'm not sure he had any lines other than "arrrg!". So, technically, there was some representation but only as cannon fodder, and this doesn't count!
From your wikipedia link:
:)
prominent occipital buns even among Europeans are now relatively infrequent. They are still found fairly often among Lapp and Finn individuals. Bushmen from South Africa and Australian aborigines often have occipital buns also.
So is this the same thing? Wikipedia makes it sounds like occipital buns are actually most common with Bushmen and Australian Aborigines (with Lancashire the one European exception where it is also common).
The article is talking about some gene they found which 70% of humanity carries. They don't know where this gene came from and whether it affects the brain in any way, gives you a hairy butt, or just gives you a predilection to grunting.
Also, we *all* have supra-orbital ridges (brow ridges). They're just more pronounced with Neanderthals. You don't look like the guy from the Geico commercials, do you?
Funny, if you read the article, it does sound like wild speculation. They have this gene which is common in Europe and rare in Africa. Neanderthals were common in Europe and rare in Africa. That seems to be about it, as they're not even sure if the gene does anything to the brain. They suspect it may or may not have any effect on brain size, and it may or may not have an effect on intelligence:
"The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function," Lahn said."
It might be totally wrong, but it's not a copout; the argument is that intelligence, despite what CS students who haven't thought about it long enough might assume, turns out to be innnately biological.
It's not a sentiment I agreed with, personally, until I thought about it a *lot*, since my gut reaction was that it'll only take more computing power and neural nets (or something else fluffy that gets around our lack of understanding how our own minds work).
You're right in one sense that I agree -- it isn't known (primarily, how our own human mind works; that's the tough question to answer, not how to simply increase computing power so that it happens on its own).
Honestly (and, I became an engineer by training and not an philosopher, so I'm sure that means something) I'm not sure that I understand your post well enough to reply to, other to agree with you on the basic premise of the Chinese room: it shows how you could appear to speak Chinese without understanding it at all, and as thus is an argument for how "real" AI isn't as "simple" as someone who's only looking at the technical problems might assume.
I do agree that, more than just not constituting intelligence, it doesn't even constitute understanding a conversation, no matter how perfect it might be at passing a Turing Test for intelligence...
I have a collection of comics from the 70s (some are very political, mostly they're hilarious) by an Argentine comic named Quino.
One of the strips shows the desperation in Latin America in decades past: a little girl looks at her radio and there's a stamp that says "Made in the USA". She then looks at a portable radio on her table and there's a stamp that says "Made in the USA". She then looks at her TV and there's a stamp "Made in the USA". Worried, she lifts up her shirt and examines her belly button. "Whew!" she says, "it's different!".
Of course, now it's the whole world and now the stamp says "Made in China".
Recently reading that strip sort of made me think of how much things change (and how much things stay the same).