In which John Brockman says "I was there, Gandalf."
Among the reasons we don't hear much about cybernetics today, two are central: First, although The Human Use of Human Beings was considered an important book in its time, it ran counter to the aspirations of many of Wiener's colleagues, including John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, who were interested in the commercialization of the new technologies. Second, computer pioneer John McCarthy disliked Wiener and refused to use Wiener's term "Cybernetics." McCarthy, in turn, coined the term "artificial intelligence" and became a founding father of that field.
Cybernetics, rather than disappearing, was becoming metabolized into everything, so we no longer saw it as a separate, distinct new discipline. And there it remains, hiding in plain sight.
This whole language debate hinges on Lisp bigot patient zero. Lisp is the whole enchilada, because John McCarthy says it's so. On the other hand, Wiener's terminology nicely captures the entire spectrum of cognitive processes, from radio to infrared, from ultraviolet to gamma ray. I tend to split the difference by referring to the technological field as "artificial cognition".
Why is it that Lisp bigots have this terrible knack of perverting language?
McCarthy : intelligence:: Stallman : freedom
Neither of these culturally prevalent definitions was entirely credible on day one. Wiener for sure knew that "intelligence" was far, far down the road, just as Stallman's original critics also knew that one man's freedom is another man's viral-license insurgency. I've personally known that "AI" was bogus terminology since the mid-seventies (when I first discovered Asimov), and Brockman has known it since 1965.
Brockman was also quick to realize that science writing could be effective in taking debates across traditional disciplinary boundaries. As a student at Columbia Business School, he spent his evenings in south Manhattan, where the sub-cultures and artists hung out.
Brockman recalls: "The artists were all reading science. Robert Rauschenberg turned me on to James Jeans' The Mysterious Universe, and Claes Oldenburg was reading George Gamow's One, Two, Threeââ¦âInfinity."
But even more influential was a series of dinners organized by John Cage, at which the composer introduced his ideas to young artists.
Brockman recalls: "Luckily, I was part of the group, and one evening — it must have been in 1965 — Cage said, 'Here, this is for you' and handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener. Everything I've done since goes back to that moment."
The actual problem has always been exactly the other way around: it's not that we excessively glorify machines, who are nowhere near doing anything seriously impressive, but that we excessively exalt human intelligence, which does sometimes truly knock our socks off, but much of the time is entirely derivative, and far too often leaves machine cognition smelling like a rose (e.g. every asshole who's ever killed someone by texting while in "control" of a moving automobile).
What's the IQ required to text while controlling a moving vehicle. 15 points below a cockroach? "A just question, my liege. Late is the hour in which these narcissistic dipshits continue to imperil their fellow man."
Intelligence is hard work. Humans are lazy. You do the math on just how secure your simian heritage leaves you as we enter into the Great Cyborg Reconciliation with it's innate and ineluctable lazy-dipshit displacement imperative.
The other day I figured out what "wisdom" really is: it's when your counterfactuals become a lot less shiny.
Many of the youthful believe that if Trump hadn't been elected, America would be a shiny, perfect place. (They won't say this out loud, of course, being generation cynical.) Or they believe that if Trump were impeached, America would return to its former glory as a shiny, perfect place.
I personally kind of hope Trump gets reelected in 2020 (along with a Democrat house and a Democrat senate) so that he remains on full display for eight solid years. Eight years in the incessant limelight turns just about anyone into old news, on both sides of the aisle. At which point, we could have an excellent meeting of the minds, and begin to more forward again.
[*] I found Trump tiresome after eight minutes, because—apart from the Brooklyn bluster—he's entirely unlike Richard Feynman. Feynman could not go ten minutes without explaining something deep; Trump can't go ten minutes without anti-explaining something into a deep ravine. If it takes eight years for the other side to catch up, it's the least of many evils for me to simply sit here and wait.
My newfound patience in old age comes from the recognition that the counterfactuals are rarely as bright and shiny as what one wishes to suppose. Stark counterfactuals about a Hilary administration running America into the ground are full of shit, too. With Hilary we would have had more of the old problems, and fewer of the new problems; with Trump, we've got more of the new problems, and fewer of the old problems. Hilary is just as difficult to listen to as Trump, but she's easier to turn off. She was highly unlikely to blindside her own security forces by unilaterally discontinuing military readiness on the Korean peninsula. (Given equally repellent, it's harder to look away when an egocentric pyromaniac gets his hands on a blowtorch.) Outside of that, the difference between the two is fairly marginal for me on a day to day basis. Trump has done many stupid things, but Hilary would surely have done many stupid things, too.
Google has demonstrated less than ethical behavior. The last thing I want is them advising me on ethics. As someone else pointed out, this is basically a lobbying group.
So what's the counterfactual? What superior reality would exist if trillion dollar corporations could be convinced not to invest in industry-funded lobby groups?
Who would you rather have instead? Bill Gates? Larry Elision? Mark Zuckerberg? Jeff Bezos? Anyone at all from the entire Uber universe? Elizabeth Holmes? The bipolar snarky–saintly Steve Jobs?
On the other hand, if you've got a viable game plan for displacing cynical industry lobby groups altogether, everyone and their dog in a thousand mile radius is sitting on the edge of their seat, awaiting your next word like you had just discovered a more fantastic way to procreate, and you were about to spill the beans entirely out of the goodness of your own heart, with not even the slightest possible vestige of a business plan or a Ticket Master toll booth.
Those controversial curly-cue ones that were cutting edge not that long ago? Gone.
Suffer the children, for these shall become tomorrow's consumers of news for nerds. (Oh, really?)
———
I have one beef with energy-efficient lighting. The recessed sockets for the central lighting in my kitchen do a great job of preventing the glare of the bulb from meeting me at eye level.
But only the old-fashioned incandescent floods.
All the replacement LED floods I've examined place the bright, light-emitting substrate further up (down) the neck of the bulb, so I actually do catch the dazzle-inducing "filament" in my peripheral vision during normal kitchen activities.
Brightness is not the sole figure of merit. Contrast is also a figure of merit. Brightness is maximized when you look straight into the bulb. Contrast ratio, however, tends to suffer when the bulb is (mostly) in between you and subject matter of interest.
I've never seen specialty bulb packaging in my life that gives the viewing angle to the dazzle-point ever in my life. There's no way to find out without buying one, screwing it a socket, and turning it on. I did this quite a bit back when I had many other sockets to fill, so all my failures had somewhere good to go after the experiment failed. But now my entire house is LED, except for the recessed bulbs in the kitchen (three times 60 watts) which now contain the very last of my old-fashioned incandescents.
[*] Actually, I lied: we still have a halogen pea-bulb circuit under the kitchen cabinets along two walls which produce an excellent light for actual cooking (it's the last circuit we turn on when just passing through).
For many people, these LED floods are "the same" as the old incandescents, minus the heat, the expense, and prehistoric "warm" colouration. For these to be "the same" in my kitchen, I'd have to sink three pots at least another inch deeper (while perhaps raising the floor in the room above by a compensatory distance).
Hmm. It might be more environmentally sound for me to simply continue using incandescent floods on this one kitchen circuit for the time being.
(We're on electric heating, in a marine climate, where we manage to keep the kitchen around 63 degrees F for most of the winter without ever turning up the kitchen thermostat. On especially cold days I bake bread or reduce onions. A little bit of incandescent heat in the kitchen is no skin off my energy-budget nose for at least half the year.)
I've been reading about VR for years, and this is the first time I've ever read anything that cut to the chase. Awesome! Now I can die happy, in my own bed, surrounded by ordinary walls, covered with drab wallpaper.
For some reason the usual sluggishness I experience after my melatonin therapy sometimes boils over into something bordering on narcolepsy.
Normally we talk about "falling" asleep. These nearly obligatory naps would be better described as unconsciousness welling up from below. It's almost as if my brain is busy going to sleep, without noticing the lights are still on, upstairs. Then when I finally lie down, I fall into a sleep that is entirely bereft of the "rested" feeling one normally experiences on waking up again. Sometimes I feel refreshed on some level, but never the actual rested feeling.
I keep mental sleep notes at all time as part of managing my condition.
I've long known that I have any number of semi-waking states, with varying degrees of awareness of my surroundings. I had a weird one recently where I lost all conception of time, but some other things were still held in consciousness. I couldn't, for a while, have told you if I had been (partly) asleep for ten minutes or two hours.
Rarely I experience a condition where both the waking and dreaming worlds are available to semi-consciousness at the same time. Sometimes one even tries to comment on the other, but this never goes well.
The only thing I've read about this in the literature is an observation that partial microsleeps have been observed in brains that are sleep deprived (or merely just sleep phase deprived of one normal phase). People with disrupted sleep architectures (like I sometimes experience) can feel like you're sleeping eight hours per night, but still wind up with peculiar sleep debts.
I tried modafinil for a year at one point, mostly on low dosages. I was somewhat enjoyable at first, but I quickly acclimated, and the enjoyable part of the buzz became very minor. It always inhibited my ability to add a pair of two-digit numbers in my head. Usually I just know the rough magnitude of the result automatically; this signal vanished. Without this signal, it was almost as if I didn't know where to start the addition process. Trying to deal with numbers on modafinil just made me feel stoned, but I didn't feel stoned otherwise. Combining with caffeine (5-ounce doses of coffee) intensified many of the effects (until my responsiveness to that wore off, too).
The problem with modafinil is that it masks the difficulty of coping with tiredness, but does not ultimately compensate for the deficit. And it tended to shorten my sleep at night by about an hour, if I took a small dose in the morning, which for me proved counterproductive. I did manage to get something working a bit where I took modafinil one morning, then nortriptyline the next evening, and alternated like that. NT deepens sleep (at least it does for me), especially toward the end of my sleep interval. I didn't like the carry-over, so I eventually had 4 mg pills custom compounded, and these still help my sleep enough, with hardly any lingering fatigue the next morning. (NT is one of two metabolites from amitriptyline, which is commonly used to treat symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, which could well prove to be sleep related at the end of the day; I figure one metabolite is better than two, and I discovered that NT does the trick for me just fine.) With the alternation program, I get one short night, followed by one longer night. On the modafinil day, I have fewer problems with fatigue from the melatonin therapy. But there were other problems, and it shuts down part of my math ability.
Anyway, in mucking around with all of this, I got myself into some pretty weird states. At one point, I was having full blown hypnagogic hallucinations while 100% awake. This was when I tried to use modafinil to stay on day mode when my body had decided I should be on night mode. I was getting enough sleep, measured by hours unconscious, but it clearly wasn't fully restorative sleep. It only took about a week of this protocol for the hypnagogic hallucinations to gain a serious toe hold within my waking cognition. It only took one glorious s
At fifty you have the face you deserve.
— George Orwell and Coco Chanel split the wishbone
George: Well, I wrote an entire book about scalpels—scalpels taken to the human soul. And then Gilliam came along and made my book's metaphor physical, too, so nyah-nyah.
Coco: Oh come on, George, I have seventeen patents on alpha hydroxyl acid. And you can guess the rest... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it truly behooves the beheld to take matters into her own sweet little hands.
[A blood-curdling scream cuts the conversation short.]
George: By George, what was that?
Coco: Oh, didn't you see? The Cable Guy... he staggered into the men's room with a dermatological razor blade the size of Crocodile Dundee's—
George: —don't say it, my darling, I can indeed guess the rest.
You just need a system to credit the person called by ten cents for every call received from the originating party (whether answered, or not).
Even better if each phone owner can establish his or her own price. I'd probably set mine my inbound threshold at 25 cents to see how that goes, initially.
Mostly these small tithes would just slosh back and forth and be largely a wash for many people.
But somehow you need to make sure that your phone company doesn't install a tollbooth and then take a bite of 50% or more on every transaction (which they will surely justify as as a necessary economic response to the lower call volumes).
My name is Ed Sussman. I have interest and expertise in articles around business, technology, the digital world, law, media and journalism.
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Let's be real. The Intercept and First Look Media didn't do this for The Greater Good.
Because purity is pure, with nary a visible means of support.
Which begs the question: What was God's bag?
Surely he wasn't into creation for the greater good or the love of humanity, at least not judging by how many of us he's already turned into pillars of salt.
Now here's where it gets trickier still: good people generally find it easier to move between jobs. Bad people cling on to their job like a life-raft because they don't know where the next one is coming from.
You're not managing to cast a stellar ray of sunshine here in advancing this argument.
One could just as easily divide humanity into A) those who live to work, and B) those who work to live.
For the second group, job hunting is a time-consuming, stressful, largely uncompensated PITA, where the prize for winning is A) huge amount of personal upheaval, B) even longer hours in the office every week to justify this nice, fat pay increment. The prize for losing is the enjoyable experience of dressing up to be on your best behaviour to endure the slings and arrows of ridiculous HR screening procedures—not one minute of which pays a dime, though if you're lucky, you might score a free mug or two of decent single-origin coffee (but don't hold your breath, it could just as easily be a low-elevation Indonesian coffee roasted by Starbucks to a witness-protection-program muddy hue from the soil-to-oil colour Pantone).
Completely failing to notice how the contentment signal conflates with the competence signal is not a feather in your cap on the competence side of the fence—present-company-implicitly included, no doubt—in this tired narrative of yore.
Say you have this person on your staff with a proven track record of building positive customer rapport. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and consequently, he tends not to leave cut marks on your customers due to having a cheese-grater genius aura. Your company is small and closely held, and growing nicely. Bob is well compensated within his line or work, because he's a proven quality, with demonstrated loyalty to the cause; consequently, he wouldn't be better paid anywhere else.
But then your company is acquired by Big Fish, which consults the Oracle of Delphi, and determines that it now has enough Clout to treat the customer's good will as a liability rather than an asset.
Bon voyage, Bob. You're no longer exactly the right person in exactly the right job with no reason but fear—fear of the inevitable corruption of a good thing—to hump around in his best suit drinking random mugs of coffee as procured by the HR unwashed.
No, of course not, none of this narrative is about fit to circumstance, or personal values, or corporate-value weather vanes; no, it's all a tidy little narrative about how the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers, and how the meek shall not inherit the earth, because their thin little arms are wrapped in panic around their thin little gig.
As of July 2016, White Americans are the racial majority. African Americans are the largest racial minority, comprising an estimated 12.7% of the population. Hispanic and Latino Americans are the largest ethnic minority, comprising an estimated 17.8% of the population.
The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 61.3% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 76.9%.
Sadly, the modern Grievance Studies dept.—now on a campus near you—stockpiles the dumbest bricks of all.
Public-key/private-key encryption systems are based on factoring primes and the premise is no one can identify all the primes in a truly huge list of whole numbers starting at zero.
Everything about that statement is wrong.
We don't factor primes, we factor prime products. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to identify primes, or we couldn't come up with the two large primes to multiply together in the first place.
We can also test that the product isn't prime with good efficiency.
What we can't do is efficiently identify which primes were multiplied together in the first place, not even knowing a priori that there are exactly two prime factors, and that they are roughly comparable in magnitude (with a similar number of digits—not that this hint helps much at all).
If that 28.8% cost significantly more to maintain than the other 71.1%, then this move makes sense.
You can't seriously be suggesting that young bucks with their tongues hanging out of their wallets are the less lucrative constituency of their user base.
Vizio allegedly collected data on what people viewed on 11 million of its TVs and then shared the data with third parties, without informing people about the data collection or receiving consent.
Gotta move a lot of glass to pay a $2 million fine on 6% margins.
No wait—it's only the margins on the televisions that are a thin 6%. Other parts of the business are total payola.
"None of the people I photographed had any idea their images were being used in this way," said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM's collection, known as a "training dataset."
Funny that I've not yet heard about the CC-as-foreseen license, which apparently billions of people have been using, in earnest, all along.
I reengaged with Twitter for about a month not long ago, a decade after emitting my first tentative Tweet, and for a few days I didn't entirely hate the experience.
At first I started small, but then I threw caution to the wind, and began following people from both the technological and the political side of the spectrum. Within two days of having technology and politics randomly jumbled into my feed, I had mothballed my Twitter account for another decade.
I can be highly asynchronous in my mental appetites, but that brief fly-by of the ultimate conflation nearly killed me. I guess Twitter doesn't want to let me sort or partition my feed, because then some portion of it wouldn't be urgently fresh, and a week later—on a designated day of the week, perhaps—I might rudely bump some stale political threads that are hours cold.
There is no solution that I can foresee to social media's inherent velocity problem.
What fires together, wires together.
Unless you want to turn your brain into a transporter-accident molten howl, the velocity-vortex tuna melt is best avoided.
[*] Apparently there are some on again, off again add-ons to accomplish this in various browser environments, but I simply can't summon up the curatorial mojo to engage with this hapless cause.
[**] GenX really should be called the Now generation. Like Woodstockers later in life, with the wisdom of years they'll recall their chosen mind-altering drug with hazy recollections of glam happening nostalgia and visceral shudders of inward disgust.
and a trained dragon 1.0 did just as well back then, as current shit does today
You're completely nuts.
Dragon did okay back in the day if you bought exactly the right condenser microphone, positioned it exactly right on your headband (about 2" away from your lips just off to the side of your mouth), trained it properly in exactly that configuration, and you used it in quiet environment with no dogs barking, slamming doors down the hall, traffic noises through the open window, etc. Also, it was good to avoid getting allergies or coming down with a cold, to start/stop smoking unless you wanted to train your model again with your "new" voice.
It's the same deal with squash rackets. The original graphite rackets from the early 1980s had a powerful sweet spot, but it wasn't very big. They also shattered every tenth time you scuffed the wall hard by accident. Then they started to monkey with the head shape, and the sweet spot expanded to the size of a cantaloupe. The graphite eventually became less brittle, too.
But that old sweet spot the size of a mandarin orange sure was just as good as the modern shit today.
You just know this isn't go to take the world by storm (for some as yet undisclosed reason) when the first press release you encounter is blathering on about silencing MRI machines for the benefit of people who are allergic to synthetic earplugs, and who can't, unfortunately, use the ones made out of solid steel, either, because of the intense magnetic fields.
Marketing person grappling with harsh reality: Gee, the HVAC people have all the volume, whereas the MRI people have all the money.
Probable end result: this fancy new technology gets installed in the HVAC system connected to the MRI room, so that no-one else in the hospital needs to listen to it hum 24/7.
Fundamental law of marketing: those who open their wallets on a lark have no money to spend, those who have money to spend open their wallets with great reluctance. Thus the sweet spot in the early going tends to be small.
For Korean phone giants Samsung and LG, Foursquare's API will be used in some of their default apps. If you take a picture using a Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+, the phone will tag your location based on Foursquare's Places database.
This brain damage appears to concern fairly recent models. I'm about six generations further behind, so my mandatory security practice is to enable my data modem less than once a month, and to enable my Wi-Fi modem almost as rarely.
A lot of perfectly good computers will be junked and will put a strain on intel and amd for "new" PCs.
One man's "strain" is another man's comfortable margin.
It's hardly ever the supply that's strained. The "strained" are almost always the smallest fish in the pond, with the least secure contractual futures and demand leverage. Apple is not going one measly CPU short of their ultimate desire, I guarantee it.
What this story really means is that HP tooled up to sell a higher volume at a lower price point, and now at the last minute, they need to revamp their channel strategy for lower volumes at higher price points. Since this isn't a sexy category any longer, they probably don't enjoy a lot of pricing power, so they'd probably rather have the former scenario than the later scenario.
At the end of the day, some consumers balanced on the marginal knife-edge will continue to run their old junk for six months longer than they might have otherwise. Then their next purchase begins to age out six months later than it might have but for the supply headwind.
A few HP salespeople on the personal-bonus knife edge are lathering up a storm. Few other parties to the system feel any great strain at all. Even Intel's manufacturing arm probably turned the tiller months ago, and now just have to sit back and let this run itself out.
"Hey, Intel facilities guy, couldn't you just commission that fancy stepper line a month sooner? We know this is delicate work that potentially affects yield for years to come, but We Need It Now."
Hard, cold stare in return.
Basically, that hard-pressed HP sales guy who is $5000 short of making his next commission rung can go jump into a cold lake.
Slashdot Mirror
The Spirit of Unlimited Possibilities — 15 March 2019
In which John Brockman says "I was there, Gandalf."
This whole language debate hinges on Lisp bigot patient zero. Lisp is the whole enchilada, because John McCarthy says it's so. On the other hand, Wiener's terminology nicely captures the entire spectrum of cognitive processes, from radio to infrared, from ultraviolet to gamma ray. I tend to split the difference by referring to the technological field as "artificial cognition".
Why is it that Lisp bigots have this terrible knack of perverting language?
McCarthy : intelligence :: Stallman : freedom
Neither of these culturally prevalent definitions was entirely credible on day one. Wiener for sure knew that "intelligence" was far, far down the road, just as Stallman's original critics also knew that one man's freedom is another man's viral-license insurgency. I've personally known that "AI" was bogus terminology since the mid-seventies (when I first discovered Asimov), and Brockman has known it since 1965.
Humankind's big questions — 1 January 2017
The actual problem has always been exactly the other way around: it's not that we excessively glorify machines, who are nowhere near doing anything seriously impressive, but that we excessively exalt human intelligence, which does sometimes truly knock our socks off, but much of the time is entirely derivative, and far too often leaves machine cognition smelling like a rose (e.g. every asshole who's ever killed someone by texting while in "control" of a moving automobile).
What's the IQ required to text while controlling a moving vehicle. 15 points below a cockroach? "A just question, my liege. Late is the hour in which these narcissistic dipshits continue to imperil their fellow man."
Intelligence is hard work. Humans are lazy. You do the math on just how secure your simian heritage leaves you as we enter into the Great Cyborg Reconciliation with it's innate and ineluctable lazy-dipshit displacement imperative.
The FTC makes no data publicly available on their collection rate so that the citizenry can follow this up?
How does that work?
The other day I figured out what "wisdom" really is: it's when your counterfactuals become a lot less shiny.
Many of the youthful believe that if Trump hadn't been elected, America would be a shiny, perfect place. (They won't say this out loud, of course, being generation cynical.) Or they believe that if Trump were impeached, America would return to its former glory as a shiny, perfect place.
I personally kind of hope Trump gets reelected in 2020 (along with a Democrat house and a Democrat senate) so that he remains on full display for eight solid years. Eight years in the incessant limelight turns just about anyone into old news, on both sides of the aisle. At which point, we could have an excellent meeting of the minds, and begin to more forward again.
[*] I found Trump tiresome after eight minutes, because—apart from the Brooklyn bluster—he's entirely unlike Richard Feynman. Feynman could not go ten minutes without explaining something deep; Trump can't go ten minutes without anti-explaining something into a deep ravine. If it takes eight years for the other side to catch up, it's the least of many evils for me to simply sit here and wait.
My newfound patience in old age comes from the recognition that the counterfactuals are rarely as bright and shiny as what one wishes to suppose. Stark counterfactuals about a Hilary administration running America into the ground are full of shit, too. With Hilary we would have had more of the old problems, and fewer of the new problems; with Trump, we've got more of the new problems, and fewer of the old problems. Hilary is just as difficult to listen to as Trump, but she's easier to turn off. She was highly unlikely to blindside her own security forces by unilaterally discontinuing military readiness on the Korean peninsula. (Given equally repellent, it's harder to look away when an egocentric pyromaniac gets his hands on a blowtorch.) Outside of that, the difference between the two is fairly marginal for me on a day to day basis. Trump has done many stupid things, but Hilary would surely have done many stupid things, too.
So what's the counterfactual? What superior reality would exist if trillion dollar corporations could be convinced not to invest in industry-funded lobby groups?
Who would you rather have instead? Bill Gates? Larry Elision? Mark Zuckerberg? Jeff Bezos? Anyone at all from the entire Uber universe? Elizabeth Holmes? The bipolar snarky–saintly Steve Jobs?
On the other hand, if you've got a viable game plan for displacing cynical industry lobby groups altogether, everyone and their dog in a thousand mile radius is sitting on the edge of their seat, awaiting your next word like you had just discovered a more fantastic way to procreate, and you were about to spill the beans entirely out of the goodness of your own heart, with not even the slightest possible vestige of a business plan or a Ticket Master toll booth.
Suffer the children, for these shall become tomorrow's consumers of news for nerds. (Oh, really?)
———
I have one beef with energy-efficient lighting. The recessed sockets for the central lighting in my kitchen do a great job of preventing the glare of the bulb from meeting me at eye level.
But only the old-fashioned incandescent floods.
All the replacement LED floods I've examined place the bright, light-emitting substrate further up (down) the neck of the bulb, so I actually do catch the dazzle-inducing "filament" in my peripheral vision during normal kitchen activities.
Brightness is not the sole figure of merit. Contrast is also a figure of merit. Brightness is maximized when you look straight into the bulb. Contrast ratio, however, tends to suffer when the bulb is (mostly) in between you and subject matter of interest.
I've never seen specialty bulb packaging in my life that gives the viewing angle to the dazzle-point ever in my life. There's no way to find out without buying one, screwing it a socket, and turning it on. I did this quite a bit back when I had many other sockets to fill, so all my failures had somewhere good to go after the experiment failed. But now my entire house is LED, except for the recessed bulbs in the kitchen (three times 60 watts) which now contain the very last of my old-fashioned incandescents.
[*] Actually, I lied: we still have a halogen pea-bulb circuit under the kitchen cabinets along two walls which produce an excellent light for actual cooking (it's the last circuit we turn on when just passing through).
For many people, these LED floods are "the same" as the old incandescents, minus the heat, the expense, and prehistoric "warm" colouration. For these to be "the same" in my kitchen, I'd have to sink three pots at least another inch deeper (while perhaps raising the floor in the room above by a compensatory distance).
Hmm. It might be more environmentally sound for me to simply continue using incandescent floods on this one kitchen circuit for the time being.
(We're on electric heating, in a marine climate, where we manage to keep the kitchen around 63 degrees F for most of the winter without ever turning up the kitchen thermostat. On especially cold days I bake bread or reduce onions. A little bit of incandescent heat in the kitchen is no skin off my energy-budget nose for at least half the year.)
I've been reading about VR for years, and this is the first time I've ever read anything that cut to the chase. Awesome! Now I can die happy, in my own bed, surrounded by ordinary walls, covered with drab wallpaper.
For some reason the usual sluggishness I experience after my melatonin therapy sometimes boils over into something bordering on narcolepsy.
Normally we talk about "falling" asleep. These nearly obligatory naps would be better described as unconsciousness welling up from below. It's almost as if my brain is busy going to sleep, without noticing the lights are still on, upstairs. Then when I finally lie down, I fall into a sleep that is entirely bereft of the "rested" feeling one normally experiences on waking up again. Sometimes I feel refreshed on some level, but never the actual rested feeling.
I keep mental sleep notes at all time as part of managing my condition.
I've long known that I have any number of semi-waking states, with varying degrees of awareness of my surroundings. I had a weird one recently where I lost all conception of time, but some other things were still held in consciousness. I couldn't, for a while, have told you if I had been (partly) asleep for ten minutes or two hours.
Rarely I experience a condition where both the waking and dreaming worlds are available to semi-consciousness at the same time. Sometimes one even tries to comment on the other, but this never goes well.
The only thing I've read about this in the literature is an observation that partial microsleeps have been observed in brains that are sleep deprived (or merely just sleep phase deprived of one normal phase). People with disrupted sleep architectures (like I sometimes experience) can feel like you're sleeping eight hours per night, but still wind up with peculiar sleep debts.
I tried modafinil for a year at one point, mostly on low dosages. I was somewhat enjoyable at first, but I quickly acclimated, and the enjoyable part of the buzz became very minor. It always inhibited my ability to add a pair of two-digit numbers in my head. Usually I just know the rough magnitude of the result automatically; this signal vanished. Without this signal, it was almost as if I didn't know where to start the addition process. Trying to deal with numbers on modafinil just made me feel stoned, but I didn't feel stoned otherwise. Combining with caffeine (5-ounce doses of coffee) intensified many of the effects (until my responsiveness to that wore off, too).
The problem with modafinil is that it masks the difficulty of coping with tiredness, but does not ultimately compensate for the deficit. And it tended to shorten my sleep at night by about an hour, if I took a small dose in the morning, which for me proved counterproductive. I did manage to get something working a bit where I took modafinil one morning, then nortriptyline the next evening, and alternated like that. NT deepens sleep (at least it does for me), especially toward the end of my sleep interval. I didn't like the carry-over, so I eventually had 4 mg pills custom compounded, and these still help my sleep enough, with hardly any lingering fatigue the next morning. (NT is one of two metabolites from amitriptyline, which is commonly used to treat symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, which could well prove to be sleep related at the end of the day; I figure one metabolite is better than two, and I discovered that NT does the trick for me just fine.) With the alternation program, I get one short night, followed by one longer night. On the modafinil day, I have fewer problems with fatigue from the melatonin therapy. But there were other problems, and it shuts down part of my math ability.
Anyway, in mucking around with all of this, I got myself into some pretty weird states. At one point, I was having full blown hypnagogic hallucinations while 100% awake. This was when I tried to use modafinil to stay on day mode when my body had decided I should be on night mode. I was getting enough sleep, measured by hours unconscious, but it clearly wasn't fully restorative sleep. It only took about a week of this protocol for the hypnagogic hallucinations to gain a serious toe hold within my waking cognition. It only took one glorious s
Ridiculous. You have to budget before data collection. But this approach could be valid, I suppose, anywhere money grows on trees.
George: Well, I wrote an entire book about scalpels—scalpels taken to the human soul. And then Gilliam came along and made my book's metaphor physical, too, so nyah-nyah.
Coco: Oh come on, George, I have seventeen patents on alpha hydroxyl acid. And you can guess the rest ... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it truly behooves the beheld to take matters into her own sweet little hands.
[A blood-curdling scream cuts the conversation short.]
George: By George, what was that?
Coco: Oh, didn't you see? The Cable Guy ... he staggered into the men's room with a dermatological razor blade the size of Crocodile Dundee's—
George: —don't say it, my darling, I can indeed guess the rest.
You just need a system to credit the person called by ten cents for every call received from the originating party (whether answered, or not).
Even better if each phone owner can establish his or her own price. I'd probably set mine my inbound threshold at 25 cents to see how that goes, initially.
Mostly these small tithes would just slosh back and forth and be largely a wash for many people.
But somehow you need to make sure that your phone company doesn't install a tollbooth and then take a bite of 50% or more on every transaction (which they will surely justify as as a necessary economic response to the lower call volumes).
One man's inevitable calamity is another man's droolworthy challenge.
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Because purity is pure, with nary a visible means of support.
Which begs the question: What was God's bag?
Surely he wasn't into creation for the greater good or the love of humanity, at least not judging by how many of us he's already turned into pillars of salt.
You're not managing to cast a stellar ray of sunshine here in advancing this argument.
One could just as easily divide humanity into A) those who live to work, and B) those who work to live.
For the second group, job hunting is a time-consuming, stressful, largely uncompensated PITA, where the prize for winning is A) huge amount of personal upheaval, B) even longer hours in the office every week to justify this nice, fat pay increment. The prize for losing is the enjoyable experience of dressing up to be on your best behaviour to endure the slings and arrows of ridiculous HR screening procedures—not one minute of which pays a dime, though if you're lucky, you might score a free mug or two of decent single-origin coffee (but don't hold your breath, it could just as easily be a low-elevation Indonesian coffee roasted by Starbucks to a witness-protection-program muddy hue from the soil-to-oil colour Pantone).
Completely failing to notice how the contentment signal conflates with the competence signal is not a feather in your cap on the competence side of the fence—present-company-implicitly included, no doubt—in this tired narrative of yore.
Say you have this person on your staff with a proven track record of building positive customer rapport. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and consequently, he tends not to leave cut marks on your customers due to having a cheese-grater genius aura. Your company is small and closely held, and growing nicely. Bob is well compensated within his line or work, because he's a proven quality, with demonstrated loyalty to the cause; consequently, he wouldn't be better paid anywhere else.
But then your company is acquired by Big Fish, which consults the Oracle of Delphi, and determines that it now has enough Clout to treat the customer's good will as a liability rather than an asset.
Is Bad Customer Service More Profitable Than Good? — March 2019
Bon voyage, Bob. You're no longer exactly the right person in exactly the right job with no reason but fear—fear of the inevitable corruption of a good thing—to hump around in his best suit drinking random mugs of coffee as procured by the HR unwashed.
No, of course not, none of this narrative is about fit to circumstance, or personal values, or corporate-value weather vanes; no, it's all a tidy little narrative about how the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers, and how the meek shall not inherit the earth, because their thin little arms are wrapped in panic around their thin little gig.
At my tech-heavy uni, we always used to laugh at the dumbed-down math options in the non-STEM faculties.
Race and ethnicity in the United States
Sadly, the modern Grievance Studies dept.—now on a campus near you—stockpiles the dumbest bricks of all.
Everything about that statement is wrong.
We don't factor primes, we factor prime products. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to identify primes, or we couldn't come up with the two large primes to multiply together in the first place.
We can also test that the product isn't prime with good efficiency.
What we can't do is efficiently identify which primes were multiplied together in the first place, not even knowing a priori that there are exactly two prime factors, and that they are roughly comparable in magnitude (with a similar number of digits—not that this hint helps much at all).
You can't seriously be suggesting that young bucks with their tongues hanging out of their wallets are the less lucrative constituency of their user base.
That's why I keep notes: to inform my future purchasing decisions.
From my notes today:
Vizio Settles With FTC, Will Pay $2.2 Million and Delete User Data — 6 February 2017
Gotta move a lot of glass to pay a $2 million fine on 6% margins.
No wait—it's only the margins on the televisions that are a thin 6%. Other parts of the business are total payola.
Funny that I've not yet heard about the CC-as-foreseen license, which apparently billions of people have been using, in earnest, all along.
I reengaged with Twitter for about a month not long ago, a decade after emitting my first tentative Tweet, and for a few days I didn't entirely hate the experience.
At first I started small, but then I threw caution to the wind, and began following people from both the technological and the political side of the spectrum. Within two days of having technology and politics randomly jumbled into my feed, I had mothballed my Twitter account for another decade.
I can be highly asynchronous in my mental appetites, but that brief fly-by of the ultimate conflation nearly killed me. I guess Twitter doesn't want to let me sort or partition my feed, because then some portion of it wouldn't be urgently fresh, and a week later—on a designated day of the week, perhaps—I might rudely bump some stale political threads that are hours cold.
There is no solution that I can foresee to social media's inherent velocity problem.
What fires together, wires together.
Unless you want to turn your brain into a transporter-accident molten howl, the velocity-vortex tuna melt is best avoided.
[*] Apparently there are some on again, off again add-ons to accomplish this in various browser environments, but I simply can't summon up the curatorial mojo to engage with this hapless cause.
[**] GenX really should be called the Now generation. Like Woodstockers later in life, with the wisdom of years they'll recall their chosen mind-altering drug with hazy recollections of glam happening nostalgia and visceral shudders of inward disgust.
When a Good Idea for a Podcast is a Bad Idea for a Podcast — 2017
17:05 "What's going on? I was trying to learn."
20:00 "The ocean ... felt like a giant church ... in the absence of extraneous influences. It was strangely magical."
22:00 The quietest day on the East Coast that anyone had heard in fifty years.
You're completely nuts.
Dragon did okay back in the day if you bought exactly the right condenser microphone, positioned it exactly right on your headband (about 2" away from your lips just off to the side of your mouth), trained it properly in exactly that configuration, and you used it in quiet environment with no dogs barking, slamming doors down the hall, traffic noises through the open window, etc. Also, it was good to avoid getting allergies or coming down with a cold, to start/stop smoking unless you wanted to train your model again with your "new" voice.
It's the same deal with squash rackets. The original graphite rackets from the early 1980s had a powerful sweet spot, but it wasn't very big. They also shattered every tenth time you scuffed the wall hard by accident. Then they started to monkey with the head shape, and the sweet spot expanded to the size of a cantaloupe. The graphite eventually became less brittle, too.
But that old sweet spot the size of a mandarin orange sure was just as good as the modern shit today.
You just know this isn't go to take the world by storm (for some as yet undisclosed reason) when the first press release you encounter is blathering on about silencing MRI machines for the benefit of people who are allergic to synthetic earplugs, and who can't, unfortunately, use the ones made out of solid steel, either, because of the intense magnetic fields.
Marketing person grappling with harsh reality: Gee, the HVAC people have all the volume, whereas the MRI people have all the money.
Probable end result: this fancy new technology gets installed in the HVAC system connected to the MRI room, so that no-one else in the hospital needs to listen to it hum 24/7.
Fundamental law of marketing: those who open their wallets on a lark have no money to spend, those who have money to spend open their wallets with great reluctance. Thus the sweet spot in the early going tends to be small.
Foursquare is now working behind-the-scenes with Asia's biggest social networks — June 2017
This brain damage appears to concern fairly recent models. I'm about six generations further behind, so my mandatory security practice is to enable my data modem less than once a month, and to enable my Wi-Fi modem almost as rarely.
Two birds with one stone.
One man's "strain" is another man's comfortable margin.
It's hardly ever the supply that's strained. The "strained" are almost always the smallest fish in the pond, with the least secure contractual futures and demand leverage. Apple is not going one measly CPU short of their ultimate desire, I guarantee it.
What this story really means is that HP tooled up to sell a higher volume at a lower price point, and now at the last minute, they need to revamp their channel strategy for lower volumes at higher price points. Since this isn't a sexy category any longer, they probably don't enjoy a lot of pricing power, so they'd probably rather have the former scenario than the later scenario.
At the end of the day, some consumers balanced on the marginal knife-edge will continue to run their old junk for six months longer than they might have otherwise. Then their next purchase begins to age out six months later than it might have but for the supply headwind.
A few HP salespeople on the personal-bonus knife edge are lathering up a storm. Few other parties to the system feel any great strain at all. Even Intel's manufacturing arm probably turned the tiller months ago, and now just have to sit back and let this run itself out.
"Hey, Intel facilities guy, couldn't you just commission that fancy stepper line a month sooner? We know this is delicate work that potentially affects yield for years to come, but We Need It Now."
Hard, cold stare in return.
Basically, that hard-pressed HP sales guy who is $5000 short of making his next commission rung can go jump into a cold lake.
This morning sonic waves had mass, this afternoon scandals have mass.
Confusing world.