I've worked out (running and rowing on an ergometer) with a Sony Walkman for five or six years, and this past April I got tired of buying AA's and making new tapes all the time, and switched to a 10 gig iPod.
The iPod is light enough that I just carry it in my left hand while running, though I have a high tolerance for lugging around a five ounce object for an eight or ten mile run, due to years of doing the same with a heavier, larger Walkman.
The only complaint I have is that the iPod crashes if I frequently skip songs while running. So you either have to stop briefly before skipping a track, or ensure there aren't any clunkers in your workout mix you feel you must fast-forward through.
No problems with sweat or rain screwing up the player, despite daily use.
The book by Papert that you are thinking of is called "Mindstorms."
This sort of thing is very interesting to me. I'm actually working under a grant at the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach at Tufts University to integrate programming and discrete math into the 6-8 grade curriculum at a local school district.
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
Not quite...
What would happen is that to certain observers (including ones at the signal destination) the signal would arrive before the light from the source would. Therefore, so someone looking at the sender with a powerful telescope, you would have the message arrive, and then later see the sender do the sending.
This causes problems with causality, since there is a principle that states that a POV from one reference frame, including the receiver's in which effect seemed to precede cause, is a wholly valid one. Causality is not a law that can be proven from a set of axioms, it is a law in the same sense that there is a Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy or of Uncertainty. It is just a fact about our universe that doesn't ever seem to be contradicted, either in actual or in thought experiment.
I'm not certain whether your error is in your initial estimates, in nomenclature (the British call 1 followed by 12 zeroes a billion, while Americans give that name to 1 followed by 9 zeroes, for example), or in calculation. But... $600M + $300M = $900M which is ~1000x less than your sum of $1 trillion.
I've worked out (running and rowing on an ergometer) with a Sony Walkman for five or six years, and this past April I got tired of buying AA's and making new tapes all the time, and switched to a 10 gig iPod.
The iPod is light enough that I just carry it in my left hand while running, though I have a high tolerance for lugging around a five ounce object for an eight or ten mile run, due to years of doing the same with a heavier, larger Walkman.
The only complaint I have is that the iPod crashes if I frequently skip songs while running. So you either have to stop briefly before skipping a track, or ensure there aren't any clunkers in your workout mix you feel you must fast-forward through.
No problems with sweat or rain screwing up the player, despite daily use.
I'm a cucumber, I'm a cucumber, I'm a cucumber, I'm a cucumber.
I'm a cucumber, I'm a cucumber, please don't take me to the pickle farm!
The book by Papert that you are thinking of is called "Mindstorms."
This sort of thing is very interesting to me. I'm actually working under a grant at the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach at Tufts University to integrate programming and discrete math into the 6-8 grade curriculum at a local school district.
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
Not quite...
What would happen is that to certain observers (including ones at the signal destination) the signal would arrive before the light from the source would. Therefore, so someone looking at the sender with a powerful telescope, you would have the message arrive, and then later see the sender do the sending.
This causes problems with causality, since there is a principle that states that a POV from one reference frame, including the receiver's in which effect seemed to precede cause, is a wholly valid one. Causality is not a law that can be proven from a set of axioms, it is a law in the same sense that there is a Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy or of Uncertainty. It is just a fact about our universe that doesn't ever seem to be contradicted, either in actual or in thought experiment.
I'm not certain whether your error is in your initial estimates, in nomenclature (the British call 1 followed by 12 zeroes a billion, while Americans give that name to 1 followed by 9 zeroes, for example), or in calculation. But... $600M + $300M = $900M which is ~1000x less than your sum of $1 trillion.