...bingo because 90% of the population of Britain over 65 seems to play that and they have the intellectual capacity of a turnip. Old people in Britain are very depressing. They seem to be trained, from birth, to believe that they will be incapable by time they retire and when the time comes to retire they are capable of nothing. One of the things that amazed me when I came to the US was the zest for life of older people. Jogging along the roads, working out at the gym, hiking the trails, doing tai chi, travelling round the world, having fun eating out at restaurants, at the movies, whatever. It's fantastic if video games can keep people motivated to do something with their lives and keep stretching those neurons and I hope it catches on in Britain.
Every time you see a production of Shakespeare it's a 'remake' yet nobody complains about that. The problem is not remakes but (1) remaking stuff that was awful first time around and (2) making it even more awful the next time around.
Not me! I think flavored high fructose corn-syrup drinks tatse horrible.
Look, these health nuts have a serious logic problem. The problem with diets today is the diet itself, not the individual things that go into it. Foods in the US are pumped full of sugar (even things like bread which in Europe are typically unsweetened (or they were a few years ago)). Small wonder Americans are so obese. But it's a mistake to say that sugar itself is bad. The problem is the bad diet. It's like saying that water is harmful because of what happened in New Orleans last year.
CNET: Cool, eh? Just how cool?
Apple: Really cool!
CNET: Are you sure?
Apple: Well, maybe not really, really cool, but still quite cool.
CNET: Just 'quite' cool you say?
Apple: Not just quite cool - pretty cool.
CNET: 'Pretty' cool? Nah! We're not interested. Who wants to report stories about stuff that's just pretty cool? We're CNET. We only report the coolest of the cool dude!
Apple: OK, OK. They're actually really cool.
CNET: Great, we'll be there for the announcement.
3 hours later...
CNET: Hey! You lied! You said that stuff was really cool but it was just pretty cool. We wasted expensive web site space on 'pretty cool'! What kind of lame ass web site do you take us for?
Apple: Um...well...we tried to tell you...
They don't 'supposedly' have 666, they do - almost. The three 'guard' bars, the long vertical pairs of thin lines that occur at the beginning middle and end are similar to the way 6 is represented on the right right of the two panels of the bar code - two thin vertical lines. I'm not sure how this happened, I'm inclined to think that it was a joke on the part of the inventor.
That was probably a reference to algebra, not numerals. Algebra is derived from al-Jabr which is from the name of a book on equation solving.
But...this wasn't symbolic manipulation. The Arab method, though similar to some of what we might today recognise as algebra, was written out in full as words. It was good enough to solve the quadratic (though the Indians had already done that) and it was Europeans who made the smart move of replacing those words with symbols and then were able to go on and solve the cubic and quartic.
It' wrong to say that science cannot make claims about past events
I never said any such thing. But I don't think we can make accurate claims about a specific event that happened a few billion years ago - even with the wealth of genetic evidence we have today. The genomes we see today are like a palimpsest - they're been edited again and again through evolution. There's no reason to believe that there is any readable sign of the first cellular or multicellular organisms. Of course we can accurately order today's species into phyla using a variety of methods. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about an event in our deep past that will probably always be beyond reach.
In a sense what's going on here is history, not science. We're not looking at generalisations, like physical laws, that can be repeated in a lab, but an event that happened once in our ancient history. It seems to me that it's a little futile to speculate on how cellular and multicellular life first appeared because the evidence was lost long ago.
Towards the end of the 19th century the main French and British linguistic societies banned any further papers on the origins of langiage because unprovable speculation was so rife. I can't help feeling we need the same thing here.
Firstly, "overhype" is a strangely tautological word. Surely the word needed is "hype".
And secondly, what hype? I don't remember seeing ads everywhere advertising these new products. I surf tech web sites. I read news on Slashdot. I heard a rumour that Apple were going to make an announcement and was curious - but that's it. But I don't remember any hype coming from Apple.
But it makes some people sick. The point is, you can't deduce that it's generally harmful simply by pointing out some examples of people who suffered ill effects from it.
Granulated sugar is bad, it's already processed
What does its being processed have to do with anything? Are you saying it's processed with chemical process that might leave a poisonous residue? Almost all foods are 'processed'. Cooking is processing.
it has health effects to the point where any truly healthy conscious person will tell you straight up to try to cut it out of your diet as much as possible.
It's not that sugar is intrinsically bad. It's that large amounts of sugar are bad when consumed without care to ensure an overall balance of diet. The same goes for just about any component of diet.
And even if there were something harmful about granulated sugar, these effects are irrelevant when considering the effects of sweetener. You're trying to use 'guilt by association' to make sweeteners seem worse than they are.
Most people don't need an SUV. But plenty of people buy them. Most people don't need luxury cars. But there are plenty of luxury cars on the road. Most people don't need a supercomputer at home, and yet plenty of homes have >2GHz Pcs with >1GB of ram. Most people don't need hundreds of channels of entertainment, and yet they pay for digital cable.
I know it does more than they say it does. Hell my mom used to get migraines from drinking it, stopped drinking it, migraines gone.
And I know people who get horribly sick from eating wheat products. Does that mean wheat is dangerous? Generalising from a sample size of one is far more dangerous that drinking diet soda.
No. You are horribly mistaken. I can only assume you arrived at this conclusion through some grotesque misunderstanding on your part.
Just reading the Bible which is full of examples of people being smitten down by Yahweh.
He concerns himself with Egyptian Pharaos, towers and powers in Asia, infidels in Nineveh,
Egypt, Middle Eastern Asia. As I said, parochial.
The crew complains that while other gods are very much regional in nature, and do not act outside of their limited geographic domains
No they don't. You need to read the actual text, not some commentary. BTW It's a truly horrible story. If a terrorist group were to hold an entire city hostage with the threat of destroying it if the inhabitants didn't convert most people would call that reprehensible. I've no idea why Christians and Jews find such behaviour acceptable in the deity they worship.
So you're saying that the guys who full steamed ahead into the World Trade Center were doing God's work because those towers were built for the glory of man?
where God strikes down King Herod after the masses exclaim that the king looks like a god, and Herod does not disabuse them of this notion but rather basks in their undue adoration.
The Creator of the Entire UNIVERSE gets all hot under the collar because some human in the Middle East 2,000 years ago looks like him. Does the word "parochial" mean anything to you?
Why do you think people spend four bucks on a cup of coffee on Starbucks...
Because the Mom-and-Pop diner next door sells filter coffee coffee that tastes like battery acid, like in most of America before Starbucks arrived.
...even though only 30% of the people surveyed actually like Starbuck's coffee?
Because it's fashionable to dis Starbucks (for largely political reasons) and claim that you prefer Peet's even though you can barely detect a difference.
*hint* You can buy a better mp3 player for less money than the iPod.
Which is why I talked about the complete package, iTunes and iPod. Every other music/media management app I have ever used is at best poor by comparison. Sony released one that was so bad that some reviewers had trouble reviewing the device that it came with. You don't need to make up some Wired-article style techno-mythology to explain why Sony can't compete with Apple in this market.
The only difference between the Sony products and the Apple ones is that the Sony ones are less sexy
Did you ever look at Sony's apology for an mp3^H^H^Hatrac player? The iPod succeeded because it, and iTunes, were awesomely easy to use. People didn't have to stop for a moment to figure out how to use them. They just worked, straight out of the box. (So well that countless applications have now copied many of iTunes GUI elements.)
Apple didn't succeed because new social practices become possible. This is obvious - mp3 players were available before the iPod came along. (And anyway, half the social practices associated with iPods are mythical - like random strangers jacking into each other's iPods.)
When are people going to stop making up ever more fanciful notions about why the iPod is so popular and just look at the device and software itself? Unless you're a geek who likes to waste their day messing about with clunky hard to use software and devices it's pretty obvious why the iPod is a superior product to its competition.
ALso they forgot to mention that they're using NASA units to measure probability. According to NASA units I have a 25% chance of winning at least $100,000,000 in a lottery next year.
I'd have thought that they'd be more likely to gravitationally attract more asteroids onto the same collision course the moment NASA realises it's onto a good thing.
...nearby mini-black holes hurtling through space. You can be sure that the moment someone does we'll have to endure endless news stories about mini-black holes with a 1 in 1000 chance of eliminating all life on earth. Same goes for predicting nearby supernovae, directed gamma ray bursts, unravelling cosmic strings and any number of other potential cosmic disasters.
On the other hand, maybe we need more stories about asteroids potentially hitting the Earth. By time we've seen a few thousand people will finally catch on to the fact that these figures are bogus and we'll stop getting them.
...figures out a smart new way to improve network speeds, but it's expensive, they can't just get together with a bunch of clients who are willing to pay the extra, but instead have to simply dump the technology. This doesn't seem right to me.
But...many (if not most) patients are more likely to open up to a machine than a person. It's easier to mention those embarassing symptoms, or symptoms that seem too trivial to bother someone's time with and so on. I'm surprised that these expert systems aren't available on web sites (with disclaimers).
What happened to those expert systems that seemed so promising in the 70s and 80s? I don't believe a doctor can weigh up the range of symptoms that a patient might have, and the even bigger range of symptoms that a patient doesn't have, more reliably than a machine, in order to make an assessment of the probability of the patient having any particular disease. MYCIN is one that comes to mind but there were others. I was under the impression that they had performed better than doctors in tests.
Video game technology and Einstein's work on relativity may at first seem as unlikely a couple as Oscar and Felix.
Um...no. They both might benefit from number crunching. What's unlikely about that?
90 hours of supercomputer calculation for each second on screen.
Big deal. Go see a movie and you'll see thousands of individual frames that take days to render (adding up everything from simulation, 3D rendering and compositing).
a graphics language called Open GL
Language?
The visualization software that allows players to live and die in cyberworlds like Call of Duty 2, he said, is destined to be the future chalkboard of science.
You mean OpenGL? It was developed for scientific visualization work. Are we supposed to be amazed like this? This is like benig amazed that the Bible (in English) and Penthouse both use letters from the same alphabet. I don't see the parallel or connection that the author of this article is trying to highlight.
as computer geeks in the movie industry realize that the real cosmos as defined by Einstein's legacy is far more mind blowing than fiction.
Er...I'm one of those geeks. I started with Einstein's field equations and went on to make movies. Where does this guy think people with degrees in physics and mathematics go? They don't all do research in academia.
Hollywood, he added, "simply doesn't realize the richness of nature."
No, this guy doesn't understand the constraints of making a movie whose job is to entertain. What he fails to realize is that someone could just make up a silly light show using a tiny fraction of the CPU power and the audience would be just as entertained if told that it was a 'real' simulation of a black hole. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I did for some documentary or other way back when...
It's funny the lengths journalists will go to in order to convince people that science is interesting. In this case highlighting an unbelievably tenuous link between games and astrophysics. Maybe someone should write a story about how astrophysics and finance are linked because those presentations so beloved of managers are also likely to have components rendered using OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
...bingo because 90% of the population of Britain over 65 seems to play that and they have the intellectual capacity of a turnip. Old people in Britain are very depressing. They seem to be trained, from birth, to believe that they will be incapable by time they retire and when the time comes to retire they are capable of nothing. One of the things that amazed me when I came to the US was the zest for life of older people. Jogging along the roads, working out at the gym, hiking the trails, doing tai chi, travelling round the world, having fun eating out at restaurants, at the movies, whatever. It's fantastic if video games can keep people motivated to do something with their lives and keep stretching those neurons and I hope it catches on in Britain.
Every time you see a production of Shakespeare it's a 'remake' yet nobody complains about that. The problem is not remakes but (1) remaking stuff that was awful first time around and (2) making it even more awful the next time around.
Look, these health nuts have a serious logic problem. The problem with diets today is the diet itself, not the individual things that go into it. Foods in the US are pumped full of sugar (even things like bread which in Europe are typically unsweetened (or they were a few years ago)). Small wonder Americans are so obese. But it's a mistake to say that sugar itself is bad. The problem is the bad diet. It's like saying that water is harmful because of what happened in New Orleans last year.
Apple: Really cool!
CNET: Are you sure?
Apple: Well, maybe not really, really cool, but still quite cool.
CNET: Just 'quite' cool you say?
Apple: Not just quite cool - pretty cool.
CNET: 'Pretty' cool? Nah! We're not interested. Who wants to report stories about stuff that's just pretty cool? We're CNET. We only report the coolest of the cool dude!
Apple: OK, OK. They're actually really cool.
CNET: Great, we'll be there for the announcement.
3 hours later...
CNET: Hey! You lied! You said that stuff was really cool but it was just pretty cool. We wasted expensive web site space on 'pretty cool'! What kind of lame ass web site do you take us for?
Apple: Um...well...we tried to tell you...
They don't 'supposedly' have 666, they do - almost. The three 'guard' bars, the long vertical pairs of thin lines that occur at the beginning middle and end are similar to the way 6 is represented on the right right of the two panels of the bar code - two thin vertical lines. I'm not sure how this happened, I'm inclined to think that it was a joke on the part of the inventor.
That was probably a reference to algebra, not numerals. Algebra is derived from al-Jabr which is from the name of a book on equation solving.
But...this wasn't symbolic manipulation. The Arab method, though similar to some of what we might today recognise as algebra, was written out in full as words. It was good enough to solve the quadratic (though the Indians had already done that) and it was Europeans who made the smart move of replacing those words with symbols and then were able to go on and solve the cubic and quartic.
Well it allowed linguists in France and Britain, at the end of the 19th century, to get more linguistics done, wasting less time on idle speculation.
Towards the end of the 19th century the main French and British linguistic societies banned any further papers on the origins of langiage because unprovable speculation was so rife. I can't help feeling we need the same thing here.
And secondly, what hype? I don't remember seeing ads everywhere advertising these new products. I surf tech web sites. I read news on Slashdot. I heard a rumour that Apple were going to make an announcement and was curious - but that's it. But I don't remember any hype coming from Apple.
And even if there were something harmful about granulated sugar, these effects are irrelevant when considering the effects of sweetener. You're trying to use 'guilt by association' to make sweeteners seem worse than they are.
What does "most people" have to do with anything?
Apple didn't succeed because new social practices become possible. This is obvious - mp3 players were available before the iPod came along. (And anyway, half the social practices associated with iPods are mythical - like random strangers jacking into each other's iPods.)
When are people going to stop making up ever more fanciful notions about why the iPod is so popular and just look at the device and software itself? Unless you're a geek who likes to waste their day messing about with clunky hard to use software and devices it's pretty obvious why the iPod is a superior product to its competition.
ALso they forgot to mention that they're using NASA units to measure probability. According to NASA units I have a 25% chance of winning at least $100,000,000 in a lottery next year.
I'd have thought that they'd be more likely to gravitationally attract more asteroids onto the same collision course the moment NASA realises it's onto a good thing.
On the other hand, maybe we need more stories about asteroids potentially hitting the Earth. By time we've seen a few thousand people will finally catch on to the fact that these figures are bogus and we'll stop getting them.
...figures out a smart new way to improve network speeds, but it's expensive, they can't just get together with a bunch of clients who are willing to pay the extra, but instead have to simply dump the technology. This doesn't seem right to me.
But...many (if not most) patients are more likely to open up to a machine than a person. It's easier to mention those embarassing symptoms, or symptoms that seem too trivial to bother someone's time with and so on. I'm surprised that these expert systems aren't available on web sites (with disclaimers).
What happened to those expert systems that seemed so promising in the 70s and 80s? I don't believe a doctor can weigh up the range of symptoms that a patient might have, and the even bigger range of symptoms that a patient doesn't have, more reliably than a machine, in order to make an assessment of the probability of the patient having any particular disease. MYCIN is one that comes to mind but there were others. I was under the impression that they had performed better than doctors in tests.
It's funny the lengths journalists will go to in order to convince people that science is interesting. In this case highlighting an unbelievably tenuous link between games and astrophysics. Maybe someone should write a story about how astrophysics and finance are linked because those presentations so beloved of managers are also likely to have components rendered using OpenGL.