I think that the proposed "rainbow gravity" (http://phys.org/news/2015-01-black-holes-space-theory.html) and the big bang theory are mutually exclusive
I also own a G27 and won't be "upgrading" to that G920. If I was going to spend that money I'd be looking at getting something that offers more than the G27 does, and quite honestly my first upgrade would be the pedals -- specifically the brake pedal, first -- rather than the wheel itself (although I might upgrade the G27 brake pedal using a Perfect Pedal or maybe a load cell or something I hack together myself)
See my comment below regarding force feedback. There is no practical way to make the base heavy enough to work without clamps due to the force feedback. Possibly you could strap some lead weights to it, but that would be quite a bit more bothersome than some quick release clamps on your desk.
I don't own this peculiar item, but all the Logitech gaming gear I've used (mostly WingMan joysticks) have a rather heavy-ish metal base, to keep it stable.
And all the steering wheels I've seen have special attachment to clamp/screw them on the table.
Are you forgetting about the force feedback? Without clamping the wheel to your desk the wheel is going to jump around like a piece of cooking popcorn and that's before you even get to the first corner. To turn the wheel overcoming the force feedback generated by the turn wouldn't really be possible unless the base weighed 100kg (ok, maybe not that much but it'd have to be a darn heavy base). I suppose it might be possible with force feedback turned off but then what's the point?
Intelligent Design has failed once, and so has Evolution. Of course it won't happen again. The principal who said that may be the only sane person in the universe. We all know that both ID and Evolution are flawed and only theories; they're not law. The obvious and only correct answer is that it (it? what is it?) is a combination of both theories. And I can assure you that this will not happen again -- it was a disaster.
I guess my last post was a but abrupt but it does summarise my view of the modern world pretty well. We've, in my opinion, moved into an era where knowledge and research that has no practical application equates to something that's not worth all that much. Capitalism seems to be the dominant (economic) system that drives modern research and I hate it. If there is no concrete monetary profit from a venture then good luck pursuing an avenue of research that does not yield a "return on investment".
As an example, at the job before my last job my role was to study plants, the environment and ecology, and write plans that would direct on-ground works to achieve restoration of degraded ecosystems. At first it seemed like a dream role. After a while I discovered that the accountants classified me as a "non-earner"; i.e. my work did not directly earn income for the company (for the most part -- I did consultancy work that did, but that was pretty minor compared to my overall workload). Therefore every time pay grades and, hey I would have appreciated this even more, thanks and acknowledgement I was always at the bottom rung of the ladder despite my work guiding the on-ground teams who implemented the works, corrective interventions, etc. that I developed. They were classified by the accounting department as "money earners" whilst I remained a "non earner" and therefore of less value to the company. In the end I acknowledged that they were stupid and resigned.
Guess what. The next company, which I only left a month or so ago, had a similar system! I was told that as a researcher I did not directly earn money for the company and therefore I could not expect to get paid as much. I was also told that because I didn't directly control a team of people (only indirectly through my plans and development of project goals) that I was worth less. They didn't use those words but that's what it boiled down to. So I left that train wreck of a company as well. But, to my dismay, every single job I've applied or interviewed for since then has the same attitude! "How can you directly earn us money". They (the managers or whoever) cannot see indirect value.
I guess what I am trying to say is that science or research without direct fiscal benefits is not, in my experience, that the modern world wants to pay for (well, maybe in academia but they don't pay that well either and you'd be constantly seeking grants that nobody wants to provide or sponsor).
Archaeology must be even worse... in their case there is probably not even a hope of gaining a return on investment (fiscally). It's a shame that knowledge for knowledge's sake apparently means so little to so many these days. But, that's the society we've chosen I guess.
The way these viruses are mutating, sharing RNA (code), and recombining to form new strains is ridiculous. My main concern is that my computer is in close contact with Windows, OSX and also Linux. Even if I was just dual booting Windows and Linux it would be bad enough. Dual booting with the obvious genetic soup it forms between the two different operating systems is a recipe for disaster. Such close contact between operating systems and a virus that mutates to form new strains, frankly, makes me quite uneasy. Because the operating systems run on the same underlying hardware, sharing the same genetics (opcodes) means that the likelihood of the virus crossing species (OS's) is pretty damn likely. We could seriously have an uncontrollable pandemic on our hands withing weeks unless the governments of the world (and their health organisations) proactively get together and tighten air traffic so that laptops and other computers come into contact. Without cooperation I fear that we face a pandemic that will make SARS look like a baby chicken (after it comes out of the egg all nice and fluffy).
Follow up. So why don't some of you folk follow Bruce's pretty good advice:
a) A personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate b) [You] may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale
The summary appears to totally misrepresent what Bruce actually wrote about.
(SUMMARY) Last week, I wrote an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and how its attitude towards other projects might be part of its problem. "No one wants to see OpenOffice humiliated,"... Why, for example, would I possibly [sic] to see OpenOffice humiliated?
Why indeed? Bruce never said he would want to see OpenOffice humiliated. He followed with:
(BRUCE) I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
So, he has a preference, personal ideals (or ethics, or something else, I don't know). So what? The thing is he prefers LibreOffice. Big deal; that's his right.
(SUMMARY) The same is true of other famous feuds. Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
*gasp*. He has a preference! This cannot be tolerated! The real information:
(BRUCE) To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
(SUMMARY> Similarly, because I value Debian's stability and efforts at democracy, am I supposed to have a strong distaste for Ubuntu?"
I don't know. I wonder what Bruce thinks. Hey! He answers the almost rhetorical question in his fucking article!
To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
The summary (and therefore the story as appearing here on/.) is flamebait. The summary picks and chooses quotes from the article and presents them out of context. There is no story here. The article is actually good and non-biased. Pity the same cannot be said about slashdot.
Related to the above, I'm not even 100% sure if Torvalds' mantra of "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" is the best course of action. If userspace needs breaking, then break it and bump the major version number, otherwise things could potentially end up as horrible as MS operating systems and their attempt at preserving that over time.
I'm not really sure because I don't know if Linux adheres to Semantic Versioning or not (previous bumps in the major version number might suggest not). Semantic versioning doesn't work for every project but I am pretty sure that (if Linux used semantic versioning) that the next release would not introduce any incompatible changes to the API/ABI.
Serves me right for reading only the summary before commenting. I knew/. summaries were bad but this is just dumb. The article does not say that the algorithm "Curiously, ignores personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on" at all and nor does the paper synopsis. This study says nothing about "beauty" at all... it's basically a study about photographic or artistic composition and what compositions are pleasing to the eye.
[...] then allowed the algorithm to "learn" the difference by taking into account personal factors such as the age, sex and race of the subject as well as technical factors such as the sharpness of the image, the exposure and the contrast between the face and the background and so on
Curiously, the algorithm does this by ignoring personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on and instead focuses only on technical details such as sharpness, exposure and contrast.
From Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only 3 years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults... This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness... Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives. Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things.
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts.
School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen preadolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characte
When I am laying on my death bed and someone says "you did all these useless things -- you could have directed your talent towards really useful stuff and made lots of money", I will honestly be able to say "They were not useless; they made me happy. And that is what gave my life meaning."
Obviously a talented individual, think of that useful software could have been written with the same amount of time and effort.
I've been asked this question all my life.
When I decided I'd like to fly to the moon everyone asked why. "You could have spent your time and effort making a ship to fly to Australia," they said.
The time that I decided I'd like to write a series of novels that spanned generations of characters and several hundred years they said asked why as well. "Your time is better spent writing non-fiction and and historic account of something that really happened."
I remember one time when I decided to ride my bike to the other side of town. My grandfather said "Why? The bus is faster and you'll be less tired."
Sometimes I take a break from work. My co-workers ask me why when work is so rewarding anyway.
The other day I spent a crazy amount of money buying ingredients to make a very tasty meal (well, I thought it was). I was asked why. It provided my body the same energy as something I could have made using much cheaper ingredients.
Related to the above item, many of my friends ask me why I cook my own meals at all. If you look hard enough you can get someone else to cook something kind of similar for about the same cost.
I once decided to make my own analogue clock. I made all the gears and built it from scratch. Took ages. Cost a lot more than an analogue clock I could have purchased (and certainly a lot more than a digital clock).
Sometimes I do crosswords or solve other puzzles.
Even more occasionally I listen to music.
I go bushwalking (I am not sure of the American term -- walking in National Parks along trails?) and camping.
I could go on forever and for ever.
I don't need to do any of these things. I enjoy doing these things. I want to do these things. Most of them serve no practical purpose at all, apart from making me happy. That's not entirely true, though. If I set myself a goal that has no practical or useful purpose and achieve it I do get a reward. I even get a reward if I fail.
There is no purpose to life apart from being happy (IMO). And if doing something meaningless makes you happy then... then, well it's not meaningless is it?
I imagine this sort of identification software would just output a list of possible identifications ordered by probability. I think the shortcomings you've identified could be mitigated by making the user go through a decision tree answering illustrated questions about the plant's size, leaf branching, seeds/berries, etc. and by comparing the user's GPS location to plants' known distributions. If the list linked to descriptions and pictures of the potential IDs it'd become a pretty useful tool even if its single best guess wasn't reliable.
Yes, this is what existing applications (essentially) do. If one of these "interactive keys" (see DELTA and Lucid) combined image recognition to get key characters then that would bring things closer reality.
I'd like to be able to take a picture of a plant or mushroom and have it identified for me. Bonus points if it tells me if it is edible. Bonus Bonus points for preparation instructions and recipes.
That's a long way off in my opinion. Positive plant identification relies on having reproductive material for the plant (e.g. flowers and/or fruit/seed/drupe/spore/etc) and a way of looking at those structures closely (often under a microscope). The identification of some plants will also take into account the root system.
Some plants are able to be identified (but not 100%) using vegetative characters only: e.g. phylotaxy, leaf complexity, growth habit, stipules (and their position), bark, pubesence on the stem or leaves, shape of those hairs if they are present (probably need a microscope), etc, etc, etc. But the positive identification is elusive -- mainly because of the taxonomy of species classification in the first place which necessarily takes into account non-vegetative characters and morphology.
That said, identification to the level of family might be a more realistic goal. Even then there are problems because not all genera (and certainly not all species) need not share common characters.
Grasses (Poaceae)? Good luck.
Identifying fungi using an app? Even more difficult unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
I like how you say Sunday school and at the same time give the big bang theory gospel status. Very clever post.
I think that the proposed "rainbow gravity" (http://phys.org/news/2015-01-black-holes-space-theory.html) and the big bang theory are mutually exclusive
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
I also own a G27 and won't be "upgrading" to that G920. If I was going to spend that money I'd be looking at getting something that offers more than the G27 does, and quite honestly my first upgrade would be the pedals -- specifically the brake pedal, first -- rather than the wheel itself (although I might upgrade the G27 brake pedal using a Perfect Pedal or maybe a load cell or something I hack together myself)
See my comment below regarding force feedback. There is no practical way to make the base heavy enough to work without clamps due to the force feedback. Possibly you could strap some lead weights to it, but that would be quite a bit more bothersome than some quick release clamps on your desk.
I don't own this peculiar item, but all the Logitech gaming gear I've used (mostly WingMan joysticks) have a rather heavy-ish metal base, to keep it stable.
And all the steering wheels I've seen have special attachment to clamp/screw them on the table.
(See Logitech official page)
Are you forgetting about the force feedback? Without clamping the wheel to your desk the wheel is going to jump around like a piece of cooking popcorn and that's before you even get to the first corner. To turn the wheel overcoming the force feedback generated by the turn wouldn't really be possible unless the base weighed 100kg (ok, maybe not that much but it'd have to be a darn heavy base). I suppose it might be possible with force feedback turned off but then what's the point?
'I can assure you this will not happen again.'
Intelligent Design has failed once, and so has Evolution. Of course it won't happen again. The principal who said that may be the only sane person in the universe. We all know that both ID and Evolution are flawed and only theories; they're not law. The obvious and only correct answer is that it (it? what is it?) is a combination of both theories. And I can assure you that this will not happen again -- it was a disaster.
I guess my last post was a but abrupt but it does summarise my view of the modern world pretty well. We've, in my opinion, moved into an era where knowledge and research that has no practical application equates to something that's not worth all that much. Capitalism seems to be the dominant (economic) system that drives modern research and I hate it. If there is no concrete monetary profit from a venture then good luck pursuing an avenue of research that does not yield a "return on investment".
As an example, at the job before my last job my role was to study plants, the environment and ecology, and write plans that would direct on-ground works to achieve restoration of degraded ecosystems. At first it seemed like a dream role. After a while I discovered that the accountants classified me as a "non-earner"; i.e. my work did not directly earn income for the company (for the most part -- I did consultancy work that did, but that was pretty minor compared to my overall workload). Therefore every time pay grades and, hey I would have appreciated this even more, thanks and acknowledgement I was always at the bottom rung of the ladder despite my work guiding the on-ground teams who implemented the works, corrective interventions, etc. that I developed. They were classified by the accounting department as "money earners" whilst I remained a "non earner" and therefore of less value to the company. In the end I acknowledged that they were stupid and resigned.
Guess what. The next company, which I only left a month or so ago, had a similar system! I was told that as a researcher I did not directly earn money for the company and therefore I could not expect to get paid as much. I was also told that because I didn't directly control a team of people (only indirectly through my plans and development of project goals) that I was worth less. They didn't use those words but that's what it boiled down to. So I left that train wreck of a company as well. But, to my dismay, every single job I've applied or interviewed for since then has the same attitude! "How can you directly earn us money". They (the managers or whoever) cannot see indirect value.
I guess what I am trying to say is that science or research without direct fiscal benefits is not, in my experience, that the modern world wants to pay for (well, maybe in academia but they don't pay that well either and you'd be constantly seeking grants that nobody wants to provide or sponsor).
Archaeology must be even worse... in their case there is probably not even a hope of gaining a return on investment (fiscally). It's a shame that knowledge for knowledge's sake apparently means so little to so many these days. But, that's the society we've chosen I guess.
I guess that's all the funding they could get. Fuck you, modern world.
Do you know the rest of them?
http://www.languagemonitor.com...
The way these viruses are mutating, sharing RNA (code), and recombining to form new strains is ridiculous. My main concern is that my computer is in close contact with Windows, OSX and also Linux. Even if I was just dual booting Windows and Linux it would be bad enough. Dual booting with the obvious genetic soup it forms between the two different operating systems is a recipe for disaster. Such close contact between operating systems and a virus that mutates to form new strains, frankly, makes me quite uneasy. Because the operating systems run on the same underlying hardware, sharing the same genetics (opcodes) means that the likelihood of the virus crossing species (OS's) is pretty damn likely. We could seriously have an uncontrollable pandemic on our hands withing weeks unless the governments of the world (and their health organisations) proactively get together and tighten air traffic so that laptops and other computers come into contact. Without cooperation I fear that we face a pandemic that will make SARS look like a baby chicken (after it comes out of the egg all nice and fluffy).
Follow up. So why don't some of you folk follow Bruce's pretty good advice:
a) A personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate
b) [You] may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale
The summary appears to totally misrepresent what Bruce actually wrote about.
(SUMMARY) Last week, I wrote an article about the decline of Apache OpenOffice, and how its attitude towards other projects might be part of its problem. "No one wants to see OpenOffice humiliated," ...
Why, for example, would I possibly [sic] to see OpenOffice humiliated?
Why indeed? Bruce never said he would want to see OpenOffice humiliated. He followed with:
(BRUCE)
I prefer LibreOffice's releases, and -- with some misgivings -- the Free Software Foundation's philosophy and licensing over that of the Apache Foundation. I also question the efficiency of having two office suites so closely related to each other. Yet while exploring such issues may be news, I don't forget that, despite these differences, OpenOffice and the Apache Foundation still have the same general goals as LibreOffice or the Free Software Foundation.
So, he has a preference, personal ideals (or ethics, or something else, I don't know). So what? The thing is he prefers LibreOffice. Big deal; that's his right.
(SUMMARY)
The same is true of other famous feuds. Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?
*gasp*. He has a preference! This cannot be tolerated! The real information:
(BRUCE)
To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
(SUMMARY>
Similarly, because I value Debian's stability and efforts at democracy, am I supposed to have a strong distaste for Ubuntu?"
I don't know. I wonder what Bruce thinks. Hey! He answers the almost rhetorical question in his fucking article!
To me, a personal preference is no excuse for a rabid hate. I may dislike the direction certain projects are going, and even consider them misguided, but that is very different from condemning them wholesale.
The summary (and therefore the story as appearing here on /.) is flamebait. The summary picks and chooses quotes from the article and presents them out of context. There is no story here. The article is actually good and non-biased. Pity the same cannot be said about slashdot.
Page 2 of http://mrkulk.github.io/www_cv...
So... how good is snorting black pepper anyway? I might give that a go tonight.
http://conference.hitb.org/hit...
Better apart from being a damn slideshow
Related to the above, I'm not even 100% sure if Torvalds' mantra of "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" is the best course of action. If userspace needs breaking, then break it and bump the major version number, otherwise things could potentially end up as horrible as MS operating systems and their attempt at preserving that over time.
I'm not really sure because I don't know if Linux adheres to Semantic Versioning or not (previous bumps in the major version number might suggest not). Semantic versioning doesn't work for every project but I am pretty sure that (if Linux used semantic versioning) that the next release would not introduce any incompatible changes to the API/ABI.
Serves me right for reading only the summary before commenting. I knew /. summaries were bad but this is just dumb. The article does not say that the algorithm "Curiously, ignores personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on" at all and nor does the paper synopsis. This study says nothing about "beauty" at all... it's basically a study about photographic or artistic composition and what compositions are pleasing to the eye.
[...] then allowed the algorithm to "learn" the difference by taking into account personal factors such as the age, sex and race of the subject as well as technical factors such as the sharpness of the image, the exposure and the contrast between the face and the background and so on
Curiously, the algorithm does this by ignoring personal details such as age, sex, race, eye colour and so on and instead focuses only on technical details such as sharpness, exposure and contrast.
Something does not compute
From Jared Diamond's book The World Until Yesterday
How much freedom or encouragement do children have to explore their environment? Are children permitted to do dangerous things, with the expectation that they must learn from their mistakes? Or are parents protective of their children’s safety, and do parents curtail exploration and pull kids away if they start to do something that could be dangerous?
The answer to this question varies among societies. However, a tentative generalization is that individual autonomy, even of children, is a more cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands than in state societies, where the state considers that it has an interest in its children, does not want children to get hurt by doing as they please, and forbids parents to let a child harm itself.
That theme of autonomy has been emphasized by observers of many hunter-gatherer societies. For example, Aka Pygmy children have access to the same resources as do adults, whereas in the U.S. there are many adults-only resources that are off-limits to kids, such as weapons, alcohol, and breakable objects. Among the Martu people of the Western Australian desert, the worst offense is to impose on a child’s will, even if the child is only 3 years old. The Piraha Indians consider children just as human beings, not in need of coddling or special protection. In Everett’s words, “They [Piraha children] are treated fairly and allowance is made for their size and relative physical weakness, but by and large they are not considered qualitatively different from adults ... This style of parenting has the result of producing very tough and resilient adults who do not believe that anyone owes them anything. Citizens of the Piraha nation know that each day’s survival depends on their individual skills and hardiness ... Eventually they learn that it is in their best interests to listen to their parents a bit.”
Some hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming societies don’t intervene when children or even infants are doing dangerous things that may in fact harm them, and that could expose a Western parent to criminal prosecution. I mentioned earlier my surprise, in the New Guinea Highlands, to learn that the fire scars borne by so many adults of Enu’s adoptive tribe were often acquired in infancy, when an infant was playing next to a fire, and its parents considered that child autonomy extended to a baby’s having the right to touch or get close to the fire and to suffer the consequences. Hadza infants are permitted to grasp and suck on sharp knives. Nevertheless, not all small-scale societies permit children to explore freely and do dangerous things.
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts.
School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen preadolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characte
I meant to add...
When I am laying on my death bed and someone says "you did all these useless things -- you could have directed your talent towards really useful stuff and made lots of money", I will honestly be able to say "They were not useless; they made me happy. And that is what gave my life meaning."
Obviously a talented individual, think of that useful software could have been written with the same amount of time and effort.
I've been asked this question all my life.
When I decided I'd like to fly to the moon everyone asked why. "You could have spent your time and effort making a ship to fly to Australia," they said.
The time that I decided I'd like to write a series of novels that spanned generations of characters and several hundred years they said asked why as well. "Your time is better spent writing non-fiction and and historic account of something that really happened."
I remember one time when I decided to ride my bike to the other side of town. My grandfather said "Why? The bus is faster and you'll be less tired."
Sometimes I take a break from work. My co-workers ask me why when work is so rewarding anyway.
The other day I spent a crazy amount of money buying ingredients to make a very tasty meal (well, I thought it was). I was asked why. It provided my body the same energy as something I could have made using much cheaper ingredients.
Related to the above item, many of my friends ask me why I cook my own meals at all. If you look hard enough you can get someone else to cook something kind of similar for about the same cost.
I once decided to make my own analogue clock. I made all the gears and built it from scratch. Took ages. Cost a lot more than an analogue clock I could have purchased (and certainly a lot more than a digital clock).
Sometimes I do crosswords or solve other puzzles.
Even more occasionally I listen to music.
I go bushwalking (I am not sure of the American term -- walking in National Parks along trails?) and camping.
I could go on forever and for ever.
I don't need to do any of these things. I enjoy doing these things. I want to do these things. Most of them serve no practical purpose at all, apart from making me happy. That's not entirely true, though. If I set myself a goal that has no practical or useful purpose and achieve it I do get a reward. I even get a reward if I fail.
There is no purpose to life apart from being happy (IMO). And if doing something meaningless makes you happy then... then, well it's not meaningless is it?
What is the appropriate forum to get the agency to address these matters?
I imagine this sort of identification software would just output a list of possible identifications ordered by probability. I think the shortcomings you've identified could be mitigated by making the user go through a decision tree answering illustrated questions about the plant's size, leaf branching, seeds/berries, etc. and by comparing the user's GPS location to plants' known distributions. If the list linked to descriptions and pictures of the potential IDs it'd become a pretty useful tool even if its single best guess wasn't reliable.
Yes, this is what existing applications (essentially) do. If one of these "interactive keys" (see DELTA and Lucid) combined image recognition to get key characters then that would bring things closer reality.
I'd like to be able to take a picture of a plant or mushroom and have it identified for me. Bonus points if it tells me if it is edible. Bonus Bonus points for preparation instructions and recipes.
That's a long way off in my opinion. Positive plant identification relies on having reproductive material for the plant (e.g. flowers and/or fruit/seed/drupe/spore/etc) and a way of looking at those structures closely (often under a microscope). The identification of some plants will also take into account the root system.
Some plants are able to be identified (but not 100%) using vegetative characters only: e.g. phylotaxy, leaf complexity, growth habit, stipules (and their position), bark, pubesence on the stem or leaves, shape of those hairs if they are present (probably need a microscope), etc, etc, etc. But the positive identification is elusive -- mainly because of the taxonomy of species classification in the first place which necessarily takes into account non-vegetative characters and morphology.
That said, identification to the level of family might be a more realistic goal. Even then there are problems because not all genera (and certainly not all species) need not share common characters.
Grasses (Poaceae)? Good luck.
Identifying fungi using an app? Even more difficult unfortunately.