Are you guys out of your minds? A treadmill desk. Have you even considered the energy-wastage implications of this? Oh no, sorry, I forgot, as libertarians you've probably opted not to believe in climate change.
The solution to this non-problem is obvious. it's called healthy balance. Get an ergonomic chair for working, and take regular breaks. And then walk home from work. Basta. "Problem" solved. Why does there have to be a technological "solution" to everything? This thread is just crazy.
It is simply impossible to get a handle on modern science, even at fairly basic levels, without a good understanding of mathematics
These sound like "fairly basic levels" for a postdoctorate student, rather than a layperson. I find it difficult to believe that cell division, or sublimation, or even gravity, can be better explained using chalk and algebra than by our much-derided friend the "infographic" or by any kind of decent animation, perhaps with interactive elements to assist understanding. There is just tons of potential there.
But yes, my question lacked clarity on this point. I do not want to understand "complex ideas" completely, just to grasp the basics. I want basic things to click in ways they haven't done so far. I'm not a scientist and never will be (I studied history), I just want to be a little less dumb. Just a little.
They look stronger on humanities subjects, and the course titles seem somewhat arbitrary rather than hierarchically organized. But interesting nonetheless, thanks for the tip.
Yada yada yada. Did I ask for advice on how to learn? Please, if you don't agree with the premise of the question, just don't reply. (This could have been addressed to a number of posts, I picked yours at random.)
Thanks, there are a couple of small leads in your densely packed advice! In general though, I'm looking for something which forms a coherent whole (i.e., a start-to-finish course, even if short) and has high production values. Hulu rather than Youtube. Wikipedia is, as you say, just way too dry and in-depth most of the time. I believe they have an "Introduction to..." series for complex subjects, but so far there aren't many such articles.
Baking soda is great, but hydrogen peroxide is even better on the bathroom tile grout. Now I just need to understand how it works!
Excellent points. This is looking like the definitive answer to my question. "It doesn't exist yet, come back later." You're right that teachers will always be needed as the one-on-one recourse. And that in turn can help towards the design of the next generation of educational material.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I just want to understand what the hell an amino acid (or indeed any acid) is, or how jetsteams work, or what exactly chemical weight is, without having to squint at a small video of someone scraping a barely visible blackboard while burbling jokes and anecdotes to class of students. I figure that there has to be a better way.
Have you never seen a well-made animation, or even simply a graphic, that allowed your understanding to click into place? I have. I'm thinking subjects like plate tectonics, weather systems, DNA, evolution, the structure of molecules (rather than mathematics, which my question didn't mention). There are concepts here that clearly lend themselves to explanation by advanced computer graphics, and yet the market doesn't seem to be offering much.
Is it so difficult to see the difference between computer animation and a video of someone scratching a blackboard with chalk? Come on. Did we really invent computers and the web simply to speed up the distribution of videos? There seems to be a lot of luddism in this thread.
Infographics is perhaps a dumb buzzword, but everyone understood, you included. And no, far from being "someone stuck in traditional academia", I work at the IT end of journalism and I spend my days trying to convince people to adopt newer, more efficient methods of working.
But I wasn't casually dismissing anyone or anything. That's your own interpretation. And I have no illusions at all about how little I will continue to know next week. The contrary is also your interpretation, nothing more.
Thanks, nice point. But then NNTP is a protocol not a media type. My idea, which cannot possibly be original, would just add one very simple and useful feature to the Internet Message Format (defined as RFC5322). I suppose some software maker, Google for instance, could just push this unilaterally with a new custom header. For some reason it hasn't happened.
Add two new headers, both random strings. One as ID for the message, the other the ID of the parent message. This would allow email clients to understand the relationships between messages – eliminating at a stroke (1) the ugly "Re: " in the subject, (2) the messy compounded quoting at the bottom of emails, and (3) the "possibly a reply to..." nonsense in certain email archiving software.
It's so obvious that I don't understand why it hasn't been done already. Perhaps I'm missing something.
The solution to the password non-problem is obvious. I worked it out it years ago and never looked back.
1. Think of a hash which turns two letters into 6-letters-plus-2-numbers (use alphabet position for the numbers) 2. Use it to encode the first two letters of the site or app name
That's it. You get a different non-alphabet password for every site or app, and you'll never forget anything if you remember the hash. Why the hell are we having this debate? We should just get on with it and evangelize for this technique. It's easy and failproof. The only hard bit is learning the number-correspondence of letters, but even just using a favorite number instead the solution is somewhat secure.
Well, I see that I'm outvoted by incurable, irrational techno-utopians.
I too am optimistic, as it happens. But only cautiously so – not recklessly, like you people are. Given humanity's past, there is no reason to believe that we can't rise to the current environmental challenge. But we're taking our time seeing the problem, as evidenced by this frivolous chat about mining asteroids. Right now the world a half-century hence is looking a scary place, and even in the best-case scenario a lot of permanent damage is going to be done to the biosphere. If and when we solve this problem – mitigating the effects of consumption rather than finding resources for more of it – then we can perhaps start thinking about mining asteroids. Until that point, you are putting the cart before the horse.
I have a strange feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about, that we're not even on the same page here. That's sad, because I'm talking hard science, and the solutions will come largely from hard science too. They include energy tech, biotech and all kinds of innovation in farming, town-planning and architecture. They don't include mining asteroids.
Why does the bulk of humanity always have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future?
Your "future" seems to be somewhere around 1970. Today's challenge is not how to find and use ever more resources, it is how to use and re-use the existing ones without making the planet unliveable. Given the current context of impending climatic and ecosystem breakdown, mining asteroids is nothing but an outrageous red herring.
I continue to be astounded by the number of "technologists" in this forum who appear stuck in an almost Soviet mindset of science, where the future is all mining and flying cars and space exploration. It's as if you haven't noticed the last 30 years of scientific advance and all the new constraints that humanity must now work within.
If "we were all completely open about everything we have done that directly affected at least one other human" (and that definition leaves few deeds uncounted) then there might indeed be little war. There would be fascism instead, because information is power.
Transparency begets freedom when applied to those in power. When applied to private citizens, it destroys freedom. This is the nuance that some transparency absolutists have yet to understand.
Really. This whole spectacle, this so-called debate, is painful to watch. The rest of us have moved on. And I say that as a friend and a resolute pro-American.
If all Facebook's users thought like you (and many others here apparently) then Facebook would have no reason whatsoever to safeguard anyone's privacy. That is the reality.
Users expect the level of privacy that is described to them, as per the settings that they chose. (We're not talking about advertisers here, we're talking about other users.) And Facebook generally upholds its side of the contract. Why? Because it is afraid of user outcry, of PR disasters, and in the end of regulation.
Your attitude gives Facebook a free pass. I just don't understand it. If you don't trust Facebook, don't use it. But this idea that Facebook can and will get away with anything is utterly cynical and gets us nowhere. Please stop.
Exactly. THIS is the real issue. We humans will survive, we're too clever not to. But the damage is going to be awful, and permanent. I find it terribly sad.
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Are you guys out of your minds? A treadmill desk. Have you even considered the energy-wastage implications of this? Oh no, sorry, I forgot, as libertarians you've probably opted not to believe in climate change.
The solution to this non-problem is obvious. it's called healthy balance. Get an ergonomic chair for working, and take regular breaks. And then walk home from work. Basta. "Problem" solved. Why does there have to be a technological "solution" to everything? This thread is just crazy.
These sound like "fairly basic levels" for a postdoctorate student, rather than a layperson. I find it difficult to believe that cell division, or sublimation, or even gravity, can be better explained using chalk and algebra than by our much-derided friend the "infographic" or by any kind of decent animation, perhaps with interactive elements to assist understanding. There is just tons of potential there.
But yes, my question lacked clarity on this point. I do not want to understand "complex ideas" completely, just to grasp the basics. I want basic things to click in ways they haven't done so far. I'm not a scientist and never will be (I studied history), I just want to be a little less dumb. Just a little.
They look stronger on humanities subjects, and the course titles seem somewhat arbitrary rather than hierarchically organized. But interesting nonetheless, thanks for the tip.
Udacity looks cool. To you and others, thanks for the tip.
Yada yada yada. Did I ask for advice on how to learn? Please, if you don't agree with the premise of the question, just don't reply. (This could have been addressed to a number of posts, I picked yours at random.)
Yep, mentioned above. Thanks for the tip.
Thanks, there are a couple of small leads in your densely packed advice! In general though, I'm looking for something which forms a coherent whole (i.e., a start-to-finish course, even if short) and has high production values. Hulu rather than Youtube. Wikipedia is, as you say, just way too dry and in-depth most of the time. I believe they have an "Introduction to..." series for complex subjects, but so far there aren't many such articles.
Baking soda is great, but hydrogen peroxide is even better on the bathroom tile grout. Now I just need to understand how it works!
Thanks, will definitely be checking out Crash Course. Sounds great.
Good points. Thanks for the TED link.
Would have written that in the question but wanted to keep things polite. Well put.
Excellent points. This is looking like the definitive answer to my question. "It doesn't exist yet, come back later." You're right that teachers will always be needed as the one-on-one recourse. And that in turn can help towards the design of the next generation of educational material.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I just want to understand what the hell an amino acid (or indeed any acid) is, or how jetsteams work, or what exactly chemical weight is, without having to squint at a small video of someone scraping a barely visible blackboard while burbling jokes and anecdotes to class of students. I figure that there has to be a better way.
Have you never seen a well-made animation, or even simply a graphic, that allowed your understanding to click into place? I have. I'm thinking subjects like plate tectonics, weather systems, DNA, evolution, the structure of molecules (rather than mathematics, which my question didn't mention). There are concepts here that clearly lend themselves to explanation by advanced computer graphics, and yet the market doesn't seem to be offering much.
Is it so difficult to see the difference between computer animation and a video of someone scratching a blackboard with chalk? Come on. Did we really invent computers and the web simply to speed up the distribution of videos? There seems to be a lot of luddism in this thread.
Infographics is perhaps a dumb buzzword, but everyone understood, you included. And no, far from being "someone stuck in traditional academia", I work at the IT end of journalism and I spend my days trying to convince people to adopt newer, more efficient methods of working.
At this point I (as the OP) would be interested if anyone had pointers even to "comic-style drawings". No such luck unfortunately.
But I wasn't casually dismissing anyone or anything. That's your own interpretation. And I have no illusions at all about how little I will continue to know next week. The contrary is also your interpretation, nothing more.
Thanks, nice point. But then NNTP is a protocol not a media type. My idea, which cannot possibly be original, would just add one very simple and useful feature to the Internet Message Format (defined as RFC5322). I suppose some software maker, Google for instance, could just push this unilaterally with a new custom header. For some reason it hasn't happened.
Add two new headers, both random strings. One as ID for the message, the other the ID of the parent message. This would allow email clients to understand the relationships between messages – eliminating at a stroke (1) the ugly "Re: " in the subject, (2) the messy compounded quoting at the bottom of emails, and (3) the "possibly a reply to..." nonsense in certain email archiving software.
It's so obvious that I don't understand why it hasn't been done already. Perhaps I'm missing something.
The solution to the password non-problem is obvious. I worked it out it years ago and never looked back.
1. Think of a hash which turns two letters into 6-letters-plus-2-numbers (use alphabet position for the numbers)
2. Use it to encode the first two letters of the site or app name
That's it. You get a different non-alphabet password for every site or app, and you'll never forget anything if you remember the hash. Why the hell are we having this debate? We should just get on with it and evangelize for this technique. It's easy and failproof. The only hard bit is learning the number-correspondence of letters, but even just using a favorite number instead the solution is somewhat secure.
Well, I see that I'm outvoted by incurable, irrational techno-utopians.
I too am optimistic, as it happens. But only cautiously so – not recklessly, like you people are. Given humanity's past, there is no reason to believe that we can't rise to the current environmental challenge. But we're taking our time seeing the problem, as evidenced by this frivolous chat about mining asteroids. Right now the world a half-century hence is looking a scary place, and even in the best-case scenario a lot of permanent damage is going to be done to the biosphere. If and when we solve this problem – mitigating the effects of consumption rather than finding resources for more of it – then we can perhaps start thinking about mining asteroids. Until that point, you are putting the cart before the horse.
I have a strange feeling you don't even know what I'm talking about, that we're not even on the same page here. That's sad, because I'm talking hard science, and the solutions will come largely from hard science too. They include energy tech, biotech and all kinds of innovation in farming, town-planning and architecture. They don't include mining asteroids.
Your "future" seems to be somewhere around 1970. Today's challenge is not how to find and use ever more resources, it is how to use and re-use the existing ones without making the planet unliveable. Given the current context of impending climatic and ecosystem breakdown, mining asteroids is nothing but an outrageous red herring.
I continue to be astounded by the number of "technologists" in this forum who appear stuck in an almost Soviet mindset of science, where the future is all mining and flying cars and space exploration. It's as if you haven't noticed the last 30 years of scientific advance and all the new constraints that humanity must now work within.
If "we were all completely open about everything we have done that directly affected at least one other human" (and that definition leaves few deeds uncounted) then there might indeed be little war. There would be fascism instead, because information is power.
Transparency begets freedom when applied to those in power. When applied to private citizens, it destroys freedom. This is the nuance that some transparency absolutists have yet to understand.
Really. This whole spectacle, this so-called debate, is painful to watch. The rest of us have moved on. And I say that as a friend and a resolute pro-American.
If all Facebook's users thought like you (and many others here apparently) then Facebook would have no reason whatsoever to safeguard anyone's privacy. That is the reality. Users expect the level of privacy that is described to them, as per the settings that they chose. (We're not talking about advertisers here, we're talking about other users.) And Facebook generally upholds its side of the contract. Why? Because it is afraid of user outcry, of PR disasters, and in the end of regulation. Your attitude gives Facebook a free pass. I just don't understand it. If you don't trust Facebook, don't use it. But this idea that Facebook can and will get away with anything is utterly cynical and gets us nowhere. Please stop.
Exactly. THIS is the real issue. We humans will survive, we're too clever not to. But the damage is going to be awful, and permanent. I find it terribly sad.