There were times that I thought he was incredibly aged. He'd sit on the couch and his eyes would glaze and he'd slip into a nap like a senile cat. He moved so slowly. Sometimes I thought he was just being really careful, other times I thought he was just dimwitted. Either way it left me exasperated.There was just this way about him, that timeless "you'll see" that every old man says to every young man and every young man subsequently scoffs at, that made me laugh. I knew someday I'd be him, or at least be like him, but I was neither afraid of it...
Friday, 30 December 2011
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Look, I don't have much to add to this incredible article. I just want to point out that the American taxpayer has paid/continues to pay Lockheed-Martin $112 BILLION DOLLARS to build 166 aircraft that have never been used in combat and are already planned to be replaced by an even more expensive aircraft -- built by Lockheed-Marti...
Andrew Sullivan and I EXACTLY agree on this: In this difficult endeavor, Paul has kept his cool, his good will, his charm, his honesty and his passion. His scorn is for ideas, not people, but he knows how to play legitimate political hardball. Look at his ads - the best of the season so far. His worldview is too extreme for my tastes, but it is more honestly achieved than most of his competitors, and joined to a temperament that has worn well as time has gone by.I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both...
This is the time of the year where popular bloggers put out "holiday gift guides" and slyly link to amazon with their username embedded so they get a little kickback if you buy the products they represent as awesome. More often than not, they do not disclose this little circle jerk to the readers. I find that disingenuous and reprehensibl...
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Imagine you were completely crass and immoral. You wanted to extract as much money as you could from as many people as you could. How would you do it? Here's the three things I would do:1. I'd defeat my competitors by intentionally underbidding every contract. Or I'd come in at the same cost as my competitor but make outlandish scope promises in my bid.2. I'd make those bids knowing I could weasel contract modifications in later to get more money. This would be accomplished by "buying" Congress. How would I buy Congress? I would open offices for...
One thing I can NOT stand about libertarians is their dogged repetition of the idea that "letting the market decide" will somehow end well for humanity. My arguments against this belief usually start with "well nuclear missiles are in high demand, as are human organs...so let's deregulate those, right?"But seriously. Here's the thing. People (for example Megan McArdle) like to point out that even as the price of solar power decreases, it still costs more than fossil fuel-based energy. And that the price drop is being helped by massive government...
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Gary Stix: "If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?"In Gary's defense the rest of the article is fantastic, and I am looking forward to reading Connectome, the book he is reviewin...
Friday, 9 December 2011
Tonight I am sitting at my wife's school (The Abstracted Wife teaches art at an elementary school) on a cafeteria bench watching my wife hold my daughter. It is "pajama night" at the school. They are browsing the tables of "gifts" that kids could buy. Most range in price from 50 cents to 2 dollars. They're "shopping for a present for daddy" while I pretend not to watch. After they pick something out, I will take The Abstracted Daughter around the tables and let her choose a gift for Mommy.I hang on to these moments. At work they're talking (very...
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Martin Robbins:Try this thought experiment. Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find yourself tied to your bed and rendered mute, your naked genitals exposed to the harsh glare of hospital lights. Your parents have decided that some skin should be hacked from your penis; perhaps so you can be forced into their religion, perhaps because they don't trust you to clean yourself in the shower, or perhaps simply because they think your penis should look more like your father's.If you don't like the thought of this happening to you, if this offends...
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
So it turns out that Governor Sam Brownback has an internal team that works for Governor Sam Brownback that searches social media for instances of the name Governor Sam Brownback.Now, rather than use this knowledge to troll Governor Sam Brownback's policies or bash Governor Sam Brownback personally...well...readers of this blog know that I recently applied to be a NASA astronaut.So (operating under the assumption that Governor Sam Brownback's social investigation team will find this post) I'd like to use this opportunity to send a message to Governor...
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
Against massive troop deployments (without Congressional consent) to countries where the locals hate us? You're an isolationist.Willing to consider raising taxes to cover national debt? You're a socialist.Not willing to universally support whatever Israel does? You're an anti-semite. In this country, we got right to the most extreme rhetoric we can think of, and then try to find an even worse extrem...
Monday, 21 November 2011
Let me just bounce this off Hanson's post about the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, on 100 or so planets.Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. The dilemma is this: if aliens live on another planet in our galaxy, and drive their alien-cars to their alien-work and read the alien-news and occasionally blast radio waves into space in hopes that other aliens (us) will detect it, and if they are 40,000 light years away (relatively close in galactic terms - the Milky Way is 100,000 or so light years...
Thursday, 17 November 2011
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
One of the annoying things about television is summarized by the immortal phrase "hundreds of channels and nothing on." One reason for this (though not the only one) is that channels are provided in bundles. For example Discovery Channel typically comes with a cadre of other channels like Discovery Health, the Military Channel, TLC and BBC America. If a cable provider, like AT&T Uverse, wants to provide Discovery Channel to its users, it must buy the bundle from Discovery Communications, Inc. Similar bundles exist from many outlets (for example...
Long time readers of this blog know that on more than one occasion I have taken potshots at NASA. I've complained that manned spaceflight, while a noble pursuit, seems perilous and without point unless a clear direction is given. For example, if manned spaceflight involves building an orbital launch vehicle to send terraforming equipment to Mars...I'm all for it. Manned spaceflight as an economic stimulus mechanism for east Florida, on the other hand, I do not like.I've laid out on this blog a time or two what I think should happen, going so far...
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Computer animations of robotic animals are pretty easy to produce. I know this because my roommate and I used to do it for fun in college.So earlier this year when BostonDynamics robot cheetah animation came out...I held my breath.Now we have a robot ostrich animation complete with weird render that looks like a Halflife 2 creature! It'd be neat if it was built, sure. But I'll hold my breath in the mean tim...
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Scott Adams thinks that health monitoring will be the first substantial step in our "cyborg evolution." Welcome to the club, Scott.Here at TAE, the inevitable seamless integration of machine and man has been discussed too many times for me to link to. Heh.But I want to make a point about Adams' piece, because I think he understates the ideal. His vision:I predict that health monitoring will be the next substantial phase of cyborg evolution. I think we'll have embedded chips to continuously monitor our blood for sugar levels, cholesterol, vitamins,...
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
You know, I don't have a Twitter account. I never really see the utility in it; always seems like just a bunch of white noise. People who trumpet it as an innovation usually point to its power for news dissemination, for example when the East Coast experienced an earthquake earlier this year. Others contend that Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring uprisings, helping to organize protests. That's a fallacious argument to me, because people...
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Micro-sensor-embedded-fiber-optic-super-prosthetics may hold promise for future American soldiers that lose limbs...but what does that uninsured amputee in Botswana do? As medical breakthroughs become more and more expensive to develop...they become more and more disconnected from the places they are truly needed.The counter-argument, that these technologies need to be developed in the First World and become profitable and then the patents run out and then it gets cheaper and then eventually it trickles down to the Third World...that argument falls...
First off, I applaud this effort. Amazing science in progress.However, look at that diagram...they want to create an awfully complicated design. Tiny optical mirrors are placed along equally microscopic optical fibers, which are then wound around individual nerves. A nerve signal headed for an amputated limb is detected by these microsensors and they transmit the signal via the optical fiber to a CPU of some sort which will then move the limb. Theoretically...
Monday, 31 October 2011
Here at work they're doing away with pensions. The change will be to a more 'aggressive' cooperative 403b (we're a 501(c)3 nfp) plan, where if you invest 6% they'll match an additional 3%.I have to wonder: are retirement plans really just some creamy corporate milk that companies feed you to keep you placated? If I were to take my salary today, and assume a 3% pay raise every year for the next 35 years, and then take 9% of that and invest it every year, and then get a healthy 7% return on my investment every year...I'd end up 65 years old with...
Thursday, 27 October 2011
One of the things about engineers that people forget (or don't) is that we have a really high employment rate, an average salary that easily puts us in the upper middle class, and typically engineers enjoy a career that can be upwardly mobile, with six figure incomes reasonable in your first decade of work.One might argue that the above job security factors are inherent in a system where getting a diploma from a four-year ABET accredited university in some engineering field is extremely difficult, and that the massive washout rate (75%) for freshman/sophomore...
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
In an eye-opening and poignant article, Ben Dueholm writes about the state of foster care in America:In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia’s broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many medical practices,...
Friday, 21 October 2011
This is just the kind of epic nonsense that makes me use profanities on my blog.I will say this directly to Mat Honan: if you can bitch about the recession that occurred when you graduated while simultaneously telling someone else not to bitch about the recession that is occuring when they graduate, you are a hypocritical asshole. Oh, and while you are trumpeting all your insanely awesome Gen X innovations like Google and Twitter (because a whole generation of people gets credit for the work of three people) let me point out that you are writing...
Monday, 17 October 2011
Monday, 10 October 2011
First, let me admit that I am really upset right now by what I read in Peter Thiel's article on the stagnation of technology called "The End of the Future." I am going to discuss it angrily, I admit, but please forgive me if this seems like a direct attack on Peter Thiel - I don't know him and I doubt if I did I would dislike him. He was, and is, a brilliant venture capitalist (more on that later) but I just really, really dislike what he wrote: The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States....
Thursday, 6 October 2011
In 2005, he said: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away....
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
We make big plans for ourselves. Well, some of us do.We get an idea in high school that consists of "you know what would be cool? If I were to ______" and then we slowly evolve from there. In college we major in engineering, because the desire to solve problems is like an addiction to us. Eventually we graduate with a box of parts in the trunk of our car and a broad but useless array of engineering fundamentals. Our diploma is a gatekey into some engineering firm or some startup where we tirelessly and meticulously build the world, or maintain...
Monday, 3 October 2011
The above video has been circulating amongst us engineers (and other nerd types) with awe and wonder. As is my nature (and because I am intimately familiar with many of Boston Dynamics projects) let me just drop this one grain of salt: notice the hydraulic and power lines leading up to the suspension system?The thing is about as autonomous as a fetus. That's not to say that in the future it won't have on board power generation, compressors, hydraulic fittings, and computer systems. It just means that it won't be next week.Some will remember BigDog,...
Friday, 30 September 2011
First off, Farhad Manjoo has posted a week-long series on robots entering more and more complex (read: high-paying) job markets, like robot pharmacists and robot lawyers. Some of the articles are quite good, and they all deserve at least a skim.But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music...
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
A lot of people are trumpeting as one of its features "that are better than the iPad 2" the fact that it weighs 14.6 ounces and the iPad 2 weights 21.6 ounces. It causes me intestinal distress to defend an Apple product, but...Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"Ratio: .70Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 ozWeight of iPad 2: 21.6 ozRatio: .68Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading...
Hitch hates Christianity, this much is known. But here he really takes a stab at American Christianity as the reason the Death Penalty survives in America:The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.) Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity...
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Somehow a scientist has created a "crack" in the fabric of the universe that leads back 85 million years ago to a much younger Earth. Okay, so when people go through the time portal, it's apparently a one way trip, with no way back. How do they know what is on the other side of the portal? At one point they show a "probe" they sent through first, remarking (in order to silence time travel critics like myself) that after sending the probe back 85 million years, they could not find it in the present (2149 AD) which led them to believe the past was...
Monday, 26 September 2011
Let me ask you something. Consider a future scenario in which:1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and 2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.In short, immortality and complete freedom...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
