Five Ingredients for Human Intelligence
• The desire to explore • Self-control • Creativity • Verbal communication • Decoding nonverbal communication
Memes in the Watson category “/technology and computing/hardware/computer”
101–120 of 123
The Perfect Parent
The perfect parent, if she (or he) existed, would devote herself full time to the care and teaching of her child. She would begin, even before conception, by shoring up her folic acid reserves and purging her body of any chemical remotely suspect. Once pregnant, she would never touch a drop of alcohol, pump her own…
Designer VS Cultural Memes
At this point I want to introduce a distinction between mind viruses that arose spontaneously and ones that were invented by human consciousness. I'll call the naturally arising ones cultural viruses and the human-crafted ones designer viruses. A designer virus is carefully crafted to infect people with a set of memes…
80 Percent of Americans Can't Read the NYT Science Section
One prominent researcher on the public understanding of science has even found that due to their failure to understand basic scientific terms or the nature of the scientific process, 80 percent of Americans can't read the New York Times science section.
Books Changed Everything
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be…
Guy Steele: Computers are Too Complex to Know it All
I guess to me the biggest change is that nowadays you can't possibly know everything that's going on in the computer. There are things that are absolutely out of your control because it's impossible to know everything about all the software. Back in the '7Os a computer had only 4,000 words of memory. It was possible…
Programming as the Fifth Discipline
Seibel: You mention four disciplines: music, graphics, mathematics, and text those are about as old as humanity. Clearly there are powerful ideas there that are independent of computers—the computer just provides a way to explore them that might be hard without the computer. Is there also a set of interesting…
L Peter Deutsch: Everyone Will Need to Become Computer Literate in the Future
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have…
Ken Thompson on Obfuscation in Modern Code
Suppose someone describing something to me from postulates like. "Here's a computer and here are the op codes." I can visualize the structure of programs and how things are efficient or inefficient based on those op codes, by seeing the bottom and imagining the hierarchy. And i can see the same thing with programs. If…
Guy Steele on Base Ten and Base Two
If I could change one thing—this is going to sound stupid—but if I could go back in time and change one thing, I might try to interest some early preliterate people in not ! using their thumbs when they count It could have been the Standard, and it would have made a whole lot of things easier in the modem era. On the…
Motorola XOOM Tablet Superbowl XLV Ad
TODO: Make this link to the video embedded
Not Everything is On the Internet
The Internet shows me more and more about those who participate in it, but I worry lest I forget that not everything or everyone in the world has a home on the Internet. Missing are those who cannot read or write, who have no access to a computer, or who chose to remain disconnected. There is a danger of coming to…
Good Replicators have Fidelity, Fecundity, and Longevity
Effective memes will be those that cause high fidelity, long-lasting memory. Memes may be successful at spreading largely because they are memorable rather than because they are important or useful. Wrong theories in science may spread simply because they are comprehensible and fit easilty with existing theories, and…
The Child Learner as Epistemologist
IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment…
The Economics of a Computer for Every Child in School
What these people are saying needs to be faced squarely. They are wrong. Let's consider the cohort of children who will enter kindergarten in the year 1987, the "Class of 2000," and let's do some arithmetic. The direct public cost of schooling a child for thirteen years, from kindergarten through twelfth grade is over…
Dimensions of an Atomic Size Computer
If we somehow manage to make an atomic size computer, it would mean that the dimension, the linear dimension, is a thousand to ten thousand times smaller than those very tiny chips that we have now. It means that the volume of the computer is 100 billionth or 10^-11 of the present volume, because the volume of the…
Using Someone Else as a Sounding Board for Debugging
A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. the other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck: bobbing up and down in a bathtub). they do not need to say a word; the…
How Do Artists Make Money in a World of "Free"
Obviously we must balance our desire for free stuff with a concern for work. but the open-source software tradition, our final authority on all social questions these days, has little to say about labor, oppression, compensation or collective bargaining. The supposed liberation heralded by those who promote free…
Cyberspace as a State of Mind
Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong synesthetic imagery when in hack mode, interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this…
How the Analytical Engine Weaves Concepts Like a Loom
The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of…