16 OCT 2021 by ideonexus
We are Paying for Incremental Progress
People are constantly talking about different phones to buy like there's a difference.
All the phones are the same now. Just like the cars. The only exception is the extreme upper limit of cars $150,000 and up.
These minimal improvements in each phone are indistinguishable to the average person. It's still 2007 we are stuck. All they can do is add another camera to the back. Refining.28 FEB 2021 by ideonexus
Play Has Become More Personal and More Intense Through Te...
A similar trend is the rise of personal vacations and separate activities on family vacations. Children’s street games (such as marbles, Hopscotch, and hide-and-go-seek) have been replaced with video games. Face-to-face encounters have been transformed by e-mails, electronic chat groups, and web sur'ng. Revolutionary as all this may be, it represents the clear culmination of a century of developments in media technology.
Twentieth-century technology privatized and homogenized play, but it ...Folksonomies: recreation play
Folksonomies: recreation play
10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Automation Improves Safety
The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using mano machine can do? Or, like operating an elevator and driving a car, is it because at first we don't trust machines to do a job where lives are at risk? Elevators became much safer as soon as the human operators were replaced. The human-hating Skynet from the Terminator movies could hardly do a better job of killing people than we do killing ourselves with cars. H...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess
HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player.
As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. Pe...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
25 FEB 2016 by ideonexus
Sequencing and Confluence to Inspire Technological Innova...
...innovation often occurs through sequencing—building on prior innovation. Recall that suitcases didn't used to have wheels. Then someone created a suitcase with two wheels. Now many suitcases have four wheels. What helpful improvement on the suitcase might come next?
I've pitched this question to students, who then produced amazing renditions of future suitcases, with elements like GPS tracking devices and built-in digital scales that check whether a suitcase is over a weight limit—or ...24 APR 2015 by ideonexus
The Painting "Las Meninas"
The painter is standing a little back from his canvas [1]. He is glancing at his model;
perhaps he is considering whether to add some finishing touch, though it is also possible
that the first stroke has not yet been made. The arm holding the brush is bent to the
left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints. The
skilled hand is suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter's gaze; and
the gaze, in return, waits upon the arrested gest...07 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
How Los Angeles Regulates Air Pollution
Los Angeles is not really a city of skyscrapers. All around those skyscrapers is a flat expanse of one- and two-story buildings. This low-density urban development means you have to drive to get around in LA. Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning.Los Angeles’ sprawl is considered a classic case of failed urban planning. Its public transportation has not been developed or utilized to its fullest potential. This has caused an inevitable increase in car o...Despite increased traffic.
09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Human Respiration is Not a Source of Carbon Emissions
That's not a problem. The CO2 that's released by humans (and animals) is produced by metabolising carbon from food, and the food comes from plants that have been grown recently. During their growth, the plants have absorbed an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Even when eating meat, the animals are typically only a few years old and were fed on recently grown plants. In contrast, the cars run on fossil fuels that are hundreds of million years old.03 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
The Great Demotions and the Promotion of the Human Race
Sagan had talked of the “great demotions.” Humanity had learned, painfully, that it did not live on a planet at the center of the universe, and further demotions followed. We were not (in Sagan’s view) the purpose of the Creation, not specially chosen by a divine authority, and were in fact just one evolutionary twist in a complicated biosphere shaped by the mindless process of natural selection. If we were ever to make contact with another intelligent species, those aliens would in all...Folksonomies: environmentalism perspective
Folksonomies: environmentalism perspective
History has shown us how small and insignificant we are, but it has also revealed the profound impact we have on our own little world.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Evolution as Cyclical Repetition
If we lapse into thinking of the prebiotic, pre-reproductive world as a sort of featureless chaos of chemicals (like the scattered parts of the notorious jetliner assembled by a windstorm), the problem does look daunting and worse, but if we remind ourselves that the key process in evolution is cyclical repetition (of which genetic replication is just one highly refined and optimized instance), we can begin to see our way to turning the mystery into a puzzle: How did all those seasonal cycles...Daniel C. Dennett adds a cognitive tool to help understand how evolution works over time--by recognizing that evolution keeps trying, reproduction is a cycle.