There is a Horse in the Apple Store
blog.frankchimero.com
blog.frankchimero.com
Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.
Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.
I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum)
If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.
But in the other two cases, the answers are not immediate, which was the thrust of the statement to which I objected - it's quoted above, and includes "instant gratification", "answered immediately" and "almost any question". We're not there yet, we've only got the easy stuff. Wolfram|Alpha is an attempt to go a bit deeper, and it's also part of Google's mission.
I remember being 10? (12? not sure) and having my Mum tell me we had not, in fact, landed humans on any other planets. "Only" the moon. Seemed pretty lame.
Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts.
From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future.
I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed.
Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!
And in many ways, though it was clunky by modern standards, BBS satisfies the conception of "cyberspace" much better than what we have today. I was a little past BBS when I was a kid, using Hotline instead, but it did feel like I was going somewhere when I connected to servers with decent communities. Everything was real-time, you could exchange data, there was just placeness to it.
So now we've got stuff like Second Life, which satisfies Stephenson-esque Metaverse fantasies, but it hasn't fundamentally changed anything. Everyone still meets up for drinks and fried chicken, goes to work in their cars. The internet ended up lacing around our lives instead of redefining them.
I could see you being, perhaps, underwhelmed with that in mind.
It does to me. But, then, I'm the bibliophile son of a librarian. So the new world manifests as a continuous series of oddnesses: I'm purging my book and map and magazine collection, and it is getting much smaller, and that is weird. The web changes the habits of a lifetime.
It is hard to perceive long-term changes, even when they are big.
I'm surrounded by exceptional situations every day and they just seem mundane. Tonight I congratulated a guy who just signed a record deal with Sub Pop Records. Earlier this week, I landed a development contract for an iOS app that I think will revolutionize its market come early next year. It goes on from there. These sorts of things seem normal to me now. At 15, I would've been, to quote the article, gobsmacked by my involvement—however tangential—in any of them.
Are human beings just so easily adaptable to their circumstances that they start missing the depth of these 'big' events after a while? What must it be like to be Bill Gates or Bono? "Had dinner with Queen Rania of Jordan and the food was middling to fair. My Gulfstream's flight to New York was delayed due to weather issues. What a joke. Don't they know I'm supposed to have coffee with Bill Clinton tomorrow morning to talk about his philanthropic efforts?"
Where's the magic? What does it take to surprise and delight us? Obviously not a pony.
[1] the haagen-dazs ice cream bar I'm chewing on right now doesn't hurt either: having a 24 hour supermarket across the street is the bomb. Get kicked out of the bar, go buy ice cream. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.
I think the point retube was trying to reference is that studies have shown that people vastly overestimate the magnitude and duration of changes in happiness due to a windfall or catastrophe (the most recent source I have for this is Dan Ariely's Upside of Irrationality). While there is a shift of overall life satisfaction, major changes are much less impactful to your long-term happiness than you would predict (presumably due to growing familiarity, adaptation, and the general "the grass is greener" bias we all have).
At any rate, I, specifically, would be happier without reading personally-attacking rebuttals on HN. Is that really needed to make your point?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100701072652.ht...
"A worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries included questions about happiness and income, and the results reveal that while life satisfaction usually rises with income, positive feelings don't necessarily follow, researchers report."
And some further recent research on the matter reviewed here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-money-b...
Basically - increasing wealth makes you immune to the smaller/simpler joys in life.
From the paper you quoted, this was also in the abstract:
"HIV prevalence in Africa has little effect on Africans’ life or health satisfaction"
which actually supports my other assertion that those with disabling diseases or conditions are no less happy than those more fortunate (assuming you equate life-satisfaction with happiness).
I am curious on the studies on how they measured. People on different places on the survival pyramid must have been a consideration.
Give me liberty or give me death.
When not "at work" (usually there is some signal), it obviously depends on the owner; but most of the disabled people I know pamper and love these animals to death, and they are extremely well treated. They are simply only showered with affection in private, when not expected to be focused.
The Jews that weren't killed in the concentration camps "didn't have
it so bad" compared to the ones were. But this says nothing of whether
or not overall treatment of Jews in concentration camps was good or bad.a) I've spent a reasonable amount of time around horses;
b) Can see nothing in that photo to suggest the horse has been mistreated or is distressed; and
c) Find this kind of trivialization of animal abuse by someone who has little experience with horses to be offensive nonsense.
There's real "horrible abuse" out there, and this is most emphatically not an example of it.
I am not so pleased to see an argument for the banality of evil on what is normally a bastion of liberal hipster moral righteousness either.
In any case this is not abuse (is he a troll or just ignorant?). I've rarely had trouble getting a halter on a horse except for one who doesn't like his ears being touched. My take is that if an animal that's basically 1,100 lbs of muscle (OK,not that one :-) lets you do something, it's not too bothered by it! Horses have absolutely no problem letting you know when they're pissed.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04Creatures-t.htm...
Are you sure. Why could it not be a pet? The image in the OP doesn't appear to show a harness (as in the NYTimes article) as is usual for an assistance animal. In my country assistance animals usually wear some high-vis in public too.
> soon Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences, where Rose was attending nursing school, refused Richard access, too. Stories started appearing about Rose and her monkey in the newspaper and on TV. “Suddenly,” she told me, “everyone knew I had a mental disorder.”
a monkey on one's back! idiom origin revealed!
A logical explanation doesn't change the analogy. I'm aware that S&M Gimps exist. If I went into an Apple Store where someone was being led around by a gimp, and no-one was paying attention, I'd still think that was unusual.
Not to mention that an aside explaining that helper horses exists detracts from the art of storytelling.
Let's say that I see the horse and I do realize that it's an assistance animal, albeit unusual. If other people doesn't look so surprised I might suspect my ignorance: it seems that all other people know what's going on, and take it as perfectly normal. As I don't want to stand out in the crowd as the only freak who didn't know about this socially accepted habit, I simply play quiet as nothing strange happened.
The same thing could happen in the head of many people and the overall effect would be that of uninterested people not caring about anything.
Group psychology is a very strange and fascinating thing.
(The analogy is with the tale of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Clothes)
Aside: I saw a guide dog on a sweltering day in peak summer last year in Melbourne. It was clearly very uncomfortable, licking its lips. But it was also clear there was no chance it would let down its owner. It was touching to see such faithfulness; now I often donate to the guide dogs.
To modify part of the article to fit my experience...
I asked one of the Apple Store employees: "Do you realize Steve Jobs is behind you?"He sighs at me and says, "Yes, he’s in here all the time."
Wait! Not like that, you'll get arrested.
Are there great things about being young (whether that be 16 or 21)? Sure. But there are a lot of great things about being older too, and it's easy to lose site of those things. I'm 30 now and I'm much more comfortable in my own skin now than I was even 5 or 10 years ago. Generally, I'm happier now than I was back then. I'm definitely smarter and more capable, in work and in life.
It's easy to think about how great it would be if you could be 21 again (while still knowing everything you've learned from your experiences since then), but, as they say, youth is wasted on the young. That's just how life works.
All we can do is encourage people of all ages to make the most of the opportunities they have right now.
I was at the zoo with my girlfriend in the reptile section. A little boy was staring into the same tank that we were, his mom was maybe ten feet away. You know how reptiles are, they are always hiding behind some rock or branch or just blending in nefariously. So I ask the boy, "Do you see the snake?" It felt awkward to ignore another human being crowding around the glass with us and I figured I would give him a chance to feel good by showing off his superior reptile-spotting ability.
He seemed shocked that an adult he didn't know would talk to him. There's something weird about that being weird.
Because in the past you could have been a reptile enthusiast, and he might have been interested and maybe you could have taught him something.
Now everyone just looks at you weird.
I am not even sure what it really means. I know it's purely literal, but it's almost poetic.
The "tiny horse" effect!
Maybe its because we're so focused on ourselves? I still have a regular brick-type cell phone. So its a lot of fun for me to play with an iPhone or iPad whenever I'm at the store, or when my friends let me play with theirs. I always get an urge to buy one - it could totally make my life better (especially mobile internet).
But if I buy it, I know the magic will go away. It's particular exceptional-ness will become an expectation, and even a frustration when it doesn't work correctly. And after a certain period, I'd likely refer to it as just another brick-type object, compared with whatever relatively exceptional technology is out then.
"Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" -
In my experience, there are usually quite a number of children in Apple Stores.
What really made it for me is how I can relate to it. I'm constantly taken back and think things like 'So many people are trying to take the world into new directions, myself included, and some are successful. The rest of the world gets the end results and we get accustomed to them so incredibly fast. Often times ignoring all the work done or the brilliance of the piece itself.'
Like, for example, I can literally work on my idea for a business, listen to virtually any record that has ever existed that I want to listen, watch any movie that I could possibly want to watch and thousands of other activities all in a single day and without leaving my house.
I could witness the huge developments that other people are making all around the globe and watch some of the most brilliant minds the world has, often the developers themselves, give feedback on said events. And yes, I'm talking about HN.
All in all, it's a great age to live. I'm only 20 and not particularly wealthy, but boy has the trip thus far been incredible.
This is probably explained by the Change blindness phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness
Here's the advantage: both dogs and horses require years to train in this capacity. However, horses then live much longer than dogs, maximizing the value of the training time invested in them.
Plus, they're extremely cute.
When does the magic of a situation fade?
I guess that guy hasn't seen any poll numbers lately. It's still pretty cool that we elected a black president, but the magic faded a while ago.
On-Topic: ...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Perhaps it is only me, but that things are amazing certainly does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. That things are amazing is a given.
He also had a funny term for that but I forgot it...
Apparently, this term is now actually used in Psychology to describe actual phenomena, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_elses_problem
Btw., your link was broken. Here is the correct one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem
Here's another attempt, I want to see what happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem
EDIT: OK, the problem is HN removes the apostrophe (') from the word "Else's". Not sure why.
The "strong" intrepretation was proven false by the fact that American Indians had no name for ships that sail the high seas. Yet, they still described them best in their own language. There are weaker ways to apply the theorem, but most efforts have went to Chomsky's universal grammar.
There was a horse in the Apple store.
They're not that unusual--I've met at least two people who have one.
In all seriousness, it may be a trained assistance pet for the blind.