David

There's a line to be drawn somewhere. At one extreme, the content is buried by the obscurity (but precision) of the language used. At the other, the content is lost to words that are too general, that have essentially no meaning. It's like trying to highlight a certain point using a laser so fine it can't be seen, or a lantern that illuminates the entire area. (Obviously they just need a flashlight.) To maintain a balance between educated and readable, they have a standards editor.

It's not about his disdain for the word, it's about maintaining a vocabulary that alienates no one. As it is, even if it's been around for ages from our perspective, there are technophobes out there who have no idea what a tweet is. For their sake, it makes sense for NYT writers to abstain from using a word with less than 100% language penetration.

Yes, but as a species we have a tendency for risk-aversion. So I think you have to set it up as risk versus risk, rather than risk versus benefit. Weigh the negative outliers on each side against each other, instead of weighing negatives versus positives. If we don't contact other species, what are the chances that we'll kill ourselves? (Global nuclear warfare, environmental destruction, what have you). If we do, what are the chances that they'll kill us? (Personally, I think it's quite likely that we'll end up killing ourselves, in the long run. That makes contact the better option.)

I was just thinking that cooperative behavior seems to have pretty good survival value, at least for the life we can find. That, of course, says very little about life we can't find, since we don't know how different things might be. But it makes sense to me that a cooperative form, where different members of the species can have different but complimentary roles, is likely to be useful even in circumstances we can't predict. And once a species can cooperate with itself, my belief is that it can cooperate with another. All it takes is the insertion of a member of each species into the trust hierarchy of the other species. (Of course, the possibility is far removed from the realization.)

The point of the article is that they've discovered a concrete physical link between environment and DNA. We knew it happened, but now we have an instance. It's a pretty big step.

Aside: Evolution works by natural selection across generations - the ones with the good genes live, bad genes lose. An individual's genes don't need to change for the process to take place. Of course, random mutations in DNA are a big part of what cause the variation that results in good and bad genes, so yes, sometimes changes happen within an individual. But those are random changes, whereas this is a response to the immediate environment.

The distinction is the expected ratio of US customers to international ones. A significant inconvenience for a select few customers is nowhere near as bad as a small inconvenience for every customer.

Also, shipping is _important_. Definitely agree with that point - if you spend all your time making the checkout form internationally friendly, you've already run out of time for your product. You're either irrelevant, hopelessly behind the competition, or completely out of money.

Might be viable at a large company, though, where you've got people who are already doing nothing useful.

Not that I disagree with your point, but "[...] CNN ranks 21st, while MSNBC lags even further behind at 25th."

Doesn't sound like specialization is working well for MSNBC, to me.

As a member of the current generation, I know that I don't often send personal emails. And yes, it's something my parents and teachers use.

But I definitely use it to talk to members of the older generation. And anything that's less than personal, in fact. Any sort of business arrangements, anything that's supposed to look professional.

In fact, the lack of time constraints on email make it far superior to most newer technologies for anything that requires some thought. Email gives you a chance to (re)consider your argument, idea, or response. And to spellcheck.

(Irony: Firefox spellchecker picked up "spellcheck" as incorrect. More irony: "spellchecker" is fine.)

As a high school senior, I'm jealous of your opportunity (though no doubt you earned it.) I would probably leap at the opportunity to skip this year. I share your opinion on wasted time, but more with classes I don't feel that I need than with other students who hold me back.

Part of my distress is my graduating class of 46 people. I don't have peers, and it pisses me off sometimes. But that may not be the case for you. If I had a group of like-minded, intelligent, and ambitious people to hang out with, I would probably be looking forward to this year.

And surely there's something to be said for learning how to do things before you're expected to do them right... I think, in my case, that's especially true of relationships. I need this year for social development, even if my intellectual development will suffer a little.

You, however, would appear to be more motivated than I am. If you can seek out a college course load in high school, in whatever area you're interested in (that is, without too many fluff courses), then gaining the extra year of social development would likely be beneficial in the long run -- no downside.

Putting myself in your situation, I would want to skip the year. What I should do, however, is NOT skip the year. (I had a similar debate about skipping 2nd grade, except that I didn't really know how to weigh the possibilities back then. (I didn't go for it.))

As tsally suggested, I would definitely try and find a college professor to work with. Do research in your field of choice. It's more interesting than lit homework, neh?

So I'm not really sure why I would be qualified to give you advice. Feel free to ignore. =)

Do we really want to eliminate the physical university?

One thing that a campus does, that would not exist with an online education, is create a community. Good universities get smart people together, which is invaluable in creating wealth.

For a better explanation of what I mean, see the "Universities" section of http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

[edited for grammar]

I've always been of the opinion that human existence will end because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, through the continual change of various forms of energy into heat. Looks like the black holes are with me on this one.

But I don't really know what that means. Some questions:

How much will the average temperature of the universe increase? Since energy is neither created nor destroyed, there's a finite amount of it in the universe, so there is an absolute maximum (average) temperature, if all of it were converted to heat (Nobody's holding out on us with a _preexisting_ infinite energy source, right? (How would that work? I'm not really sure. But it would definitely obey the no-creation clause they stuck on the universe.))

How long will it take? If it takes even a few billion years, we'll probably have wiped ourselves out. I guess I'm contradicting myself... let me qualify my belief, then. As long as we haven't gotten to us first, then the increasing entropy of the universe will do us in. =P

I think that last one largely depends on universal efficiency, ie the rate of loss-to-heat of various energy conversions. (Sounds like black holes are pretty bad. Converting up to 40% of mass's kinetic energy to heat... talk about heat pollution! (But wait. Heat is kinetic energy on a molecular scale, right? So really that conversion is just large-scale motion to small-scale motion. I guess that's actually a definition of entropy: Conversion of cohesiveness into even distribution. Or random distribution, I should say.)

I think I should stop now. Apologies for rambling. =)

The only place I can realistically see ill-natured joking being accepted is in a school. The social hierarchy in schools is often based on it, in fact.

But in the real world, I agree with you. (What does that say about our education system? Sigh.) (Actually, it probably says more about slowing rates of maturity and development in the general population. I still blame the education system, though. =P)

I don't see the social hierarchy as a form of oppression. And I don't see how this says anything about political correctness, either.

I'm not at the top of the ladder. I'm not particularly funny, and I'm not particularly cool. But social domination, on the part of anyone, doesn't really feel like oppression, to me.

Can you explain your POV a little more?

Do you mean a wheel-generator attachment for a manpower bike, or an attachment to borrow energy from an electric bike?

For a manpower bike, I think it would be terrifically underpowered or terrifically difficult. As mentioned in a link from Luc, http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/, even the little headlights you stick on and power with the tires make cycling _much_ harder and produce very little light.

Charging a laptop/cell off of that would be... a challenge. =P

Borrowing energy from the battery of an electric bike would be a different story, but not all that helpful. Potentially useful if you stop at a coffee shop or something on your commute, but other than that, I can't see what it would do for you.

Oh, irony. I'm at work, right now. Reading this instead of actually working.

Think I can successfully rationalize this as a focus-enhancing short term break instead of a lack of self-discipline?

My question: why do the pharms think this is bad news for them?

The placebo effect requires belief that the placebo is fixing the problem. Studies are double-blind so that the patient does have that belief. Without the expectation of being cured, there is no improvement.

For the placebo effect to be a significant influence in general health, the public needs to be convinced that it is receiving a legitimate fix. The best way to show people it's a real cure? Give them a real cure, and tell them all about how it works. The need for chemical compounds that change some aspect of body chemistry will not decrease because of the placebo effect; instead, these compounds become the placebo. It's another, more effective layer of manipulation.

But despite my wording, I see no problem with it. It might technically be a giant fraud, if the power of healing lies with the buyer all along. But if it happened in finance, who would complain? "Company convinces clients they have more money; buying power mysteriously increases" doesn't sound all that fraudulent to me.

Essentially, it's business as usual for pharms. Develop compounds that may or may not work, tell everyone they work, sell them, produce actual results. What's all the fuss about?

What exactly is the problem with swear words? He's using a word with the appropriate emotional connotation to express his message. Why hack a system that doesn't work when we already have one that does exactly what we want?

From what I've seen, good teachers are those who A) earn the respect of their students, and B) understand that different people learn differently.

Respect is important because no student will be engaged in a class with a teacher of whom he has a low opinion. At best the student will ignore the teacher and turn to an alternate, respected, source - ie textbook. At worst, the student will entirely disengage from the subject. To earn respect, I would suggest first that the teacher respect the student. A student who is respected will find class more enjoyable and engaging, knowing his ideas mean something.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences states that there are ~8 different types of intelligences. A student who is exceptional in one of them will learn best in that one - and will usually be more interested in information reaching him through it. Out of the blue, it occurred to me that a file format analogy lends itself perfectly to the situation. A program may be able to open files of several formats, but it is built around one. This format will generally produce the best results for the program, even if it can interact competently with several other formats. Think excel (because I've had to deal with it recently). You can work with CSV files, certainly, but you can do much more with xls files. So teach your material in different formats. Have the content available in both visual and auditory formats as a default, but whenever possible (and you really want to reach for these!) make it available in kinesthetic, verbal, musical, and social formats as well. (I've missed a couple of Gardner's intelligences. But you get the idea.)

Teaching to multiple intelligences will also increase students' respect for you. If you help them to understand something (by teaching it in a format that naturally makes more sense to them), they will A) realize that you know what you're talking about, and B) see that you are a better teacher, likely to teach them more stuff.

I don't mean to imply that everyone is naturally interested in learning everything, and it is only the format of the data that is interfering -- but how much more enjoyable is working with a dataset if you don't have to write a parser for the input format? ;)

"[Brian Knutson] has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one."

There's evolutionary motivation to stop and smell the roses. Who knew? (Or at least to walk a little slower past them.)

...I don't really see what high school did for you, then. That sounds more like an argument for change than against it. If you're not gonna know as a junior in college, having been through high school, any better than you did as a 8th grader - why bother with it at all?

I'm currently frustrated by high school. I've known I wanted to do "computers," like you, since middle school. High school hasn't changed that. Maybe some people aren't exposed to enough options in middle school. So why don't we fix middle school instead of sticking adolescents in 4 more years of useless education? Assuming a high schooler can take 8, and assuming only two will be in his or her subject of interest, fully 75% of the student's time is wasted learning facts and skills that are unimportant. Even accounting for an additional class in a subject of moderate interest that may be useful later in life, that leaves 5/8 periods wasted. Assuming an additional 2 classes (I'm feeling generous) are useful for the skills they provide, such as communication and... (You pick. I can't even think of another useful skill that a high school class might teach.), that leaves 3/8ths of a student's time wasted.

Consider a business where 37.5% of _every_ employee's paid hours was spent playing video games. (For all the good the other 3 classes do our student, I don't think that's an unfair comparison. Except the games would be more fun.) How do you think that company would fare? That's shockingly wasteful under any other circumstances. Why do we expect it of our schools?

I'd contend that with youth I have a better perspective on the folly of your adulthood just as you can perceive the folly of my youth. (I'm 17.) What makes your later view more correct than my earlier view, on this one?

Accumulated experience generally correlates with more appropriate responses, granted. But inappropriate experiences lead to inappropriate responses. How do you verify that your experiences have led to correct conclusions? They are influenced by the society in which you live. And society (the entity itself, not the collection of people involved) generally prefers the status quo, because of natural selection.

Of course there must be a line. There is a minimum level of development necessary for reasonable integration into a society with a specific set of values and expectations. But humans mature at different rates. Age is not the appropriate unit to be using, here. We need a measurement of an individual's ability to _grow_ from immersion in the adult world. Instead of the SATs, we need CATs... Coping Aptitude Tests. It's not such a big leap for the College Board, either. (Now all that's left is to figure out how to measure maturity. Sweet deal.)

I'd rather work a 6 day week working when I want to (say, starting at 10pm) than a 4 day week 9-5. Oh, and a do not disturb sign is probably mandatory. I'll let you know when I've got some processing power to deal with your problems. Otherwise, I'm dealing with mine.

I'm with you on the headline. Article doesn't explain anything about time actually stopping.

Time slowing seems like it'd be asymptotic. You should be able to have an arbitrarily large time t, where time is flowing at rate r > 0. According to my calculations, anyway. (Along the lines of: "shit, I really don't want time to stop.")

That makes me very, very curious. Does universal expansion imply increasing distances between every atom in the universe, or only between, say, galaxies? I can't see how the second would work, but the first would be ridiculous as well - increased distances between atoms covalently bonded together? Shouldn't the chemical properties of compounds change as bond distances change? Or would the necessary bond distances for a reaction change at the same pace as the universe is expanding?

I originally arrived at the line of thinking via the measurement question - is anything in the universe at an unchanging distance from anything else? (According to expansion theories, anwyay.) If that's the case, would it not be possible to measure the wavelength of the light reaching relatively-fixed object A from its counterpart object B? If the red shift still occurs, then we know time is slowing down. If not, then expansion wins.

Expected problems for this measurement would include scale (if chemical bonds are the only distances in the universe that don't change, how do you measure the wavelength from one atom to the next?), and more scale (would the change be measurable on a scale smaller than intergalactic?). Oh, and the original assumptions. Those might be a problem, too. (That something (anything) is fixed, and that my mental model is not orders of magnitude oversimplified).

A week of karate camp does this for me. Just one week, but it is intensely focused on my body and my immediate physical surroundings. I think what makes it so... refreshing? is that it is a new and different obsession. (It's been new and different every year for 7 years, now.)

I come back from my week at karate camp and don't know what to do with myself. During the summer I live at my computer, but after a week-long break, I can't think of anything I want to do.

What I really don't get is how I can be so easily addicted to either state - constant flow of information, or no flow of information.

I guess it's a matter of self-obsession versus world-obsession. This year especially, I came back from karate camp thinking I could become a recluse, doing nothing but physical training and soul searching for the rest of my life. I wouldn't even mind if my soul searching returned zero relevant results, because no results would be meaningful (for once).

At this point (in my thought process), it seems like it's a matter of obsessions. I don't think I could live successfully in a state of balance between these two polar ideas - I would hate it. Maybe it ties into the human need to be the best at whatever is occurring at any particular moment, which expects specialization, and thereby obsession.

That still doesn't explain why it's so refreshing to change obsessions occasionally. (But I know I'd get bored being at karate camp year round, too.)

Oh well.