heygrady

I think IQ tests can sometimes measure the limits of someone's ability to learn. But in the case of a population of people with lower than average access to quality education, an IQ test probably only measures how little they have been taught.

Reminds me of the idea that people with Uner Tan Syndrome were "devolved humans." Turns out that the main reason they couldn't walk normally was that they lacked access to proper physical therapy.

http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/walking-fours-hum...

Here's some clips from an old Nova episode on the subject:

"If they were born anywhere else they would walk normally." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=47m50s

"Astonishingly, no one had thought to provide them with a $30 walking frame." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=49m40s

"frustration with the situation often spills into anger." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=52m24s

At the end, they erected some parallel bars for the family and everyone learned to walk just fine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svFg15ftGaQ&t=56m35s

Anyway, if you watch the whole doc you can catch several scientists breathlessly describe how devolved these people are. And then at the end, $30 of equipment fixed the situation and "re-evolved" them.

Tesla SAE Adapter: http://shop.teslamotors.com/collections/model-s-charging-ada...

CHAdeMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHAdeMO

SAE Combo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772#Combined_charging_sy...

I've had two electric cars. I've only charged publicly a few times. Many parking garages have installed chargers. I charge at home in my garage. I wake up every morning with a full charge. Many people who've only owned gas-powered cars don't consider this advantage.

A Nissan Leaf or a BMW i3 can only go 80 to 100 miles on the battery. But that covers the average commute of nearly every American commuter. With a charging place at work, you'd be able to swing a 70 to 100 mile daily commute and never need a public fast-charging infrastructure. If you commute more than 100 miles each direction, an EV may not be for you.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics/

Installing workplace chargers: http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/workplace-charging-challenge...

For long distance driving and fast charging, that's currently a mess. Only Tesla has a respectable offering on that front. It's worth considering that most people don't drive long distances very often.

Tesla has made a huge investment. One might speculate that their proprietary infrastructure will eventually become the standard charging network everyone is waiting for.

Tesla chargers: http://supercharge.info/

Chademo chargers: http://www.chademo.com/wp/usmap/

Most natural gas comes from fracking, which may be a major air polluter in addition to many other known problems.

http://energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-natural...

http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/04/01/how-m...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/12/16/frackin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_transition_in_Germany

My mind will change when my brain does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

I'm not an expert but... Fly brains and human brains already have have neural networks for common tasks, like sensing motion, baked into our genetics. Evolution has already trained these networks to an extent. Training a computer-simulated neural network seems to yield similar results to what nature has done.

My personal uninformed opinion is that we'll start to see how much human experience and expression is driven by our brain wiring. That we'll discover how similar we all are to each other based our wiring. And that we'll find that approximating advanced cognition will be the result of putting that wiring into a computer model -- and having a computer powerful enough to run it.

Looking purely at the effects of segregation should answer if it's a good idea. For an individual it's possible to benefit from segregation but as a group we're worse-off. Arbitrarily picking out second-class citizens and lowering their opportunities is a short-sighted idea even if in the near term that means that more resources can be used to advance your own interests. It doesn't matter if people are choosing to be disenfranchised, it matters that we're all hurt by it -- suicide is roundly discouraged for the same reasons.

There is no way that poor people demand to live in slums. The self-segragation idea is insulting and couldn't be supported by even an uninformed hypothesis.

I imagine that there's a minority of white parents that like the segregated schools simply because they don't like black people. But, I also think that the majority of the white parents sending their kids to economically/racially segregated schools are simply seeking and advantage for their own kid.

The problem comes from the long-term effects on the community. We've ended up with concentrated black communities that are less economically developed and harboring students with fewer opportunities for advancement. There's no good reason that a black student should be denied the same opportunities as a white student. We'd all be better off if black people had the same opportunity to achieve as a white person -- because white people would be better off if poor people (even poor white people) had the same opportunities as rich people.

Self-segregating is normal but doing it purely along color lines is abnormal, or at least irrational. I have friends of all races and from most continents (I don't have a friend from Antarctica and I can't remember an Australian friend) but I don't have many impoverished friends. People hang out with similar people but it's short-sighted to see it as a race thing; it's a socio-economic thing.

We're all better off with highly integrated schools because we're all worse off with a large and growing class of second-class citizens that have fewer opportunities. Poor people with fewer opportunities commit more crimes, make less money and cost more public money to support (even if you only consider prison costs). People with a good education and good access to career opportunities commit far fewer violent crime and pay way more taxes and increase the prosperity of any community they join. We're better off being integrated.

It seems like a hollow argument to malign Github just because it wrapped something useful in its own right (Git) with a set of tools that raise its usefulness enormously (Github). And if you end up having an issue with Git, if you've got a local checkout it's 100% Git compatible and you can migrate it anywhere you'd like.

And what's to say we're not aliens ourselves? That Prometheus movie hinted at the possibility, so did Star Trek. Both point to an original creator that uses simple biology and knowledge of evolution to seed planets with life and let it grow. Modern astrobiology, as documented in the recent Cosmos reboot, thinks that life has already been traversing the galaxy on space rocks; crashing into planets in an ice ball and taking hold where it can. While not intelligent by human standards, it still spreads ET life. With the time scales involved, it seems like space rocks with simple life on them might be spreading ET fairly evenly through our galaxy and beyond.

As smart as we are, we have only recently been able to hurtle some space junk out of our solar system and into deep space. The distances involved and the limitations of our current understanding of physics make it seem likely that we wouldn't be in direct contact already. It's taken 2 generations for Voyager 1 to travel that far.

Using ourselves as the perfect example, our own broadcasts haven't reached very far into our own galaxy. If we are typical and our understanding of physics is reasonably accurate, there could be numerous human-like civilizations broadcasting and sending out probes constantly and we just haven't waited long enough -- the distances are too vast for us to have heard them. Or worse, we're not intelligent enough yet to listen to the broadcasts that are being sent to us already.

I say we build these magical self-replicating probes and send them out and hope we don't accidentally create the Borg. The only way to beat the paradox is to play along. And if we don't find anything, then we'd better get to colonizing!