mkn

My interest in programming stems from wanting to use them to solve problems, not from theoretical interest in how computers work. Most of my colleagues in the UW engineering department I was in learned just enough Matlab to get the homework done. I learned enough to program a solution to the homework. I originally learned QBasic to program a Mandelbrot-set generator on a 286, because I wanted to generate the Mandelbrot set.

Should a web developer learn machine code? I dunno. You can get pretty far in web development with a good head, some Railscasts and tutorials, and a bit of practice. Maybe the question is "When should a web developer learn machine code?" I think the answer to that question, if he/she is a working web developer, is, "When he/she has to, when it comes up."

For myself, I look at these--let's be frank--esoteric things like machine code, higher-order whatever, compiler-design, and so on and think, "That may be interesting, but I've got work to do and fun to have. I'll wait until I have to know it before I learn it." I've already had to learn about lambdas. Very fun stuff, but also very useful stuff.

Now, should the macho programmer learn machine code? Of course. But the macho programmer should also be manufacturing his own computer chips as well, to better fit with his pure and obviously correct programming methods.

There may be no 'I' in 'team,' but you can't spell 'team' without 'me.'

Am I the only one who sees the no-I-in-team chestnut as obviously manipulative?

Not to mention, there was a great article about solo entrepreneurs on HN a while ago that, I think, is something of an existence counter-proof of this article.

Maybe someone should create a lateral-thinking patent evasion group. If they did, would we primarily be smugly satisfied with ourselves for having done so, or would we be overcome with angst over the fact that such a group might be needed?

  seen them in tabular format ? you know they're great :
  have you seen them abused   ? you think you know     :
  have you thought about it   ? you think you know     :
  get the gist from this      ? good                   :
                                I can't help you       ;

The fourth statement was a reaction to a particularly egregious instance of an unsupported statement. I like to think of it as 'robust humor,' but reasonable people could disagree.

The final instance, "It may help you to understand that..." was genuinely polite. debt had gone off the rails at this point and clearly does not understand even the definition of ressentiment about which he is commenting. I humbly suggest that this one doesn't even belong on your list.

I forget the article, but there was a link on HN that covered, among other things, the differences between a 'community' and a 'society' online, and how these paralleled their irl counterparts. HN, if it can be called anything at all, must be called a 'society' rather than a 'community', if only because of its size. We simply cannot form communal ties with the sheer number of people on HN. And in a civil 'society', a little meanness is permitted, even encouraged, when responding to an attack by another member of the society.

debt has not played, and still is not playing, by the rules. Either his reading comprehension is so poor or his disregard for accuracy so complete that he is not fit for civil discussion on this site. This would not matter at all if he would at least refrain from making unsupported statements about others' beliefs and intentions. Just look at my original post and try to find justification for his aspersions, and then ask yourself what HN would be like if debt and his ilk ran amok unchecked. Justice and/or basic dignity demand that we give to him as we get from him until he either comes around or buggers off.

I think you can see that there's a difference between this kind of 'meanness' and the abject trolling and plain incivility present on other sites. This 'meanness' has a preservative and defensive function, I would argue, and should not be shied away from. To shy away, I think, would be to give in to an excessive squeamishness and would surrender the debate to persons, like debt, who are unfit to inherit this site.

I fail to see any other course in circumstances like these, but I am open to reasoned correction on this matter. And, if pg or the other demigods of HN want to chime in on the matter, their opinions would be welcome, even definitive, to some extent. Until then, when I am confronted with the kind of unreasoning and brutishly unfounded claims evidenced by debt, I will come out, metaphorical guns a-blazin', at my discretion.

Respectfully, mkn

EDIT: It is bitterly ironic that a post which contains the phrase 'I am open to reasoned correction' should be downmodded into negative territory, instead of reasonably replied to. If there is a clearer indication of the ineffectiveness of this turn-the-other-cheek pussification of debate on HN, I cannot imagine it. We will get the forum we deserve, I guess.

To what part of my comment could you possibly be referring? Let me state that this is a direct invitation for you to find in my previous comment the line or lines that supports your statement about my purported beliefs about 'those people at the party' and that I 'agree but don't want to...say it.' Put up or shut up.

Many people, yourself included, mask their personalities with a phony sense of optimism and say, "Hey, mang, leave my friend alone. He may be happy here at this baseball game, getting drunk and probably later falling asleep in your garden."

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. First, "Have you been to a...naked-ignorant-frat-boy flailing party?", implying that I haven't, or at least haven't perceived the true nature of it, and then, "Hey, mang, " & etc., seemingly implying that this is my lifestyle and that I'm defending it. It's telling that your hypothetical example individual not only is not 'happy...at [the] baseball game,' but that, as proof he is not, he later '[falls] asleep in your garden.' Again, point to the part of my comment that supports your allegation of a 'phony optimism' or retract your insipid allegation.

It's also telling that the author's non-specific use of the word 'party' induces, in you, the concept of the most objectionable kind of party you can think of, one in which the participants are engaging in some kind of blatant mass stupidity, by your judgment. Why would one compare oneself to this particular set? Why choose who one believes are the worst of the worst to which to compare oneself, unless one wants to aggrandize oneself? That is the root of the suspicion. Why not say, "Go to the boardroom of Google. Feel the tension. Everybody is faking it."? Indeed, some do, but only those who wish to waylay the corporate as inherently evil. And they do so by making the corporate out to be the opposite of themselves, who are by definition, 'good'.

Starting a company is not socially acceptable.

I want whatever you're smoking.

I believe the author's "ressentiment" is born out of the belief that the drones at parties and baseball games have somehow given in and given up rather then getting what they actually wanted.

Look at the pejoratives: 'drones', 'given in', 'given up', 'parties' as frat-boy free-for-alls, 'baseball games' as a collection of drones, and 'rather then [sic] getting what they actually wanted'. I submit, based on this portion of your comment, that you are so accustomed to committing Nitezsche's ressentiment that you cannot even see when you are doing it, nor the sheer number of spurious value-judgments that you must make in order to support it.

It may help you to understand that ressentiment is not just dislike for a class that has bested you, but the transmutation of that dislike into a moral statement, the statement that "They are wrong for winning, and all of the qualities that make them the winners are evil, and all of the qualities that make me the loser are virtues."

Actually, [having a software job with benefits and vacations] leaves me with the feeling that the author describes.

I leave it to you whether this feeling is a function of your psychology or a function of the lifestyle in which you were engaged. Was it subjective, rooted in you, or objective, rooted in the circumstance?

And here we have the crux of it. This is Nietasche's ressentiment, the origin of moral feeling. Observe the hatred he has for the successful and the contented. They have won at the game of life, in that they fit in, are laughing, are enjoying themselves, yet the author feels that there must be something wrong with them. They must deserve his scorn because he has not achieved the ease and confidence that they show. It must be a chimera. Meditation sets the author apart. He has stamina. He has determination. He has 'grit', and for this he is despised by the masses. Bullshit.

And isn't it suspicious that meditation always leads to a higher place? Isn't it at least possible that meditation might merely unveil yourself to you? Or maybe, more laughably, help you to obscure yourself from you? Or, even more laughably, to obscure the nature of reality from yourself so that you can continue to believe that you have the high ground in some realm of ideas, despite your losses and discontentment in the observable universe? It strikes me as suspicious that someone with this obvious contempt for the masses could take hold of a meditative practice and use it objectively, to discover the true nature of anything, let alone any inner 'true' happiness.

We have only the observed facts that the author has provided, minus his 'insights' into the 'true nature' of these observances or the 'ulterior motives' of the actors he observes.

Zarathustra's advice would be well taken by him, and all who find this article compelling: "Always love your neighbor as yourselves -- but first be such as love themselves"

In a conventional 'learn to test' scenario, one might feel naturally compelled to read and reread, or to take notes with the book open, simply out of desperation.

What do you think? Could the success of 'Unschooling' be largely due to the very effect described in the current article?

If we look at this from the standpoint of transactional analysis (and contextualize this narrative from the airline employee's point of view), this becomes less of a morality tale than a mini-drama about struggle for power. Two facts about airline employee's lives are relevant: 1) Their jobs place them at the low end of the socio-economic ladder, and 2) they are constantly exposed to and subservient to people with the financial means necessary to purchase air travel to distant locations. If this isn't a recipe for Nietzschean resentment, I don't know what is. Airline employees are prostrate before the abuses of the elite, and so subtly struggle to throw up obstacles to the elite's success, if only by causing irritation. This obstruction is best dealt out to the most egregious abusers, not only because it 'trains' the elite to respect the servers, but also because it gives the veneer of morality to the action.

What if, for example, the story had been told from a different angle? Two airline counter employees each receive asshole customers. One of them responds in kind, and the other responds with kindness. The 'in kind' customer escalates, but the 'other cheek' customer settles down, apologizes, and--the icing on the cake--the 'other cheek' employee gets him booked on a choice flight or provides some other bonus? Who knows, maybe the 'other cheek' employee gets promoted to supervisor, with attendant pay increase!

So, we can see that the 'nice deed' garners some benefit for the doer. This at least opens up the possibility that it is a crass manipulative move on the doers part. (Indeed, in the story in the article, the traveler not only received the earlier flight and the good will of the attendant, but also got to smugly refer to his friend as 'such an asshole' and got to gloat to his friend's face!)

Also, though we see that there is a crass benefit to the doer of nice deeds, the story is presented as a morality tale, as if the nice deed was done for the sake of niceness, but with the attendant trifling success of having incidentally, almost by accident really, attained some material good, which, it just so happens, was in the control of the gatekeeper-recipient. As if the passenger regaling us with the tale would continue to be nice, for example, even if so doing would only serve to invariably further enrage the surly staff at every encounter.

I'm not holding up unconditional niceness as an ideal, but I think it is important to recognize the full dynamic before reading too much into the situation. Nietzsche, for example, said that the Ubermensch could 'call a man his enemy without calling him evil.' In this instance, that would probably consist of recognizing that both passengers and airline employees feel powerless, and strive to master the situation with various tactics, not least of which are surliness, rudeness, and/or niceness. This is, fundamentally, a recognition of the amorality of the actors and their actions.

In a lot of ways, this is a fundamental realization that successful customer service organizations must realize, even if they sublimate it. They simply have to remove the moral indignation portion of their interactions with customers and say, "By acting in a certain way, even if we lose out at the level of the interpersonal morality play, we receive the most benefit for ourselves. Further, the only thing that keeps this from being overly crass is that we realize our personal benefit by creating the best outcome for our customers. After all, every dollar we ever hope to earn is in someone else's pocket."

Second, your stupid summary is not supported by the text of the article.

people [sic] are irrational and make stupid decisions.

There is some truth to this if we take the best possible reading. Research continually shows that people do make decisions that are not supported by rational thinking. Bubbles arise in very simple trading games, even when there is an objective maximum to the item traded that falls well below the traded value, for example. There are countless other examples and a rich and growing literature on the subject. Thus, your first statement seems actually to be true, even if it was offered with sarcastic disdain.

The government knows better.

Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article. Given that the percentage of people making a given choice can be skewed by how the choice is offered, it seems a reasonable course of action to make the offer in such a way as to achieve the desired result. The decreased withholding example from the article is a brilliant case in point. The government really does know better which way to implement a tax cut in order to increase spending.

Typical Time Magazine.

At some point in your life you're going to have to start addressing the substance of arguments offered rather than considering the source. Maligning Time serves no purpose relevant to the discussion of whether or not the propositions offered in the article correspond to reality. It serves only to rehearse your own biases.

This is a forum for grown-ups. If you can't comport yourself in a manner appropriate to your peers, please remain silent.

Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!

What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.

Really? This is your complaint? By 'unnecessary,' we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.' That much is evident to any sincere reader of the article who cares enough about the pursuit of knowledge to abide by the principle of charity: Put the best face on the argument before you refute it, otherwise you are not contributing.

The straw-man argument, "Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary," is wholly beside the point.

And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.

Again, this cannot be a serious complaint. The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor. A surface reading would be that we're just raising the temperature of the planet to an unhealthy extreme. A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state. More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.

That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.

This is evident from the shallowness of your misguided critique. More practice at reading, dead-tree media or otherwise, might have made you a skillful enough reader to have been able to follow the plot here.

The only 'invention' that goes on seems, to me, to be on the order of brainstorming, i.e., inventing hypotheticals to test their implications or shed new light on an existing conundrum.

Fundamentally, I think the use of 'discovery' terminology, rather than 'invention' terminology arises from the nature of the new thing produced. Discoveries, in the scientific or mathematical sense, were 'always there' within the corresponding realm of inquiry (e.g., the set of axioms that comprise mathematics, the physical world for scientific discoveries, & etc.) and represent a mere formulation of an existing but previously hidden truth. Inventions, on the other hand, represent a novel application of existing principles for some external purpose. The implementation cannot be said to have flowed from existing knowledge in any meaningful way. Nor do inventions have any general theoretical utility. (Mousetraps are fun little inventions, but don't contribute to a 'Theory of Pest Control' and we certainly would not refer to the 'discoverer of the mouse trap.')

Additionally, other scientists do in fact use the terms 'discover' and 'invent' in precisely the same sense as mathematicians do, and for similar reasons. In fact, these are the commonly accepted notions of the terms even among nonspecialists.

Using 'mathematical invention' rather than 'mathematical discovery' erroneously (or maliciously) ascribes arbitrary subjectivity to mathematical thought.

I regret that I have but 8 karma points to give.

Islam, like all religious faiths, is predicated on the notion that rational thought is to be subjugated to some holy book or higher power. As such, Islam, and all other faiths (including even every moderate branch of mainstream religions in the U.S.) are susceptible to radicalization and militarization. While abortion clinic bombers are currently a much smaller problem than Muslim suicide bombers on a pure numbers basis, the potential is still there.

That said, Islam has proven itself to be exceedingly prone to militarization. The subordination of the intellect is an explicit tenet of even the name of the religion. The intellects of Muslims are, by definition, enslaved to the Koran and, by common practice throughout the world, enslaved to two-bit Mullahs and the insipid fatwas they issue. Western secular civilization, by definition, has not only the right but the obligation to be paranoid about Islam for as long as it take Islam to prove itself benign.

The only reason the western secular civilization need not immediately take remedial action against other, more moderate, strains of religious belief is that, currently, their capacity for sheer mindless barbaric murderousness has been rendered latent by the secularizing force of modern technology and society. Specifically, for example, there is no danger that printing an image of the Christian god will result in mobs of anti-intellectual zealots rioting in the streets, overturning and burning vehicles while chanting, "Death to America!" There is that danger with Islam.

It is only radical and misguided political correctness to say that Islam is not the enemy of the west, when Islam itself is explicitly opposed to such shining examples of western rationality and moral values as: 1) The seeking of equality of opportunity for women, 2) The seeking of knowledge via the scientific method, even if (and especially if) it leads to the overthrow of current understanding or doctrine, 3) Due process and commensurate punishment for individuals accused and found guilty, respectively, of crimes, 4) The separation of religious entities from the government, and so on.

Any sect that explicitly and in its founding texts is opposed to virtues such as the ones listed above is not only an enemy of the West, but an enemy of the scientific method that has brought so much benefit to mankind and even an enemy of every great thinker since the Enlightenment. I am not ashamed of my hatred for Islam, nor of my dislike for other organized religions. We can thank Islam for shepherding rationalism through the Christian Dark Ages but, currently, its only other gift to mankind is showing us explicitly how severe the latent danger of the religious mind really is.

Note that the above two, if supplied, would still not rise to the level of proof that any particular area of research was lethally contaminated by researchers' avarice. For that, you would actually have to show 1) That the research was flawed or came to an incorrect conclusion, and 2) That the researchers responsible were falsifying data or inventing specters with the intent of obtaining funding. To discredit research in this way, you would have to use the scientific method to convince scientists, and/or courtroom procedure to convince a jury in, say, a civil trial to recover fraudulently obtained research dollars.

The above should be enough to show why these accusations occur in online forums, editorial pages, and blogs, rather than in research journals or courts of law. Simply put, it cannot be done because these accusations are so patently absurd as to be rejected out of hand by people whose expertise is actually in finding things like this out. If it were otherwise, one could make an academic career out of showing it. If you are so sure of it, please do so. Get published in Nature, or another respected journal. Do such groundbreaking research that you get invited to give talks to academic audiences. Your service to mankind by debunking a flawed institution that claims (at this point legitimately, I might add) the mantle of being the best way that the human race has of gaining new knowledge will be immeasurable, even if you did not, in the same stroke, supply humankind with another and superior edifice. Until then, by perpetuating this silly vicious lie, you are merely pissing in the fountain of knowledge* for the purposes of self-aggrandizement.

Our current body of scientific knowledge has been made possible by the scientific method. This method is designed to ruthlessly root out falsehood. Look at cold fusion. I would imagine there would be no easier way to get funding than the promise of cheap, relatively low-tech, non-polluting, and abundant energy. Yet, Pons and Fleischman were immediately discredited and now stand as objects of ridicule to this day. Everything that you rely on to supply you with your modern lifestyle comes from this kind of scientific rigor. Medicine, transportation, hygiene, materials, manufacturing, computers, the list goes on.

Show a little bit of the proper respect due to the edifice that has done so much for you.

*"[P]issing in the fountain of knowledge" borrowed from YouTube user Thunderf00t's excellent videos on young earth creationism whackos. I highly recommend them, even if you think you're sick to death of that whole 'debate.'

There's a great website about procrastination, http://www.procrastinus.com/, that uses this understanding of future discounting to help one get things done. The idea is that a long project should be broken up into smaller tasks so that, even though meeting the smaller goals results in less absolute reward, they are more compelling because the completion horizon is so close.

Basically, humans are wired so that a jelly donut (or a few hundred bucks) now is perceived as more beneficial than 5 to 10 years of existence tacked on at the end of life. For a very long time, that has been a very sensible proposition.

What would you call people who pay $25,000 for a nine-week course of study with a collection of Silicon Valley optimists? “Singularly Stupid”?

Name calling. This can in no way contribute to any discussion where understanding is the goal. Arguably, it follows that the rest of the essay is not intended to help people's understanding.

The idea of the singularity is that technology, especially in the form of artifically intelligent robots, will solve all of our problems and technological advance will speed up exponentially starting roughly around the year 2030.

The point is that the rate of advances in nearly all fields is exponential. Doubly exponential, in fact. That is, the exponent is growing at an exponential rate. And it's not that all of our problems will be solved, it's that the advances will be so dramatic that rules derived from how things are now--this side of the singularity--are useless for understanding what happens after the singularity.

So far technology innovation hasn’t outstripped Malthusian human population growth. We can grow more food more efficiently, but the number of human mouths to feed has grown just about as fast, so that we struggle to feed everyone. A lot of what we’ve done over the past few hundred years has come at the cost of using up the Earth, e.g., clearing forest for farmland or digging up coal and oil and lighting it on fire, taking all of the Cod out of the North Atlantic.

One of the most blatant straw men I've seen in a long time. First, technological innovation hasn't outstripped Malthusian population growth because technological innovation is the cause of it! Frankly, there are a lot of sad things about having 6 billion people on earth, but I think that about 6 billion of them would vote against programs that say, reduced the food supply.

Second, this ignores the amount of stuff we are able to get out of a unit of matter taken from the environment, and the amount of pollution produced by a unit measure of production, and the amount of dispersal for a given amount of pollution. In short, it categorically ignores any good that can have come from technology.

Far from freeing us from cleaning the house, Artificial Intelligence thus far has failed to live up to promises made by professors seeking research funding in 1960 (that reminds me I need to do laundry!).

It's probable that this fallacy has a proper name, but I've always called it Ascription of Intent. And I'm talking about the first implicit fallacy, which is an assertion that professors lied about AI for the sole reason of obtaining funding. The other fallacy is an ad hominem attack, namely that because professors were (allegedly) lying to get funding, AI is [useless|stupid|malevolent|a bad thing].

Given the track record of tech as a mixed blessing and as a slower agent for change than predicted, do young people need to prepare for 2030? Can they prepare by listening to Ray Kurzweil, or anyone else born in 1948? Should they fork over $25,000 for nine weeks or simply watch old Jetsons episodes?

It's coming thick and fast, now. Technology is a slower agent of change than predicted? Really? Who's predictions? I remember a prediction about computers someday being smaller than a rhinoceros, and another about how every town will have one telephone. Even 20 years ago, did anyone imagine that a global computer network would be so pervasive that even logically fallacious essays would be conveyed instantaneously the world over?

Furthermore, his point is specifically and directly addressed by Kurzweil et al. Actually, not even 'et al.' In 'The Singularity Is Near,' Kurzweil talks about how even scientists--especially scientists--underestimate the pace of progress because of their proximity to the drudgery of their own various specialties. He talks about how the aggregate adds up more quickly than humans are able to directly sense, and that it takes analysis to get a true picture of the rate of progress. I think we need to insist that Greenspun at least obey the principle of charity and put the best representation of his opponent's argument forward, rather than the worst. (And not just for the sake of charity, but because that is how collective knowledge--rather than, for example, an author's personal agenda--would be advanced.)

And what does anyone's birth date have to do with it? He may as well have comment on the race, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, or eye color of Singularity advocates.

Maybe I will kick off the comments section with a realistic tech innovation that would change the world in a positive way. My pick: A better battery (cheaper, lighter, higher power density). That would enable the use of renewable energy in every kind of portable application, e.g., cars and airplanes, and also make it much more practical to use wind and solar generation.

Has he not heard of Lithium-Ion batteries? He's not heard of the Tesla Roadster? Is he asserting that battery technology is the only factor limiting the adoption of renewable energy? Power generation density isn't an issue? High capital costs aren't an issue? Regulatory hurdles aren't an issue? It's batteries that are going to save us?

The "[s]pecial offer' at the end doesn't even rise to the level where comment is necessary.

Addendum:

There has been a lot of hand-wringing recently over the direction that HN has been taking. That this article has made the front page should be taken as food for thought in this regard. The content of this article didn't even rise to the level of 'commentary' or 'argument.' It's easy to get off track into name-calling, non-sequiters, and simple wrong-headedness; this applies to comments as well as story submissions. I'm not here arguing whether this article should have been front-paged. I am arguing that, if you care about HN, one of the things you can do is make sure that your comments do not resemble this article in vacuity, stupidity, needless over-emotionalism, or fallaciousness.

While I would admire the author's technical skill in skirting the issue (truly amazing), I now have even deeper reservations about the editorial policy and institutional bias of the Washington Post. While many of the participants at HN write very lucidly, I wouldn't guess that many of us have worked as writers. I have, and I could not have designed a piece of writing to better omit the issue of civilian surveillance of law enforcement officers given the subject matter they were handling.

Second, some meta-advice about the "Trollish question? Although question might be trollish, it isn't because..." meme: Don't do it. If you have a question like that, then it really is trollish. If you think it isn't trollish, then you need to think about it some more, because you're missing something obvious. When you figure it out on your own, you're going to be so glad you didn't embarrass yourself by asking the smart people on HN such a--let's be frank about it--dumb question.

I normally don't respond to posts of this kind, but it has become a line-in-the-sand issue for me because this meme, and so many others like it, seem recently to be running rampant through an otherwise useful site. We get replies of the form, "I'm obviously unqualified to talk about X, but here's my opinion on X," the afore-mentioned "Trollish Q? Not so because I think it's interesting," and so on.

Think of it as being like farting loudly in an elevator. It doesn't matter if you have really bad gas, you wait until you're alone. Similarly, if you've got a vacuous question or opinion so unjustified that you have to qualify it by saying so, just don't air it in a public forum. You're wasting people's time.

Ditto for mildew.

The earthquake resistance, pest resistance, and insulating qualities of straw bale construction are mind-blowing.

The limiting factors here are obtaining a guidance and control system that is small enough to fit down your (admittedly large bore) low-pressure launch gun. Also, your gun would have to be pretty dang straight or your vehicle would have to be wrapped in a vibration-absorbing sabot.

The benefits are: 1) Once you have the gun, you can launch as many as you like; 2) Mass fraction as mentioned above; 3)The possibility of production-lining launch vehicle construction.

Not that I've given this any thought.

BTW, Bruckner et. al. at the University of Washington have been working on a ram accelerator, a type of launch gun, for years. The only thing slowing them is funding. They omit an airbreathing stage in favor of obtaining all the Delta-V in one shot, subjecting the payload to 700-1e3 Gs.

I can't express how badly I want this meme to take hold! I've wondered for years why anyone can believe that humans are rational agents in the face of the existence of the huge marketing apparatus present in advanced economies. I mean, if we really are rational decision-making agents, why does a manufacturer pay someone to come up with a jingle? To engineer a fad via guerrilla marketing? To create brand impressions by slapping a logo on a race car or sports stadium? All of these techniques, and all of the other successful marketing techniques out there, survive precisely because humans can be persuaded to spend money irrationally.

"So what?," you say? Well, that great artifice, "Classical Free Market Theory," rests on the foundation of rational agents making locally optimal solutions with imperfect information. It seems to me to predict, for example, that there's no profit to be made anywhere in a steady state condition. The rational masses, so the theory goes, will always seek the cheapest goods that meet the need, regardless of brand recognition, sexy women placed next to sports cars, or celebrity endorsement. In this case, every competitive scenario results in goods being produced at cost.

Thankfully (I think), this is not the case, and there is a way to wealth that is left open. Namely, a successful entrepreneur needs to be present when people are making non-rational decisions with their money. This is not to say that these are bad decisions, or that the entrepreneur needs to be unscrupulous. It's just an acknowledgment of the fact that rational decision-making in a quasi-equilibirum economic scenario results in zero profit margin.

Context menus are invisible until you right-click. Also, there's been some evidence that we remember the locations of things better if they're arranged radially (like the demo approximates) rather than orthogonally (like in a context menu). A combination of a translucent constant reminders of tasks available plus a radial arrangement of those tasks floating around the mouse might make it easy to remember what's available after a right-click. It might be distracting as hell, for all I know.

One thing's for sure, it would be more than just a context menu as we know them now.

Also, call it mkn's first law: There's always something you're overlooking. (Where 'you' is the hypothetical you, not you in particular.) :o)

To be precise, it only has to be as strong as its engineering factor of safety along its entire length. Also, fundamental to the understanding of composites is the transmission of loads from the fiber to the matrix. This load is transferred via shear pressures along the length of the fiber at the interface with the matrix. The net result is that the load is transferred along a very large area and results in a low shear pressure in the matrix. Composite engineering is a tricky business, but even with current fiber materials, you can build a part that has ~7 times the strength/weight of metals, much lower modulus of elasticity, and a linear fatigue curve.

you need to construct the...counterweight in space as well...and we don't have an elevator to GET it there until we make the first one

Most current plans actually unwind the tether from the middle. Then, in much the same way as cables are strung across canyons starting with a bow and arrow and a string, this initial tether is just strong enough to haul up another larger line, and so on. A single launch using any of the heavy lift vehicles in service today would be sufficient to launch the starting material into a suitable orbit.

For reference, in Engines of Creation (iirc), Drexler outlines a personal launch vehicle that weighed ~100 lbs and could lift a single occupant to leo with one stage. I suspect that the guys that finally do build a space elevator are really just going to end up with a nice place from which to watch personal spacecraft launches.

The point is that the behavior changes based on whether you are running from the command line or from inside a script, that this is completely arbitrary, and that there was no override possible for this behavior. When run from the command line, simulations for combinations of gains that caused the system to career away did indeed career away, they just continued to do so for the full length of time specified in the function call. That kind of abject flakiness renders the program unsuitable for professional use in that you can't plan for those kind of quirks. I had invested hours by the time I worked out what the bug was, and invested hours more trying to fix it. I finally had to give up, after investing my time and effort, because the platform was fundamentally and fatally incapable of doing what it was asked.

It is completely unacceptable for a package to have such wildly different (and undocumented) behavior for the same exact function call. Matlab was indeed stupid. It was a buggy minefield of stupidity when I was using it.

Finally, it looks like your defense of this awful weakness on the part of Matlab is, ironically, a result of your commitment to the platform rather than a reasoned response to the case outlined.

Or stupidly. I don't know if the following should qualify as an edge case generally, but it does in Matlab.

The controls lab in the aerospace department at the U of W had a wonderful inverted cart-pendulum device that a grad student was doing some seriously freaky non-linear control research on. We were tasked, as part of a lab, to write a controller in Matlab that would balance the pendulum and move the cart to a designated position. After trying for days to come up with a combination of gains to result in stable control, I decided to write an evolutionary algorithm to choose a controller.

It was dead simple. The genome was a list of gains. The code created generations of genomes and then ran them through the simulation. The tricky part (for me at that time) was finding the settling time (walk backwards from the end of the data, checking for values outside of the tolerance). Choose the winners, perturb, preserve best performers, and go around again. Doing all the steps by hand worked wonderfully.

When I ran the code, I got combinations of gains that resulted in massively unstable systems; systems that overshot off the chart as soon as physically possible given the hardware. What was going on?

It turns out, when I ran the simulation from the command line, Matlab graciously accepted my 5-second simulation time. However, when run from a script, Matlab ignores that parameter and runs the simulation until the output careers off the chart. Because I was looking for a minimum time with no overshoot, my algorithm was finding combinations of gains that overshot steeply enough to convince Matlab to stop simulating ASAP! It was bizarre. My secondary condition was minimum overshoot, so I got solutions that were exactly steep enough to cause the simulation to stop when the output hit the desired value!

A friend of mine stumbled on to a workable combination of gains. I used those.