polyfractal

Gotta say, I've never had a problem with WP7. All things clickable:

- Big colorful squares

- Round icons at the bottom of the screen

- Ellipses

- Most text that is white and largish

Can you give an example of something difficult? I just flipped through my phone and couldn't find anything that might be confusing.

I've always been struck by how little Amazon's design has changed:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990828014913/http://www.amazon....?

That's actually a very good point. I rescind my original disappointment. It was a pretty cool story that emerged out of something as simple as a postal mishap.

Mildly disappointing ending to what I hoped to be some epic story/gimick/whatever.

Amusing that the USPS thought the vintage (fake) Egyptian postage was real though

Wow, this claim is basically fabricated. The content of this article is sourced from an NYT post (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/window_pain_for_ballme...), where the claims that Balmer may be fired are being speculated by "Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi", who says:

> The success of Microsoft’s mobile strategy doesn’t hinge only on this quarter’s sales. But if the company can’t boost results into next year, Ballmer would become vulnerable, Milanesi said.

> “If Windows 8 were to fail, Ballmer would be questioned,” she said.

So this isn't even a rumor, it's some analyst making speculations and then being rebranded as a rumor by a 2-bit news outlet.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure you are correct. Most people don't realize that mashing the spam button not only moves the message to the Spam label, but also alerts the ISP and ESP which causes negative repercussions for everyone.

I'm fine with people hitting spam because something is legitimately spam. But hitting it because you are too lazy to click the Unsubscribe link is crappy. Or, more likely, because everyone thinks it's the same as the unsubscribe link.

I'll only spam something if A) there is no unsubscribe link or B) I keep getting emails after I unsubscribe.

You would be surprised. I've run several mailing lists for both technical and non-technical people.

Always, without fail, you will get someone that signs up, confirms and then mashes the spam button two emails later while sending you irate "HOW DID YOU GET MY EMAIL ADDRESS UNSUBSCRIBE ME OHGODWHATHAVEYOUDONE?!" emails.

It's remarkable, really.

Wow, this is like a case study on how not to present data. I'm sure this is an interesting dataset...but it's so confusing.

Soooo...they reinvented a blimp, strapped on some gimballed cameras and are using a proprietary equivalent to ArduPilot?

One of my hobbies is FPV RC planes/quadrotors. People are doing this with planes and quads for a fraction of the cost. Not 100 hour deployments sure, but that's because blimps are boring to fly.

Interesting. Here in the States (at least, where I grew up), handwriting is a real mixed bag.

When you are learning how to write as a small child, it's a big deal to write clearly (for obvious reason). Then you are forced to learn cursive, and its a big deal to write cursive clearly.

Then it doesn't matter anymore. Literally everyone stops caring as long as it is legible. It's a weird system. While you are learning to read and write, there is an emphasis on penmanship. But once you are literate...no one cares anymore. Most people (like myself) degenerate back to chicken scratch. Especially as typing became more prevalent. I would hazard a guess that children in the States have even worse handwriting nowadays.

That's not true. There are dozens of candidate genes for Schizophrenia. None have been linked conclusively, probably because none of them are entirely responsible.

I think the general agreement in the field is that genetic abnormalities are necessary but not sufficient to cause Schizophrenia. If you are going to crack, it's usually because you are genetically predisposed to it and in the right environment to trigger the disorder.

Using Schizophrenia as an example, there are plenty of mid-20's males that are in stressful environments...but don't become schizophrenic. A minority of those males will have a genetic abnormality that predisposes them, and they start hearing voices.

Mmm...I'd hedge my bets a bit. I think a better generalization is that many psychiatric disorders are caused by genetic abnormalities (or clusters of abnormalities, or complemented with epigenetics), but that the potential pool of candidates is vast. It only takes a few rotten eggs in the whole batch to ruin things.

It's like a rocket. You need all the parts of a rocket to work or you won't get off the ground. If you are really unlucky, it may even explode

With psychiatric disorders, it's similar. Break a few choice genes and the whole system goes to shit. But unlike a rocket, it keeps working, just not in the fashion that other brains works. So you get some kind of disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar.

I was involved in a few projects where they were mapping schizophrenia with SNPs. Looking at the data, it's clear that some individuals cluster around certain SNPs...but most of them are scattered everywhere. Lots of things can cause schizophrenia, because it really isn't a single disease but a set of common symptoms.

Re handwriting:

If you are still into improving your handwriting, buy yourself a fountain pen. It makes it a lot of fun to experiment with new characters and drastically alter your handwriting.

I've always had meh handwriting. Not horrible, but not pretty either. I've been slowly converting my scratchy characters over to smoother, more flowy characters with embelleshments, since fountain pens make it so easy to play. The process was identical to what you described. Pick a character, play with alternatives until I found one I liked, then slowly retrain myself to use it.

That proves the point. To be able to fold a simple protein, you have to be capable of simulating the very challenging simulation of "real world physics at an atomic scale".

To simulate a brain, you get to do that for a few hundred trillion proteins that make up a brain...and all their interactions with all the other trillion proteins.

The complexity doesn't come from the proteins so much as the physics that govern the proteins.

Being left handed, you may have to experiment with paper and ink. Some inks, usually archival quality, take longer to dry and you may smear them. Less archival quality inks soak up faster, especially with more "open" paper that sucks it up.

At my last wet-bench lab, I was responsible for dissecting and culturing cortical neurons. Sounds cool, right?

The dissection day protocol took 5 hours, start to finish. The largest gap was about 15 minutes as samples trypsonized in a water bath. I could sneak out to the bathroom or grab a snack during this period. The rest of the time was spent stacking, unstacking, pipetting, sloshing, scraping, mixing various liquids inside of sterile bio-safety cabinet.

Every wednesday I would perform this identical protocol and effectively space out for 5 hours at a time, listening to podcasts. Sometimes I would just dream about a robot doing my job. Much of my other duties during the week revolved around these little culture dishes. Neurons require a pretty obnoxious feeding schedule.

I was effectively being paid 30k a year to be a robot. A single purchase of 30k would have saved my lab a lot of money, since it would have replaced me as a tech.

I considered starting a business trying to sell robots to do just this, but decided I didnt have enough robotics knowledge to do it, or capital to start.

Best wishes to these guys!

Yeah, I'm afraid you may be right. Looking closer at it a second time, certain character are clearly identical. The lower-case "t" for example.

=(

Exactly this. I started with a Lamy Al-Star and it's a nice, robust little pen for pretty cheap. Aluminum, so it can take being thrown around. My girlfriend recently started using the Safari and it's a good pen too.

My main "workhorse" pen is the Lamy Studio. Heavier than the Al-Star, a slightly grippy coating, better balance when "posted" (putting the cap on the end of the pen while writing). Also a bit thicker, which suits my personal preference.

This thread at SA is a pretty good primer for fountain pens and ink: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=324...

I have a few other cheap chinese fountain pens that I mess around with, but mostly stick to my Studio.

Edit: Bonus points to owning a semi-nice fountain pen: you'll never lose a pen again. I religiously keep mine in my pocket because, damnit, I spent a lot of money on this pen! No more losing your 20 cent Bics and frantically trying to find a new writing implement.

Plus inks are fun to buy and experiment with :3

It is very nice penmanship. Nice to see skills like this still around.

Tangentially related, everyone should switch to fountain pens. I made the switch about two years ago and my handwriting has improved immensely. More aesthetically pleasing and sooo much easier to write. Your hand won't cramp anymore because you don't have to press nearly as hard. You'll find yourself naturally adding embellishments to characters, smoothly transitioning between letters and words.

In short, handwriting becomes enjoyable again.

I grew up just outside of Cinci. I've lived in New York, and it's nice. Lived in Boston for a while, always a lot of fun activities and good food. Currently living in South Carolina, and the weather is great and people are pretty friendly.

But my heart will always be in the Midwest. Wide open spaces, friendly people, affordable <everything>, tolerable seasonal patterns.

I don't have any experience with the startup scene, I imagine it's not fantastic =/

As a child, I lived in England for a brief stint (around a year) because my dad was transferred to his company's British branch. We lived somewhere near the Magic Roundabout (Bovingdon, which I think is pretty close).

We had just moved, so both of my parents were still getting used to driving on the opposite side of the road. And roundabouts in general. I have fond memories of my mom getting stuck on the Magic Roundabout for about an hour, too terrified to leave. So we just kept going round and round and round. Being a small child (3 or 4 years old), I just kept telling her every-time we passed the same building.

"Mommy! There's that building again!".

I'm sure she wanted to reach back and strangle me. When she eventually mustered the courage to exit...she did something wrong and we stopped up the whole roundabout. I don't actually remember that part, but she claims traffic basically ground to a halt until she maneuvered her car out of traffic.

Fond memories =)

Edit: Based on another commenter, looks like it was the "Plough" roundabout, not the one in this article. Whoops!

I'm in the same boat. It's a love-hate relationship. If I've had a particularly rough day or just don't feel like working, it's nice to just say "screw it" and drink a beer, play with the dog and talk to my girlfriend. I don't feel particularly bad because there is always tomorrow. If you take the long timeline perspective, it doesn't really matter much if you slack a little today.

On the other hand, it's easy to become complacent and lose motivation to keep toiling away. Maintaining a steady regimen of working, even just a little, each night seems to be the best way to not lose interest. Otherwise it's easy to continually say to yourself "well, I'll work on it tomorrow" for the hundredth time in a row.

I commuted 45 minutes to work on the MBTA for about two years. I hate commuting...but if I'm going to do it, the train is a pretty swell way to get to work. I would either read or listen to podcasts. As an adult, I never get much time to just sit down and read (either fun fluff, or educational). The train was pretty great for that.

That said, since moving from Boston, I'm so much happier. No commute, three times the space and a nicer apartment for half as much rent, better weather, close to the beach. South Carolina isn't exactly the mecca of technology, but telecommuting makes up for it.

Yep, pretty much. And even if they do reconnect, it is highly likely that their relationship will be different. Change in number of synapses, strength, even physical locations make a difference. Synapses at the end of a dendritic arbor affect the neuron differently than those that are close to the root. Even inter-synapse spacing is important, as adjacent synapses have modulatory effects on the reactivity of it's neighbors.

None of this is overly important per-se. Your brain doesn't have a specific pattern of arrangements that must be just so to make a human. But as you start changing these little details, the changes will eventually bubble up to create a different "you".

How much different is hard to say, maybe not even enough to be noticeable. This is firmly in "theoretical" territory. But considering how drastically people can change from relatively small strokes, I would hazard that there isn't a huge amount of deviance allowed.

Perhaps it's possible if you can do it finely enough that only single neurons are changing, allowing time to resynapse (or artificially recreating those connections?). Not sure.

Well first, I'll quote myself:

> I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's so far from likely that being near-immortal due to bio-enhancements is almost certainly more practical. Or you can develop some "scanning ray gun" which does the same thing without killing you first, I suppose.

Seriously, I see near-immortality due to bio-engineering to be way more likely in the remote future (next few hundred years) than uploading your brain. Similarly, I see strong, general AI to be way more likely.

I'll even say that I see full, human brain simulations to be way more likely than the ability to upload your own into the net.

I'm all for being hopeful and optimistic, but sometimes physics is just not on your side.

Hadn't seen this before, interesting. Learn something new every day =)

Fair enough. I mused on this in one of the responses up above. I still don't think that makes a person more innately intelligent. More capable, perhaps, but not more intelligent.

But, humans are pretty fond of defending our position in the cosmos and our idea of "human intelligence", so maybe this is just speciesism at work =)

Nanotech is another catch-all term that makes me unhappy.

You know what is a really awesome piece of nanotechnology? All the proteins and enzymes that are making your neurons function, right this very moment. How do you download their state? Look at their conformation and who they are interacting with.

Nanotech isn't just making a computer smaller. Much of your body already operates on the "nano" level, and does it pretty efficiently.

I'll admit nanotech really isn't my field, but I understand enough of it to know that it isn't a panacea. If a materials science person wants to jump in on this I'd be appreciative (to either confirm/deny what I said)

Preface: Obviously I'm not making any 100% claims. Nothing is impossible, someday, etc etc

1) Ok, I was generalizing for the sake of brevity. Agree that there isn't a consensus, but it's pretty safe to say that it is somewhere between "your brain" and "everything".

2) To do this, you would also have to effectively freeze all the other neurons in your brain. Neurons don't operate in isolation. If you remove one from the network, the rest start (ever so slightly) re-adjusting weights, synapses, dendritic arbors, etc. So I suppose if you could put someone into a hibernation where their neurons were effectively frozen, this may be possible. Ignoring the invasiveness aspect too.

3) I suppose this boils into a big argument about what intelligence actually is, and I don't want to start an internet argument about that. Suffice to say, no one really has any idea how to define or quantify intelligence. How do you improve intelligence? It certainly isn't the addition of more knowledge (although that helps you become effectively more intelligent, since you can stand on the shoulders of those before you). If you take my brain and speed it up so I can do the same thing but faster, am I more intelligent? I don't have a good answer to that.

Perhaps hyper intelligence is nothing more than being able to think intelligently really really fast.

Yep, as a fun science-fiction idea...it's a lot of fun. I've enjoyed several novels where the Singularity is central to the plot. Fun to read about.

Mostly ridiculous to talk about in practice (imo).