Posts (page 2)
Freerice.com now has added features. You can choose what level you'd like to start at, and you can choose from many categories. Now you can learn languages, focus on multiplication or chemical symbols, or learn who painted famous paintings. So go play with all the cool kids, because it's a good thing.
I've figured out what the problem with the world is. See... all the rich people and poor people are dramatically geographically separated. So... like, we're rich, and China's poor, and we're on the opposite sides of the globe. So... the Chinese make stuff, and we want to buy it, and we have to pay like 100x more for it because we have to ship it across the world. But we're rich so we can afford it, so we don't really notice, but it's very inefficient. Then, the poor people, they might be able to afford some of the stuff we do with our high wages... ya know, after scrimping and pooling their money, but it's that much harder because of shipping.
What we need to do is evenly distribute rich people and poor people. So the chinese poor workers can make our stuff right next door, and we can get it way cheaper, and they can get iPods at a bit of a discount to their current price and climb the economic ladder faster.
Brilliant! (nobody point out how it's dumb. I'm aware. It's funny.)
My presentation at work is now Friday, @ 1. So, got a week left to wokr on the site pretty much. John, the other intern who does the database, and has been doing a lot of the CSS, is not showing to work for M-W though, suposedly. Surgery or something. Bet it's not even life threatening. Anyway, if he can take the week of the presentation off, maybe I can too. :P
We're basically done. There's stuff for me to do, though. I'll see how much gets done, I guess.
Think about it...
So, I've had a thought recently that I thought (I have many thoughts) I'd write up for a few reasons. First, you readers might not have thought of it. Second, I need to write it up to make it make better sense. And third, so I remember it and have it on record for future reference.
The thought is on the subject of the predictability of the future. Specifically the predictability of technology development. Right now there are kinda two camps. There's the techno/scientific illiterates that don't know what's going on but assume someday soon a scientist will cause the Apocalypse, and there are the scientific nerdy types who know what's happening and make vague predictions, but are very unsure of them. There are good reasons to be unsure, but I think the reasons are getting smaller.
When I tell people I'm going to live forever, or that I don't need to learn Chinese cause computer's will translate for me in x years, they usually respond with doubt. They point out failures of predictive power in the past, like how we don't all have jet packs and flying cars. There are several problems with this argument.
- In the past we had less experience with technological advancement. We simply have more data to sample now.
- Those old predictions were made by diorama designers, not scientists.
- Some predictions do not have clear value. A flying car is not clearly better superior to a non-flying car, when taking into account the cost of doing it. I mean, costs imposed by physics. Is the energy required to fly worth the benefits of flying? What about when you take safety into account? etc. Some predictions are not like that. It is always better to cure a disease than not, it is always better to have a faster computer, etc. etc.
- Gene's reason #4, explained below.
All of this is pretty basic. The new thought for me is even without those arguments, it should be getting easier to predict technological development. The idea is based on scale. Say invention X will require 4 leaps of inspiration to be invented from where we are now. Now, say that 1:500M is capable of making each leap each year. So, in a small closed system, like, say, a country like North Korea (pop. 23M), the invention will take a long time. They have about a 5% chance each year to get each leap. But in a large open population, like the Americas + Europe + most of Asia (pop. 3B) statistically would finish it in less than a year. The deviations on these estimates are percentages of the time predicted, so, maybe the North Korean estimate would be 50±10 years, and the rest of the world would be 8 - 12 months. So, on a time scale, our accuracy increases the faster we can develop.
Ok, but there are many other factors. Say I think the invention requires 4 leaps, but after leap 1 we realize there are really 7 leaps. Or, we think one prerequisit technology is easy, say, 1:50K people could invent it, but it turn out to be more of a 1:50M type of problem. These problems are relatively constant, slowly declining as we get more experienced and know a little bit better how difficult things will be, but there will always be surprises. The main change is in the random chance inherent in the statistics. The larger the sample, the smaller affect this random chance will have. Right now the sample is bigger than ever, and will grow for the forseeable future. Population will increase, scientific literacy will increase, scientific openness will increase, human interconnectivity will increase, all these forces will decrease the effect of random chance on technological development.
Put simply, as the ratio between the number of people required to make an invention and the number of people in the population decreases, the deviation from the statistical prediction decreases. Since our population is increasing, our predictive power must be increasing.
So, you can scoff at the predictions made, but you should know that they're better predictions than they used to make.
That wasn't as clear as I'd like. If I think of an improved explanation I'll make a post.
Pat's been here. He left for the Oregon Coast, though, so I have time to make a blog post. It's been a pretty gay ol' time, though, only in the classic sense of the word. D&D, Brawl, movies, WoW, all the good things in life.
Since my last post I've watched Shoot Em Up and Tropic Thunder. The former is what would happen if a talented 12 year old kid wrote a script for an action movie, then grew up to be a director and made the script adult without taking any of the stuff from the action scenes out. Totally ridiculous actionyness, totally ridiculous plot, totally ridiculous dialog, basically one of the best movies ever. I wouldn't recommend it for people not in the male 16-30 demographic, though. Tropic Thunder was very funny, kinda along the same vein as Shoot Em Up but more planned comedy and less pure ridiculous actionyness. (fire alarms go off, apparently spontaneously) They do swear a lot, but frankly, if you are so uptight you can't handle swearing, you probably should just give up on comedy and joy in general.
In other news, my roommates next year are new. I originally was gonna have Donny and Yusuke, but then Donny chickened out and graduated, and then Yusuke's paperwork got all messed up, so who knows where he'll be, and now I got stranger asians (strasians) for roommates. Maybe I'll get the single this time. Poor Yusuke is stuck holding a bunch of my stuff and he doesn't even get to use it next year. (fire alarms go off, apparently spontaeously)
Yeah, so the D&D referred to in the first paragraph is only the planning, character making, and general chatting phase of D&D. No actual playing has taken place. We, in this case, my friends from disparate places, are trying to get an online game going. If I had all 6 of us in one town we'd probably get going in about 1 night, but online is slower. Still, progress has been steady, and at this juncture I think we're all good to go. We just need everyone to be around at a computer at the same time. Unfortunately, Pat is gone so likely that won't happen for a bit.
I'm a halfling rogue. Pretty classic. I've done quite a bit of thinking about the character, though, so in my mind he's specific enough to not just be a stereotype. Wrote up a couple pages of backstory. I also created a wicked sweet spreadsheet with all the stats and stuff. I'm pretty proud. I keep adding stuff to it. I can't help myself.
Work keeps happening. I'm just been plugging away at the website. We've got to present it in a couple weeks, I guess. My partner intern, the guy doing the database, was the only one informed of this. Nobody in charge really talks to me. I kinda am an independant at this point. Progress on the site is a little jumpy. The whole thing was planned not at all because neither of us actually building the thing ever have all the information. We keep getting it in trickles, so we keep having to improvise and slap new stuff on. And at this stage, the site is sufficiently complex that changes almost always cause bugs somewhere. I'm not stressed about the presentation, though. I've definately done enough work to impress, and I'll probably have everything working smooth before the day in question. I might even have time to try and make the site look pretty. That is the one concern. I have spent almost no time on CSS, and I am not skilled in that regard, so if the people judging me aren't impressed with features and functionality, and only want color schemes and rounded corners, I might be in trouble. I'm pretty sure the engineering firm I'm working for will be ok with my approach, though.
So, Pat will return in a week for a few days. And then he's going back to Vegas. I suppose that would be a really bad week to take off. Stupid work. It's conspiring against me.
Today was the site tour. I got paid to go to work but to just sit on a bus and look at stuff. Most of it was pretty lame but I got to see the chem lab where they test samples from the tanks. It's all radioactive and such, so everything is done with the neato robotic hands.
Oh, and they also showed us the secret facility where they're making the doomsday bombs.
We got some thunder here tonight. I got hit with a few drops on my walk home, but I guess it escalated.
I was at the bus stop 2 minutes early, but it went by already. I didn't know it at the time, but I figured it out. So I had to wait an extra 30 minutes... on top of the 30 minutes walking home I had to do due to the family going on vacation. It's a sad story, I know. Those 12 hours days can get you down. I had some podcasts, though, so it wasn't a total loss.
