Why Do So Many Gifted Kids Think They Don't like Math? - <AUTHOR> http://www.talentigniter.com/blog/why-do-so-many-gifted-kids-think-they-dont-math <comment><USER3> Humble brag: I was declared "gifted" in every area except mathematics throughout school; I switched schools once and retook the test leading to some kind of broad-er exposure to the process. The tests to determine mathematical giftedness were overwhelmingly masturbatory exercises in symbol manipulation and memorized algorithms. For a long, long time I thought arithmetic _was_ math. I was told that I would not make it to AP Calculus, let alone get a math-related career. (See my profile for the exciting conclusion to this story).

Math was rote memorization and regurgitation of algorithms which I had trouble memorizing without explanations of how and why they worked. Later on I found out the answers to these questions are called "proofs," they are very fundamental to mathematics, and I am quite good at them. I did not excel at the math I was given because I was plagued with foundation questions about why any of this added up (sorry) logically and they were blockers to true understanding for me. Logic was completely missing from the curriculum. Digested mathematical trivia were handed to me like I was some kind of _child._ I was never given the power tools I wanted to build my own knowledge, perhaps for fear of my safety or my innocence.

People who were good at studying and taking people's word for things sailed through and to this day can't prove things rigorously. These kids don't like taking things apart.

It was only during some education electives I took that I realized that a well known problem in STEM education is the group of students who are intelligent but have rather slow, idiosyncratic, and methodical ways of assimilating new information. Imagine the quantum of solace that gave me.

I chose Computer Science at random from an admissions catalog because I liked writing programs even though I was "bad at math," and because I couldn't afford film school. 4 years of discrete math, modern geometry, multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, and algorithm classes (on top of other fun but not as fun-damental courses) later and I realize what a load of boring and disingenuous shit public school math was.

 __*

Why do so many gifted kids think they don't like "math?" Because "math" sucks and schools don't let kids build things anymore - materially or otherwise.

[Edit] Grammar, new insights, the sort of thorough editing I should have done the first time.

<comment><USER4> Corresponds with my opinion: The curricula are crap and many educators at best mediocre in the topic. No wonder the "smart kids" are frustrated.

P.S. I remember hitting calculus in college and drawing the "hard" professor. ("Oooh", people exclaimed sympathetically.) I pulled an A+ and enjoyed the course, because the professor _knew and cared about what he was teaching_. He just insisted that you did, too.

<comment> steve-howard Real analysis was the hardest class I ever took, and I didn't even really have to. Barely scraped a C, but I wear it more proudly than most of the A's I've ever gotten.

<comment><USER3> We use the Moore Method at UT. We started with a series of axioms and over the duration of the semester we built and proved _ourselves_ as a group every theory. And only those theories successfully proven by the group were admissible on tests. It was rad as hell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hm, site is down, so I hope I'm not repeating what's in the article.

I've got 2 really smart boys in elementary school. My wife and I are amazed at how bad the math education is. Our observations, based on a few kid-years of school across both a public and a private school:

\- In an attempt to make math easier to learn, they're teaching math really abstractly. "skip counting" and a bunch of other stuff. It's basically all the tricks you figure out after you understand what you're doing, but they're teaching the tricks and not the math itself. \- Further to the last one, they don't teach things like times tables. Rather than just getting kids to memorize the times tables, they make them go through all these hoops to get them further along. I realize that times tables are no fun, but neither is struggling through every problem. \- Most teachers are not good at math. One teacher would send problems that didn't make any sense. I sat through a presentation by the teachers on the "new math" and it was clear they really don't know what they're doing, they're just teaching an algorithm. \- Most teachers don't like math. How do you instill a sense of love for something that you hate?

Many of these things go for other subjects too. It's just that it's more obvious in math.

<comment><USER6> A friend of mine is a 4th grade teacher. That means she teaches all subjects to her students, including Math.

She was an English major in college. She didn't take a math class her senior year of college. She took a CS Elective to fulfil her math requirement in college (that's where we met. The class met once a week and a different Grad student or Professor would give a talk about whatever project they were working on. Over the course of the semester we would have to write a page "report" about 3 of the talks we heard)

So, she graduated, then got a Masters in Education and then started teaching (among other subjects) Math to 9 year olds but she hadn't taken a math class in 6 years.

She not only didn't like math, but she actively avoided it for over half a decade and then she was tasked with teaching the basics to kids...

Part of the problem could be that there are lots of teachers like her, that don't even know how to do the math themselves.

<comment><USER7> This is probably tied to female "mathphobia" in some way, because in my experience males were the most competent math teachers. Gender biases notwithstanding, I can say there were three female teachers in my school career who influenced my math aptitude a great deal: my 1st/4th grade teacher (same woman), my sixth grade English/Computer teacher, my 10th grade Algebra 2 teacher.

What they all had in common was the ability to see my aptitude and find materials for me that I could benefit from. These teachers may not have been math whizzes, but they definitely weren't afraid to give their students material they weren't completely comfortable with themselves. They also encouraged me to do more difficult math and were very supportive in general. Their attitude carried me very far, even if they couldn't answer some of the more difficult questions I would ask. My calculus teacher was very good, but he was a gigantic asshole.

<comment><USER8> And in my experience, the best math teacher I ever had (Geometry!) was female. Lesson: Don't gender stereotype based on personal experience. Not only is it probably not relevant to others' experience, it's also not helpful.

<comment><USER9> Two data points, yours and mine, are hardly enough to draw a lesson from. Lesson: Don't jump to conclusions and teach others lessons based on your hurt feelings.

The majority of the comment was praising my female math teachers for caring enough to go outside their comfort zone to foster a love of mathematics. If more teachers in general had the temerity to venture into the unknown when educating their students, especially in math and science, we might not have serious gender gaps in most professional fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a friend in college who never thought he was good at math. Then one day in 10th grade he started going through math books. He is now an _extremely_ talented mathematician at Harvard. Insert lockhart's lament, I suppose.

Part of the problem I think is that we assume that people who don't get math early on are just "bad at it" as opposed to people who don't get reading. If a student doesn't learn to read, we think "how can we better teach them? Do they have dyslexia? What are ways we can teach dyslexic children to read? We don't ask the same questions when a student doesn't get math, we just say "oh, well, they suck at that then."

<comment><USER11> I find it amazing how narrow the gap is between brilliant and average, particularly for intelligent people. A couple of hours of reading a textbook can sometimes be equivalent with about a year of public school education.

Case in point: Took AP Computer Science my sophomore year of high school. I got C's on most of the tests (mostly code tracing) for the first two months or so. After getting a particularly bad grade on a test (near failing, and I got all A's in everything else), I went home and thought "fuck this" and pulled out some Java book and read it for about 5 hours. After this, I moved from being about 40th percentile to best student in my class. I got high A's the rest of the year without trying particularly hard, and I actually enjoyed the class, and this lead to me starting to program on my own for fun, and eventually becoming a pretty good programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think a lot of it is the educational system. Educators treat math with voodoo gloves because they don't like it, and kids learn that attitude from them, leaving everyone involved with a "don't make me get too close" attitude towards math.

I was exceptionally fortunate to have a math teacher in high school who is probably one of the best high school teachers in my state. She _loved_ math. She was excited as _hell_ to get to teach it every day. I had her for 7 of my 8 HS semisters, and I credit much of my appreciation for math to her. I was still never a good math student - B+ at best due to lack of discipline in cross-checking answers and the like - but I loved (and still love) math. Calculus was such a blast for me that I took it twice in HS (the second time around for college credit).

I think the other half of the equation is that math is _hard_. It requires a level of mental discipline and precision that most people don't possess, and have no interest in possessing. I think that for most of us here, who have at least some interest in programming, this isn't obvious. We think in discrete terms and proof-like concepts, but most people don't. Math takes more brainpower and more self-discipline than most any other primary education subject, and people naturally follow the course of least resistance.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm having fun teaching my 4-year-old math. After counting, addition was easy by holding up fingers or drawing dots. Then, subtraction came by counting backwards or crossing out dots.

A couple of weeks ago we started multiplying. To do 5 * 3, we make 5 circles, draw three X's in each circle, and then count them up.

Last week, we started dividing. To do 16 / 3, he'll draw 16 X's, then circle 3, then 3 more, etc. At the end there is one left over (poor little guy). Then, he counts up the circles and writes: 5 R 1.

We go up and down the stairs for positive and negative numbers. He really enjoys all this. Kids enjoy almost anything you do together. He'll even sit down and write his own problems, and problems for me to do.

I'm not expecting too much from the schools on math when he starts in a couple years, so I'm hoping to cultivate that interest at home, and maybe he can share it with his classmates.

<comment><USER14> Make sure you teach the "tricks". Those are amusing. I'm sure you can find a bunch online.

For example, a trick to multiplying by 9: hold up all 10 fingers, and then put down the one that matches what you are multiplying. The answer is the number of fingers still up (appending the count of those to the left of the down finger to the count of those to the right).

Example in ASCII Art: 9 x 4:

        ! ! ! . !      ! ! ! ! !
        left hand      right hand

4th finger is down. 3 up on the left side, 6 up on the right. 9 x 4 = 36.

Edit: Here's a link: <http://listverse.com/2007/09/17/10-easy-arithmetic- tricks/>

<comment><USER13> I like the X9 trick. I'm surprised how many of my adult friends have never seen it.

The "tricks" he likes right now are the ones he can understand like n * 1 = n for any value of n or n / 1 = n (because you have one circle around everything).

I've tried showing him some tricks, but they aren't surprising and cool to him yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Gifted kids aren't really any different from the "regular" kids, they just often have a smarter-sounding rationalization for why they don't enjoy math. However, it's really the age-old excuse "When am I even gonna use this?"

I really came to enjoy math / calculus when I was taking a physics class and started to understand the world better through the lens of my new math knowledge. Einstein's theories made so much more sense when you could think about the physical limits imposed by the math. Otherwise I couldn't care less about the Disc method and rotely calculating the volume of objects around an axis...

So to many children, learning math without practical application is like teaching someone a successively harder alphabet/vocab every year without ever writing an essay or delivering a speech... Or like learning how to read music and play harder scales without ever performing a piece.

Effective learning needs a good balance between application (the fun) and mastery of technique (the sweat and tears).

<comment><USER11> This might be true, but I've found quite the opposite at college. A good amount of people major in math because they enjoy abstraction and want to get as far as possible from implementation details/application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The title of the article assumes that gifted kids are supposed to like math. That's plain stupid.

Although a "gifted" child is perhaps more likely to enjoy math than children less likely to receive encouragement and praise for their work in math; there is nothing wrong when a bright child's interest is in history, art, writing or even sports.

To put it another way - as the WPT shows, smart kids often prefer Texas Hold'em to Chess. The idea that intelligent people should desire abstractions rather than concrete engagement with the world is as old as Plato's redirection of Socrates' project from the actual corruption of youth to tomes of political theory.

Likewise, the article is based on a theory that smart kids like math rather than acknowledging that the data show that many of them don't.

<comment><USER17> > _The title of the article assumes that gifted kids are supposed to like > math._

That's not really true; it just assumes that _some_ gifted kids would, a priori, be expected to like math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always felt it was for different reasons.

If Math is a language, then the first 10 years of instruction are essentially spelling tests. There is very little flexibility nor room for creative thought in those years of instruction. Most kids never get to a proof or other areas without a defined path from start to finish. That is like only studying English grammar and never taking a literature test. Sure it can be interesting, but it is hardly creative.

I see mathematics, especially the more abstract areas, as much more similar to the arts than to the sciences.

<comment> guard-of-terra Proofs are boring. Who needs proofs? You either know what you're proving is already proved, then what's the point? Or you know it probably is false, then there's even less reason to.

People want math to be able to make things with it, all the math which doesn't help making things should be confined to 0,5% of population who really want this kind of punishment.

And responding on the title: the answers starts with "bo" and ends with "ring".

<comment><USER19> Because proofs are interesting. They're the "under the hood" of larger chunks of math knowledge. If you understand how to follow a proof, you'll have a much better understanding of the strengths and limitations of various mathematical statements. If you can work a proof youself (which is a lot harder actually), then you can participate in the global conversation among mathematicians and maybe even contribute.

<comment> guard-of-terra For most people, dealing with mathematical proofs is a kind of parroting. They learn a path and can follow it all right, but they never deviate from the said path because there's no point. Which might be insightful but is inherently boring, because there's no way you'll make anything that didn't exist before. You only make some mind ways in your brain which will perhaps help you one day dealing with some real problem with real output. Might as well flash a firmware over your brain.

Given the current state of math, very few people would ever be able to contribute anything. Others can skip to the plan B immediately.

<comment><USER20> For most people, dealing with any math is parroting, which is the problem. Creating proofs of simple things is well within the grasp of bright high school students, and is a wonderful experience -- I feel sorry for anyone who misses out on it. Really, very little traditional mathematics is required to enjoy proving that there is no solution to the bridges of Konigsberg problem, no way to cover a chess board with dominoes leaving only opposite corners exposed, or no largest prime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of things that I have found to be a disappointed with the US education system is lack of statistics courses in High School. In most cases, the extent of stats/prob education is limited to AP Statistics, which most students will not take and probably scares off many otherwise bright students because of the "AP".

I find this particularly troubling since I remember as a student that my peers would constantly complain about math courses using the rationale "Am I ever going to really use this?". Both sides are arguable for certain subjects (I can't remember the last time I really used trigonometry, but I do think that learning it helped me to reason better in other domains). However, I find it troubling that statistics is not mandatory/highly encouraged, yet it is something that applies to an incredible amount of everyday activities.

<comment><USER22> _One of things that I have found to be a disappointed with the US education system is lack of statistics courses in High School._

Absolutely. Teaching HS students trig but not statistics makes zero sense.

That said, the way statistics is taught is absolutely awful (probably even worse than most math education), so I'm not sure it would make much difference.

<comment><USER21> That is a valid point.

One of things I noticed when I was in HS (~10 years ago) was that since it was such a new phenomenon to teach stats in public HS, the teacher was essentially learning alongside us. This was no fault of his own, but simply that when he was training to teach, the value of teaching everyone basic stats was not appreciated.

I can only hope that trend will change.

<comment><USER23> Considering how awful college stats classes are, I don't see high school getting any better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem with math is that more so than other subjects, one bad teacher, or bad year in general, can impact you for life. I think it's more important that we make sure a higher percentage of high school students have a basic understanding of the fundamentals, and leave the depth for college.

From what I've seen from tutoring 3 younger siblings in math throughout their high school days, I think they should spend the first 3 years of high school drilling Algebra into their heads. Then in the last year they can spend half a year on geometry and half a year on trig. Or maybe keep kids in Algebra until they can demonstrate an absolute mastery.

The biggest problems my sibs had with higher math wasn't the higher math, it was the algebra underlying it. They get one year of Algebra in 8th grade and the move on to Geometry assuming they have mastered it, but they havent.

<comment><USER25> I completely agree. In my Calculus 2 class (integrals and series), the most difficult thing to work with is the algebra and trigonometry. The class is conceptually easy, but our brains get annihilated when we have to grind through a hundred steps of computation. I though my algebra/trig was fine when I went through it in high school, but apparently it didn't prepare me at all for college math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> somewhat related:

When I was in high school many of my classmates told me the 'did not like word problems.' I now realize that kids who do not like word problems are kids who do not understand what they are being taught.

Ant that is most of the kids.

<comment><USER27> This is exactly what Sal, the founder of Khan Academy, believes. What strengthens this argument is that, if you miss a few logical steps you end up even more baffled when you encounter concepts that are build upon the concepts on which you neglected to learn, mostly because you were either embarrassed to ask in class or because you thought that you got it right in the first place.

This, adding the fact that it's "socially acceptable" to claim that a person might not be smart enough and give up entirely, is what makes children fail in the end and deemed to be "stupid".

Edit: If you're further interested in Salman Khan's point of view you can check his TED talk here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk>

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the video - Always good to seen an interesting TED talk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In my own case, looking back, it's definitely because it require some semblance of effort to "get". Pretty much every other subject was intuitively easy and/or boring and/or could be faked at a high level.

Math often isn't intuitively easy (lots of rules to learn!), lots of boring grindwork to get the grade, and _can't_ be faked.

Because it didn't come "automagically" like the other subject (or at least how I knew the other subject could if I had applied myself), I figured I just wasn't good at it. Reinforce this with lots of people who also thought they just weren't good at it and leveraging all that into a pile of excuses, I did famously bad in math in K-12.

In college I decided to start over and finally tackle it, I had to learn how to accept that some subjects are hard, that grindwork has value, and how to actually _build_ competence in something rather than just _having_ it. I figure if I was so smart, I should be able to figure out how to figure out math.

And it worked! I ended up picking up a math degree as a side product of learning how to learn math while getting my C.S. degree. Got great grades up through some reasonably upper-level math courses.

Truth is, I don't think I'll ever really take an interest in math. I haven't really done any looking into it in a decade, and probably couldn't solve and integral to save my life. I still can't get over the notion of not being naturally "good" at it. But I learned tons going through the process and am satisfied that I _could_ learn the subject now even if I've forgotten all the details these days.

I'm pretty convinced after going through it all that most people could eventually learn to handle most of the maths through at least single variable calculus if they can learn how to learn it -- and I think that that process is highly personal and highly specific to the individual, but it's at least doable.

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem is you can not learn math from public school teachers because almost all of them are not able to do math themselves, the very few you meet who can are usually teaching the top level honors classes in high school, so at best you are only getting exposed to it for your last few years. The problem is the kind of skill required to do math usually leads you somewhere else besides public school, and if you are going to teach its going to be college level.

Most of the time anyone who really learns math ends up teaching it to themselves. It can be tough to find self motivation if you are struggling at all so the only kids who like math are usually the ones that instantly grasp concepts, they can do the rote busy work in a few minutes and spend the rest of class day dreaming about math ideas or reading ahead in the textbook to sections they find interesting. This is where the love of math comes from.

</comment><comment><USER30> Because math is by far the worst taught subject in schools, including university level.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there one iota of research to support any of the proposed remedies? In particular: kids need more word problems. Do they really? Would it make any difference to the outcome? What is the desired outcome? One reason education isn't better is it is by and large pre-scientific. Teaching approaches are based on opinions, anecdotes and cherished beliefs, but precious little data.

</comment><comment><USER32> I thought I didn't think I would like math until I made my first game (which needed it); it sucked me in and I tried to learn as much as I could after that. Never really stopped :) Guess kids (gifted or not?) just have to have their buttons pushed, not just do mindnumbing excersizes in school.

Edit: this was 27 years ago BTW: you would hope (gifted) kids now come into contact with game creation faster now.

</comment><comment><USER33> The author provides some system solutions that I agree with, but which I doubt would be implemented any time soon on a large scale. That leaves me asking other questions:

What can _I_ do, as a parent, if I see that my children are not being taught math at the proper pace? I could tutor my children at home to a certain extent, but that just raises all sorts of other questions:

I've got a solid math background, but no education background, so what kinds of resources are available to me to establish an effective home tutoring program?

How can I tell if the pace I am setting is too fast, too slow, or just right?

In the unlikely event that one of my children is a "math outlier," my knowledge of math, although in the 90th (95th? 99th?) percentile, would prove woefully inadequate: where would I find an (affordable) math tutor with comprehensive knowledge of math?

This last question is the only one I think I have a decent answer for: find a mathematics graduate student looking to earn some money on the side.

<comment><USER34> I tutor my 4 year old daughter in math using Singapore Math texts (<http://www.singaporemath.com/>). We are working with the kindergarten books and I think my daughter is doing OK. I think that everybody who values math education should do something like that with their children. The gain is just too big to ignore. My daughter is already thinking about addition and while she doesn't yet remember the addition facts she has no difficulty posing word problems as addition problems.

The books are not very difficult for parents to understand and give you a baseline that you can follow very closely. Also, I hope that since it is unlikely that my child will do the same book in school I do not run the risk that the she will refuse to do math in school since she has already done the book.

Since you have the book you can set the pace based on how difficult the lesson of the day seems for the child. You can do one page per week or 10 pages per day (both these things have happened to me). Of course there can be several levels of understandings of the same lesson and in my case I usually am happy with the lowest level. To correct for that I do sequentially 2 different books that have the same material (Singapore Math provides multiple books for the same level). I skipped some chapters about weights and volumes since these seemed too involved for my daughter (3 at the time), but I have done everything else that is on these books.

I must say that until now this has been a wonderful experience for me. I have never needed to ask my daughter to do math, anytime she sees me free she asks for it herself. And almost always I am the one who tries to cut the lesson short, making sure that next day she will want to come back wanting more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> How many of those kids are being shunted into something like Duke's TIPS program in 7th grade to then face a full-on SAT? That happened to me and once I saw the math involved, I just closed the booklet and put my head down. That told me pretty early on that math was not my thing.

<comment><USER36> Oh man, 7th grade was the year that math finally became fun to me. Up until that point, math had always been my least favorite subject, because it was all plain arithmetic. Then 7th grade we hit pre-algebra and suddenly math was fun. I wound up doing mathlete-type competitions, and I actually did pretty well in the Duke TIPS SAT. I remember there being a lot of stuff in the math section that I'd never seen before, but I knew it was supposed to be for high schoolers and didn't expect myself to recognize it, and it was multiple choice so I just tried to figure everything out the best I could. I forget what my verbal/math breakdown was but my total was a 1370 (back when the SAT was out of 1600).

History became my least favorite subject after that, because suddenly math was about solving problems, not being a human calculator, and history was still just memorizing names and dates and facts and regurgitating them back out on demand, which I am terrible at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The process of learning a math concept is often a step-like function. Unlike in other subjects, it can be hard to learn math concepts in small useful steps, and when it comes time to solve a problem, it's hard to fool oneself into believing that one understands a concept when one doesn't.

People often hate ego-damaging objective evaluations of their performance, and math is full of them. Learning math is, almost by necessity, a humbling experience (it's always possible to come up with more difficult math questions).

So a first step to the successful teaching of math is to teach patience, persistence, humility, a sense of what it "feels like" to learn a difficult concept, and a certain comfort with not-yet-understanding.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, this is why math draws in people who thrive in the face of intellectual challenge. People who's first reaction to a difficult problem is to spend hours dissecting it to understand how it works and find a solution are the ones that tend to like math. People who react by getting frustrated, dread going to math class and spend their lives trying to avoid it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A got a serious kick out of solving math equations and word problems. When I got the result was very satisfying. It was like a game. Maybe it was part of growing up poor and not having enough for fancy toys (paper and pencils were nice and cheap). I also liked to take apart and build things. Eventually by 13 I knew I was going to like programming. Computers were fascinating and we saved for year and I got an 8bit ZX Spectrum knock-off. It was the best thing in the wold. So for me it is very strange that kids wouldn't like math. I guess I was a weirdo growing up...

</comment><comment><USER39> What really got me was the lack of context. Here's some math - learn this stuff. Had the teacher just taken a few minutes to explain "look these equations are used in machine learning and powers google", that might've ticked your interest. Instead you developed this suspicious mindset where you couldn't really tell if they were wasting your time or not (which they often were).

It gets even worse because you spent six years in grade school grinding long division (oh god) then finding out it's almost useless. The introduction of more interesting math times out well with the rebellious phase where you stop trusting adults.

Only reason I ever got into math was programming. I'm just so happy none of the highschool computer teachers knew how to program and had us memorizing MS Word instead, because I'm sure they would've ruined that to.

As a tangent I was talking to a friend who studies astronomy. She does math for fun, but haaates programming and sees it as dull busywork. Her first introduction to it was through school and it's all "punch in these numbers and see what it does".

</comment><comment><USER40> Gifted kids need to see gifted adults using "story problems" in real life.

If kids see how math is needed to trade in Chicago, to gamble in Vegas, to optimize at Google or to solve the German tank problem kids will want to know more.

I remember every guest speaker in K-12 math classes -- only about one per year. And I'm probably exposed to more math from HN links than I was as a non- technical undergrad.

<comment><USER41> Absolutely! Like I'd posit that many of us learnt Chess from an adult. Not many kids pick this up themselves, without an initial introduction.

I think another issue is that we expect parents to be able to introduce kids to advanced topics. What happens when you get a brilliant kid with no access to education outside of the classroom? More often than not at least a few years of missed accelerated learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Back when I went to public school I tested in the gifted categories for both reading and math. However, once I got to algebra my education fell apart. "Higher math" just didn't make sense to me. However, I switched to homeschooling in Middle School and ended up going to a homeschool co-op where a Japanese teacher was teaching both a Japanese language class and the math classes.

In three months I learned more about the logic behind mathematics, and by extension more about math period, than I learned in the previous 14 years in public school. I took one math class from here years and years ago and I can still do calculus. The Japanese method for teaching math is just simply amazing (it helped that she was ranked number one in the nation (Japan, not the US) when she was in high school, this woman was seriously brilliant, she just got knocked up by an American and ended up having to quit Todai).

</comment><comment><USER43> Increasingly, K-12 mathematics is taught as a matter of brute-force rote memorization. Even the higher level math up through algebra and geometry is taught through memorization of formulas and "plug and chug" techniques combined with excessive levels of busy work (massive homework loads, etc.)

It's no wonder most kids get turned off by that.

<comment><USER23> Increasingly? The whole Discovery Program of the late 1990s and 2000s is everything but plug and chug and memorization, to the point that parents started a reactionary "Where's the Math?" movement (actual name) to put some plug and chug back into the curriculum so their kids can't bluff their way through math class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was the top math student in my school every year of my life, and I always hated math, and I even still shy away from it when I can.

I do educational research now (engineering/science/history education - <USER2> yeah I still shy away from research on math education).

The reason I believe is because kids aren't taught why math is relevant or useful to them.

For example I still remember in first grade, we got handed a big book of math problems and had to go through them all over the course of the year. It was so boring, I raced to finish it as soon as I could. I remember racing with other students in fourth grade, too, to see who could finish tests the fastest. That probably did have a role in my math abilities improving. There have been studies of having kids 'race' through math problems really fast so that they learn to do it more automatically, and this is apparently common practice in China if I recall.

This may help learning math, but it doesn't help and possibly hurts interest & motivation to learn math. And studies have shown that interest and motivation are what correlate the most with our career choices, not test scores or abilities.

Finally, yes, there are solutions already out there that teach math in a way that makes it relevant and more interesting to students - they just haven't spread all over yet. The Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) project out of the Netherlands is very old, and there have been similar efforts since then. They are basically theoretically grounded in what is known as situated cognition. All cognition/learning is tied to the context. Jean Lave for example showed how some Brazilian street children had developed very sophisticated math skills on the streets. Some less depressing contexts for learning math skills might be in the grocery store, or in creating a game or other software app (which is how I came to finally see the uses of differential equations and matrices and trigonometry and the like after college - creating educational software applications).

John Dewey knew about this 100 years ago. He said we shouldn't educate students for the future (which is uncertain and unimportant to kids), but instead educate them for today. How is what you are teaching them useful to them right now, in their own lives, not the lives of adults or professionals.

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

</comment><comment><USER45> I was just thinking about this. In a nutshell, I was a pretty smart kid, when I first started being taught math nobody believed I didn't "just know" things like multiplication tables. When I got things wrong, they thought I was acting out because I was "bored", and I was constantly punished.

</comment><comment><USER46> First off, I love math. It's awesome. I've always loved it, and it was always my best subject.

But let's be honest: It is BORING. I don't sit around doing math things in my head when I could be doing anything else.

Okay, occasionally I'll find some interesting math thing and play with it, or find a (real life) word problem and decide to solve it. But other than that, it's so amazingly boring. Learning math is even more boring.

So why don't kids like math? Because it's boring! I don't blame them.

Some people are blaming the teachers, or the education system, or blah blah blah. Okay, maybe they -could- be doing things better, but has anyone ever done their job perfectly? I've yet to meet that person. Instead, they're doing their best, just like everyone else.

I started learning Japanese a few years ago. What I didn't expect to learn was how many different ways there are to learn a new language. And the best way isn't any single one of them... It's to combine a bunch of them together. And not a particular set, either. You should combine all the ones that work best -for you-.

Having learned just exactly how complicated it is to make the perfect set of lessons for a single person, I looked around and saw how differently everyone learned. It's not only impossible to create a perfect set for 1 person, it's impossible to create a good set that matches everyone. The best you can do is catch the people who don't learn well on their own and hope the rest will teach themselves.

So then I look at our system, and I'm not surprised that I see that's exactly what they're doing. They're trying to catch the stragglers and leaving the brightest to fend for themselves. And they can. I did. But had I -known- that was happening, I'd have forced my education to go differently.

My girlfriend is homeschooling her son for various reasons, but chief among them was that he hated school. He was bored and picked on, and yet still getting bad grades. She made him a promise that if he brought his grades up to a certain level, she'd homeschool him the next year. Unsurprisingly, he easily hit that level.

It's been going great for them. She has accelerated everything to the point that he is constantly learning, and he gets top marks on everything. Then, because there's free time, he gets a little vacation to have fun for a while, then back to work the next semester.

They also go beyond the required instruction and do projects based on the material. I can't think of anything better to create lasting memories than that.

tl;dr - Our system is fundamentally flawed.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think the problem in education (and also in work) is that people feel forced to do something. It really kills interest, regardless of what it is.

</comment><comment><USER48> If they don't like math, what makes you think they're "Gifted"?

<comment><USER49> They could play a Bach piece at 5, or they write stunning prose, or any of the other remarkable things some kids do that apparently don't fall in your bafflingly narrow definition of "gifted"?

<comment><USER48> Implying I defined gifted, or even believe that people CAN be gifted.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Answers the FCC's Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/ <comment><USER2> _> For example, on an iPhone, the "Phone" icon that is always shown at the bottom of the Home Screen launches Apple's mobile telephone application, providing access to Favorites, Recents, Contacts, a Keypad, and Visual Voicemail. The Google Voice application replaces Apple's Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple's Visual Voicemail._

This is misleading bullshit.

First, they mention the "phone" icon right after complaining that GV is "replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail" to try to give people the false impression that GV is stealing the phone icon, which an app can't even do.

Then, they try to claim that by cherry-picking calls and not letting the forwarded calls hit apple voicemail, they're "disabling" visual voicemail, which is just untrue. People could still call your iPhone's direct phone number, and visual voicemail would work juts fine.

<comment><USER3> I think what they're trying to say is that they are abiding by the general principle of not allowing apps that duplicate built-in functionality, because they feel it might negatively impact the user experience of their product. This is a much more defensible (and I think _probable_ ) position than that they are singling it out for purely competitive reasons.

<comment><USER4> I think either/both could be the answer. I see no reason why the first outweighs the second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question 2: Did Apple act alone, or in consultation with AT&T, in deciding to reject the Google Voice application and related applications? If the latter, please describe the communications between Apple and AT&T in connection with the decision to reject Google Voice. Are there any contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T that affected Apple's decision in this matter?

Answer 2: Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application. No contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T have been a factor in Apple's decision-making process in this matter.

\--

I guess that is about as straight an answer as we could have hoped for on the issue. Apple, not AT&T, made the call.

<comment><USER6> As much as I'd like to believe this, it just doesn't feel right. Why didn't Apple respond in this manner sooner? Why did it take a strongly worded letter from the FCC for them to do so?

<comment><USER5> One reason may be that AT&T and Google's answers are also now public, so Apple wanted to have it's best face forward.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/18983512/ATT-Response-to-FCC- iPhon...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/18983512/ATT-Response-to-FCC-iPhone- Letter-082109-as-Filed)

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/18983640/Google-Response-to-FCC>

Personally, I suspect that Apple would prefer that AT&T take the blame for as much as possible.

From the tone of the letter, it sounds like Apple tries to shift blame onto AT&T where they can- For instance, Apple was responsible for the initial SlingPlayer rejection.

Apple's response says that they rejected the app because it violates AT&T's TOS, but doesn't say that AT&T requested the rejection.

Viewed in the context of the Google Voice rejection, this leads me to believe that Apple is happy to be able to point to the TOS as the reason for the rejection, rather than having to decide if they want to allow an (indirect) competitor to their iTunes TV store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Engadget has AT&T and Google's responses as well as quick commentary from their in-house lawyer: [http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/21/atandt-tells-the- fcc-it-h...](http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/21/atandt-tells-the-fcc-it-had- no-role-in-removing-google-voice-fro/)

</comment><comment><USER8> In my opinion, this is total BS. Apple would obviously make up some lame excuse and everyone knows it.

Update: Though, there is this at the end: "In little more than a year, we have reviewed more than 200,000 applications and updates."

That computes to around 515 applications per day. Can't really blame them for taking too long, eh?

<comment><USER9> This is the kind of problem that you can throw people at though. There is no excuse for them taking this long.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, you can throw people at it. And many of them will be underqualified or undertrained, and will reject things for no good reason...

<comment><USER11> With >600% YOY growth in iPhone sales, margins of approximately 36% and quarterly revenues/profit of $8.3/$1.2 bn, I think Apple can afford to hire and train plenty of people.

Recruiting, training and retaining 100 employees at a salary of $48k/yr - which seems like a pretty good starting wage to me - would only run them about $8-10 million a year, or ~0.2% of that profit margin. What the hell, double that amount if you need to rent/build a new office block for them. It would still pay itself in terms of positive press and developer relations.

40 reviewers each testing 40 apps per day is absurd, that's less than 15 minutes each. OK I know a lot of iPhone 'apps' do only one thing and have a novelty half-life of 90 seconds, but still.

These #s from <http://www.macnewsworld.com/rsstory/67654.html>

<comment><USER4> They wouldn't have to train so many if they easily allowed 3rd party app stores. If you don't like the wait in Apple's official store, go to the alternative. As long as they insist on being the bottleneck, this will be a problem.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but they wouldn't be making those sweet margins either, I suspect :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It shouldn't take a company with billions in revenue this long to ponder an issue as they say. It makes me wonder if there's a bit of a civil war going on inside Apple over the App Store. Apple initially approved the apps, then un- approved them, and is now leaving the door open to re-approve it. If I were an investor in Apple I would be concerned about the management structure around Apple's single most important product taking weeks to deal with the Google Voice situation that has evolved outside of a techie issue into the mainstream business press (WSJ)

<comment><USER13> My guess: Apple has decided that they want to implement Google Voice, Skype directly into the Operating System. Just like Copy-Paste, you won't hear about it until a couple of weeks before the update.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So yeah, sounds like Apple is more or less shooting straight. They're facing a huge problem (hundreds of submissions per day) and are trying to be decent about it.

The Google Voice thing is annoying but not altogether unsurprising since no one is really pretending this is an open platform:

 _Google is of course free to provide Google Voice on the iPhone as a web application through Apple's Safari browser, just as they do for desktop PCs, or to provide its "Google-branded" user experience on other phones, including Android-based phones, and let consumers make their choices._

In other words: just try it Google. You're going to play by our rules here.

<comment><USER15> The funny thing about that is, you're still circumventing visual voice mail and all the other stuff they're complaining about by using the web interface, albeit in a much less convenient manner, which is obviously the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The Google Voice application replaces Apple's Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple's Visual Voicemail."

How does a 3rd party app prevent voicemail from being stored on the iPhone? I don't understand.

<comment><USER17> If you actually use Google Voice all calls go through it, and get sent to the GV voicemail, instead of whatever voicemail your phone uses. This would make the Visual Voicemail and SMS that ship with the phone useless.

<comment><USER16> Oh I see, but does this "prevent" AT&T voicemail from being stored on the iPhone? (Which is what was said)...

I mean you could use both the Google Voice Voicemail and the AT&T voicemail, right?

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that you can use both in the sense of alternating between them, but for any given message, it only appears in one place.

From a user experience perspective, this means that some fraction of users will be confused, annoyed, or downright furious that they now have two completely disconnected ways of making calls, recieving messages, listening to voicemails, etc. I think that's what bothers Apple about it.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand this point which someone tried to make above. If GV actually came pre-installed you may have a point, but the fact is that the users seeking to use GV will not be confused, annoyed, or furious at all. We understand exactly what GV is and what we want out of it. Apple's point is completely bullshit about confusing users because only users specifically seeking this functionality will have it.

<comment><USER3> _We understand exactly what GV is_

Maybe _you_ do, but can you guarantee that every potential GV user does? Of course not. This is what I mean by "some fraction of users". That fraction is unknown, but as GV creates a significantly different parallel method of accomplishing core phone functions, it is quite plausible that users with an imperfect understanding of how it works and why would suffer as described--for instance, a user who does not understand why his voicemails might show up in two different places. While it is true that it is ultimately the user's responsibility to understand the software he is using, this potentially impacts the core functionality of Apple's device, so it would be only natural for Apple to want to consider it carefully.

 _Apple's point is completely bullshit about confusing users because only users specifically seeking this functionality will have it._

Does not follow. Users who specifically seek to purchase (say) Microsoft Office are entirely capable of being confused, annoyed, or infuriated by it. The same can be said of most software, hardware, and machines in general. Have you ever seen someone try to push a pull door or pull a push door?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an easy to solve problem.

Duplicate phone functionality: Let the user decide which number they want to dial from by changing the Settings on the iPhone and thus making the iPhone capable of making and recieving the phones calls from either AT&T and Google.

Voicemail: Let both AT&T and Google store the voicemails at their own servers and push them down to iPhone.

SMS issue: Solution is same as voicemail. Let the user decide which number they want to send the SMS from, and let both Google and AT&T deliver the SMS to the iPhone Messages app.

This solution will allow for flexibility for both the users and the service providers.

</comment><comment><USER20> Pondering? Could they choose an any more lazy way to describe this process?

<comment><USER21> "Pondering?"

This seems to call for a parody video of Pinky and the Brain working as App Store app reviewers.

(Apologies to readers too young to get the reference.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised that Apple rejects 20% of all submissions. That number seems huge!

 _We receive about 8,500 new applications and updates every week, and roughly 20% of them are not approved as originally submitted._

No wonder complaints are so common.

<comment><USER23> It's submissions, not applications. I'd expect the majority of the apps whose submissions were rejected to be updated and resubmitted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So apple says they haven't rejected the application which in iTunes connect terms would mean that it is still "in review". So did the Google development team mis-read the status or is Google lying about the rejection or did the media jump the gun or is Apple just outright lying now or what? I wish I had access to their iTunes connect account to see for myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently Google never said the app was rejected, they only said it had not been approved (which was 6 weeks after it had been submitted).

<comment><USER25> Six weeks is not a long time to wait. I've had applications take 3+ months before they ever get a response. Google should stop acting so entitled and get in line like the rest of us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So Apple _is_ evil.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (via Daring Fireball)</comment>


Canonical is not interested in the Linux kernel   - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2168086/canonical-linux-kernel

<comment><USER2> The kernel shipped with Ubuntu has hundreds of patches. They simply don't bother sending them upstream. Whether this is because they don't care, because they know they are poor quality and would be rejected, or because they want to "differentiate" I do not know.

</comment><comment><USER3> and this is a problem why?

</comment><comment><USER4> Red Hat's Scott Crenshaw is a jerk. I guess since money is involved, RH feels the need to turn to negative campaigning.

RH: MS contributes more to the kernel than Canonical! psh!

Canonical: True. The work on the kernel was already good; our focus is usability. Besides, RH uses a lot of our technologies, such as our cloud and init tools.

RH: Whatever. Call back when you give a damn about the kernel.

Canonical: _facepalm_

<comment><USER5> I think a lot of people don't realize that Canonical is working on another important part of free software: appealing to the majority of users. With limited resources and time it's good to have different players focusing on different things.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Vipsql – A vim-plugin for interacting with psql - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martingms/vipsql <comment><USER2> I can't imagine anything better than this.

I've struggled countless times against psql, trying to rewrite queries is a painful experience and this apparently solves it forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it! It's pretty rough around the edges yet, but it solves the same problem for me (iterating on complex queries). Let me know if there's anything you're missing!</comment></comment>


Facebook using tagged photos for authentication - <AUTHOR> http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2010/07/facebook-using-tagged-photos-for-authentication.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+DataMining+

<comment><USER2> I've experienced this too when I logged into from a different computer than usual. It's very misleading from Facebook, since it's not a re-authentication, it's just a login. I'm also pretty sure they just use this as a simply way to get their photo archive tagged by forcing people to go through this procedure.

To me this is just another lame move from Facebook to get their hands on personal data for their own advantage. Considering that my benefit from Facebook is to see friends' vacation photos, some random things they do and wish them happy birthday, I don't see the need for Facebook to know much about me.

To sum it up, Facebook needs to take a chill pill.

<comment><USER3> I'm no Facebook fan, but how is Facebook getting any additional personal data from you with this move?

<comment><USER4> They get you to put names on faces in pictures.

<comment><USER5> How can they use that for authentication if they don't already have the data to see if your answer is right?

<comment><USER2> That's why I'm thinking that they don't use it for authentication. There were quite a few steps to go through, so my assumption would be that some steps are used for authentication and others are used to collect data.

Man, I'm realizing I must sound paranoid about Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice if they ran a facial recognition algorithm or something on their pictures. I've been forced to guess which one of my friends got tagged as their pet or as some beach.</comment>


Interactive real-time raytracing in WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathan-olson.com/tesserace/tests/3d.html <comment><USER2> For anyone who suffers from terribly long load times/freezing when compiling the shader, this is caused by the ANGLE wrapper Firefox and Chrome use to convert the WebGL calls to Direct3D 9. You can get better results by disabling it: [http://www.geeks3d.com/20130611/webgl-how-to-enable- native-o...](http://www.geeks3d.com/20130611/webgl-how-to-enable-native- opengl-in-your-browser-windows/)

I think the rationale for using ANGLE is to avoid driver bugs, but in my experience, it causes much more damage than the problems it solves. Practically any page with a non-trivial shader freezes Firefox for up to a minute or sometimes even more on my machine.

<comment><USER3> Since I am generally skeptical about "web technologies", when I read that WebGL had landed in Firefox, I disabled it[1].

>Practically any page with a non-trivial shader freezes Firefox for up to a minute or sometimes even more on my machine.

That makes me glad I disabled it.

[1]: In about:config, I set webgl.disabled to true.

<comment><USER4> You should check whether your drivers and browsers are uptodate. Most WebGL pages work just fine these days, although some (e.g. many shadertoy shaders) tend to use too expensive shaders which might be slow on older integrated GPUs from Intel or generally mobile GPUs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great work. I love seeing how the renderer quickly draws the basic details and then ever more slowly over time fills in the finer points. I know that's pretty much how ray tracing is working but still cool to see.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm learning about rasterization based computer graphics at the moment and it somehow bothers me that all of it might be obsolete in a couple of years when we can do path tracing in real-time. It's such a fast moving field.

<comment><USER7> Don't think raytracing will kill off rasterization for the crucial "first bounce" step anytime soon if we're talking about increasingly-detailed ever- content-richer realtime 60FPS game renderers. Usually as soon as RT gets semi- real-time for simplistic scenes at a rather-too-low resolution (without AA), consumers move on to double the previous standard resolution (four times per- pixel workload) such as the move from FHD to retina/hiDPI, we're back to square one. Especially if say you find you need 4 split-screens stereoscopic at 4k with full shading fidelity.

Rasterization is just too cool of a hack to avoid the tracing of primary rays. In fact, it's rather all the hardware and software hacks that evolved _around rasterization_ for 2 decades combined that make it so, not rasterization by itself per se. Various GPU & CPU based culling methods, early & hierarchical Z-buffer, today's realtime rendering pipeline is an amazing combination of cool techniques that keeps getting better. Raytracers say "pff, with real raytracing we wouldn't need all those dirty hacks", _but_ for one most of them come with the GPU or are well-known and intuitive to implement, _plus_ to get anywhere near-realtime they need to implement another set of even more (and less comprehensible/intuitive/hardware-accelerated) hacks of their own.

All shading stages are also designed around rasterization and matured over the last decade. It's good fun to write some pixel-shader-based raytracer but that alone doesn't make it the better fit for current/next-gen gamedev at all.

The oft-antipicated "hybrid" approach however is finally arriving. Once you have some "depth-aware screen-space" (whether voxelized or N-layers), you can shoot specialized and rather simple rays to create diverse outstanding effects in post-process, from much smoother water surfaces to of course "screen-space raytraced reflections" (SSRR).

<comment><USER6> When we are able to trace multiple rays with multiple bounces per pixel in real-time, would the first bounce really carry that much weight compared to the subsequent bounces that it would justify a separate rendering technique?

Besides that, what would you say to ilaksh's comment? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060197)

<comment><USER7> He's referring to demos that have been around for years and I've been following the space, too. His argument doesn't really refute any of my points. Knowing how the rasterizers work is never going to hurt you, quite the opposite. If you're serious about computer graphics you'll really want to have internalized both raytracing basics and rasterization basics. If I didn't know how triangle meshes are fed into the GPU and processed until the "final fully lit&shaded output pixel" for any one of my 94 favourite games, I'd feel pretty uneasy. Rasterization will always be orders of magnitude faster by necessity: that means when raytracing can finally render ca. 2004 scene complexity (think GTA:SA -- hint, it still can't even at quarter-res), rasterization can render ca. 2016 (or 2018 or whenever) scene complexity at full-res. Guess what the folks at Rockstar, Ubisoft, Crytek wanna do? Throw more details, more content variation, more procedurally-generated or -perturbed geometry at the screen at 60+ FPS. Sure Brigade can reach almost/barely 30FPS at some low resolution in a small limited preprocessed scene and then there's no more room for any physics, any AI, any animated crowds etc etc at all. They're doing important work and one day the big payoff will come, but for the next 10 years knowing how our rasterizers works will not be wasted at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazing work. The most complex path-tracing shaders I've seen in WebGL so far.

My project, [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io), also features interactive ray-tracing but we do it server side using V-Ray. Example here:

[https://clara.io/view/a82f8a80-8a5e-4e61-8faf-3de9eb4313c2/r...](https://clara.io/view/a82f8a80-8a5e-4e61-8faf-3de9eb4313c2/render)

</comment><comment><USER9> In kubuntu 14.04, Intel HD4400, Firefox:

        Error: WebGL: drawArrays: incomplete framebuffer

Chrome:

        GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION : glDrawArrays: framebuffer incomplete (clear)
        GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION : glDrawArrays: framebuffer incomplete (check) (repeated many times)

<comment><USER10> Sorry about that! I had someone else report that it fails across all browsers with the HD4400.

<comment><USER4> It works well on OSX 10.10 with an HD4000 in Firefox, Chrome and even in Safari. The "framebuffer not complete" warning looks like you're using an extension which isn't supported everywhere, probably OES_texture_float or WEBGL_depth_texture?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have made a Path-traced online game 2 years ago. [http://pog.ivank.net/](http://pog.ivank.net/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does the hn title say ray tracing. Its path tracing which is different. Is this another one of those moderators editing things?

<comment><USER7> Raytracing is a _very_ broad family of algorithms, path tracing _is_ certainly "a raytracing algorithm".

<comment><USER12> Seems like they are similar but different.

<comment><USER13> Raytracing is the art of tracing a ray.

Pathtracing is the art of tracing paths of rays using raytracing.

<comment><USER12> Is it an art or a specific technique used in 3d computer graphics rendering?

<comment><USER13> Both ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On my ubuntu 12.04 with on-board intel graphics+ chrome browser. Error: GLSL link error: for vertex shader: <fragment source>

<comment> luke-stanley I got "Error: GLSL link error: for vertex shader" also. With Xubuntu / Ubuntu 12.10 running an Asus VivoBook S200E.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm looking forward to trying this on my iOS device once iOS 8 comes out.

</comment><comment><USER16> It crashes my browser.

<comment><USER10> Sorry about that! Do you mind if I ask what browser and/or graphics card caused this?

<comment><USER16> Firefox 30.0, Radeon HD4870

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Incredibly beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER18> long long time to load (over a minute). But it worked well once loaded. You can move through the floor...

<comment><USER19> I don't think the author took effort to focus on control logic like motion clipping through objects. It's more of a showcase of how quickly his raytracing algorithm is able to render images. That was the real takeaway from me, having written a raytracer in c++ it is amazing to see this running so quickly, and in the browser too.

<comment><USER20> This is a damn impressive demo, but it's not really "in the browser". The browser is the shell, but absolutely all of the heavy lifting is being done on the GPU. No matter what you're using to push shaders over to the GPU, you're really looking at the same performance (so long as that's all that's happening -- it's obviously easy to do horrible things and slow down WebGL or D3D or whatever you happen to be using for a graphics API).

<comment><USER10> Author here! It's very true that the GPU does the heavy lifting, although I'm not sure exactly where an "in the browser" line could be drawn (conceptually any page uses the browser as an execution engine and library).

It's a bit trickier due to restrictions in WebGL (OpenGL ES based) compared to the desktop (e.g. no bitwise operators makes it a pain to get randomness that doesn't bias the result), but it's basically the same.

<comment><USER21> Could you please list literature/papers that you found especially useful while making that renderer? I plan to do the same thing for education purposes.

<comment><USER10> I've done some similar implementations years ago (but with C/OCaml, nothing on the GPU), so I didn't refer to many things for this.

Fresnel reflectance is based off of [http://mathinfo.univ- reims.fr/IMG/pdf/Combined_rendering_of_...](http://mathinfo.univ- reims.fr/IMG/pdf/Combined_rendering_of_polarization_and_fluorescence_effects_- _Wilkie.pdf), although I'm not doing any spectral or polarization-dependent code right now (I wanted to leave that open, and it allows accurate metal simulation).

I tinkered with a blend of some pseudorandomness functions until getting something that worked.

[https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/rayt...](https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/raytrace/rtinter3.htm) was used for ray-box intersection.

The distance function experiment for the drinking glass is based off of the concept of [http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfun...](http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm) (like raymarching, includes normal computation).

I consulted [http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path- tracing/](http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/) to see the best way to do accumulation (and made some realism fixes in [https://github.com/jonathanolson/webgl-path- tracing](https://github.com/jonathanolson/webgl-path-tracing), see [https://github.com/evanw/webgl-path- tracing/pull/1](https://github.com/evanw/webgl-path-tracing/pull/1) for details).

Many other things can be pulled from online or from books like [http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Design-Interactive- Technol...](http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Design-Interactive- Technology/dp/0122290631).

Please let me know if you have any questions, (see my email at [http://jonathan-olson.com/about](http://jonathan-olson.com/about)), and please feel free to use my code however you like (things I wrote are MIT, but I use CC-by and CC-by-non-commercial HDR images).

<comment><USER21> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Excellent work!</comment>


Bethesda sues WB, calls Westworld game 'blatant rip-off' of Fallout Shelter - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/22/17492806/bethesda-lawsuit-warner-bros-westworld-mobile-game-fallout-shelter <comment><USER2> sounds like WB hired a team of dev that used a source code template</comment>


Achieving paid order fulfillment bottleneck in 10 weeks - <AUTHOR> http://differential.io/blog/cladwell-week-10-paid-order-fulfillment-bottleneck-yay

<comment><USER2> Curious what you've done to drive traffic/demand thus far? Pretty sure most startups would like to get to this "problem" :)</comment>


Is bootstrapping becoming sexy again for web2.0? - <AUTHOR> http://sramanamitra.com/blog/655 <comment><USER2> Does YC only invest in ventures planning on liquidity events, or are they open to ventures that only plan on becoming profitable and paying dividends?

<comment><USER3> Definitely a valid question. My guess is that they'd be fine with you building a company for the long term -- you could always buy out their shares at some point.

But I think most YC founders will be saying "yes" to offers that are in the millions. As pg says _"That first million is just worth so much more than the subsequent ones"_

When you walk away with a few million dollars in your pocket there's not much stopping you from creating a new startup, if you have the drive.

<comment><USER4> I think there's a failure to acurately calculate opportunity cost going on here.

At startup school they talked about (presumably VC backed) startups being a %15 chance of success. IF you have a %15 chance of building a company worth $20M in 2 years, and you'll get $2M of that-- then the opportunty value is 0.15X2M or $300,000.

On the other hand, if you bootstrap, and you build the same business, your chances of being a success go up to %60 (No flatline VC sitting on your board forcing bad decisions) but maybe you spend a bit less on marketing and grow more organically (really, I'm being generous here- I think the same business would grow just as fast bootstrapped.) so you end up being worth $10M in two years. Your share of that is $5M, for an opportunity value of $3,000,000.

In other words, you're likely to return ten times the money by forgoing venture capital.

While in both cases you could end up with nothing, weighting the payoff with the likihood of success lets you evaluate two very different opportunities.

If you take the choice tht has a %15 chance of success, odds are you won't get that first million... where as in the alternative, odds are you _will_.

<comment><USER3> The biggest problem most founders have in the beginning is just being able to devote undivided attention to it. If you have to work a full-time job and do your startup on the side for the first 1-2 years that's a huge disadvantage and it massively deceases your chances of success.

If you have something good and don't need a lot of money there's no reason you have to put yourself at the mercy of VCs -- you can maintain control.

You can't judge this kind of thing in a vacuum. What kind of scenario are you thinking of?

<comment><USER4> YC is three months of funding. IF you make $25 an hour, you can work a three month contract and save up enough to fund yourself for three months to try and get a prototype done. You can totally focus on the project for those three months. If you can only get a 6 month contract, then do it, and you'll have 6 months to work on your idea.

Also, you're assuming that doing your startup on the side "massively decreases your chance of success". I think this is in error-- success is goverened by determination more than anything else, and someone who builds something on the side is clearly determined.

Personally, its more fun to focus on your project completely, and so, its probably psychologically better to work for 3 or 6 months, and then take a 3 or 6 month "break".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Open source tools, low cost on bandwidth and storage space have all triggered low cost and overhead involved in starting something. When you have a passion for what you are doing and costs are way too low, then any wise person would run it on his own. Now a days everyone knows that going to a VC or scouting for funds would lead to power struggle inside the company with the result being the founder getting kicked out.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be precise: is bootystrapping bringing sexy back?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are you currently looking into VC or are you bootstrapping your startup and growing it organically?

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes.</comment>


Ask HN: What keyboard do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I find a lot of keyboards to be of crappy quality when it comes to prolonged usage. So I'm wondering if there's something programmer-friendly (as in LOTS of typing). <comment><USER2> Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000

[http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productde...](http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/productdetails.aspx?pid=043)

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple keyboard (<http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB110LL/A>)

I just like the feel of it, but normal keyboards feel like chunky Commodore 64s to me now.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Happy Hacking Pro 2 is great if you like a compact 60 key keyboard. The Escape and Control keys are positioned perfectly for Vim and Emacs, so you don't have to bother with remapping them. Works on PCs and Macs. The price is steep but worth every penny. If I ever go to Japan I'll buy half a dozen and stockpile them. This keyboard is not for everyone, so you should try it before you buy.

[http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards,hhk...](http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards,hhkbpro2&pid=pdkb400b) and <http://www.geekstuff4u.com/happy-hacking-keyboard-pro-2.html>

I also use a Das Keyboard, a nice full-sized keyboard with a great build quality---but it is extremely noisy and I wouldn't recommend it for that reason only. There is a silent version, too. Knowing what I know now, I'd go for the quiet one. Funny thing, daskeyboard.com sells matching earplugs for this keyboard. You buy a set for yourself and for everyone who works in the same room as you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Buckling spring.

I know I am not the only one here who has gotten a keyboard form Unicomp: <http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/>

In terms of prolonged usage: it takes some time to get used to, it really depends on what kind of feedback you want form the keys. Further reading [comparison of different mechanisms and the tactile feedback they give]: [http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Mechanical+Switch+Key...](http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Mechanical+Switch+Keyboards+Sorted+By+Switch&s=cde12ba82bc275f8df7c1ede6930f994) [more force graphs]: [http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Switch+reference&...](http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Switch+reference&s=cde12ba82bc275f8df7c1ede6930f994)

<comment><AUTHOR> WOW, they look really nice. I like. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be interested in some discussion about the specific problems over long sessions with keyboards considered "crappy" -- we can't all be annoyed by exactly the same things, can we? Tactile feedback isn't everything, especially with all the goofy layouts everyone seems to be coming up with these days.

As a PC user and occasional twitch-gamer, I personally stick with plain 104-key USB keyboards from Dell or Microsoft (quiet you), since they're fairly cheap to replace at local thrift stores. If my keyboard happens to die by misadventure, I'd rather not drop another $60+ just so I can use my machine comfortably.

When it comes to notebooks, the answer for me is and has always been ThinkPad, though the MacBook Pro/PowerBook keyboards are pretty solid as well. Sadly, nobody seems to be donating any MacBooks to my cause... :{

</comment><comment><USER7> Apple Bluetooth keyboard with those chicklet keys, the similar keys on the macbook, and a heavy,noisy,awesome unicomp buckling-spring keyboard at work to annoy everyone around me. For prolonged use I prefer the buckling-spring - although at first it may seem like you need to type "harder" - you actually don't - the tactile feedback lets you automatically fine-tune your typing to _just_ the right amount of pressure.

Plus it's semi-waterproof (water drains right through it, as long as you don't dump enough in for it to rise above the key silos and get in the electronics) and it can take a beating like no other for those angry typing sessions.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm using a Das Keyboard Ultimate (<http://www.daskeyboard.com/>).

It's a nice keyboard but very, very loud. I can see myself switching to an Apple Keyboard sometime soon.

<comment><USER9> I like it being noisy! Of course, it's best if you have your own office.

<comment><USER8> It is a great keyboard, but I like using the wider Apple Keyboard. When I purchase an iMac, I'll make the switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use a ThinkPad X60 and Synergy as my "keyboard". I've had way too many keyboards over the years, but the X-series ThinkPads are the only ones that don't make my hands ache after a day (or night) of code wrangling.

Alas, I can't comment on which modern ThinkPads are best. I know for a fact that X40 and X60 lines are perfect. I've never used an X200 though. On the other hand, I've had a T400-something from work for a few months. That keyboard was worthless compared to my current X60.

<comment><USER5> If you like thinkpad keyboards you might be interested in the usb version: [http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...](http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=55Y9003&current- category-id=E9ADAEB6787146E29B78400A33E7FE8A&&hide_menu_area=yes) A colleague of mine swears by this, he says its just like the X60 series except bit bigger and can be placed at an angle. Nice touches are the inclusion of volume control and the trackPoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally I'd recomend a Cherry G83, it's really cheap, lasts ages, and feels great.

Although a generic budget keyboard (about £10-£15 here in the UK) it's become really popular among PC gamers (the sort who wouldn't think twice about spending £90 on a special gaming keyboard), and personally I've used it as my primary keyboard for years, it's never let me down yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> Logitech MX 5500 - Awesome keyboard, best keys ever, Bluetooth connection, and this is part of keyboard- mouse package. The mouse is totally awesome, def worth the money. probably one of the most expensive keyboards from Logitech, but worth the money. Awesome battery life too. Zoom, all other multimedia keys too. really lightweight, and very nice keys.

</comment><comment><USER13> Happy Hacking Lite <http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/haphackeylit1.html>

Good feel, small foot print, and an old style key board layout that keeps Esc within reach of the home row for Vi-ers

</comment><comment><USER14> TVS Gold (Black). Crunchy!!!</comment>


PlayStation 4 Tops One Million Units in First Day  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/17/sonys-playstation-4-tops-one-million-units-in-first-day/

<comment><USER2> Very impressive. I have one but I haven't opened it yet. For me, none of the launch titles were particularly compelling. But I missed out on a lot of console games last gen because of the transactional inertia of not owning a system to play them on. Super stoked for Deep Down and The Division, when they come out.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised you would have chosen a PS4 over a PS3. The PS4 is not backwards compatible and the PS3 has a large assortment of console exclusives as well as being significantly cheaper (and DLNA media streaming if you are into that). There are some intriguing Black Friday sales coming up on the PS3 and they are still releasing exclusive games.

I honestly have no interest in a PS4 at this time. I have a PS3 and looking forward to some games coming out still (and have a huge backlog), but I also want a Wii U (and I will get one contributing to even a bigger backlog).

<comment><USER4> With the PS4 selling faster than the initial PS3, I would expect it to quickly gather steam with developers. Life is way too short to cling to older technologies.

"The company has said it expects to sell five million units by March, which would beat the initial sales rollout of its last-generation videogame device, the PlayStation 3, which sold 3.5 million units worldwide over the same introductory period."

<comment><USER5> The PS4 exclusive titles don't look all that much better than PS3 titles, honestly. Knack is more of a mediocre beat-em-up than a platformer, and Killzone is a blurry mess.

Coming from an Xbox 360, I've got to say that the user experience on the PS4 is a mess. I put a game into the system, and I can play within a minute, but it is a pared down version of the game while it installs. Then I have to exit the game to install it. Oh, and if I want online multiplayer, I usually have to download a 700MB patch before that is available. If I access a TV app through my library, it will boot me back out to the main screen if I have a game running, but if I access it through the TV apps section, it will close my game and allow me to run Netflix.

<comment><USER6> > I put a game into the system, and I can play within a minute, but it is a > pared down version of the game while it installs

With respect, what did you expect? To be able to play the full game before it is installed?

> Oh, and if I want online multiplayer, I usually have to download a 700MB > patch

Oh, the horror. I am guessing that could take as long as 10 minutes!

Talk about your first world problems....

<comment><USER5> From the Xbox 360 to the Dreamcast to the PS2 to the PSX to the SNES to the NES to the Atari 2600, all the games required that I simply place the game into the console and the system would run the game. Now we have this odd kludge that used to be reserved only for PCs. The other features are certainly nice to have, but the PS4 bills itself as a gaming console first, and there is a degraded experience in that regard.

<comment><USER2> > used to be reserved only for PCs

Used to be something only PCs were capable of doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To put this in contrast, this is the most successful console launch, they sold more in one day than any other consoles have in a month from their launch (from neogaf.com):

[http://abload.de/img/screenshot2013-11-17a34cad.png](http://abload.de/img/screenshot2013-11-17a34cad.png)

<comment><USER8> It's not "in a day". It's all preorders.

<comment><USER7> That's still one day, all pre-orders are picked up on day 1.

<comment><USER9> But they have been ordered months in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The funniest thing is that these numbers have been known for months, with probably weekly/daily updates to Sony executives, thanks to ubiquitous pre- order systems.

PS: it's also a single continent, two countries launch. I wonder how well it will fare once it's available worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER11> I haven't owned a console since buying the Wii but before that my last serious console was a Nintendo 64. I am seriously considering buying one of these bad boys in the new year when I have recovered from the Christmas savings crush. Will be interesting to see how the XBOX One sells in comparison.

So far it appears as though the XBOX One has the better launch titles, the ones for PS4 are very underwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER12> vs 9 million iphones in the first weekend

<comment><USER13> How in the world is that a valid comparison? Are you under the impression that the high end console market is as big as the high end cell phone market?

<comment><USER12> It's actually not about the hardware. It's about the games, movies, music and series.

Sony is not aiming just for the 'console' market.

<comment><USER13> They are in fact aiming for the console market. Hell, the PS4 doesn't even play MP3's and has no appreciable network media sharing features. If you compare the PS4 to the last iteration it is obvious that they have backpedaled from the media center mentality.

<comment><USER14> They haven't so much back-pedaled as prioritized gaming above media functionality for launch. All those missing features will come in future updates.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I know they'll be patching some things in, but those features were not emphasized at all during the marketing blitz. It has been all about gaming.

<comment><USER15> They were trying to push Bluray as a media format when the PS3 was released, having the PS3 act as a media center meant more people would buy Bluray movies.

This time, HD-DVD is dead, and everything in your living room already plays streaming media, so it's not much of a selling point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> and only 500k are still functional...

[http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-4-Launch- Edition/product-r...](http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-4-Launch- Edition/product- reviews/B00BGA9WK2/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending)

<comment><USER17> your type of reasoning is the one that makes hard working people go mad. Someone works hard on something and it happens to have 0.5% failure rate but you negative people see only that. You know why there are only 1000 5 stars? because all the other people that have working consoles prefer to play instead of leave reviews...

This is really why we can't have nice things...

<comment><USER18> Also known as the vocal minority.</comment></comment></comment>


Transhumanism Is a Dead End (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/essays/transhumanism.htm <comment><USER2> I always failed to understand what the "consciousness isn't local" can predict. I mean, come on. You either take the egocentric view that you're the only conscious being in the universe, or you realize other humans are similar enough to you that the only conclusion is that they are all similarly conscious.

From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.

Even if you take the most egocentric worldview, you can still drink alcohol and watch and realize how your internal logic and consistency and personality is changed by an external chemical. I can't see any possible conclusion from that other than the fact that this brain really is all you are.

Suggesting there's anything non-materialistic in consciousness means there's an aspect of human consciousness that remains immutable under all internal brain malfunctions, under drugs, under different education, under different environment, under different circumstances. I've yet to find a single counterexample.

<comment><USER3> > From there you don't need to look far to realize that the brain is really > all there is. Just look at all the brain malfunctions. You've got people > forgetting from dementia, so clearly the brain has most of your memories. > You've got people with all sorts of weird phenomena from strokes.

We observe many correlations between the neurological and the mental, and it seems likely that in the years and decades to come we will learn many more. Materialists argue that this is evidence that the mental is a product of the neurological. But what about the idealist alternative, that the neurological is a product of the mental? An observed correlation between two phenomena cannot, by itself, tell us which of the two is more fundamental.

<comment><USER4> What?

Each of the provided examples from the parent comment are causal perturbations to the system that establish necessity (although perhaps not sufficiency) beyond a pure correlation. If you lesion a part of the brain, you lose associated "mental" faculties. If you perturb the system via disease or chemicals, you observe a corresponding change in the mental state. This is evidence of a one way interaction beyond correlation.

<comment><USER3> > This is evidence of a one way interaction beyond correlation.

You appear to be saying that non-mental event A temporally precedes mental event B, therefore the non-mental must be the cause of the mental, rather than the mental being the cause of the non-mental.

However, "you perturb the system via disease or chemicals" is not non-mental. There is a mental act of will to do perform such a perturbation, and a mental awareness of such perturbation being performed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Transhumanism is based on a wholly materialistic conception of reality. In > effect it says, "What we now understand about the mind and consciousness is > all there is to it; there's nothing left but to fill in the details of how > the brain works."_

Woops, I detect a straw man being set up! The view in opposition of "we already know everything" is _not_ "woo must be true", but merely "evidence rules".

> _For millennia the majority of the human population has believed..._

...that the sun was pushed across the sky by a great scarab beetle. Oh wait...that isn't what you were going to say? Oh. So maybe believing things doesn't make them true.

<comment><USER6> > For millennia the majority of the human population has believed...

argument from antiquity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> " _For millennia the majority of the human population has believed that the mind is more than a biological machine, that it extends in some inexplicable way beyond the individual body both in space (ESP) and in time (continued consciousness after death). The scientific evidence for the former can be denied only by those with closed minds;..._ "

I'm not one to dispute that transhumanism is an unspectacular idea, but....

Ok, fine. I have a closed mind. If you can consistently do something clear and visibile that cannot otherwise be done, I'll take you seriously. Until then, I won't. Sorry. Pick me some Powerball numbers or something. Tell me where the hell my old copies of The Fantasy Trip stuff is hiding. Fling Randi James into an ocean. _Something._

<comment><USER8> I stopped reading exactly there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least as far as I managed to stomach, this reeks of "woo". It uses vague wording and suggestion to avoid making concrete supernatural claims, but supernatural premises seem to be the only real arguments it poses against the idea of transhumanism.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think the transhumanism that she talks about is very specific in the way that it is one that believes in the capacity to upload consciousness in some sort of computer hardware which wholly differentiate itself from transhumanism that sees more simple improvements like say eyesight repairs through hardware augmentations which is the more realistic one.

</comment><comment><USER11> Transhumanism is a fairy tale, but I do appreciate the pointed critique of materialism. I always found it odd that the majority of mainstream philosophers are materialists (apart from a few standouts like Chalmers).

Even if I wasn't a Christian, I'd find materialism to be absurdly reductive.

<comment><USER12> I would contest "materialism being absurdly reductive" with a quote from Feynman:

> I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't > agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it > is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this > is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," > and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees > is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be > quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a > flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I > could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also > have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one > centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, > also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order > to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can > see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in > the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions > which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the > awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

I think that even if science can reduce processes to simple understandable components, this doesn't take away from everyday life.

The fact that a book consists of characters doesn't make it worse.

The fact that you're simply a specific configuration of atoms* doesn't devalue you as a human being.

* or evolution of this configuration in time, but that's a story for another time

The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.

<comment><USER11> > The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking > (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.

I think you're attacking a straw man here. I agree that the mind is fascinating whether or not dualism is true. But at the same time, I think that the kind of hand-waving materialists do when faced with qualia, intentionality, and (what appears to be) objective morality is not very convincing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good article and I totally agree. Besides when we look at all our intrepid tech-bro "pioneers" that embrace transhumanism, it begs the obvious question. Would you want to spend eternity with them? I, for one, welcome the sweet release of death. It can't possibly be worse.

<comment><USER14> Or you could just not interact with the people you don't want to interact with.

I don't think any transhuman has a vision of transhumanity where you are physically impossible to suicide or are forced to interact with certain people.

<comment><USER13> Who else would you be interacting with? You would only exist through our own technology. You would solely exist in a predetermined state of "existence" created by us. How would that be "transhuman"? It's just a lateral form of the experience we create for ourselves now, just without the inconvenience of objective reality and immediate consequence. We don't even understand the state of our own existence. How can we move forward when we don't even know where we are?</comment></comment></comment>