5000 years ago Sahara was a green landscape with lakes and rivers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/fall_of_civ_pod/status/1168101940758306817 <comment><USER2> > > [https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/7go26a/the_hour_will...](https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/7go26a/the_hour_will_not_begin_until_the_land_of_the/)

> It was narrated from Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) that the > Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: "The > Hour will not begin until the land of the Arabs once again becomes meadows > and rivers."

When I was a teenager, I was interested in what people used to say about the future in the past and this was the one thing that ever stuck out to me in my readings.

I guess it was common knowledge among the knowledgeable at the time that this was true but I was never able to corroborate it.

<comment><USER3> That would not have been about the Sahara, but about Arabia.

If you look at some Sat photos of Saudi Arabia you will see some crazy large circular meadows. They have greened the desert. Almarai is one of the world's largest dairy farms.

<comment> crooked-v More broadly, the Middle East in general was once extraordinarily bountiful, but the cumulative effects of natural climate change and thousands and thousands of years of saltwater irrigation have unfortunately desertified much of the region.

<comment><USER4> Well yeah, and also considering that natural climate change was the most significant issue. Since the Pleistocene ice age ended around 11 thousand years ago, and ever since then the equatorial regions have changed dramatically. Coincidentally this is about the beginning of recorded history, or at least the parts recovered from antiquity. The regions around north Africa, the Arabian peninsula, etc... they all would have been ideal habitats for hominids given the climate of the Earth back then, most of the habitable zones were near the equator during the last ice age, and began expanding north/south as the Ice melted. Likewise the grasslands of north Africa, and Arabian peninsula began to slowly change into arid deserts while the other places thawed.

It's a pity the cradle of civilization turned to sand, but at the cost of Earth becoming more habitable it's a fair trade.

<comment><USER5> Would the Sahara have turned into a desert without millennia of overgrazing and over-burning?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Changes in the earth 's orbit known as its orbital precession, a change in tilt that cycles every 25,000 years, forced the African monsoon rains southward, and the Sahara became drier._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles)

<comment><USER7> Um. Cut down all the trees and a forest has a hard time recovering. The Sahara is likely man-made. Like almost all deserts on Earth except Namibia and Australian which are millions of years old, the rest are mere thousands.

Familiar story. America's Southwest used to be treed grasslands until overgrazing turned them to sand and wasteland.

<comment><USER8> It's not just a lack of trees. It's a lack of soil as well. And the temperatures are really unforgiving. Heard about al rub al khali, ie most of saudi arabia? Who cut down those trees you think?

I'm not saying overgrazing never happened, bit it was not nearly enough to explain the current desolation.

<comment><USER8> Also, on the otger hand, check out the al bayda project in saudi arabia, the site of which was a forest just 100 years ago (according to the villagers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And just 2 millenniums ago, around 140 B.C., when Romans conquered Carthage (now Tunisia), it was a fertile land and its wheat fields produced enough food to feed the Rome.

<comment><USER10> And this is what the Thermopylae pass (The battle in 300) looks like today: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this suggesting that modern civilization started with climate change? At the end, he points out that the occupants of these areas moved towards the coasts during the desertification. This would have been immediately preceding the establishment of the first Egyptian dynasty.

<comment><USER12> It's worth remembering that civilization was independently invented in several different places, at least in Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus River, and China. Possibly more, as anthropology has tended to assume that cultural innovation is imported (or at least adapted) from elsewhere in the absence of evidence one way or the other.

Climate change is presently believed to be a major catalyst to the development of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia. It also thought to have led to the collapse of the Indus River Valley civilization. But it is not thought to have played major roles in the other developments of civilization.

<comment><USER13> All civilization started soon after the end of the last ice age, which was the last big climate change.

<comment><USER12> Your comment does prompt the reply that there is a wide variance in the definition of key words on the subject, particularly as applies to popular interpretation.

In the anthropological context, "civilization" is usually meant to refer to the most complex form of societal organization. Civilizations don't start appearing until about 6000-7000 years ago. By contrast, the Younger Dryas (a sudden climatic shift in the Northern hemisphere that reverted temperatures back to the last glacial maximum) occurred about 12000 years ago. The Laurentide ice sheet probably completely collapsed by about 11000 years ago.

With these definitions, you can see that the distance from the end of the last ice age (collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet) or the end of the last big climate change (Younger Dryas) to the beginning of civilization (~Uruk period in Mesopotamia) is around the same magnitude as the distance from the beginning of civilization to the present day. That's not exactly "soon."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Twitter is such a terrible way of displaying long form content like this.

<comment><USER15> You beat me to it. I find this subject interesting but the platform of Twitter is incredibly ill-fitting for this. I've noticed recently more and more people doing long-form content on Twitter - I hope it's not a trend that catches on.

<comment><USER16> Being able to link and pass around the most interesting sentence (and associated media) as a unit separate from the rest (but keeping the original context attached) makes it much easier for things to spread. How often have you wanted to share an interesting paragraph from an article and been unable to link to it? Twitter threads are an awkward solution to this, but they're the best available.

<comment><USER17> They are far from the best available. The best option is to send the link and then send the text of the paragraph you wanted to highlight.

<comment><USER15> You could do this on Twitter if you stay within the character limit but for material in the link, that requires 5+ tweets to cover completely, it simply seems that the amount of scrolling and clicking is a waste. This sort of stuff is not always so neatly presented as it is on this particular link within Twitter. On your timeline, you might notice the "part 3" tweet first. Then you gotta click it to try to gain a larger context to see if its actually interesting. Then, if it is, you have to click to find the "part 1" tweet. Sometimes this will be simple because you can show the entire thread. Other times it seems like you cant. It is a lot of manual overhead to consume two paragraphs or so plus a link to the actual podcast that the paragraphs are describing.

<comment><USER17> Twitter is obviously a broken system for trying to share interesting links then. I don't see why we should ruin publishing for everyone else because twitter doesn't allow sharing text properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do we know the size and health of the Amazon at this time?

I've read that the Amazon relies on silt carried from the Sahara.

<comment><USER19> Did you mean the Nile? I can't think of any method that would get silt from the Sahara in Africa to the Amazon in South America.

<comment><USER20> I think it is Sahara to the Amazon: [https://www.wired.com/2015/02/sahara- keeps-amazon-green/](https://www.wired.com/2015/02/sahara-keeps-amazon-green/)

<comment><USER19> Dang! That's really wild.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This video puts a lot of it together: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_Of0WGkEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0_Of0WGkEs)

He starts with science and reaches into speculation, but, there's real, interesting science in it.

<comment><USER22> I see it as a little of science mixed with a lot of speculation, and good amount of crackpotoplogy.

The part where he tries to show that the old map of Herodotus (c. 484BC – c. 425BC) is somewhat similar to the map of rivers and basins, but they don't even look similar. (Also note that the dates discussed in this articles are about 5000 years ago, something like 2500 years before Herodotus.)

About the erosion in the Sphinx: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx_water_erosion_hypothesis)

And I prefer to ignore the last part about the Atlantis ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What a striking map that is. It makes me curious how big the Sahara will get, and how long it will be until it begins shrinking again.

</comment><comment><USER24> curiously looks like it could be in the trough of a milankovich cycle.

</comment><comment><USER25> Those people should have really used electric cars back then

</comment><comment><USER26> Goat?

<comment><USER27> You're being downvoted, but there's actually something to this theory. The spread of Islam throughout the African continent brought with it a cultural taboo against pork; pigs were mostly displaced by goats, which will frankly eat anything down to its roots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even just 500 years ago most of the Sahara was green.

<comment><USER29> Hate to be the "Source?" person, but were you there at the time?

If not, please update Wikipedia with references to your original source of information.

(Wikipedia doesn't admit original research.)

<comment><USER28> it was a conspiratorial youtube video but the narrator sounded like a real straight shooter.</comment></comment></comment>


Bad day at the office? Try these life hacks from the military - <AUTHOR> https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/bad-day-at-the-office-try-these-life-hacks-from-the-military/ <comment><USER2> This might be the most British thing I have ever read.

</comment><comment><USER3> link is broken or website down</comment>


Share your startup for free - <AUTHOR>

We are giving an opportunity for startups to share their website for absolutely free (the offer will end soon) please go to enythings.com and share your company for free exposure. <comment><USER2> Thanks :D</comment>


Don't Trust Google (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2002/12/don_t_trust_google.htm <comment><USER2> And 14 years later there still _" is no evidence or even reason to suspect that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven't heard of anyone being arrested for running a dodgy query."_

So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, it's been more than a decade and those fears haven't really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being said in anti-Google threads in 2014.

<comment><USER3> Here's a few ways the post became true:

Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data. [http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html)

Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft used to. [http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook- la...](http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit- motorola-Samsung)

Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking. [http://digiday.com/platforms/google- tracking/](http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/)

Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email? [http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep- google-engineer-stalked-tee...](http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google- engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats)

Paid inclusion for shopping search results [http://marketingland.com/once- deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...](http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil- google-now-embraces-paid-inclusion-13138)

Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains- outranked-...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked- google-local-listings/111539/)

Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.

[http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google- intentional...](http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google- intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/) [http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad- practice-i...](http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is- deceptive.html/?a=viewall)

<comment><USER4> I'm sure you're aware that this collection of yours pertains to complaints of interested parties, and that if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture.

But seeing as you had a cherry picked list of the harshest (and incomplete) reportings at the ready, augmented with you're own slanted commentary my guess is that a "full picture" isn't what you're aiming for here.

<comment><USER5> >if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture

Why don't you expound on that very different picture instead of such a hand wavy kneejerk dismissal without any reasoning or references?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Got an android tablet for 94 year-old grandma a week ago. To simplify her experience I turned off most services she doesn't need. Every time I visit, Google has hoodwinked her into switching something on. Location services, Google+, Google now. She only wants mail and pics. Yesterday I got her an iPad because Apple just makes money on the devices and doesn't spin their BS web of ad-based services at grandma.

From an ex Google absolute fanboy writing this on a Nexus. They used to be an example of open trustworthy behaviour. Now they're just another company to me. The ultimate 'you're the product' company at that, and I dislike that phrase.

<comment><USER7> I'm not going to comment on the horrifying way you seem to throw money around...

I am however going to comment on the absurdity of how you seem to protest this whole situation. If she only wants mail and pics, why not get rid of all the other junk that comes pre-installed and put in a generic mail and a generic pics app?

Do you think the situation will be any better on ipad, which is running on a platform that is twenty times as closed as android?

<comment><USER6> Luckily I had backup plans for the Android, in case she didn't want to use it :) It was a test machine to see if she could even begin to find it useful, and I assumed it'd probably be good enough because hey, they're all the same these days.

That's the reason why I chose Android in the first place, assuming I could set the launcher and just make it dead-simple. I did a week or two of research looking into apps that might suit an old-timer. Big Launcher is great, but doesn't fix Skype because Skype's UI is a nightmare (contacts + favorites + recent? really? she has about four people she'd Skype. Why are the video/etc buttons so tiny? Yes obviously that issue will be on iPad as well.) Tried a couple photos apps to see which was best. Tried a couple mail apps. Get PPS from daughter, have to find tiny buttons to move to next slide of cat, rather than just swiping, so app closes and she misses half the pics. I've found websites dedicated to the elderly but none that seem to clear the whole mess up. While trying to do this, I'm listening to her talking to Google because she clicking something and Google says "Talk now", so she's telling it she can't find her email. They put in a quad-core processor so battery dies in no time. The Google tells me the mini has better battery life.

Home button disappears sometimes (e.g. camera, or Solitaire game) and replaced by tiny dot (so you want to go home but can't, or at least can't find it). iPad, it's always there - the physical round thing. Sometimes she touches the home/back buttons when typing (closes game or mail, very surprised - so now you don't want to go home but do), and iPad doesn't have soft buttons below the space bar. Send button is very close to the menu on Android. On iPad there are only two buttons and they're far from each other. Just above the home button Google has the "all apps" button, which she just doesn't need front- and-center. Back button sometimes does X, sometimes does Y, depending on context. Small USB cable works one-way only, iPad's can be inserted both ways. On this device can't remove the Google search bar near the top (I think?) and she's not quite ready for the web yet. Or Google's voice thing that didn't help her. At some point I need to take her off Google+ because she doesn't need any alerts that some random person is now following her. That shit is not in the user's best interests, it's in Google's. Then she's building up a great set of drafts because she'll edit and hit the wrong thing and it'll be gone, whereas the iPad app asks "Delete Draft? Save Draft?" when you click cancel. AFAIKT you can only hit "Send", "Cancel" or the hardware home button while writing a mail. Nothing else goes wrong.

Please don't assume your ten seconds on the problem has shown me to be an idiot. If you find a perfect setup, please tell me.

Btw her daughter and granddaughter both have iPads which helps the support situation greatly because they know what the button does. And shops currently have specials on the older non-retina, which is fine for her. We'll try it out and if she finds the Android better given her extra week of usage, that's a useful experiment. The money is very secondary compared to finding an experience that makes an old lady happy that she can "write letters to her friends". It's a game changer and she's enjoying it despite frustrations.

Current annoyance is that the toolbar icons on iPad can't grow with the fonts. Yes can use the Zoom but that's a bit crap. Will test it with her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I have one idea for how to do that, through a network of peer-to-peer search > engines, and I hope to post it soon.

This was 2002 ... Is there any follow up posting on it?

I'm actively developing a censor free distributed search engine, with the abilities to parse the layout of a page into fields like author, title, date, abstract, article, pictures. The system is able to login into sites, hide itself as a normal browser to scrap the dark side of the web. Nodes and leafs of the network will communicate with tor (nyi), and act like a torrent of search engines.

Use the /chat/ or contact from my homepage, if you want to discuss my vision of a Google killer.

<comment><USER9> Have you seen YaCy? It's a distributed search engine project that's been running for several years. You can start using it to search and crawl right now.

[http://yacy.net/en/](http://yacy.net/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something like 5 out of the first 16 comments on this post were all from accounts (1 each) created under 1 hour ago. Weird.

<comment><USER11> It isn't surprising. There are lots of reasons why people are unwilling to put their "primary" HN account at risk when they want to say something which can be used against them (or simply down voted into oblivion). When I worked at Google I was very careful about what I said outside of Google, there is very little the company doesn't know about its employees. Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that translates into real money.

So when folks want to contribute to the conversation in some way (either to support, attack, or deflect it seems) but don't want to do so openly, the new accounts come out. One motivation for having a 24 hr waiting period on posting is to mitigate that, but sometimes folks do bring good data under an extra layer of anonymity.

<comment><USER12> > Being a trouble maker always looked bad on your calibration scores and that > translates into real money.

Wow. Did you actually see first hand anyone who was punished by Google for things said outside the workplace? And did this extend to topics other than Google?

<comment><USER13> I remember some of michaelochurch's comments that mentioned Steve Yegge at Google:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017446)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4462217)

<comment><USER14> Who, you will note, did _NOT_ get in trouble for his public stuff according to michaelochurch's posts.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but michaelochurch's point was about why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "[...] what would you do if Google required you to set up a user account, or enroll in a service [...] so that you could have more 'personalized' search results, and the occasional special offer?"

Um...

<comment><USER2> Key word: _required_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is incredibly prescient but then again Harry S. Truman said a long time ago "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know". It seems that all corporations travel the same historically beaten path.

</comment><comment><USER17> Once a company has too much power, the physics of corporations states that it will be abused: [https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly- trick...](https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly- trick-27baf5983516)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wrote about this last year. Somewhat similar. [http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind- faith-i...](http://prosehe.tumblr.com/post/64853725968/our-blind-faith-in- dont-be-evil-and-why-we-need-a)

</comment><comment><USER13> Personally I do think Google is not perfect but I never liked things such as Scroogled.

<comment><USER19> using a service like scroogle might help to avoid local/targeted search results (which I don't like most of the time)

<comment><USER13> I am talking about the campaign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like recently these anti-Google posts are being dredged up at a noticeable rate. Is there a reason behind it or is all just ad hoc?

For instance I wonder how OP stumbled about the link.

<comment><USER21> Thanks to Google these links and many others are kept down under the rug.

<comment><USER22> This HN page is currently #3 for the search query "Don't Trust Google". So I'm going to call BS right there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't think there is one instance in the history of mankind, that great power hasn't been misused. ..I believe in unicorns too. ..But not that much.

</comment><comment><USER24> um, so what happened to the p2p search engine?</comment>


Dull and Uncertain: Life - <AUTHOR> https://thecoldblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/09/dull-and-uncertain/ <comment><USER2> This post reminded me of a short essay by Theodor Adorno on the nature of free time in which he argues that the concept itself is flawed and a mere extension of our working lives, and that the boredom that the author describes here is a result of the modern conception of work bleeding into our every thought and actions.

[http://xenopraxis.net/readings/adorno_freetime.pdf](http://xenopraxis.net/readings/adorno_freetime.pdf)</comment>


Deep learning for visual question answering: demo with Keras code - <AUTHOR> http://iamaaditya.github.io/2016/04/visual_question_answering_demo_notebook <comment><USER2> Even though this is "Question Answering", it is trained as a classification model. Thus the model will try to come up with one of the top "1000" answers it has seen during the training. This certainly limits the possibility of answers and sometimes returns very weird answer.

It is not for lack of trying that all the top papers in visual question answering end up doing this as a classification task. Results are really poor when it is used as RNN generation, and also extending it more than top 1000 answers does not yield any better results. 87% of the questions in training + validation is within 1000 unique answers.

Latest models have started using more complex form of memory and more tightly integrating the question vectors. One of the top model called DPPNet trains a separate matrix from the question vector (chain of GRUs) to find correspondence on the image filter weights. Their idea is that some question have more relevant areas in the image features. Yet another model DMN+, by Metamind uses dynamic memory network which they build to do language question answers but the extension to images work pretty good.

Surprisingly the models that use visual attention are not the best and I think it is mostly because this kind of model requires even more data and longer training. Just taking 10 different crop of the question image and doing voting of answer beats attention models (based on numbers reported by these papers).

Right now I am working on converting "End to end network" -[http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08895](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08895) to this task. I tried working on Neural Turing machine but I could not make it work for this kind of task, but it was mostly because of lack of indepth understanding of NTM.

Any feedback from you guys are welcome.

P.S Thanks fchollet for writing Keras and for this post. Can't wait to try Keras 1.0

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your work on this, I find the VQA task really interesting.

The classification-based approach is definitely the part I find unsatisfying about this task. The problem to me is that it biases the models learned very strongly towards the data that was collected for training and testing.

Has anyone tried outputting a vector from the model, and using cosine to predict the nearest word/phrase/sentence etc? This seems to work for non- visual QA.[1] Training is performed using noise contrastive estimation. I've discussed this idea with the Virginia Tech team, but I haven't had time to try it, and they seemed a little skeptical.[2]

[1] [https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/](https://cs.umd.edu/~miyyer/qblearn/)

[2] [https://github.com/VT-vision- lab/VQA_LSTM_CNN/issues/14](https://github.com/VT-vision- lab/VQA_LSTM_CNN/issues/14)

<comment><USER2> hi syllogism

Right now everyone doing this is highly focussed on the competition and trying to beat the numbers. For that purpose certainly they would want to stick to predicting Top K answers.

For e.g see this table

      Model 	Q+I [1]	 Q+I+C [1] 	ATT 1000 	ATT Full

      ACC. 	0.2678 	0.2939 		0.4838 		0.4651

Where ATT full is when using all the words, it performs worse than ATT 1000 (Source)[Chen, K., Wang, J., Chen, L. C., Gao, H., Xu, W., & Nevatia, R. (2015). ABC-CNN: An Attention Based Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Question Answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.05960.]

Once the competition is over (in rough two months), there will be more focus on actual AI part, where generating the answers would be the right thing to do. There are other papers where they use external knowledge base like DBPedia, certainly "answer word" could be picked up from there.

What you have suggested is a very interesting approach, and I am not aware of any paper which has tried that. Certainly quite a few paper have tried to extend NLP QA to Visual QA but with limited success (expect Metamind people). I will certainly keep that in my ideas to try list. I will update you if I get some results.

P.S: Thank you for creating Spacy, I love it and I use it everyday !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a very weird behaviour in this image that (to me, at least) speaks a lot about the (low) consistency of this method: if upon the last image a sport-neutral question is asked, then the answer is:

        40.52 %  tennis
        28.45 %  soccer

But then "Are they playing soccer?" is asked, and the answer jumps to the following:

        93.15 % yes

What would it happen with tennis then? How can this make sense?

My only rationalization would be along the lines of, "Well, it guessed it was a sport at least", but no person would answer these question like that...

<comment><USER2> Hi Harperlee

I ran the question you asked --

"Are they playing tennis?"

and following is the result

99.93 % yes

00.05 % no

000.0 % right

000.0 % left

000.0 % black and white

<comment><USER4> Thanks for adding more information! This is very interesting. So what's limited in the response then is being able to discriminate among the separate semas of the answer. The network is sure of a lot of common things among the two sports but can't communicate that perhaps tennis is more likely than soccer...</comment></comment></comment>


Populism is the result of global economic failure - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/26/populism-is-the-result-of-global-economic-failure?CMP=share_btn_fb <comment><USER2> Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it.

People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.

<comment><USER3> USA "proles" fell for populism and elected the worst neocapitalist team possible, against their own interests, that's what we're talking about when we talk about "populism".

By and large people (demographically) who voted for the democrats won't be much affected by the GOP gov, but the people who voted for the GOP will be badly affected.

If a mod comes here, I vote for closing this post, I feel it is very very prone to political flame wars.

<comment><USER4> Sharing your country and resources with immigrants is also against one's self- interest, but we don't label _that_ as irrational.

<comment><USER5> How about your stop shitting on immigrants and blaming them for everything?

It only fosters irrational hate and causes unnecessary violence.

It's not like those immigrants are occupying good paying low skill jobs that could otherwise be done by Americans. They do fruit picking in California for below minimum wage.

Immigration is used as a scapegoat.

Look at Germany. They have the same policies. They have immigration. They have open borders and they have free trade policies and they fully embrace globalism.

Yet Germany retained its high paying relatively low skill jobs and the US didn't. The reason is simply that the various CEOs in the respective countries decided on different business strategies. In the US it seems they decided to go with low cost manufacturing in China/Mexico.

<comment><USER4> Immigration increases the supply of low-skilled labour, thus lowering wages. And since a good deal of the US economy is based on exporting, the increase in the demand for labour due to the presence of immigrants is smaller (i.e., they don't have to be in the US to buy iPhones and Snickers bars).

Finally, people are naturally tribalistic - you can blame evolution for that one. Until we fix that, immigration will increase ethnic tensions, which serve as a distraction for corporations to use while they rob you.

But I guess I'm just being irrational..

<comment><USER6> It does seem a little bit irrational to state that immigration is being used by corps to distract us, while ignoring the positive aspects of it.

Also, saying that people are naturally tribalistic, because of evolution, fails to take into account that we're not slaves to our impulses, and that evolution blatantly favours cooperation over competition.

<comment><USER4> Tribalism is as much about cooperation as about competition - help the virtuous Us to drive out the villainous Them.

It makes it no less easy to abuse however, e.g. "Look at those no-good _black_ welfare queens with their 12 kids paid for by good honest _white_ people! Cut social spending!"

<comment><USER7> Some credit should be given to the war cry of the current (still pretty much current) regime : let's help the favored classes (I would say the weak, but lots of weak classes find themselves excluded) and everything will get better for everyone !

And then, for about 16 years, since the crisis of 2000 ... it didn't get better for everyone. Real income has been dropping since the 1980s, but it was almost steady until 1999. And then healthcare, fuel/energy and education really exploded. Of course this is the result of the crisis in 2008, which was of course not caused in 2008, but before then.

Obama got elected on the same platform as Trump, really. He was going to change things. Hope and change. The famous blue and red posters, his own characteristic style, all very memorable and well executed. An abundance of hope, but I must say the change was found somewhat lacking. Despite a nobel peace prize, Guantanamo was not closed, and there was a massive 2008 crisis, rather than a recovery (yes Obama promised an economic recovery from the situation BEFORE the 2008 crisis, remember ? The Bush tax cuts were the big bogeyman at the time).

Then the experience of the crisis came. Even if you weren't one of the people who kept the debt but lost their home, very few people did well during the crisis. Then there was the initial pullback, but aside from the 1% with lots of stocks nobody was really made whole.

Then the FED "fixed" this. They came up with what's commonly known as the "PCE deflator" because of oil. You see, because of the huge fuel/energy price rise people were using much less energy, and as a result it shouldn't be counted in inflation (or else inflation would have been close to 10%). Likewise, people use less housing, same reasoning.

That's great, but ... people still had less fuel/energy as a result, the banks just refused to count that as inflation. There's a famous Y Combinator article titled "There's a remarkable correlation between the quality of life and energy use". Likewise people have enjoyed less housing, all of which is not counted ...

Despite this massive adjustment to favor economic indicators under Obama, his policies have not improved the situation of the average American. All together I would say that, on a large average, and without counting inflation, Americans have gotten back about half of what they lost in the 2008 crisis. Counting CPI inflation sadly I'd say it's more like 20%.

And now they elect the other party.

The response "They must be evil racists !" (because let's be honest, "tribalism" is no more than a euphemism) seems like it might be missing the point a bit, aside from being entirely unhelpful.

<comment><USER8> Pity US has just one party in two colours. The party for rich. Both sides take in a lot of support and allow lobbying.

<comment><USER7> In Europe the situation is very different. We simply have political parties that are job plans for their administrators. Doing what the rich want means they also get to divide up jobs on corporate boards and that makes all of them ... also parties for the rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the same argument left academics have been using to excuse the repeated failure of electorates to vote for socialism for a century.

It's not a new argument. And it nicely avoids left wing thought ever having to take responsibility for its own electoral failures.

<comment><USER10> Can you give any more references to the sort of thing you're talking about? I believe it's lack of significant class consciousness and the large-scale remnants of propaganda from the Cold War (on which many if not most people are misinformed about Socialism) which are the biggest obstacles to electing a Socialist candidate.

<comment><USER11> What's there to be misinformed about socialism when they gave us the Berlin Wall and big socioeconomic disadvantages that were not solved even in East Germany today (not to mention Eastern Europe as a whole). Those are facts, not misinformation. Not to mention the usual excuses of "not real socialism"

And those were the ones who got the "best" socialism

"Class consciousness" is divide and conquer crap

<comment><USER10> > Not to mention the usual excuses of "not real socialism"

I feel as though I've gone into this a thousand times. If I had a penny for every time someone said this, I'd invest in stocks and shares and become a capitalist.

The act of refusing to back up or defend all or any implementations or interpretations of an idea, especially given pre-existing economic conditions and various external factors is by no means making a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Even if I were to accept your premise that Socialism actually existed in GDR, it wouldn't rule out anarcho-Communism, anarchism, communalism, gradualist Communism, non-Leninist Marxism and a whole host of other leftist ideologies.

Class consciousness refers to the proletariat recognising their interests as a class; it is only divide and conquer in the sense that recognising the _division_ of society (albeit a little more fuzzy nowadays) between the bourgeoisie and proletariat is a startig point to _conquer_ capitalism.

<comment><USER11> > I feel as though I've gone into this a thousand times.

And repeating it doesn't make it true, though repeating a lie makes some people start believing it

> it wouldn't rule out ... and a whole host of other leftist ideologies.

Agreed on that

> Class consciousness refers to the proletariat recognising

Splitting the population into proletariat and 'big bad businessman' excludes all those that work for themselves, excludes the non-factory workers (hence it is a division made to divide and conquer). Not to mention the fallacy of the surplus value, because apparently to Marxists having a factory costs nothing and somehow businessman would hire people if that cost them more than they're getting out of it.

Your proletariat will be increasingly replaced by robots, and as much as I'm in favour of giving everybody living conditions all socialism has given is poor conditions to everybody except if you were one of the higher ups.

<comment><USER10> >Splitting the population into proletariat and 'big bad businessman' excludes all those that work for themselves, excludes the non-factory workers (hence it is a division made to divide and conquer)

No it doesn't. Those who work for themselves are peit-bourgeois, who own the MoP but do not exploit labour; their trade is of commodity for commodity (e.g money for a painting) rather than of labour-time for wage. As I said, the division is rough, though for most people it exists very clearly. Those who are petit-bourgeoise can be considered for the most part proletarians as they are not exploiting labour; many transition to a state in which they employ wage labour and at that point they immediately become in possession of private property and bourgeois.

As Marx put it,

>The self-employed labourer, for example, is his own wage labourer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage labourer.

>excludes the non-factory workers

No. Engineers, project managers, accountants etc. who are employed for wage labour are workers, because they add value to the product and they sell their labour-time on the market to sustain themselves. They are in every respect proletarians.

>because apparently to Marxists having a factory costs nothing

No. The costs of maintaining the factory are taken out of the revenue; the profit which is left over at the end (i.e the amount extra which the capitalist has in his bank account after the production process is complete) is a result of surplus value, and is either used for the capitalist's personal wealth, for shareholders, or re-investment into future actions of the business. Maintenance of the machinery, rent etc. is all taket out of the revenue and it is not profit.

Labour from machinery (i.e dead labour) is merely transferred to products, it is not augmented or created a new. This is done in proportion to the wear and tear of the machine.

>somehow businessman would hire people if that cost them more than they're getting out of it.

Precisely. This is the whole point. Capitalism would not exist if the capitalist could not profit; i.e if the workers would not give their value, the capitalist would have no reason to employ them. The reason why businessmen currently employ people is beacuse these workers are paid for their labour- time but in the course of this inevitably provide surplus labour.

Even in a system of equal exchanges, this still happens. It is clear that workers apply some amount of value that the capitalist can sell despite paying for the labour-time he purchased because when strikes happen, the capitalist makes less money (tending to no money in the long term).

>Your proletariat will be increasingly replaced by robots

Again, you are right on the money. But not everyone can be replaced by robots, beacuse people need to buy back products with their wages. So capitalism must keep people employed, so when one job is taken by a robot, it is very advantageous for the capitalist to find another job for the displaced worker. This happens with sponsorship of the state, such as with job seeker's programmes.

I suggest that robotics be used to help workers rather than be used against them. The fact that a worker doesn't need to work as much should be an advantage, but instead the capitalist makes the worker produce more. It has been estimated that people would only have to work between 7 and 8 hours a week if automation were used to make life easier for the workers rather than short-term profit for the capitalist.

I advocate for direct democratic control of the means of production by distributed voluntarily organised of self-interested workers; the workers receive the product of their labour and any surplus product is subject to a collective democratic decision as to how it will be distribtuted, probably to those who cannot work (e.g elderly, infirm and children) or those who do not need to work because production is so efficient.

Large-scale automation is used against the workers in capitalism. In Socialism, it can be used for the workers to improve living conditions, as the falling rate of profit would be of no concern at all in a society where products are made for use rather than exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see Donald Trump and Brexit more as a protest against the status quo--which does not mean that the entire system is terrible. It could just mean that people want reforms that benefit the public good and not just some Senator's home state.

<comment><USER13> An issue with the current system is that while the people wanted a change candidate, our two-party political system almost successfully suppressed a change candidate from emerging from both sides, and _did_ successfully suppress one of them, Sanders. If the political system can't adapt to change, then how can it successfully evolve?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it extremely amusing when one side bashes the other for being anti intellectual and then goes on to bash economists. Anyway, I stopped reading at wage slave, what a load of crap.

<comment><USER6> Er, mainstream economists. Considering their record, mainstream economists seem far more anti-intellectual than most of their 'bashers'. Though your handle suggests this might be hard for you to swallow.

Also, wage slaves do exist. America is full of them, and it's very much deliberate and intentional. I knew an extremely kind and bubbly lady with the incredible skill of recognizing every one she's ever met, no matter how long ago. She could remember their name, and the names of their whole family. She worked two crap paying full-time jobs to support her small family, and did not have any options, because of America's totally fucked welfare system. That's a wage slave. With respect, if you think wage slavery isn't a thing in America you're in a very strange bubble.

<comment><USER14> > Considering their record, mainstream economists seem far more anti- > intellectual than most of their 'bashers'

You don't explain why you believe this. Please go ahead and explain why _you_ believe that economists are anti intellectuals and please explain what their horrible record is.

> She worked two crap paying full-time jobs to support her small family, and > did not have any options, because of America's totally fucked welfare > system. That's a wage slave.

No you don't understand. I know that a term called 'wage slave' exists and that people have given it definition that is completely unrelated to what actual slavery is. I think it is insulting to the actual slavery that still exists on this planet.

Suffering because of your stupid life decisions is not slavery.

<comment><USER6> Alright, I'll do my best. Your ignorant comment about people's "stupid life decisions" (ever hear of a thing called "bad luck"?) suggests I'll be pissing into the wind, but alright.

Most mainstream economists (with a few 'sort of' exceptions like Hayek and Krugman) think of their field as a science, when it's really not. They speak as if they had authority and empirical evidence, when they really don't.

They allow economic warfare against Africa, South America, poor Americans, Greece, Italy, Ireland, etc. to go unchecked. They issue recommendations that consistently favour the wealthiest, the central banks, the status quo. Those who differ, such as Varoufakis, are ridiculed and chuckled at, while ignoring their arguments.

They lack any introspection or ability to examine their mistakes. Few, very few, mainstream economists chose to make their voices heard about the economic crash of '08\. Contrary to the myth they spread that it was "unforeseeable", many people knew that house prices were getting way out of control. I knew, my friends knew, but somehow economists didn't know... Goldman and others deliberately sold shitty bundles, and mainstream economists let them off the hook completely, even when the facts came to light. Now it's happening again, and they're still silent.

They quote Adam Smith to support their arguments, though he would have hated the system we have now. Alternative views to the dogma of mainstream 'economic theory' are mocked, rather than engaged with.

In the history of economic brutality - colonialism, apartheid, the financing of wars - there are very precious few economists willing to speak up about the effects on the least well off. They get denounced as naive, and have trouble finding jobs.

Where are the mainstream economists talking about the future of our species, the ones with some fucking vision, some foresight, some creativity, some unique thought, some compassion? Unem-fucking-ployed, that's where.

Almost by definition, mainstream economists refuse to challenge the status quo. And the status quo is fucked for the vast majority of human beings. We are nowhere near our potential, and mainstream economists spend their time debating miniscule changes in tax policy.

Despite the economic impact and effects of unchecked global surveillance, they say nothing.

Despite the economic impact of continuous increases in military spending, they say nothing.

They'd lose their cushy job, and deep down they fucking know it.

And after all that, they only speak up whenever someone comes along who wants to help people and bring them together. They're trotted out on Fox News and CNN to denounce Bernie Sanders' economic policies, despite the fact that those policies are practically substandard in Europe. What did they say about Trump? In comparison, nothing.

And yes, "actual slavery" exists. But in what economic course in the world do students grapple with those issues? Where are the leading lights, the clear voices in economics telling us what we can do about it?

Feel free to tell me how wacky, unrealistic and naive I'm being. Projection is a funny 'ol thing. But here's your major clue that they're full of shit, and anti-intellectual - in the history of mainstream economists, time and time again they've been proven utterly wrong about major things. "Trickle-down", "austerity", "cutting taxes on the rich drives growth", Brexit, Trump, '08\. But there's never any reflection, never any expansion into inter-disciplinary approaches.

Economics, as taught today, tries to make people simple, cogs in a vast machine that only economists can understand. And even though they've been wrong more often than nutrionists, and more catastrophically, the text-books stay the same. Inequality grows, and we're told it's a good thing. Too many times economists have told us it's raining while we're being pissed on.

The real, respected, popular intellectuals - Feynman, Sagan, Einstein, Chomsky tell us that mainstream economists are full of shit, and they've saif it far more eloquently than I could. But economists sniff, and scoff, and laugh at how ignorant they are, before calling poor people stupid and endorsing the latest scam on the people of Earth.

I haven't had breakfast yet, so I hope this doesn't come across too harsh. I'm sure I made some mistakes, and I know I swore a lot. Rather than nit-pick, please engage with the major points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly this is a terrible article. I don't know why these "journalists" have such a hard time stepping out of their bubble. Ask a trump supporter it's great for me but it blows my mind how ignorant these cosmopolitans are. I just hope they keep their head in the sand so we can get another 4 years

<comment><USER16> You do realize you haven't said anything of any substance, right? I believe an accurate summary would be as follows: "Terrible article. Bad. Ignorant elites. Wrong."

Care to provide any useful insight? Just... something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Populism is the failure of compulsory education and the beginnings of the fall of the 20th century western nation-state. The system favours the more-popular over the objectively-superior, and the biased, ancient mass schooling makes that the rule instead of the exception. We'll have to abolish nations and any sort of tribalism---how sophisticated might it be---or it'll decay by itself hurting everybody until it disappears.

<comment><USER18> So you're suggesting more indoctrination and the abolition of states aka. conquest and colonialism?

Because the way we're going, there's going to be another world war long before people willingly succumb to a global state...

<comment><USER17> I'm not suggesting those, nor am I suggesting anything at all. I just say what I think the reasons and the future trajectory is.

No need to be _binary_ about the potential political changes. I only say that nation-states are bad, I din't say that states per se are bad.

Also, the next world war won't be before anything but the end of all of us. I didn't ever say anything about a global state, but what I think indeed is that, analogous to programming, state should be contained in the smallest possible context, that is, I think that smaller, more focused states with more direct democracy and with more (respective to today's nation-states) people that indeed share common values, would be more stable and peaceful. I know that such an idea will get many objections (even I do have my objections), but I believe such a political situation would be better for everyone.</comment></comment></comment>


Snowden calls for whistleblower shield after claims by new Pentagon source - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/snowden-whistleblower-protections-john-crane <comment><USER2> Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? It seems like most of the people I encounter who aren't on his side either don't fully understand the situation or think the story is so ridiculous some conspiracy is going on.

Everyone is so gung-ho on getting rid of political insiders, exposing the wrong doings of the government, and yet we blacklist someone who could be a bannerman for that cause.

<comment><USER3> I will offer the voice of dissent. Snowden is a slightly improved version of Chelsea Manning and deserves a similar fate as her. Both revealed legitimate issues that they deserve praise for highlighting. However, both also revealed information that has little public interest, isn't illegal activity, and can really only be categorized as releasing privileged material (look to The Intercept and this weeks SIDtoday releases for the most recent examples of this). The intentions of both were noble, but you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad. That isn't how the law currently works or in my opinion should work. You have to take all of the good and bad into account.

As a nation, we also can't set the precedent that any person with classified information has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions. If you are going to ask for whisteblowing protection, you need to be fairly focused on things that are either illegal or at the very least objectively amoral. Neither Snowden or Manning did that. They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?

<comment><USER4> I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions. Anything less is tyranny.

You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world.

My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

<comment><USER3> >My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

<comment><USER5> You protect it by not picking fights and minding your own business.

<comment><USER3> Once again, this is a naive and idealistic viewpoint that doesn't have a place in real world governing. There is a reason why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms. Simply "minding your own business" only goes so far and isn't a fool-proof protection scheme.

<comment><USER5> Where did I mention closing military or intelligence? The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

<comment><USER3> >Where did I mention closing military or intelligence?

Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries "minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the US abandoning secrecy.

>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."

<comment><USER5> > why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29)

I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's never going to happen, or at least, not anytime soon. We live in a country that has its intelligence agencies "Losing" the evidence of their torturing people for years, and really, that's the least of their crimes.

<comment><USER7> Pseudonymity is arguably the best whistleblower shield. Drake just outed poor administrative oversight, and he was ruined financially. Whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning are lucky to avoid torture and execution.

<comment><USER8> Arguably Manning did face a period of torture.

<comment><USER6> By any reasonable definition of torture, definitely. Certainly if a foreign government did what we did to Manning, to an American hostage, we'd call it torture. The problems with recognizing torture today though, have gotten harder, not easier. It's fundamentally harder to make people understand torture that utilizes "soft" methods (as defined by Darius Rejali) such as electrotorture, solitary confinement, various forms of drowning/suffocation, drugs, etc... compared to torture that leaves unambiguous physical scars.

<comment><USER9> > The problems with recognizing torture today though, have gotten harder, not > easier.

I don't think it is all that hard.

<comment><USER10> I think the post was referring to it in a legal sense, not a lay person's sense. I'm making an assumption here, but I'd say by most common definitions, quite a few common penal actions are likely torture. However, the law, and specifically the military and government, have very specific idea of what constitutes torture and what doesn't, and they're very good at spinning public perception to their side.

Remember the public facing debate in the US whether or not waterboarding was torture? You had hundreds of pundits and news outlets weighing in on the matter and making a declaration, and public polls would be split. Of course, the few pundits that put their money where their mouth is and actually underwent waterboarding did an immediate 180 in virtually every circumstance.

But it also goes a bit beyond definitions of torture and instead is a problem of jingoism. One need not look too deeply online to see what some American citizens feel is the appropriate response to muslims, to black people, to virtually anyone from the middle east, and so on. When you have a public that, superficially or not, is okay with thinking in terms of "waste the fucking [racial epithet]s", it's really easy to bend and flex the definition of torture in your country, as the US has done so quite a few times.

<comment><USER7> bad stuff done to people we like = torture

bad stuff done to people we hate <> torture

<comment><USER6> It's also about bad stuff we can imagine being torture, vs. bad stuff that is hard to empathize with, unless you have some background in it. The concept of stress positions only really becomes horrifying if you've ever been forced, or forced yourself, to try and hold one. By the same token, what is the subjective experience of being hooded, while someone uses an OTC "stun" electroshock weapon to jolt your genitals, face, and anus?

Some things are easy to imagine, in the place of another; getting shocked in the taint is an easy thing to be horrified by. The more pernicious and subtle effects of sleep deprivation, loss of a sense of time and self control, isolation, fear, and of course the total loss of self determination and freedom are hard for a lot of people to grasp.

You deal with people who lack imagination or empathy, or people who imagine themselves as being far tougher than they are. You have people who think that anything survivable, that doesn't maim, and doesn't leave someone a gibbering wreck, can't be torture.

It's always easier to get through to people with scars from a whip, or lost limbs, than it is with a complicated story of months spent in captivity. If you're like many torture victims, most of what you'll be able to describe is the inside of a hood, or the inside of a small, unpleasant cell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing with IGs (inspector generals) though is that they are also like HR-- they serve to protect the government as an entity rather than the agents, just like HR serves the company, not the employee.

<comment><USER12> Agreed, though, I'd say they act like that because they answer to the higher ups in the organisations they're apart of, and aren't properly independent. Thus there is no self-interested incentive to take the rank-and-file's side. I'm not sure why HR or IGs are ever assigned the task of 'representing' agents in the first place; it just seems like a conflict of interest.

Also, the plural of inspector general is inspectors general, not inspector generals.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if an independent board could eliminate this conflict of interest. We have a so-called independent system setup for lots of local policing agencies, yet they often coverup the misdeeds of the police rather than protecting the citizenry.</comment></comment></comment>


Our Visual Imagination Is Severely Limited - <AUTHOR> https://undark.org/article/visual-imagination-brain-implications/ <comment><USER2> Magic Leap is relying on our visual imagination, [https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear- intro...](https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/lightwear-introducing- magic-leaps-mixed-reality-goggles-w514479)

 _" The current thinking is that about 40 percent of your neurological power is being used for visual processing ... the visual cortex functions a lot like a graphics processor in a computer. It takes the information fed to it by the eyes and renders a world for the person to perceive. And that it only really needs to be fed a very sparse amount of data to do that. "Maybe we all have genetically passed on versions of the world and all we do is intake sparse change data to update that model, but we have a persistent model ... Everything you think is outside of you is completely rendered internally by you, co-created by you plus the analog light field signal ... The world you are living in, you are creating constantly"_

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of this:

> According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; > when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

[(8) Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Seth - YouTube]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very nice article. It is so refreshing when someone who really knows what they are talking about writes in the popular science writing style. As a post-doc in a related field of cog neuroscience, I give the article my thumbs up.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to reconcile this with the fact that some people can solve a rubik's cube blindfolded after having a good look at it. It seems like they have the ability to imagine the relative movements of 26 objects at once.

<comment><USER6> It is well known that while everyone has roughly the same capacity of visual working memory, expertise in an area drastically alters our efficiency in utilizing that memory. For example, chess masters are much better than novices at recalling chess positions when they look like typical middle-game positions, but they perform nearly the same as novices on random arrangements of pieces [1]. In the rubik's cube case, the expert is not memorizing 54 individual squares, but rather they are taking advantage of learned patterns to store fewer, larger chunks.

For another example, consider memorizing strings of letters: Which one do you find easier? GKAMIFTBW or IBMFBICIA

[1] Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology, 4(1), 55-81.

<comment><USER7> Would Stephen Wiltshire's talent be attributed to the same explanations ?

[http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/](http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/)

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223790/Autistic- art...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223790/Autistic-artist- draws-18ft-picture-New-York-skyline-memory.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsJbApZ5GF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsJbApZ5GF0)

<comment><USER6> Great question and I have no idea. My comment was geared toward those with normal function (should have specified). There is a large literature on memory and austism/savantism, but I'm familiar with none of it. However, my guess would be that the current best answer is as it is with nearly all of autism -- we don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kinda tangential, but after living alone for a few years I've updated my selection criteria for furniture to prioritize cleaning difficulty and comfort over visual style. Given its nature, industrial-style furniture is usually easier to clean and it's made from tough material capable of handling a wider range of cleaning chemicals.

I wonder what the outcome would be for a person with autism. I remember watching a video of a psychologist explaining that normal people are better at abstracting visual concepts, and used a drawing of a house as an example. Most people would likely draw the traditional pentagon house with chimney, but a person with autism would need to draw a specific house.

Don't we improve on this by leveraging tools? e.g. paper and pen, computers, etc. I don't have to imagine a large number of visualizations all at once, I can just draw a mockup and reference it when needed. That lets you group everything up into a conceptual black box, instead of tracking it all in your head.

In the case of treating phobias, can't we leverage photos and video? From an uneducated perspective, it would seem like a reasonable middle ground.

<comment> aero-002 What do you mean by leveraging photos and videos to treat phobias? Sounds interesting

<comment><USER8> Well, in the article they mention that you need to physically confront the phobia in order to overcome it, or confront it by a method which incorporates your visual imagination. But that seems to me like it kinda skips over the possibility of using photos or video to become more comfortable.

      The mentioned alternative would be to use your visual imagination. However,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last year at CoreOS Fest I spoke to a gentleman from Google who said they think limiting Tensorflow nodes processing power and/or trimming out some nodes entirely appears to cause the entire model to become more robust and perform better by spreading certain attributes (like edge detection) across multiple nodes. A type of holistic training, if you will. I see correlation with a limitation on visualizations.

Regarding this particular article, members of this research group at New South Wales and related studies have been making a variety of claims regarding visualization over the past few years, including what appear to be loaded comments about Aphantasia.

These comments include:

 _"It's a lack of the mind's eye. My hunch is that there is something a bit different about their brains and that there may be a genetic component." — Adam Zeman, University of Exeter_

 _"If there's too much activity and noise, it's like sketching on a dirty piece of paper: it's hard to see the drawing." — Joel Pearson, University of New South Wales_

 _"It could also alter moral judgement." — Alice Klein, reporter for New Scientist while relating comments by Joel Pearson._

I would present a counter argument that our visual imaginations are not something to be considered "severely limited". Instead, our imaginations are something that _may be limited_ , either by intent (see Zen) or by circumstances (non-visualizer). If someone happens to be a great visualizer, then good for them, but don't tell me I'm limited. ;)

Judging it to be something we lack and thus need more of is questionable. Perhaps the desired outcome is to have less of it, rather than more.

</comment><comment><USER10> > The will of action is always dualistic. Is it possible to go beyond this > will which is separative and discover a state in which this dualistic action > is not? That can only be found when we directly experience the state in > which the thinker is the thought. We now think the thought is separate from > the thinker; but is that so? We would like to think it is, because then the > thinker can explain matters through his thought. The effort of the thinker > is to become more or become less; and therefore, in that struggle, in that > action of the will, in 'becoming', there is always the deteriorating factor; > we are pursuing a false process and not a true process.

> Is there a division between the thinker and the thought? So long as they are > separate, divided, our effort is wasted; we are pursuing a false process > which is destructive and which is the deteriorating factor. We think the > thinker is separate from his thought. When I find that I am greedy, > possessive, brutal, I think I should not be all this. The thinker then tries > to alter his thoughts and therefore effort is made to 'become; in that > process of effort he pursues the false illusion that there are two separate > processes, whereas there is only one process. I think therein lies the > fundamental factor of deterioration.

> Is it possible to experience that state when there is only one entity and > not two separate processes, the experiencer and the experience? Then perhaps > we shall find out what it is to be creative, and what the state is in which > there is no deterioration at any time, in whatever relationship man may be.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, Chapter 15, The Thinker and The Thought

</comment><comment><USER11> Several of these recent studies read like the brain has specs, like a fancy GPU.

Scary thought but I guess at some level it had to be true.

<comment><USER12> Why should Discovery of these "specs" be scary? I find it fascinating, by know the limitations of myself I can actively choose to think in ways that I am more likely to be good at. I can use that new active process of thinking to help me, for example, design software that is easier to reason about.

<comment><USER13> Some people are afraid of the truth. Many questions people don't like the answer to.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where is the intersection between Art and Logic? - <AUTHOR> I'm a freshman in University. Today I had an English class, where we analyzed a poem and debated what the message was. I also had some Calculus, where we began to learn about derivatives. I realized that I found both the of the topics really engaging.
Next year I'm supposed to declare my major (I've been wanting to go into CS for a while now), but I feel that would be ignoring a large part of me that likes art - I read and watch movies a lot.
Where do these two loves meet? <comment><USER2> For me - in 3D computer graphics. Check out SideFX Houdini, Maya, etc.

It's incredibly fun, engaging, and satisfies both of my drives, for creativity and for technical stuff.

When you're a digital artist(generalist), in one day, you can write a python script, experiment with rendering and shaders, draw a sketch, animate a character, whatever you want.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was an undergrad English major and I double majored in Classical Studies because I did not find the English major rigorous enough. I'm now pursuing a master's degree in Computer Engineering.

Regarding declaring a major I would recommend talking to as many advisors and people at your school as possible. Personally I would recommend sticking with CS (especially because that is your gut feeling) or another major with good career prospects, disabusing yourself of the notion that your major defines who you are as a person, and use your electives to take well chosen courses in subjects that you have interests in.

In general you want to keep options open if possible, so if you are really serious about both you might be able to double major. But double majoring in, say, English, would not make you any more true to yourself, but just, perhaps, more likely to be able to pursue grad studies in that field, and you did not cite that as something you are interested in. Instead, I would recommend heavily shopping your electives at the beginning of the semester and then choosing the ones you like the best. In general, the better classes will be taught by professors (not grad students), and the person teaching is more important than the topic.

</comment><comment><USER4> Art is a totally subjective term, and "What is Art?" is a question that has been debated for thousands of years.

I think the best art is always an acquired taste.

I see well written source code as art. I see music as more artistic than poetry. I can appreciate paintings visually, but a machine that produces a painting (like the deep dreams) is more artistic in my mind.

The two are not mutually exclusive - mix them up!

The more fields you learn the more you can appreciate - Right now I look outside and see a tree:

\- A biological organism in a different time scale, it's evolved as it needs to be, and continues to propagate. I think of the evolutionary tree of species, I think of it's niche. Its physical position on the globe, its symbiotic relationship with bacteria, and the parasitic relationship with the fungus.

\- The chemist in me thinks about DNA, Xylem and Phloem. It thinks about CO2 consumption and O2 production. I think about photosynthesis and the electron chains.

\- The mathematician in me sees fractal patterns of the branches. I think of my first OpenGL fractal program. I see symmetry and asymmetry at the same time. I see the golden ratio and powers of 2 in the lengths.

\- The darkness in me sees only the shadow, it sees a man hanging in a noose. I see waves in a pond, and a dolphin.

\- The survivalist in me sees fuel for fire, and the makings of a bow. I think about how to make activated charcoal to purify water to drink.

The more you know the richer your perceptual experience.

Learn both!

</comment><comment><USER5> "Parametricism": Computational architecture and large-scale urban design ;)

Zaha Hadid's successor: my blueprint for the future

[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/11/zaha- ha...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/11/zaha-hadid- architects-patrik-schumacher-blueprint-future-parametricism)

</comment><comment><USER6> I personally love the work of C-C Shan¹.

Read "From word to sentence. A computational algebraic approach to grammar" by J. Lambek. Your university library should have a copy, if not press the issue to your librarian.

Start though with Smullyan's "To mock a mockingbird".

These suggestions reflect my taste. Art is a language, so understand how language is studied and use it to approach art.

If you're serious about the art part, make sure you make art, or at least dissect art you like using the formal tools you're introduced to.

Have fun!

¹[http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/ccshan/](http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/ccshan/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Low effort comment, but simply put: Design.

</comment><comment><USER8> My advice: Don't ignore the part of you that likes art!

Two interests meeting is where great things happen.

> If you want an average successful life, it doesn't take much planning. Just > stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if > you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

> Become the best at one specific thing.

> Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

From: [http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html](http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part2.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I tell students that it would be good to have a "problem solving" major (such as engineering, computer science, business, or law) as well as a second major in a "problem" they care about, which could be anything from art to zoology. Then you have the ingredients for a career -- applying your problem solving methodology to a problem you know something about.

In your case, maybe you learn computer science and you apply it to some problem in art or the humanities.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think art is art for its own sake, if you have a tool and decorate it, that would be a combination of a functional tool and art. Mathematics and derivatives in particular have enormous practical value yet many aspects of mathematics is pure art. Logic as art would be music, logical scales of sounds is definable an art. I have lost the thread of what I was saying so will leave my comment unpolished as performance art :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd say data visualisation, the kind of stuff that for example Mike Brondbjerg or Jared Tarbell do:

[https://www.behance.net/mikebrondbjerg](https://www.behance.net/mikebrondbjerg)

[http://www.complexification.net/gallery/](http://www.complexification.net/gallery/)

</comment><comment><USER12> For non technological fields, I would say philosophy, investigative journalism and fiction (books, movies etc where you cover your bases). One might add whatever political analysis do too but to me they are basically fence sitters who say things without accountability or liability and are simply glorified whatiffers.

</comment><comment><USER13> Animation and computer graphics.</comment>


Future Of Business In 2014  - <AUTHOR> http://www.sourcepep.com/future-of-business-in-2014/ Here is a statistics of how business is going to be shaped in 2014. The analysis shows the importance of Visual data, Marketing channels and the continued rise of social media in business growth. <comment><USER2> Here is a statistics of how business is going to be shaped in 2014. The analysis shows the importance of Visual data, Marketing channels and the continued rise of social media in business growth. - Hell Yeah!</comment>


IBM 1959 Job Post - <AUTHOR> https://p.twimg.com/AeuClYxCMAIxMdV.jpg:large <comment><USER2> A few observations:

      - Lots of reference to military applications
      - Nuclear reactors and shielding
      - FORTRAN!

An interesting note about the applications on the nuclear side: I worked in a semi-high security clearance environment on certain nuclear operations. One item we dealt with in particular was a very old algorithm implemented in FORTRAN. We were attempting to scale the system involved, and the implementation of the algorithm was a major bottleneck.

The algorithm was phenomenally complex (it's nuclear science, after all). And, we had a challenge in documentation that was impossible to clear up with the original algorithm implementors: most of the team involved had passed away more than a decade earlier.

It was one of the neatest programming challenges I've ever encountered. Those old-school engineers were cool, and I wish our industry could keep more of those people around to pass along what they learned and help teach our industry going forward. The technologies may change, but logic never goes out- of-date.

<comment><USER3> What I noticed is how many references there were to wanting mathematicians to learn to code. It's weird because it's a good idea and I don't see that in job ads any more.

<comment><USER4> Yes you do. The branching out just happens already at university. The coding mathematicians are known as computer scientists.

<comment><USER5> Anecdotally, most computer scientists I know (excluding undergrads... I'm talking about PhDs, graduate and professional academic researchers etc.) don't write code and do a fairly poor job when they try.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but certainly they had the same problems in 1959. My point was that CS is a branch of Mathematics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The saddest thing for me is just what an institution IBM has been for America over the years. Having gone to UC Santa Cruz, the Computer Engineering department was started by IBM alums (my advisor was Glen Langdon of Langdon and Rissanen / Arithmetic Coding fame. Other friends/faculty spent time working at IBM Almaden Research where several advances in storage technologies have been produced.

These days, IBM is in decline. Friends/tech blogs/even sites like Cringely -- <http://www.cringely.com/> \-- note how IBM is quickly trying to shed any semblance to it's old self in names of meeting investor expectations.

IBM isn't the only legacy company in the same situation, we have seen this happen with HP as well as AT&T over the years. Microsoft Research, Google to a point, and Xerox Parc (after a period of decline) are stepping up for some long term/basic research. But, I wonder, will we every see the hey day of IBM Research, PARC, Bell Labs, etc. ever again?

<comment><USER7> What about Watson ?

IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.

<comment><USER8> _IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research._

Can you qualify that? Almost every big technology company and thousands of small ones have teams of smart people conducting interesting research across many fields. Take a look at any issue of _Wired_ or _Technology Review_ (or the top links to HN on any given day) to see some examples.

<comment><USER7> I probably should have said "important" instead of "interesting".

How many of those companies are doing research that can be compared to what came out of Bell Labs in the 60's and 70's - the transistor, the laser, ... ?

IBM's work on advanced semiconductors and Watson certainly qualify. The later will probably be seen as one of the most important developments in the history of humanity and it wouldn't have been possible without the former.

<comment><USER9> its pretty hard to know what is important in the moment.

<comment><USER10> Not really. Lots of people knew that the laser was important, that Xerox park stuff was important, that C/Unix was important, etc even at the time they were introduced.

<comment><USER5> In the case of the laser, there may have been some sense that it was important, but at the time there were no immediate applications and it was called "a solution in search of a problem."

<comment><USER10> In Wikipedia though it says that "Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Notice the lack of reference to rockstars, ninjas, or brogramming.

<comment><USER12> And also notice, with transparency, that your work will ultimately contribute to strategies and innovations in the field of power acquisition and, by proxy, literally the death of other humans.

Worth noting, also, minus the overt militaristic references, how similar these job descriptions are to a modern quantitative finance position.

<comment><USER13> The military is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for bad things, and it can be used for good things. Without having a military, we would be up shit's creek.

I think you should be more thankful of and respectful towards the people "in the trenches," and also the technologists, who make it possible for _you_ to live in a safe place and spend your time according to your desires.

<comment><USER14> Consider for a moment who that military decided needed killing en mass during the decade following the topic of discussion. Where all those communal farmers really threatening our way of life? When this army got it's ass kicked and left with it's tail between its legs a few years later, leaving those farmers to live their own lives as they chose to, did our society come crashing down?

Why didn't it?

There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.

<comment><USER13> _that military decided needed killing_

No, _politicians_ decided that. That's an important distinction. If we don't like what the military is doing, we need to place blame where it belongs: on the politicians.

 _There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade_

The military is still highly important. Think about the role it played in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII, to name a few wars that most consider to have been justified for the US to enter. More recently, the Gulf War where Hussein invaded Kuwait. I personally believe that in the future, Iran and/or North Korea will acquire a nuclear weapon that threatens US citizens. Somali pirates. Who knows what else will come up. We still need a military.

<comment><USER14> So if the military does something and it is bad, then it isn't their fault because politicians made them do it. But if the military does it and it is good, then they deserve our praise and thanks....

Do you recognize the problem here?

Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have _billions_ of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks?

No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER13> (1) The military deserves praise or blame regarding how well they do, _militarily speaking_ , and the politicians praise or blame regarding political decisions. You're conflating the two.

(2) And, yes, you should be thankful that someone is willing to defend your freedoms.

(3) I don't scold people who don't thank the military; I scold people who denigrate the military. Actually, it's not scolding, it's showing a more rational way to think about it.

(4) I've enjoyed this, but I'm done here.

<comment><USER14> [1] I only recognize that a distinction _could_ exist when we restrict the discussion to conscripted armies.

[2] I assert they do nothing of the sort.

[3] Call it what you like, telling people that they should be more respectful of the military when they express concern about being, by proxy, responsible for a loss of life, is... I don't even know how to describe it. Lets say "insensitive of the humanity of others".

[4] Cheerio

<comment><USER15> Perhaps the most unforgivable thing you've done here is forced me to weigh in on the side of javert. >:(

If you cannot separate political policies from military ones, you cannot pretend to argue usefully about this.

 _"I only recognize that a distinction could exist when we restrict the discussion to conscripted armies."_

You need to further elaborate on this, because one easy interpretation is that you have no idea how to reason about volunteer armies. I'm not going to even go into more esoteric arguments about how "volunteer" anything actually is-- just consider that the military does not (except in some bizzaro world some people seem to want to live in) spontaneously go to war. The politicians guide policies, the politicians set agendas, and declare wars and deploy troops (for our sake here, I consider the President in the politician camp).

(I'll also argue that things like what the CIA/Homeland Sec. do that require drones and such are wrong, so save it.)

It is wrong to inflict injury on another human being (we could argue this, but let's not). That said, surgeons cut to good effect, police detain suicide attempts, and bouncers eject unruly patrons. We can argue that harm is being done in all those cases, but to good effect.

More to the point, though, javert is saying that the military deserves praise in terms of how effective/professional they are, and you did not disagree beyond saying that the divide between politics and force was beyond you.

You cannot with a straight face tell me that you refuse to agree that the (American) military is due praise for their ability due to their given directions--while at the same time participating in this community here on HN.

Tell me, what is the cost of pushing consumerism and advertising on people? What is the cost of buying the latest and greatest smartphone? What is the cost of the shinier, faster computer? What is the cost of developing games and amusements to distract and destroy manhours of productivity?

What is the cost of datamining to circumvent privacy and better target ads? Of streamlining sharing of information about friends who wouldn't do so themselves?

So, please, by all means, criticize those dumb sociopaths in the military--but hold yourself to the same goddamn standard when talking about the majority of your fellow hackers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The funny thing about the problems stated at the top is I could imagine seeing a job posting today (maybe even from IBM) with the same problems and thinking, "Wow, I have no idea how I'd go about solving those problems."

It makes me wonder what they were really doing back then vs what a job in those fields would look like today.

Related, I find it somewhat annoying when people abstract the job to such a degree that you can't see the tangible things you'd be working on in that field. I'm all for a "change the world" vision -- I really am, not just qualifying --, but sometimes I'd like to hear up front how they plan to solve that problem.

</comment><comment><USER17> Compare this to a more recent job posting, which more frequently reads like "Looking for a code ninja to make our photo-sharing app beautiful. You need to be awesome and make shit happen." Funny and sad at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm noticing that a lot of the expectations / requirements are a lot lower. Most are "up to 2 years" experience.

Last time I was job hunting, everything was asking for 5+ years experience in one software stack and multiple frameworks. Sometimes 5+ years in multiple fields. What changed?

<comment><USER19> Probably the availability of people with 5+ years of programming experience. It was 1959! :)

<comment><USER18> I don't know. Essentially every place I've contacted I've asked about that clause. Not _one_ actually expected to find it, but they all listed it.

5+ years seems to me to be a strange expectation. That would mean you've had either multiple failing jobs and might be an undesirable, or you've been somewhere for 5+ years. If you've been there for 5+ years, what's motivating you to leave? Where do people expect to find these vast pools of highly- skilled jobless people who have experience with <software stack X> in <field which employs a couple thousand people nationally> within <narrow time window>? That they never find any seems to underscore how irrational the 'requirement' is in the first place, but I see it everywhere.

<comment><USER20> I remember reading a job ad back in 2003 that wanted someone with 5+ years of C# and .NET experience. I assume the position was filled before 2006. (It's possible but unlikely that they were solely looking to poach Microsoft employees.)

<comment><USER21> This happens a lot. HR ends up being in charge and comes up with requirements that don't make much of any sense.

<comment><USER22> I think it's breaks down like no experience = SDE 1

2 years = SDE 2

5+ = SDE 3, regardless of language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love the fact that the problem domains remain so static. Well, that's not strictly true: we have a lot __more __problem domains with which to contend now, but even our tremendously improved knowledge in operations research, military science, and meteorology haven't led us to consider these "solved problems".

Though I personally wish we focused much more on (1) and (3) than (2) as a society.

</comment><comment><USER24> The first thing I noticed that none of the positions were asking for degrees in Computer Science. All math and physics. Before its time I guess.

<comment><USER25> Wikipedia says the first CS degree in the US was at Purdue in 1962. (And the first internationally was at Cambridge in 1953.)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's amazing how so many of those projects remain largely unsolved today.

<comment><USER27> It was a time when people thought Artificial Intelligence was either on the way shortly (those who actually used computers) or already here with those Atomic Brains we have now (everyone else).

I just watched the Svengoolie episode of "This Island Earth" and, early on, one of the characters mentioned how that era was called the "pushbutton age". Well, we live in more of a "pushbutton age" now but familiarity breeds contempt; conversely, unfamiliarity breeds a kind of awe, and unreasonable expectations that can leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths.

I personally remember going through it when the Internet was first beginning to trickle down to the masses, pre-Bubble, and I remember thinking that some of those ideas then were patently idiotic. But _which_!

And in the 1920s, radio went through the same thing, if not bigger. Radio!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Most of these problems, and jobs (with appropriate changes in technologies applied), still exist today, and in greater numbers than in 1958. It's just that the other parts of the industry have grown at a much more rapid pace. This is good to bear in mind when you hear people treat "technology" as synonymous with "web site programming".

</comment><comment><USER29> Love the pencil. Nice period touch.

</comment><comment><USER30> I noticed none of the software jobs were in India.</comment>


The next Frankenstein - A hacker in Cuba - <AUTHOR> http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=578 This blog generally publishes anecdotal stories of life in Cuba. I thought this one might be of interest here. Keep in mind that it's translated from Spanish, so it could be awkwardly worded in places.<p>I wonder what he would have accomplished had he been born somewhere else. <comment><USER2> I've got RAM I can send; will they let it into Cuba?</comment>