They does?

Funny, I would've thought the Fark Nitpicking Patrol would have been full of early risers.

If you have a child in middle school, there's a very good chance they'll be required to use a TI calculator -- these days, a TI-84, most likely. Those calculators run on a Z80. If your child's ambitious, he/she can still tinker with Z80 assembly on an actual physical host.

This is a small tribute to the Z80 processor, and huge, scathing indictment of TI's lock on the education market. ~US$100 for a Z80-based calculator? In 2015? It was a sweet chip in 1977, and it's clearly still useful. But at this point the calculators should be selling for well under $10.

Ah, so you think that the second story is silly -- never mind the first, straight-news story, which the doltish AC apparently missed.

So, overlooking the irony that you're here on a Web forum mocking people instead of Bringing Aid To The Victims yourself... no, I find that I can't actually overlook that irony. HAHAHAHA, as you say. But, for the sake of argument, what would you have people do on Facebook? Or here? Perhaps you'd prefer that people in the affected area refrain from tweeting, and restrict themselves to decorous registered post?

My, you're dense.

Until now I hadn't realized that there are actually people out there RIGHT THIS MINUTE who are several times more bored than I am. (Not, upon pain of death, to be confused with "several times as bored", or, God forbid, "several times less interested".

Everybody jumps on the three-letter acronym, but no love for the researcher's name?

Like exercise?

Thanks.

I started to edit the penultimate paragraph, but it messed with the flow too much. I have "mellowed" quite a bit in the intervening eight years -- I've gotten older and a bit more comfortable with my mind as it is. Being the smartest guy, or at least feeling like the smartest guy, doesn't seem quite as urgent any more. I'd love to have more selective attention, better memory, or savant skills, but not if it ruins my sleep, or makes me hot-tempered or cruel.

In more detail, I'm not sure exactly what's changed. I feel like the whole concept of "intelligence" isn't as clear to me any more as it used to be -- it still seems like certain people are smarter and certain people aren't, but I've seen so many smart people believing and doing stupid things that it's sometimes hard to put much stock in the concept. I'd hate to see performance-enhancers just enabling people to do stupid or misguided things more quickly and effectively.

And if people are willing to risk their lives and freedom to get an illegal drug that just makes them high, what makes you think laws will prevent them from getting a drug that makes them more money?

It's not just pot or meth. It's true for alcohol as well. The general phenomenon is called state-dependent memory, and it's been established science for many decades -- the Wikipedia article cites a text from 1835.

When this came up a number of years ago on another forum, someone wrote:

And I wrote this (slightly edited here):

Let's walk a few years down this road. It's 2025, and ehancers are legal, or at least their use is tolerated.

Your son has just joined a law firm. The other new arrivals are using Modafinil, or its successor, to let them work 100+ billable hours per week. While his employment agreement explicitly states that he's not required to use any enhancers, it's also clear that he'll never make partner without them. Is there an element of compulsion here?

Your daughter is getting ready to take her SATs; she's smart and ambitious, and wants to get into a top-tier school, eventually going into med school. Recent anonymous surveys indicate that 20% or more of students taking the test are using enhancers. Nobody's been able to do a formal study, but there are indications that these students are seeing boosts of 200-300 points in their scores. What advice do you give your daughter?

Fast-forward another ten years. Your kids have been using enhancers for the entire time. Originally, they were just a way to get a little extra "edge" -- but, having established a performance baseline while using them, who wants to become "dumber", slower, or sleepier by giving them up?

The problem is, the drugs aren't working quite as well as they used to. It's not surprising, really, at least not to a cognitively-enhanced neurochemist; enhancers, particularly the primitive second- and third-generation varieties, lead to short-term habituation and long-term neurological adaptation. New drugs are better, and with their help, new researchers are smarter. But they still can't do much to help those who scarred their brains with the older drugs.

Your son is fairly secure in his position as a full partner, but the firm's newest hires are scary. Most of them simply don't sleep, ever; they're at the office for days at a time without rest, and when they do take "time off", they're out skydiving, or rock-climbing, or just partying. Partners have always had the power in law firms -- but how long can they maintain power when their underlings are so much smarter and more ambitious?

Your daughter... your daughter isn't doing so well. She's landed a great residency, but the early-21st-century movement to limit the length of residents' shifts faltered and died in the face of enhancement drugs. She doesn't really need sleep, but she misses it, and she misses the companionship that was once associated with it. (Who wants to be involved with a surgical resident, who's almost never home?) When she does try to sleep, her dreams are invaded by the brain-burn victims she sees at work, and she wakes up screaming.

And sometimes the dreams intrude while she's nominally "awake". It's an increasingly common syndrome in long-term gen-3 enhancement users. The neurochemists are hoping that the new gen-5 products will help reduce this symptom.

I think we will go down this road. There's a very good chance I'll go down this road -- I've never felt like there was any such thing as being "smart enough". I think people in general, and researchers in particular, will be able to become "more intelligent", and once they do, they'll be able to figure out ways to accelerate the process.

But I think it's going to hurt. A lot.

That camera's body is approximately a cube. The lens occupies most of one face. Now, class, what percentage of the camera's surface area is occupied by the lens?

For extra credit, describe a geometric solid of which one face has more surface area than the entire solid.

I'm glad you asked.

1. I assert that it will always be more expensive to make an array of individual PV cells, with circuitry to route their output to readout logic and the global power pool, than to make a conventional sensor and a conventional PV cell with larger effective area. I can't "prove" this, but I can't imagine a realistic scenario where it wouldn't be true.

2. I observe that a sensor in an optical assembly, with light only entering through a lens, can only absorb light that falls on the lens. In fact, it can't absorb all of that; the lens will reflect or absorb some light and some won't land on the sensor, unless the sensor encompasses the entire FOV of the rear of the lens. So, if your lens has one square centimeter of aperture, and your light level is one milliwatt per square centimeter (pretty bright indoor lighting), you get less than a milliwatt onto the sensor.

3. I assert that any camera will have a housing with more surface area than its lens. That's where you put the (conventional) PV cell(s) to harvest energy.

Feel free to poke holes in these assertions and observations, or to point out things that they don't cover. I'll take a crack at it myself:

a. Maybe you've got a situation where most light is coming from a single direction, and your camera faces that direction. You build your camera as a cylinder, perhaps embedded into a wall, so that light falls on no part of it except the lens. In that situation, you don't have a place to put an exterior PV cell. I think this is an unrealistic scenario; if it's built into a wall, plug it in, or surround it with a PV bezel.

b. Maybe your manufacturing is so good and so mature that microelectronics cost a flat rate per square cm, whether you're making a simple PV cell, a simple CMOS image sensor, or an integrated light-harvesting imaging array. From what I know of semiconductor manufacturing, this seems unrealistic, too -- but even if we get there, you can still collect more light with an exterior PV cell (from points 2 and 3), as long as you aren't also in contrived scenario a.

c. You're in a mature IoT scenario, where you've got smart dust everywhere, and it all needs to be self-powered. Here again, though, those dust grains will have more surface area than the lenses integrated into them. In this scenario, I'd expect something more like a fly-eye arrangement anyhow.

Any other ideas?