I've sat right next to people who see the dress differently than me. It's *the same image* on *the same monitor* at *the same time*. So it's not a case of the monitor calibration or the camera white balance that creates the discrepancy, although obviously manipulating those things will change our individual perceptions of the dress. What's interesting here is the differences between people presented with an identical image.

Color doesn't exist in the external world. "Purple" isn't a wavelength of light, it's a kind of "additional data" tag which our brains add to parts of an image that allows us to extract more information from it. Consider the famous "Rubik's Cube" optical illusion where the same square looks either orange or brown based on whether contextual cues make us think it is in shadow or not. There's an illustration here.

The only difference between the Rubik's Cube illusion and The Dress That Broke The Internet is that practically *everyone* experiences the paradoxical sensations of the Rubik's Cube Illusion; in the case of the dress the paradox is in how sensations *differ between people*. The dress image is a kind of borderline case where our brains can "tag" the "pixels" of the image in one of two possible ways depending on what it thinks the context is. Different brains are trained by different experiences to expect different contexts. If we saw the dress being worn and in person, chances are with all that context there'd be less disagreement.

I am watching the "new generation" use the internet/web browser. They don't do it the way we (I?) did. They have little concept of "url" or web site address. Any resource they access is entered into the ever-present search box or "magic combo url bar", as series of search terms or a common name. They rely on the (non-standartized but helpful) search subsystem (usually, Google, but not always) to bring them to the right place. Domain names with their formal fixed format are not part of their use pattern, and I don't expect that to change.

So, let it be .whatever.

I imagine you'd start by laying down a set of climate benchmarks, agree on what is an acceptable variation under normal conditions, then should the averages begin to venture beyond those on the regular basis ...

I don't think you've read much Taleb. Your "benchmark" sounds like something freshly checked out from the LTCM Lemma Loans Library.

In a sufficiently complex system (Rule 110), means are not guaranteed to exist (Cauchy--Lorentz distribution).

Jay Rosen on Edge.org:

Still, we would be better off if we knew when we were dealing with a wicked problem, as opposed to the regular kind. If we could designate some problems as wicked we might realize that "normal" approaches to problem-solving don't work. We can't define the problem, evaluate possible solutions, pick the best one, hire the experts and implement. No matter how much we may want to follow a routine like that, it won't succeed. Institutions may require it, habit may favor it, the boss may order it, but wicked problems don't care.

And he's specifically thinking about this particular problem.

Know any problems like that? Sure you do. Probably the best example in our time is climate change.

It's an open question whether the earth's climate is still considered to be a wicked problem 500 years from now, or five million years from now. Even a future Extropian Eloi might find themselves stuck with having to participate in a climate lottery.

I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.

I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.

Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.

At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.

The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.

A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.

For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.

From French invasion of Russia:

The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! ... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. ... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibly strong. Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die. I tried in vain to save a number of these unfortunates. The only words they uttered were to beg me, for the love of God, to go away and let them sleep. To hear them, one would have thought sleep was their salvation. Unhappily, it was a poor wretch's last wish. But at least he ceased to suffer, without pain or agony. Gratitude, and even a smile, was imprinted on his discoloured lips. What I have related about the effects of extreme cold, and of this kind of death by freezing, is based on what I saw happen to thousands of individuals. The road was covered with their corpses."

Yes, all my forcible 24-hour experiments ended at some point in the third week when I would blindly stagger into my bed with the hint of a smile upon my discoloured lips. The only difference is that after a sixteen-hour sleep of the dead, I actually woke up again feeling like a million bucks. When I used to bike tour, I would become so ravenous that a simple peanut butter sandwich would taste like nectar of the gods. This was like waking up after your best sleep ever, multiplied by nectar_of_gods / peanut_butter.

The cure for people who lack the cognitive equipment to distinguish bleeding from haemophilia is Insomniac by Gayle Greene (520 pages, 2008). Gayle is a professor of English with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Somehow she's managed to stay employed at a high level despite her intractable sleep disability. I admire her grit. Think Mattie Ross bunkered down in a survival shelter for thirty years to outlast nuclear winter.

Some of the feedback on this book suggests that the author is a sharp-tongued and doth protest too much. Somehow I imagine that most of this criticism comes from the same people who regard the loss of yet another 1/2" of leg room in cattle class as being worth a half-hour bitch session with their seat mate. I have a feeling Mrs Greene's sustained snark—sleep loss affects the mood like PMS on steroids, that's the whole point of her book—quickly becomes hard to bear for people who enjoy complaining about minor things.

What does the Lubyanka, Hanoi Hilton, and Abu Ghraib all have in common? Sleep deprivation. Tough customers who are willing to endure the physical abuse, soon discover that extreme sleep deprivation dissolves your identity and spirit from the inside out (taken too far, it ultimately destroys your thermo-regulation, and then you die).

Case 0: Your body gets used to the 24.7 hour day, with no physical symptoms. Whatever zeitgebers are influencing your body clock are sufficiently strong to achieve normal entrainment to a abnormal entrainment period.

Case 1: The extra forty minutes gives you a mild case of jet-lag, but the jet-lag causes your body to adjust proportionately. Maybe a permanent state of mild jet-lag is just the cost of doing business on a 24.7 hour day.

Case 2: Your body fails to track the lengthened sleep period. You go in and out of jet lag on a week by week basis as your internal body clock syncopates with your sleep routine.

Case 3: Your body fails to track the lengthened sleep period, and the constant stress drives your sleep clock into some horrible non-state that never abates.

Case 3A: You somehow managed to cope with this by adopting a fragmented, irregular sleep routine (best attempted by those under the age of thirty, when energy reserves are high enough to ride the dips out).

Case 3B: You don't manage to cope with it, and become permanently trapped in hazy zombie gulag house of mirrors (stress-induced haemophilia).

Next we have the orthogonal matter of whether your sleep routine tracks your living environment, of whether your sleep routines syncopates with your living environment.

Case 0: Sleep and environment track together. You might or might not suffer from the length of the circadian day imposed upon you, but at least if you are suffering you can make stable plans to work around your suffering.

Case 1: Your sleep might track the rotation of Mars, but the living environment on Mars marches to its own drummer (like the submarines some have mentioned). Every you wake up with a different orientation to the environment around you. If you're bleary, weary, and far from your best from the moment you awake (and for much of the day) this is an extremely challenging environment to live within.

Case 1A: The daily drift is smallish, maybe an hour a week or a little more. You'll have enough stability in your routine that the changing phase can be managed incrementally.

Case 1B: The daily drift is large, 20 to 40 minutes a day. You'll be able to adapt incrementally, but you'll be aware of having to manage this all the time.

Case 1C: The drift is huge, 40-70 minutes a day. You'll think consciously about the phase-of-the-day first thing on waking, last thing on retiring, and at every meal time in between. It will be Monday morning, and you'll think back to Monday morning from the previous week like a time when you lived in an entirely different country. You'll probably buy a Pebble watch and program it to constantly display your internal body clock as well as the local time the coordinates your living environment.

Case 1D: The drift is stupendous, 70 minutes or more a day. Not only will you buy a Pebble watch and program it yourself with a custom calendar for a "market of one person" (Gershenfeld). You'll create strange names for each and every phase relationship, so you can keep track of your incessant daily adjustments cycle over cycle. You'll be overheard muttering to yourself "it's the third day of the spider, Brumaire the seventh" and people will think you just teleported onto planet earth from the Second Revolutionary Epoch of the Ferengi Reformation. If you're the conscientious type, you'll experiment with prescription amphetamines. This will help to some degree, while drawing you into whole new vistas of personal weirdness, which you'll welcome with open arms because you're so damn fed up with the incessant, all-too-familiar weirdness. (If you're not the conscientious type, your medicine cabinet will soon resemble the pagan love-child of Glenn Gould and L. Ron Hubbard).

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.
                                                                — Daniel Kahneman

There's an interesting corollary to this wonderful gem of wisdom. Nothing adds up as fast as a circadian drift of five minutes per day when you stop thinking about it.

When you really live with a condition like this, if it's mild, there's this tendency to start thinking about life issues, like the recent fight with your bunk mate, and forget about your small problem.

Just five minutes a day sustained for five weeks—e.g. a thrilling library book you've already renewed once because you never even got around to cracking the cover by the time the original due date rolled around—turns lunch into breakfast.

People get this all wrong because they think in terms of homeostatic jet lag (i.e. jet lag minus the haemophilia term). And they get this wrong because they forget that time soon slips by in months, seasons, and years. Finally, people get this wrong because they don't think clearly about whether the period stress lies within the zone of biological accommodation, or lies outside the zone of biological accommodation (and when it lies outside the zone, whether the stress is ignored or induces the entire system into chaos).

The SCN is actually a complicated little thing. Here's a recent paper (2014) which provides a good starting point for anyone interested in the literature.

The clock shop: Coupled circadian oscillators Here's a paragraph extremely interesting to me, personally, as I have not before encountered the GABA pathway:

Decreasing GABAergic tone by genetically deleting the Na(V)1.1 sodium channel leads to impaired communication between the ventral and dorsal SCN and, intriguingly, a longer circadian period. Furthermore, pharmacological blockade of GABAA receptors or reducing GABA release with Na(V)1.1 deletion decreases the ability of the SCN to adjust to shifts in the light cycle, presumably by impairing communication between ventral and dorsal SCN. Thus, GABA appears to play an important role in long-range, rapid synaptic communication in the SCN to facilitate entrainment to environmental cycles.

I'm pretty sure part of my problem is that normal light-cycle entrainment has almost no effect on me. I've even used the Philips goLITE BLU (what sleep-deprived marketing drooloid styled that handle?) Light exposure when I'm sleeping does, however, substantially reduce my sleep quality; and white light exposure late in my circadian day does increase my latency to sleep onset. Phase effects? Forget about it.

In electrical engineering terms, coupled oscillators can exhibit degenerate coupling modes (usually where one flips over, and the coupling phase changes by 180 degrees). This was recognized from the mathematical model, then a light/dark stimulation program was devised to see if it could be triggered in an animal model (hamster is what I recall), and it was actually observed. (I haven't looked at that paper for years, so I'm rusty on the details.)

As I presently understand it, the SCN is actually just a reference clock. Nearly every tissue in the body contain local "clocks" that govern gene expression patterns. Most of these local clocks are coupled to the global reference clock, so the entire system stays on Moscow Standard Time. This prevents the liver from going into a metabolic housekeeping cycle right before the main daily feed.

The brain, in particular, does an immense amount of housekeeping. When all this housekeeping is coordinated (aka consolidated) we call this "sleep". Mess up the sleep program badly enough, and different subsystems in the brain begin to schedule housekeeping pretty much at random—including while you're wide awake. The sleep expert James Maas has some online talks where he discusses microsleeps and the neurological function of sleep spindles (recently discovered, and extremely interesting).

Also recommended is The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D. T. Max. This book is not quite what it pretends to be.

First, members of this family sleep just fine until they reach a certain age. In this respect the condition resembles Huntington's disease. Then because of what is now believed to be a prion disorder, their ability to regulate consolidated sleep goes MIA. The afflicted quickly descend into a personal hell, and die without fail inside of two years. The meat of this book, however, concerns the scandalous history of breeding in and in and its probable contribution to "mad cow"-ish diseases in modern livestock. (Like the fat slav Mengele threw into an ice-water swimming pool who survived for forty-two minutes[*], prions laugh at bleach or steam for a long time.)

[*] Research shows that forty-two percent of all statistics are made up on the spur of the moment.

WARNING: The above book is not suitable for deregulationists (NSFD). There is, however, a fat chapter devoted to an alleged, convicted, and largely self-confessed pervert who pursued his deviance on an epic canvass.

Finally, the commonly-accepted 25-hour circadian day is complete hogwash. As I recall it, the original experiment erred in not sufficiently reducing ambient light. Sensitivity to low light levels was not properly understood. All recent research places the endogenous rhythm at just a hair over 24 hours.

Bah, I just typed so much I can't be bothered even to skim it for obvious errors.

CEO: This Superfish incident has put our credibility in the toilet. Even corporate customers are looking askance at us now, and we didn't put it on their computers. Suggestions?

Executive 1: Lay low until it blows over.

Executive 2: Hire a new PR firm.

Executive 3: Start a social media campaign.

Genius executive: Maybe we should promise not to do stuff like that anymore.

It'll be one of those moments I'll remember, like coming into work and being told about the Challenger disaster, or turning on the car radio and hearing the hushed voices of the announcers on 9/11. Like so many people I feel a connection to this wonderful man.

Of course he did more than play Spock; and in the early post-TOS years he was famously ambivalent about his association with the role. But he did something special with that role. It's easy in the fog of nostalgia to forget that man TOS scripts weren't all that great (although some of them were). The character of Spock might have become just an obscure bit of pop culture trivia; instead Nimoy turned Spock into a character that I feel sure actors in our grandchildren's generation will want to play and make their mark upon.

What Nimoy brought to that role is a dignity and authenticity, possibly rooted in his "alien" experience as the child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. In less sensitive hands the part might have been a joke, but I think what many of us took away from Nimoy's performance was something that became deeply influential in our world views. Nimoy's Spock taught us that there was something admirable in being different even when that is hard for others to understand; that winning the respect of others is just as rewarding as popularity. The world needs its oddballs and misfits, not to conform, but to be the very best version of themselves they can be. Authenticity is integrity.

It's customary to say things in remembrances like "you will be missed", but that falls short. Leonard Nimoy, you will live on in the lives of all us you have touched.

I wonder how much direct or even second-hand knowledge of unions you have.

In my family we've been on both sides of this issue. My sister, who is an RN, just recently led a successful but bitterly contested unionization drive of her hospital. The impetus for bringing in the union was that after privatization the hospital cut staff so much the nurses feared for patient safety. Nurses don't just administer medicine and make beds; one of the most important things they do is catch mistakes. When a surgeon starts prepping the wrong limb for amputation or an internist accidentally prescribes a medication that will kill the patient. It's nurse's job to catch that. It was unequivocally fear of making mistakes that drove the nurses at that hospital to unionize.

Did she piss off the hospital's new owners? You bet she did. But would you rather go to a hospital where the nurses *lost* that fight? How would you feel about the nurse checking your medications had worked back-to-back weeks of double shifts caring for more patients than she (or he) can keep track of?

On the other hand my brother is a senior executive at a large food service company. He told me about a meeting he had with a local African-American union representative where she played the race card with the first words out of her mouth. This was pointlessly antagonistic, in part because while my brother is a conservative he's open-minded and has a good track record of working with the unions. But mostly pointless because we're not white. We can pass, but as the genealogist in the family recently figured out we have only about 1/3 European ancestry. Fortunately he could laugh that off but if he'd been white and thinner-skinned that might have driven the negotiations into a ditch.

Well, this "richest country in the world" business is somewhat misleading. It means the country with the greatest aggregate economic power, not the country where people tend to be the best off. You need to look at several measures before you can begin to understand the thing that's mystifying you.

By total GDP the US is by far the wealthiest nation in the world. It has almost twice the total GDP of the second country on the list, China. By *per capita* GDP, the US is about 10th on the list, just below Switzerland; so by global standards the typical American is wealthy, but not the wealthiest. On the other hand the US ranks about 20th in cost of living, so the typical American has it pretty good.

Where things get interesting is if you look at GINI -- a measure of economic disparity. The most equal countries are of course the Scandinavians, with Denmark, Sweden and Norway topping the list. The US is far from the *least* equal (Seychelles, South Africa, and Comoros), but it is kind of surprising when you look at countries near the US on the list. Normally in most economic measures you see the US ranked near advanced industrialized countries in Europe, but it's neighbors on the GINI list are places like Turkmenistan, Qatar, and El Salvador.

What this means is that we have significant classes on either end of the scale: the *very* wealthy and an economic underclass. Now because of the total wealth sloshing around in the US, the US underclass has it pretty well compared to the underclass in, say, India. But what this doesn't buy is clout or respect. "Poor" households in the US usually have TVs and refrigerators -- a fact that seems to anger some people, who see the poor in the US as ungrateful people who are too lazy to improve themselves. But a study by the OECD suggests that they don't have the *time* to improve themselves. In a ranking of countries by time spend on leisure and self-care the US ranks 33rd, at 14.3 hours lagging almost two hours per day behind world leader Denmark (big surprise). But remember this is an average; it doesn't represent the time available for the poor.

Most Americans seem to think that poor people spend all their time sitting around waiting for handouts. This willfully ignores the phenomenon of the working poor. After selling my company, I volunteered on a lark at a charity which refurbishes old furniture and household stuff and furnishes the homes of poor people, and I found poor people to be neither lazy nor ungrateful. Let me tell you I have never met so many people who work two or sometimes more jobs. Particularly shocking were the number of women who took their children out of abusive relationships, and then have to work a full time job, raise three or four kids, without a car and in a neighborhood that doesn't have a grocery store. You don't know what gratitude is until you've given a poor, overtaxed mother beds when her children have been sleeping on the floor for months.

When some smug, ignorant and conspicuously well-fed media head starts whining about the poor having refrigerators, it makes me want to punch them in the mouth.

A social media company data mining your communications and sharing the results with third parties shouldn't come as a shock to any social media user.

PCMCIA CF card reader, plus fat formatted CF card, plus USB CF card reader.

Or about a thousand other ways.

Find a compromise between predicting too much of the future and just managing a project by the seat of your pants; get into a rhythm where you check how good your estimations and learn to get better at them.

Of course you can't develop every project this way; I've used Agile and it's worked for me. I've used waterfall and it's worked for me too. You have to try to be sensible; you can't completely wall of other people's need to know when you'll accomplish certain things, nor can you build a solid plan based on pure speculation. You have to have an intelligent responsible way of dealing with future uncertainty, a plan to cut it down to size.

I've even had the good fortune at one point of winning a $750,000 grant to build a system for which no firm requirements had been established. It was kind of an uphill-flowing waterfall: we knew how long it would take us and how much it would cost but we had no firm idea of what we were supposed to build. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it was; but my team was *successful* and built a product which was still be used and supported over a decade after the grant finished.

What's missing from many programming estimates is honesty. It's a matter of ethics; you can't take people's money and say maybe someday you'll deliver something useful to them. People don't have unlimited time and money to accomplish all the things that need to be done in the world. It's an honor being entrusted with people's aspirations, and a serious responsibility. It's hard, even nerve-wracking, but you've got to care enough about the impact of your planning on other people to make the effort to do the very best job you can.

And what I've found is that if you do make the effort you can do a surprisingly good job of estimating a project if it's in an area and with technologies you're reasonably familiar with. If you look closely your specific predictions will often be way off, but if you care enough to be brutally honest the pleasant surprises tend to balance out the unpleasant ones.

Great Scott! It appears I've been leading a sheltered life thanks to AdBlock, Ghostery and the like. I did not expect that level of douchebaggery from them, though. Well, hope AdBlock is ready for this.

This, I'd mod this up.

I love technology as much as the next guy on /., but that's not what makes a human or a human relationship. We are all living but for a limited time, the only question is just how limited.

Spend time with your children now. While you still can - go somewhere with your daughter, take her out of school if necessary. Take a trip to all the places you (and/or, especially, her) wanted to see but couldn't, do things together - go fishing or skiing or walk through Tokyo, whatever you can, while you can. There is nothing like building a shared experience. People live in the memory of those around them - the more of those memories the better.

Your daughter may or may not grow up to be a "geek". She may (and probably should) find her own path in life. But she will remember you for whatever you do now.

If you feel she needs a "hard record" of ut for later - take a few videos, while you do it.

What are companies supposed to do when security agencies in other countries want the same access, such as FSB (Russia)? DIRNSA tried to pass that one over, but it is a real concern -- look at what Blackberry went through with India, for example. And how many other countries has Blackberry provided access to?

Do not do anything on the internet you would not do in your front lawn.

Unimpeachable advice, if you've satisfied with having 100% of your brain devoted to the problem of what idiots with power might possibly think.

There's a name for what happens when people draw false conclusions from information they've obtained by skulking around that was never intended for their ears in the first place: it's called situation comedy.

Your advice is a prescription for madness on a global scale.