Even monks tended to have private monastic cells where they went throughout the day to pray alone.

The problem with generalizations, however, is whose world? It is easy to say "things are getting better" when we live in comfortable first-world situations where even the poor among us may count as rich in other countries. So long as violence and rape don't happen on our doorstep, we decide that things are better. But it all means very little to the person who happens to be on the underside of this better world. In short, the ways in which we tend to judge the world to be better tend to be predetermined according to limited scales that almost guarantee the result. Hence we might say that there are fewer wars today, but that does not mean that violence is going away; war has shifted into terrorism, and murder has escalated into the phenomenon of serial killers and school shootings. I don't doubt that in the last few years even these things may have decreased, but things often trend on larger cycles than a few years, and it may be that some of the low points we are experiencing are mere incidental shifts within the overall curve, rather than real and lasting improvements.

The danger, of course, is that we so quickly jump to giving ourselves a pat on the back, and we stop ourselves from seeing the evils and suffering that are out there. Or, we find ways to explain them away in order to exonerate ourselves for our inaction. One might have trouble swallowing the claim that the world is categorically a better place if one is on the front lines in Ukraine, or if one had a brother murdered by the police in Mexico, but we who are safe and comfortable can always pretend that it's those people's fault and theirs alone for not making their country as wonderful as ours. We refuse to see that the prosperity of the proud is intricately linked with the suffering of the downtrodden.

Exactly. What people don't understand is that economic interests are not fundamentally opposed to the progress of technology--they actually drive it. We like to think that technology soars as high as our aspirations, but invention costs money and at the end of the day, commercialism pays the bills. We are constantly promised flying cars and cities on the moon, but the real tangible products only arrive when they become economically viable in some sense. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but only the iPod really pushed the market forward such that technological innovation went from better and better mp3 players, to smart phones, to tablets, etc. This is because, on the one hand, the iPod was surrounded by excellent marketing, and on the other hand, the product itself was shaped by economic interests to target the then-current market in a superior way. Hence it may not be that the iPod was the best and newest technology that could be produced, but it was perhaps the best blend of innovation, marketing, and economic viability for the situation, and thus because of its marketability it drove future innovation in the direction of handheld wireless devices.

Back to the situation at hand, companies that sell skincare products do have a vested interest in bad skin, but only to the extent to which it enhances the marketability of their products. They might be able to form a conspiracy network and hide such a miracle product only if human nature were not what it is, and economics were not driven by competition. One company still has to compete with another, and so one company will likely invest in high-tech means of skin care in order to dwarf another. Thus there will be no conspiracy to bury this new technology. Rather, one company will promote the technology enough to gain an upper hand in a high-end market (e.g. not cheap Suave products like I buy), but cost and convenience will prevent this technology from eliminating the skin care industry altogether.

Human genetic engineering could change the situation, but that will involve complex issues (patented genes?) and other economic and political factors that will be external to the skin care industry in itself. Like all other technologies, human genetic engineering will be driven by the economy, no matter how much transhumanist idealism pushes for it as the supposed next step in human evolution. In the meantime, this particular discovery will more likely lead to lesser technologies that purport to target Granzyme B without eliminating it genetically.

I'm just a home user with Comcast but I use my own DOCSIS 2.0 modem (the max Comcast speed in my small city is so slow that it hardly makes a difference). The catch is that every four months or so Comcast seems to do a review of my account and decide that my modem belongs to them. So they start billing me a rental fee for me own modem, and then I have to call them and yell at them. This resets the clock, but in another four months or so it'll happen again, and again, and again.

The trick with dealing with Comcast, in my experience, is that you should always follow the prompts for cancelling your service. The only people who can actually help you or give you discounts or anything are the guys who have to talk you out of ditching Comcast. When my contract runs out and they start to bill me more, I usually just have to threaten to switch to AT&T, and they will offer me some kind of deal.

Ironically, the reason I use Comcast is because there's no options here other than Comcast and AT&T, and despite their repeated attempts to lay claim to my modem and their general sleaziness, Comcast seems to be the *less evil* option for me. AT&T had me on a bimonthly schedule of adding false charges to my bill, and a daily schedule of outages and crappy service. It's sad when one of the most evil companies in America seems to be the lesser of two evils.

Correct. The scientific method requires a hypothesis, which may be hinted at by evidence but still requires imagination to extrapolate from preliminary evidence and hints toward a possible outcome. A bad hypothesis can stifle an outcome. Moreover, once evidence is gathered, the more speculative the conclusion the more imagination is required to piece disparate evidence together into a plausible possibility. The Antikythera device is a great example of this, because at least from what I've seen, much of the speculation about it is grounded on some very tenuous evidence because of the condition of the device. It is not entirely clear what it looked like, because its original appearance has to be extrapolated from heavily corroded junk, and this requires a lot of speculation and imagination.

lol, it was sarcasm. But the real math is in the profits. One could construct an economic formula to represent the profitability of fiction in popular markets relative to the general unexpectedness of its events and the use of cliffhangers and secrecy to keep the reader attached. I say "unexpectedness" and not "unpredictability" because it may really be that such outcomes, because they are determined by the desire to compel and surprise the reader in order to make the book profitable, are actually extremely predictable.

For example, I used to annoy my wife my predicting the ending to NCIS episodes long in advance. The killer would almost always be (1) the person you least suspect, because the character has no real rational justification for the crime in the early episode and (2) the one superfluous character introduced in the episode, since they didn't want to pay much and dedicate screen time to characters who did not push the plot forward. In short, because the writers of the show were trying so hard to be surprising, they would cook up contrived motives that could be presented in the last five minutes of the episode, and then make the one person who seemed most innocent actually turn out to be guilty. But then, this is predictable. It's just like how if you've watched enough episodes of House, M.D., you can easily guess that the person who first gets sick during the prologue is not the actual person who's going to pass out and end up in Dr. House's care.

In short, it is somewhat silly to analyze literature in terms of a kind of Asimovian statistical "psychohistory," when the real principles that structure the literature are so evident. For example, whether or not a particular character appears in future books is not determined relative to characters' appearances in prior books, but according to the MO of the author, which is not something that remains static over the years but which develops and fluctuates according to his historically-conditioned priorities. Vale is honest about the limitations of the statistical approach, but what I think is necessary is to recognize how that which derives from human freedom but ultimately manifests in statistical ways is always also at the same time codetermined by implicit principles and formulae (e.g. the economic viability of such and such kind of writing), especially economic ones.

The next book opens with an interesting but hard to follow prologue concerning random throwaway characters that you never heard of and will never hear about again.

Almost nothing really significant happens for tens of chapters, even though every chapter bleeds into the next with a cliffhanger making you want to read the next one. Plus there's several gratuitous sex scenes to keep the Slashdotters interested.

After many chapters of pretty much no development, something horrific happens toward the end making the fans say, "NO! He can't do that!" and so they read on.

It closes off with an unsatisfying cliffhanger ending with a teaser epilogue that advertises yet another book. We still learn pretty much nothing about what is north of the wall and any protagonists we rooted for are that much farther from achieving anything good. There's no deep moral significance and nothing to be learned about life except that one is better off not being a character in one of George R.R. Martin's books.

Rinse and repeat until the series becomes unprofitable. (Unless Martin gets hit by a car, seven novels simply will not be enough.)

I myself miss Sim City 2000 the most, especially for the wacky newspapers.

Grant is the only one I'll miss. I might watch the show again now that the other two are gone.

Nah, they'll be perfect when nuclear winter comes around. ;o)

I don't think it will ever be a problem, anyway, inasmuch as free-will is not something that can be developed through a quantitative increase in heuristics and processing power. It is a qualitatively different kind of intelligence, and not something that we can invent. The problem, however, will always be that because people believe that they can endow something with free-will, there will be (A) attempts to create superior robots that mimic free-will to a convincing degree, and (B) people who foolishly believe that their AI has free-will, and therefore should be treated as a person. It's analogous to the way in which many people are convinced that their dogs qualify as persons on the same level as human beings. In the future, it is likely that people will become so attached to AIs that they go so far as to insist that they are people.

Maintenance manuals are a good idea, but VR editions would probably cost more time and money than a company is willing to spend, especially when they'd rather have to buy something new than fix something old.

One can argue for increased protein, but the frequent claim that this represents a better, more "natural" way of living is suspect. We have to come to terms with the fact that humanity's natural state is technological. We cannot even survive in most of the climates in which we live without clothing, which is a basic form of technology. The protests against processed food are, in a sense, highly dishonest, because (1) they delude themselves into thinking that the technological aspect of our food is the problem, rather than any issue of self-control, and (2) especially for Americans the call for government regulation shows that while we pretend that the market itself can regulate everything and set the terms of value, we are uneasy with the results, which tend to devalue human life and well-being for the sake of profit.

Besides, I certainly don't need to go to the freezer section to buy unhealthy, fatty food. Some of my favorite homemade meals, such as traditional Mexican enchiladas, are bad enough for me.

Yeah, every so often they decide once again that the cable modem that I own must somehow belong to them, and they start billing me for renting my own equipment.

True.

I think there's definitely something about gamertags that impacts the way people respond to you. I remember when playing Gears or War or Halo there seemed to be an unspoken policy of avoiding being on the team of someone with an all-lowercase name, because it at least seemed to often be the case that such a person was a young kid or a newer player. Of course, looks are deceptive. There are many good players who use all-lowercase gamertags. But even if we cognitively know that our assumptions are faulty, that does not stop us from unconsciously acting upon them before we think about it. (Hence Pascal says that human reason is subject to imagination: you could put the world's smartest philosopher on a secure plank hanging over a cliff, and even though he knows that he won't fall, he will probably still be afraid of it.)

The only name change I paid for on Xbox Live was to make my gamertag more interesting and less newbish, so that other experienced players would be less likely to avoid being on my team. You can say that one's skill should speak for itself, but you have to win a game first in order for your skill to speak, and in team-based matches a set of bad teammates can easily make you look like a newb.

I agree. The mark of many newb gamertags will often be that he or she chooses a name that he or she *thinks* is intimidating. It would be better to imitate very closely gamertags of players who *are* intimidating, when these have some distinctive character. I opted for something in the middle, which would not look like it was trying to be too clever but would not immediately appear to be newbish.