The ability to join in a course based ONLY on the fact that you're interested in it, with no risk of "failure" is, I think, one of the best features of many MOOCs.

Where there's no difference between "auditing" a class and trying for a certificate, it means that people may be much more likely to try something which they might turn out to enjoy and do well in.

Now, I'm sure if you required people to pay something for the class, or commit to trying for a certificate such that there would be a record/cost of failure, then that would greatly increase the *percentage* of people who would pass. The question is whether you would get more people passing overall since it would stop everyone who was not sufficiently "serious" from attempting the course.

Even those who sign up on a whim and don't get far in a course will probably get something from it, and they might well decide that it was something they want to try again more seriously the next time once they have a taste of what it's about and the amount of work involved.

So absolutely I think "no pressure" is the right way to run a MOOC.

G.

I find that reading a good book is like a complete exercise workout for your brain, and I know I feel a lot sharper when I'm reading regularly.

If I'm having trouble working through some problem or other then taking some time to read is always helpful, even if the subject of the book is unrelated to the problem at hand.

It seems as though it needs to be something with a lot of prose but either fiction or non-fiction works.

Moderately technical non-fiction is OK as long as it is interesting and mentally stimulating (makes you stop and think etc.).

But pure technical books don't seem to help at all and may just clutter things up with new knowledge that the brain is trying to assimilate. So for example pretty much anything from O'Reilly will not make me feel generally smarter even though it may be very good at cramming in the domain specific knowledge I need for some project.

So just reading tech books is not very helpful at all, and needs to be supplemented with more general works from my experience.

G.

Well, Mathematica is now free for non-commercial use on the Raspberry Pi of all things.

You could run a Raspberry emulator and run it inside that on other operating systems. But I haven't looked at the license agreement so maybe that's explicitly prohibited.

No idea how it performs, but the screenshots at Wolfram look promising.

G.

http://xkcd.com/1234/

Probably my favorite XKCD strip so far.

G.

Seems to me that the device itself had to be relatively harmless unless you managed to actually crack it open and get directly at the cobalt. Maybe this was a very old device, but after previous deadly incidents of ignorant people getting their hands on such things, I would think they would be manufactured such that it would be REALLY difficult to get at the cobalt inside. Maybe if you stare into the bore of the thing for a while though?

If the cobalt had actually been accessed/exposed then I would expect them to have a nasty hot clean-up exercise on their hands, but the Mexican authorities seem awfully unconcerned.

I suspect they are just trying to scare the shit out of the thieves, perhaps to motivate them to turn themselves in hoping for some sort of treatment.

G.

This, lol. I would mod you funny by have no points today, sorry :)

G.

Clearly they need to hire someone named Gil Bates, that would be awesome.

G.

Statistical probabilities tell you EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYONE and yet NOTHING ABOUT ANYONE.

Yes, if you take 1,000 people like your daughter then of those who live to age 65 or whatever, just about 550 of them are going to get Alzheimer's.

But each individual will have an ACTUAL rate of the disease of exactly 0% or 100%, and that 55% chance actually gives you NO information about which you will be.

And without those gene variations, she still might have a 10% say chance of getting the disease.

Behind the screen the DM rolls the dice. You don't get to see the results of the roll. Anyone who has played a D&D like game, or something like World of Warcraft which is so dependent on dice (random number generators) for the outcome of events, will know that it's hopeless to think too much about what the next roll of the dice will bring, because when you're rolling a lot of numbers between 1 and 100 on a regular basis, you're going to get numbers like 1,2,3 and, 98, 99, and 100 all the time, and you absolutely cannot develop any sort of intuition based on probability.

So lots of people with 55% chances will not get the disease, and lots of people with 10% chances will.

Even when your risk factor is 95%, there's no guarantee, and you should not be "surprised" if you turn out to have it happen to you after you thought you could just round the probability to the nearest value of 0 or 100.

People hate uncertainty. Given a probability most people will NEED to decide at that point whether the event will happen or not, because they can't stand to go through life in suspense. They will ask you "Ok, so that means I will get the disease?" when it means nothing of the sort.

A 55% chance to get terrible disease by age 65 is just NOT a reason to change your lifestyle IMHO.

For a good dose of reality, take 100 people age 65 and have them get their 23 and Me tests done and watch while they laugh at all the things they were at higher risk for that they DIDN'T get and all the things they were at low risk for that they DID get. If you do this (even for one sample, give a 23 and Me gift certificate to an older relative and see how much their results make you worry less) chances are it will make you worry about probability a lot less.

Statistics are great for determining insurance rates and public health policy, but they DO NOT ACTUALLY GIVE YOU ANY INFORMATION about whether YOU as a single individual will come out one way or the other.

There are a few "completely penetrant" genetic diseases (hemophilia, etc.) where if you have the gene then you WILL GET the disease. But almost everything 23 and Me tells you is about probabilities which are much less than certain and honestly nothing to get too worked up about.

G.

People living in an area with Yeti legends and superstitions encounter a rare Polar/Brown bear hybrid. Of course some of them are going to immediately scream "aaaagh it's a yeti!".

That doesn't necessarily mean that this is the sole origin of the Yeti legends in the first place.

If you showed up in the Himalayas wearing one of those velociraptor costumes, people might also report Yeti sightings.

G.

Python.

It's widely used in many branches of science which means there's a lot of existing code you can look at, and if you produce something interesting then you can expect people will more readily be able to consume it (because they're already familiar with the language) than if it were written in something they aren't as familiar with.

It's a great high-level language and should be easy to pick up for someone with VBA and BASIC, and it should be just about the right step in the direction of more "serious" programming languages without being overwhelming.

There's hardly ever a "best" answer to "what programming language should I use/learn", but in this particular case I think there is.

G.

I've been out of the FPGA world for a while, but I would expect anything interesting in terms of a 3D chip to require a largeish FPGA chip, and if you have to use a $200-$2000 FPGA (with exotic surface-mount and power requirements) then this seems like maybe not that much of a win.

G.

This is not about you and me and our health data, it's about some billionaires who (understandably) don't want to see what happened to Steve Jobs happen to them.

You can sit around and say this is Evil and whatnot, but honestly would any of us here behave any differently if we were in their position?

Note that the president of the new company Calico is Art Levinson, who is currently also Chairman of Genentech and *Apple* so there's a direct Steve Jobs link here and even a quote in the press release from Tim Cook:

Tim Cook, Chief Executive Officer of Apple, said: “For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.”

So this is all very science-fiction (both from a technology *and* a social point of view) and it will be fascinating to watch.

From a Science point of view this is really interesting because at the moment there are relatively few sources of funding for basic life-extension research, since much research money comes from the government, and making people live longer is no more politically acceptable than talking about population control. So if you're a fan of applied biological research and specifically life-extension technologies then you should be pretty excited by Google's move here.

Interesting times.

G.

P.S. I for one welcome our new genetically enhanced immortal geek overlords.

Given the option of taking point on some really hazardous operation yourself and letting a machine do it? I think it's stretching it to think that soldiers are going to start treating the machines as equals.

Besides, you can backup the robot's state onto a USB key, air-drop in a new one and restore its "personality" (such as it is) and your "friend" is back from the dead.

Very little requirement for sympathetic emotional attachment.

G.