Still low compared to college dorm/cheap apartment ratio of about 10 years ago - those folks are spreading out, and spreading expectations.

We sometimes see ideas spreading 'virally', but really, largely shared ideas are often established generationally - the 'viral' ideas are usually just those ideas exposing and exploiting those slowly growing generational ideas that have been growing as people's desires and needs shift.

Wifi is an expression of this expanding set of generations desire to be ever connected to faster information and resources through computers.

It's a neat time to have grown up in - and I don't think we've fully imagined all the places we can go with it.

It's sort of a 'real' version of the previous generation's largescale exploration of meditation, medication and spirituality, only made consistent, shareable, but oddly balkanized. For instance, there's still awesome music involved in all of it, but more sort of everyone's flavor of the month, and seemingly fewer universal classics than previous generations.

Ryan Fenton

Sounds like generalized damage to white blood cells they're detecting. It's my understanding that "cancers" of a sort kind of exist in pockets in most everyone - they're just not the sort that get aggressive and kill people, because those mutant pockets just don't break enough of the rules of good cell conduct yet to count as a notable risk.

My big issue with the methodology is that when anyone has already detectable active cancer, they usually are on chemo, or too sick to stop the progress... both of which will cause generalized damage to the body's defenses. If they can reliably distinguish the kinds of damage though, that would be a nice development.

Even as it is stated, sounds useful to help distinguish some symptoms from cancer perhaps - but it seems this could also correlate with radiation damage or other generalized damage too. Cool study all the same - perhaps may help lead to cheaper or more automated screening at some level.

Ryan Fenton

That's science right there - all our best evidence indicates that this can be feasible, and this seems the least effort to try it. Nice plan to at least see how far we can get, before we have to revise and replan. We're testing just the principles we want to test, using established functionality where we aren't testing.

That's far more 'magical' to me, than promising another set of boots in places that won't be feasible without exactly these kinds of experiments happening first. More rovers - more measurements!

When we need to spend the big resources to send people off this gravity well, lets have it make sense, perhaps set up a semblance of an workable environment first. We can barely make earth-based closed etiologies last for long - it would be a sad excuse for a 'backup' with our current level of development. We absolutely CAN expand into the galaxy/universe - but we've still got a few mountains of puzzle pieces left unsorted still, in my particular opinion.

Ryan Fenton

While the unlocked graphics style is certainly better for screenshots, it suffers the problem of highlighting close things, while highly blurring anything at a distance. While more 'realistic', if I were testing the game, I'd definitely suggest disabling this 'feature' by default, as it really can hamper gameplay and discovery. Skyrim EMB mods frequently enter into this territory, and it can be troublesome there too.

The headlight effects are pretty cool though.

The worst middle-finger-to-the-audience has to be the mouse handling though - it's not just mouse smoothing or mouse acceleration, but a particularly nasty form of negative acceleration from capping out the maximum allowed mouse speed, presumably to match controller max speeds. This limitation is a pain in the ass if you're expecting any kind of free or accurate mouse control. I cannot imagine any tester not making this a 'show stopper' bug - it's really, REALLY bad from what I've heard/seen/tried, and can't be fixed so far (lots of half-fixes out there though).

Ryan Fenton

I'm typing this on a monitor with 3840x2160 resolution, at 60hz right now. I posted about it weeks ago:

Clicky

It's like $600 when on sale, and it works superb for coding and playing games. Skyrim/Saints Row 4 plays fine on a GTX 660 at 4k resolution, you just disable any AA (not needed), but enable vsync (tearing is more visible at 4k, so just use that). Perhaps that's just me - but things seem fine at 4k res on a medium-cost graphics card.

A few generations of video cards, and everything will be > 60-FPS smooth again anyway (partially thanks to consoles again), so I don't really need to wait for a dynamic frame smoothing algorithm implementation to enjoy having a giant screen for coding now.

I don't see any reason why you'd want to wait - it's as cheap as two decent monitors, and if you're slightly near-sighted like me, it's just really great. See my previous post for a review link and an image of all the PC Ultima games on screen at once.

Ryan Fenton

This has always bothered me with the current state of neuroscience: The whole point of nerves/brain matter is to communicate/remember/transform information, but we're still relying on crude external cues like heat/bloodflow/electrical activity to tell us "somethings happening around...here", and that's pretty much it. It always bothers me when I hear the term "brain signals".

Nerves should be able to query their neighbors about their state, and the state of other nerves - otherwise, they wouldn't really be able to form something like a mind (as in, "the mind is what the brain does"). Why still can't we find a way to just "ask" the nerves what their state is?

Even in our simulations, we just represent nerves as nodes that grow associations - but those associations are useless, unless they can be traversed in queries by the system, to gather inputs, and send outputs at all levels.

Are we getting anywhere close to a stage where we can communicate with nerves to use that same communication system that logically must exist for it to function? Seems like even with limitations, that would be a LOT more useful than analogously inferring from traffic levels what the function of buildings in a city are, like we're doing now.

Ryan Fenton

Just googling a few seconds brought me to:

This article about cleverbot., which also eeked out enough votes to 'pass' a turing test.

It's all sounds just like Eliza, just put into a character with enough human limitations that you'd expect it not to string together phrases well, or keep to one topic more than a sentence.

I'd interpret it basically as an automated DJ sound board with generic text instead of movie quotes - you can certainly string a lot of folks along with even really bad ones, but that speaks more to pareidolia than anything else.

I'd classify this stage of AI closer to "parlour trick" than "might as well be human" that a lot of people think of when they hear Turing test - but that's also part of the test, to see what we consider to be human.

Ryan Fenton

I got it recently, and it's got 4k at 60FPS, in a 28" size - great for programming.

Review link

Just to try it, I was able to get all the single-player PC Ultima games running in about half the screen real estate:

ALL THE ULTIMAS

It's around $600 when its on sale, so I think it just about matches the model slashvertised here.

Ryan Fenton

We do what we must - because we can!

Neat design - always liked the kind of foil origami that goes into satellite construction. Designs like this are great, because they compete well against heavier designs to create a de-facto specialized GIANT EYE IN SPACE. They're also seem a little, ahem, short-sighted in the sense that they may not last long against various sources of degradation, but as proof of concept, this is great science!

It's always cool to see the science get done, for the people who are still alive!

Ryan Fenton

American Gods was an interesting take on mythology, similar to Wolf Among Us, but with gods bumming around in human lives instead of Grimm tales animals.

It seems like that one would be the better one for a movie - the amusement of seeing gods depicted with human lives would could keep fresh with new and stranger gods, perhaps with some strong personalities popping in and out as they died... but none of it seems like it could keep as fresh as, well, endless dreams with a touch of the Twilight Zone. Every story would be its own universe, with a slow thread of Dream's own tale coming in a few times a season. Sort of a mix between Doctor Who and Twilight Zone, really, jumping around in time and reality to explore both humanity through strange eyes.

They could both make decent movies - it's just American Gods was put together as a single story revealing the nature of the gods being depicted in a clear arc, and Sandman was designed as an endlessly serialized exploration of timelessness and dream, with overlapping story arcs.

I'd be more than glad to see either of them explored though - it's always nice to see stories that twists the usual equations of power to produce a more interesting exploration of humanity than just who is powerful. Both these stories feature characters beyond the usual definition of power, and even morality, and use them to push the other characters into more poignant territory.

In any case, here's hoping the series get good enough writers to match the exploration that these kinds of stories demand, without slipping into the common pitfalls we've been seeing with Superman/Heroes/etc, with world-shaping levels of power. When in doubt, at least they can copy Doctor Who/Twilight Zone.

Ryan Fenton

Boy, when you remove context from misleading headline excerpts, things sure do get wacky!

You know those jokes that sometimes aren't funny from old movies, that your relatives laugh real hard about? A large number of those came from the same logic - taking a topical story, removing the context, and applying hyperbole to the idea. They know the idea is misleading, and are 'in' on a joke that they just can't explain to you and still be funny.

Just bundling some of those together with a 'technology' theme isn't making a point - its bungling a joke. Not as bad as that whole 'beta' attempt, but still, a bad attempt at a joke.

Ryan Fenton