Calculus is OUR way of DESCRIBING the motion or action that is happening. The fact that you can use calculus to determine the area under a curve doesn't mean that the area under a curve is 'calculus'. Or that the volume of an arbitrary vessel is 'calculus', just because you USE calculus to determine the volume.

The fly has evolved a set of behaviours that corrects for certain environmental conditions while it's flying. That's all. There's no real computation going on.

Let's get this out of the way: I have an iPhone 4, I tend to like Apple's designs, and I've scornfully referred to Samsung's phones as "the phones that Tupperware made" in the past.

This isn't changing my mind any.

Let me also say that I think that the Lumia phones, the HTC one and the Xperia Z1 compact all tickle my design bone in some way, so this isn't just some anti-Android rant.

Samsung really seems to slap together their phones from stuff that's available with no mind towards anything other than just cramming stuff in, and it turns out they're not even very good at that. Why anyone continues to buy them is honestly beyond me when there are so many good options available, even just within the Android ecosystem. This is why Apple continues to have so many fans. They at least try to have all their ducks in a row before making announcements and promises.

Hopefully more people start bailing out of the Samsung trapâ"what differentiates their phones other than 8GB of system software and a flimsy plastic body?

Until recently, all Apple devices used a common charger. At some point in the not-too-distant future, all Apple devices will use a common charger again.

So, by platform, Android isn't that much different than iOS.

Apple made some design decisions vis-a-vis their connector. You don't have to agree with them, but they had some specifications that they wanted to meet that USB didn't and still doesn't allow them to. (Having a reversible connector that doesn't need to be aligned a specific way is a perfectly reasonable design decision from the point of view of usability.)

Anyway, you can plug that cable into basically anything that accepts a common USB 2 connector and it'll work. So it's compliant on at least one end of the cable.

I don't know what expensive proprietary software you're talking about--iOS? I mean, yeah, I don't want to stop using iOS because I like it. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Yeah, see my UID? This has been happening for as long as I've been here. :)

The flat Earth hypothesis has a 'kernel' of truth in it as well. The Earth looks flat from our perspective. It's just that when you decide to look at it with a more analytical eye things start to break down.

The kernel of truth that you're seeing is one that we have to acknowledge: men and women have the opinion that women aren't as good at math, and over the course of history, it's abundantly clear that fewer women have been stand-out mathematicians than men.

The *actual* question is whether or not this is down to biology or societal conditioning. I'm on the side of societal conditioning at this point. It seems unlikely to me that evolution would select for women that aren't as good as math as men in a biological sense, or conversely, that only men would benefit from being better at math (or the prehistoric math analogue) and that would be a characteristic that is located only on the Y chromosome, or is enhanced by testosterone and muted by oestrogen.

Meanwhile, our species has had a long history of systematic and institutional sexism since we became agrarian. Women have only been openly welcome in Universities for less than 100 years, and they haven't even always been allowed to study 'male' subjects like science and engineering. It seems MUCH more likely that conditioning is a greater part of the equation than we've given it credit for until recently.

I know I'm late to the conversation, but you do understand that the cost of tuition has vastly outstripped both a) inflation and b) wage increases, right?

When I went to University, it cost me about $2000/semester. It's EASY to not go into debt at those levels. Even the shitty TA jobs I had paid enough for that. I did end up taking out student loans, though. Tuition costs went up over the years I was in school, I moved out of my parents' place, I got into a car accident and needed ~$3000 of dental surgery (which I eventually got back through my tax return, actually), and I wanted to work less. But still, it was cheap in comparison to what it is now.

We're very good at looking back and thinking, "gee, I could do it, why can't other people," but circumstances have changed. We're OLD now. I started University in 1995--that's almost 20 years ago. The world just isn't the same place.

iPhones are disproportionately represented among those that make $100k/year and up. If you know someone that makes a lot of money, you will be right most of the time if you guess that they've got an iPhone in their pocket. You may be wrong as much as 20% of the time, but considering the marketshare numbers for Android, that's actually pretty counter-intuitive.

It took a lot less time for Apple to go from 'pretty crap' to 'usably good'.

I tend to use Apple's maps and, from the statistics, so do most people. Google Maps hasn't been downloaded on that many iOS devices compared to the number that are running a version with Apple's maps. The usage data is fairly clear.

But in any case, it wasn't a play for dominance. Apple needs a built-in solution that is full-featured with turn-by-turn instructions and the like, and Google wouldn't give them that, so they made their own. Now Apple can say that they have a map application on their phone and it does the things that you would expect.

And yet, this was considered much less convenient than having your music library in one program that had things more or less organised, and allowed you to sync based on THAT structure rather than a directory structure. A directory structure is pleasantly factual--a band has albums has songs--but lacks any sort of filtering structure that adds in meta-data like song rating, last played date, added-to-library date, genre, etc. People just wanted all of the Jazz on their iPod, or just all the songs that they rated 4 and 5.

So while you think that old structure was superior, history has proven you very, very wrong. (And I can't deny that the current state of iTunes on Windows is pretty awful and has been for a while. But earlier versions were smaller and cleaner, and iTunes on Macs has always been a lot more reliable.)

And that's why when you try to bring creatures up from that depth, they often fall to pieces. The pictures of blobfish that we usually see are pictures of the fish after they've been hauled up. They look totally different when they're still alive.

The assumptions are simple: assume that the user hasn't given you permission to do anything. Your app may be useless at that point, but it shouldn't crash. It should just not do anything. If the user then asks the app to search their contacts, you ask them for permission to the contacts again. It happens all the time in iOS apps.

I think the wisdom comes from knowing what is necessary and what isn't. Elegance is always defined by the lack of complexity, not by the addition of it. That's why the best code is as pared down as it can be--it does the most with the least.

It's an interesting saying; I've never heard it before. :)

How did Apple drop the ball, exactly?

I've had apps ask me permission for my GPS, microphone and photos all individually. I've rejected allowing all those things at various times for various reasons with no problems. I've gone back and given permission later, or denied permission when I didn't want that functionality any more. Every app that requires location services asks me individually at the first moment it tries to use them if it's okay. If there's a flaw with the Apple system, I suppose you could say that it's that you get the same questions over and over again, or that apps that absolutely require certain permissions (photo editing apps need access to your photos, duh) can't get them automatically. (But honestly, I don't mind answering that question.)

I test-drove a Nexus 4 for a week, and it really grated on my nerves that I had to give permissions at time of download, couldn't revoke any of them, and had to take it on faith that the app would play nice. No. Ask me for each individual thing, ask me each time.

Heh, I didn't think you were talking to me.

It's also worth noting that I've got a few really nice bikes anyway. ;)

Yeah, and all the best designers for dams and canals are from there, it's true. What your startlingly naive comment doesn't take into consideration is that it's ALWAYS been there, and the cities that we've built on the coasts in the last 50 years HAVEN'T been underwater. This is a new thing. They weren't designed for it.

But sure, take the coastal cities of the world out of the equation. The costs are still enormous, and still real. Agriculture, storms, unpredictable weather, weather patterns shifting substantially (snow where there wasn't snow previously, no snow where there used to be lots of snow), coral bleaching, ocean acidification, desertification...the list is really long. This is to say nothing of the stuff that we don't even know is coming; I suspect that we've failed to capture the entirety of the problem. The things that we ALREADY know about will cost a shit-tonne of money. The stuff that we DON'T know about are going to be even worse because it'll be impossible to prepare for them in any way.

Cost-benefit analyses really start to fall apart at this point.

The thing is, there are lots of little things that we can do, individually and societally, that don't cost much but slowly make a big difference. They've started adding sails to really big cargo ships. It's free energy. It helps. I walk to work, drive my car very little, and try to be good about my own personal energy usage. I use less energy now than I have ever before in my life. It wasn't a step down in my quality of life in the least. I live close enough to home that I can walk home for lunch now. I have fewer, nicer things.

Collapsing economies and cave-dwelling are a line that we've been sold by interests that have a stake in us not changing. I provide less revenue for oil companies than I used to. Because I pay a little more for better things, I don't dispose of things as often. As a consumer, I'm much less lucrative than I was 10 years ago.