Sounds an awful lot like that other "soft science", Economics. Some researchers are finally getting away from the 'revealed wisdom' of Friedman and company, and hopefully Chicago School Economics will soon end up in the dust bin of history with phrenology and vital humors.

I grew up a few blocks from a large mental institution, and many of my classmates' parents worked there. An awful lot of the people who worked there ended up loonier than their patients.

Your thought process still puzzles me. Erosion is an amazingly powerful force. It may be slow, but once the Appalachians were taller than the Himalayas, and there used to be a tall range of mountains in the middle of Africa where today there is only veld. Soft matter such as rotting roots erodes much faster than rocks, just ask any farmer. At the time scale of continent building the dinosaurs were around the day before yesterday.

Optical sensors on most other smart watches don't have any problem, since they actually did some research and learned from other manufacturers that green LEDs are blocked. Some other colors seem fine, but a different sensor probably would have cost Apple an extra $0.45 per watch so they just ignored that inconvenient fact and assumed that the fanbois would buy it anyway. They're probably right.

It's the color of LED that they use in the sensors. This has been a known issue since the FitBit hit the market with green LEDs a couple of years ago. Other smart watch vendors, like Samsung, learned the lesson and used other colors so have no problem. Apple, being Apple, seems to have decided that they were somehow "pioneers" in this market and didn't bother to do any actual research on what works for existing devices.

Was at a party one time where a skinhead was showing off his new eagle tat on his shaved head. When asked why he chose there he rather smugly said, "When I want to have kids and get a better job I can just grow my hair and no one will know." An acquaintance nearby started laughing hysterically, and when she calmed down enough to talk she said, "You idiot, both your grandfathers are bald and started losing their hair in their thirties. It's hereditary."

You're also too dumb to figure out how to create and log into a SlashDot account, so the rest of us really don't give a flying fuck about your opinion.

I've been wearing wide-brim fedoras since 1978, I'm not likely to be mistaken for a hipster (a doofus, on the other hand . . .)

Are you sure Louisiana is a place where "anything goes"??? I guess you need to come to Seattle, where you'll meet bankers with neck tattoos and insurance executives with nose rings. Sorry, but New Orleans hasn't been avant guarde for decades.

Melanin is generally transparent to the frequencies used in these devices, so skin color doesn't make a difference. It's essentially the same technology as the little finger clamp they put on you in the hospital to measure pulse and blood oxygenation, and they work fine on people of all colors.

So this was a known issue with the technology that Apple was either ignorant of, or ignored? Guess I'm not surprised, they have a tendency to go into an existing market with the attitude that they are somehow "pioneers", and no one else in the world knows anything.

You obviously don't live in Seattle, Portland, New York or San Francisco. I see bankers here with tattoos.

You're not saying that the average hipster will actually read "that part", or much of anything else besides Twitter, are you? Hope not, at least my observation of them is that a tweet is about the maximum their attention span will handle.

Apple works purely on fucking bullshit marketing

I thought this was obvious by the time the iMac was released, and Jobs' job had become a hundred times more important to the company than Woz's.

It depends on the cost of these things. If each robot is a gazillion dollars then yes, you're right, they'll only be used in the first world. If the price is intermediate then they may well be mounted in military helicopters and mobile facilities to do battlefield surgery beyond the capability of the corpsmen. If they are cheap (comparatively) then they will be widely deployed, never mind the network and security issues, in the Third World. In Peru, which I am most familiar with, the top surgeons tend to prefer to live in Lima or Arequipa, and if you need their services you need to travel there. Most other Third World countries are much the same. If I lived in Machu Picchu and needed heart surgery I would need to travel to Cusco, and then to Lima, three days of travel before I could even be examined. If I can go to Cusco and be examined and treated I would dramatically reduce the travel and expense necessary while still receiving decent care. Even more likely is that advanced medical students will be called in to perform large numbers of basic medical services, like dental treatment and cataract removal, in the smaller towns while still under the supervision of their instructors.