Golf swing analysis. Good players would love this to check ball impact angles if the resolution was high enough.

I can't believe the first comment realizing sports applications are awesome was bowling!! What about baseball and golf? Those are much higher speed motions where people already pay obscene amounts for high frame rate video to fix swing mechanics.

Spoken like someone who either has never had a kid (might go into labor spanned 9 weeks for us, you'd know this if you were educated about it), is a ridiculous tight ass, or maybe has a wife who is a ridiculous bitch and is too whipped to realize how much his life sucks.

for pretty good reason. unlike a cell phone there isn't a brightly backlit screen but I can still get texts/updates/emails that may signal I should quietly excuse myself from the theater to take care of some personal business. It's even less invasive than a pager.

There are huge ways this can (and probably will at some point) be used to make technology less invasive to those around you and your life. I'd love to not interrupt a conversation to check if my wife just went into labor or needs me home ASAP while out having a beer with a friend. Or my friends who are doctors can get a low profile pop up that they are needed at the hospital rather than having to have their phone out.

we got involved in the ISS ages ago. First plans were in the 80s and Russia got involved in 1993 (first piece went up in 1998). And frankly, we are only not seriously talking about decommissioning the ISS because it ran so far over schedule. It should have been at end life before the shuttles.

just wondering, what in the world could you possibly be doing that was originally designed at 1/100,000th of optimal and relevant?

I mean, I've done this before. I had to generate all the legit ticker symbols for derivatives on futures, and just to understand the rules I wrote code for that. Now, I could have built a config file from that code that would have sped up the "generation" portion by 10,000x I'm sure. But the thing is, all it cost me was about 3 seconds on initialization of a process that required about 10 minutes to run. So for me, I didn't care as optimization in the guts of the calculations I was doing were far more important (i.e. at one point I was able to take the run time down from 20 minutes to 15 minutes earn on in dev, which was only a 50% speed increase on the relevant section, but far more important than a 10000x speed up on the ticker generation).

any half decent coder would have broken it up into 20 different cells, probably something like DA-->DT with meaningful column names and a comment in each one and then combine it together way over on the left for whatever you want to see........

But you can do the exact same thing in python and I see it all the time, where people get lazy (oh wait, there is some minuscule savings of milliseconds, so it's worth it....) and put into one line what would be a lot more nicely done across several.

Luckily excel makes it nice and easy to segment the nested code as it highlights which parens tie out to other parens. So I can fix the crappy nesting that my juniors would write for me and then tell them if they want to keep their job they won't make me waste time making their tools readable and maintainable.

best example is middle eastern money actually. I have a good friend from college who for years I never had any idea of the wealth and power of his family, and then I find out they were deep into oil money but you couldn't trace it at all. There was no listing of the potential wealth this family had, in fact the people weren't even mentioned. And you are talking about families (and because this money is new, the patriarch is still alive) that control billions and no one even lists on a world billionaire list.

Forbes lists the richest people whose wealth can be measured because primary asset ownership is known. This is easiest if you hold a large portion of a publicly traded company, and hence, they are all scions of people who build such companies. I would be amazed if the head of the Sauds is worth anything less than the combination of Buffet, Slim, and Gates; the king gives his wife an art budget of supposedly, 2 billion dollars a year. This is the kind of money even Buffet can't come up with as a side expense.

Undocumented wealth in this world is unbelievable in its scope. But its funny the GP actually thinks rich people just hand over their personal financial accounts to Forbes.

doesn't always work. I spent years in Finance, and my first 2 were primarily writing and building spreadsheets to monitor risk, pnl, track drift in pnl, simulate portfolios, etc.

A couple years back my firm put into place a dev environment driven by python, and this was the first time since I was in middle school that I was programming withs something other than VBA or excel. After about 2 months, the same sheets I had been writing for years could be translated into massively simpler and easier to read (and follow, modify, extend) python.

Our problem was primarily driven by the need to keep all the information on one screen (in trading, you usually abhor having to scroll back and forth, as it takes time, and can lead to you searching for something rather than focusing on meaningful information). Of course, I could do all the calculations far to the right, and just do references that would be a mess on the dependency tree, but things seem to break just often enough to where you need to balance debugging on the fly (i.e. making it not impossible to see where your inputs are flowing to and which step they are breaking on). I never found a perfect balance.

Some folks decided to use VBA, but then I have never found it easy to read someone's hacked together VBA code. Python I find much easier, and this probably has to do with the weird inconsistent syntax in VBA.

And I'm well aware we were probably banging with a hammer to chop down a california redwood, but sometimes there is so much momentum in a firm you can't change how things are done (interoperability).

so not a single news article. in fact, the first link is a blog with an axe to grind (this is like going to the huffington post to get accurate information on poverty or healthcare) and the next 3 are in general, you could be found liable for child endangerment if the courts find the child was in danger. But funny enough, if you read your own links, you'd see that they specifically state that in some states there is a law, but in other states it is discretionary and the onus is on the parent to not fuck it up.

But you are right, I did some some stunning nanny state articles. For example a 2 year old and 4 year old were left home alone, locked in, while the parent was out at work. The parent was arrested for child endangerment.

The closest I saw that was borderline was a parent leaving a 13 year old in charge of 3 younger siblings (including a baby and a preschool age child) and one child got out and was wandering around the neighborhood. That parent was arrested though I could find nothing about charges being filed or punishment. But then if you had taken the time to read the comments and dig, you'd find out this wasn't the first time this had happened, there was a drowning hazard on the property (a proper lake supposedly), and other extenuating circumstances. Sounds like a not unreasonable arrest, and of course there is no follow up of the mother actually being punished, the children being taken away, or any of the fear mongering your original post implied. But good try.......

I actually went and dug and could find only one comparison internationally for 4th graders, and we don't look that bad till you see that Japan, Korea, Singapore, and a whole host of other countries don't participate in those studies. On the other hand by 8th grade we are comfortably behind, so much so that only 7% of our students score at the highest level! while in the best countries that number is around 47%.

This was the study: http://nces.ed.gov/TIMSS/

Are there others? I couldn't find any.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion it has never happened and you are baiting with a straw man. Glad to know the law is still reasonable. Because if it has happened, it would require minimal effort to show such a case, especially if you actually cared enough to follow these things.

if the DARPA challenge can get autonomous vehicles to move effectively around an urban zone, what makes you think an accident is all that complex?

http://archive.darpa.mil/grand...

This was 7 years ago, done by groups on relatively low budgets. Where do you think the tech has gone since then?

do you have any citation for a parent being arrested for leaving an 8 year old at home alone (without extenuating circumstances like the child being mentally handicap or being left for unreasonable lengths without food)?

I Have never once heard of such an arrest. But then I haven't lived in the US for quite a number of years besides a short stint. Maybe something radical has shifted in the last 8 years.

what are you talking about? I can find no law that says you can't leave a child at home alone, especially not in your 8-10 yo range. Hell, now it's easier with cell phones. I'd feel quite comfortable leaving my child at home alone once he had shown me:
1. I can pick up the phone and call if I need something
2. basic responsibility around some dangerous things in the house

I'm not saying an accident can't happen, and it would be very tragic (for my family, not tragic in the society wide sense), but it's just not likely. But then again, I also live in a country where it is considered bad form to pick your child up from preschool with a stroller or to not let them walk to school on their own from the start of elementary education. Maybe the US has changed since I grew up there.....