It is not about how big the brain is. It is about the number of neurons, latency, signal reliability and number of connections.
Voltage-gated ion channels are non-deterministic. Meaning they don't always open (or not open) when they should. In order to stuff more neurons into the same volume of space, you have to shrink them. The problem is, those ion-channels become more and more unreliable as the size decreases. I would argue that they're already too unreliable in many humans.
Second problem, as the size of the axon and myelin sheath decrease, signal reliability and latency will suffer. Yes, the current can die out part-way to its destination. As the brain is less globally connected due to the sheer lack of space, poor signal reliability and increased latency, it will begin to favor local connections over global ones. In other words, specialization and usage of signal superhighways to compensate, just like a crowded city. The problem with a crowded city is, even with great public transport, many people never leave their neighborhoods.
So what to do about it? You can leave neurons the same size and make more room instead of trying to shrink them.
First problem with this, difficulty of childbirth due to skull size. Second, increased development time, it's already too long as it is.
Third, latency and signal reliability will still suffer due to increased distance.
Fourth, increased use of resource. You also need to support those neurons and that support system will eat up more and more space.
If you try to blow up the size of the axon and myelin sheath to fix the latency and reliability problems, it will eat up even more space. In other words, less room for neurons and you're back to square one. Another problem is, you need a bigger body to support that huge brain. More neurons will be dedicated to processing touch instead of higher-level abstract thoughts.
One last thing you can try is, decrease body size, increase brain volume slightly. The lower level of violence, abundance of food, modern healthcare (c-section) and longer lifespan (more time to mature) in modern human societies allow us to do this already. Dedicate more resource to higher levels of the brain associated with abstract thoughts, planning, reasoning, etc. Over-myelinate those areas to increase signal speed and reliability.
At the end of the day, there's not much more mother nature can do without deep structural and material change.
Reengineer the myelin materials to increase their insulating property and decrease the size. Make the ion-channels more reliable so you can shrink neurons even more, although you still have to worry about quantum tunneling. Or better yet, do away with ions completely and switch to photonic computing.
I dont think neurons have a reliability problem. Most synapses use ligand-gated channels, and neuronal homeostasis makes sure neurons do fire within their physiological range. Stochastic channel opening has not been found to have conclusive effects in reliability. Cortical neurons live near the surface and the brain solves the surface area problem by creating folds - the bulk of the brain volume is axons which form the white matter. If there's a tradeoff that evolution had to make, i speculate it would be between head size and vaginal opening size.
Personally, the hardest part for me was keeping track of the size of everything. Coming from a higher level language, keeping track of the bits and bytes takes some getting used to. Working with arrays in C is much tougher especially when the compiler will compile almost anything you give it, and even a small mistake is catastrophic.
Before C, I was pampered and took everything for granted.
Now I appreciated my life more after C and feel blessed every time my IDE gives me a warning.
My pet hate is #include files. The whole way that C handles multiple source files just seems archaic to me, having worked in higher-level languages. I wish C had a proper package system that was standard, so I don't have to mess around with things like include file path order (or my favorite, the C++ template definitions having to be in the header files thing I only recently learned about).
Interestingly, I first started with C (although I haven't written a line of C code for a long time), and when I first move to higher-level languages, I dislike the fact that I have no idea where the file I just imported is. Moreso when I'm playing with obscure/ new language: if I can just import whatever files I wanted (rather than at package level), it seems that would be much easier to hack on the language/std itself.
A sufficiently long include path can give you this problem anyway. I recently tripped over this when I created a "reason.h" and discovered that Windows had a file of the same name deep inside MFC.
I don't quite get this lament about being pampered in higher level languages. To me, it feels like someone saying they feel pampered for having indoor plumbing or running water.
I don't think this is true. It's narrative nice people tell themselves to find reason in a world that has none.
Yea, they suffer sometimes from poor planning and bad luck, but more often than not, they'll get away with it. And they won't feel bad about it, not even a little bit.
Just see how some people cheat on their spouse and then get a sweet settlement and fat paycheck every month by order of the court. Maybe those people are secretly miserable but I doubt it. It's actually pretty clever if you think about it and nature rewards cleverness.
It's not about American or European. Assuming these jerks are of higher rank, few people have the balls to stand up to their boss short of quitting. If they're lower or equal rank, then we don't have much to talk about unless the person is just a masochist that enjoys being a doormat.
In the West, we have some laws to deal with these problems.
In Japan and Korea, it wasn't that long ago that it was
totally acceptable for your boss to smack you in the face. And you have to take it because no company will hire you if you quit.
It's still pretty bad in South Korea and China, just look up Korea Airline nut rage scandal.
The strong always oppress the weak. The weak gets angry and revolt, then they become the strong and proceed to oppress those weaker than them. This is the summary of human society and history.
I know people who tries to be stubborn to cover up their lack of knowledge.
Usually, those people are smarter than the majority but not quite smart enough to realize that they're not always right.
One thing I don't understand is why Steve Jobs took credit for some of the stuff that Jony Ive did (assumming this is true). He's already the CEO, so unless he was worried about Ive usurping his position, there was absolutely no point.
People talk behind your back and the truth will usually get out. It's just miscalculated and ego-driven with absolutely no gain, monetarily and socially.
Then we have the story of him scamming Wozniak over his fair share of the Atari bonus. Maybe Jobs thought they wouldn't have a long friendship left?
Forget nice or jerk for a moment, but would you sell your friendship with a genius for that small amount of money?
At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody.
Imagine if Wozniak found out earlier. Imagine if Ive went over to a rival company.
Some of these jerks do not realize how long people hold grudges and what an angry person is capable of. A lot of it is just childish like a bully beating up some small kid for no reason.
It's not smart or assertive, just short-sighted. Look at how many revolutions were started by hunger and poverty. Millions of Irish people starved to death during the Potato Famine and evicted from their land while their landlords happily dined on lobster soup. The Irish Republican Army is still running around today.
It's people like this that breeds problem in the world.
Today most of us are not dying from hunger in the first world but just go back in time a little bit and you can watch these "jerks" dining on abalones, shark fins, caviar while riding inside their cozy palanquin.
They do leave some scrap left for the peasants though, enough to stay alive, work and pay tax. But they see it as theirs to begin with, so it's ok. All that generosity "trickling down".
"At this point in his life, Jobs was a nobody and without Wozniak, he would probably still be a nobody."
I have to disagree here. While Jobs might not have been a tech giant without Woz (then again, he might...NeXT, Pixar, new Apple all happened without Woz), I'm as certain as I can be that the man would have been famous no matter what. Possibly as a cult leader, a music promoter, or a politician, but famous somehow.
We'll never really know. I would love to watch that movie though.
Also I didn't mean to use "nobody" as an insult. There's nothing wrong with being a nobody. The majority of people who lived were nobody but without them we would have nothing today.
That's one way to view it. The truth about anything real in this world is that it is too complex to have only one valid explanation. Don't fall into the trap to only believe one. Look at the other ones and find that there is more to it than any single explanation can provide.
Money is a reasonable way to track favours, but it's also a reasonable standard exchange medium, it's also a reasonable representation of value, etc. But for all explanations you can also find reasons why it's not, e.g., it's not a favour because a favour is a one-to-one relationship, while money you can get from one person and use it to get something from another person. (No need to counter argue here, you don't need to convince me. I just wanted to present an example of why the idea of "money=favour" is not perfect as well.)
I'm not sure if I get that <government> part. Is that only for the example? If I convince you that I have a cool t-shirt for you, then I give you the t-shirt and you give me the money, not the government, and if I get the money depends mostly on your decision if the t-shirt has value to you or not. There might be cases where I could convince the government that you should give me money, but in the case of the t-shirt that's unlikely.
Using that example can you understand the confusion and explain more in detail? Thanks.
The decision depends upon what value I think the t-shirt has, what value I think the money token has, what value you think the t-shirt has, and what value you think the money token has.
I guess I am thinking of money as being a token of favour against a third party (<government>) not involved in the transaction, and moreover being a token for a favour that will never be invoked.
edit: From this perspective it seems reasonable to ask "what difference does it make what the third-party is?" and "if the favour is never to be invoked, why think of it as a favour at all?".
edit 2: the "favour" and the "value" here are quite different ideas, if that part is confusing.
It's not favors that money represents, but rather a convenient frozen form of productive labor and goods. It represents time.
The world does not owe you a debt or favor just because you possess that money. I don't owe you a debt, such that I have to give you anything for that money if I choose not to; and nobody else does either. Viewing money as a debt owed, is a very incorrect way to look at it.
To prove the point, try walking up to someone and telling them that you have a piece of government paper in your pocket that represents a claim on their shoes, and since they owe you a debt you demand they give you their shoes (or really anything else for that matter) right now. See what happens.
Your shoes-favor example is a fair critique of one interpretation of the parent comment:
> Money is a piece of token that represents favor or debt the world owns to you, or at least, anyone who takes money as payment
I think perhaps that line might be better stated as something like:
"Money is a piece of token that represents favor or debt the <backer-of-money> owes you."
E.g. <backer-of-money> might be a bank or government. E.g. fiat currency.
If someone accepts my money in payment, that is not because money is some "debt-upon-the-world" that I can transfer to an arbitrary person, and force them to repay, rather, they perceive that a token of the <backer-of-money>'s debt has value, and they are willing to exchange some good or service so that the <backer-of-money> is now in their debt.
Perhaps a more general way of looking at it is that money is a token that one believes has value because one believes that others believe the token has value, and are willing to accept it in exchange for other things of value (which may or may not be other forms of money, or goods/services with "actual" value).
Yet another way of looking at it is that money is part of a system that influences a group of individuals in society to behave in a certain way. From this perspective you could ask things like:
1. are the collective actions of society a desirable outcome?
2. is this an efficient way to achieve the current outcome?
3. what other kinds of systems might produce different outcomes?
4. pragmatically, what other kinds of systems are reachable given that we're operating within the context of the current system?
The part on being enforced by a central government, yes.
But my last line still applies to all money.
That's why when someone mentions the phrase "intrinsic value", they are not seeing the core truth of money.
It's interesting that money is misunderstood by so many people while representing the fundamental fabric of human society.
There is no intrinsic value to anything in this universe, not one that applies to every single organism.
For humans and most life forms, the closest thing that I can think of is food/water/(oxygen for aerobic organism), force of violence, pleasure and time.
Today, most money aren't even in physical circulation. Most of the gold in the world sits in some cold dark vault.
It's literally a video game and the funny thing is, we have enough food and water for everyone in the world already.
Current fiat monetary systems are not based on 'what the world ow[e]s you'. Money is only a token of a debt an individual or group of individuals has with a legally sanctioned and central bank blessed commercial bank.
At it's core money is merely a concept used to determine deservingness though. It lets us answer the question "does this person deserve X," where X can be providing them services/goods (or not.)
At the moment money is a rather contorted and easily manipulable proxy for deservingness though which is the cause of a lot, if not the majority, of the world's troubles.
There's no technical reason though why we couldn't for example determine deservingness through interpersonal distribution of value; like PageRank but for people.
There's nothing in the phrase "Money is a piece of token that represents favor or debt the world owns to you" which specifies either fiat or specie currency.
There have absolutely been government-issued specie currencies through history. Virtually all have also seen tremendous devaluation. Look up the 94% devaluation (and corresponding inflation) of the silver Roman denarius.
I don't fear it; I'm amused by people who tell me that fiat currency is going to collapse any day now unlike super-safe gold, but that they will nonetheless be happy to exchange some of their super-safe gold for my soon-to-be-worthless fiat currency. Out of the goodness of their hearts or something.
The dollar has lost roughly 97% of its value (per the Fed's own assessment) since the Federal Reserve was created. And that's a good outcome, we could talk about the ruble, or the real, or the bolivar.
Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison.
Gold has plenty of issues, confidence as a store of value is not one of them. By comparison, the global economy is filled constantly with stories, from one country or another, of fiat being demolished through constant inflation / aggressive devaluation.
Countries can drown their citizens via all sorts of schemes involving debt (ala Japan and the Yen), that then become currency devaluation schemes (QE) to debase that debt and chop down the standard of living of its citizens as a stealth move to pay for that debt. Such a thing inherently can't happen with gold.
The Euro zone for example is in the middle of seeing its citizens standards of living chopped down via QE, to debase the vast debt that has been choking off the growth potential of much of Europe since 2007 (the European economy has seen zero net GDP growth since roughly 2007). How many Euro zone citizens understand what the ECB is doing to them exactly? Do they realize that what they're about to suffer, is what Americans went through from 2002 to 2014 as the Fed debased the dollar to try to avoid multiple recessions, leading to a substantial decline in the US standard of living?
If the ECB drops the value of the Euro by 1/3 via QE, that substantially reduces in real terms the standard of living of anyone living on that currency. Gold shields against that abuse.
Trouble is, that for all your dire warnings about the horrible things the ECB might do, the one store of value that actually has dropped in value by a third in recent years is gold (it lost nearly a third between mid 2012 and mid 2013, and its a little lower than that now)
Sure, in the long run, gold holds its value, though it doesn't perform nearly as well as stock markets, or real estate. In the long run, a predictable 2% annual inflation erodes the value of savings, which is why people participating in the dollar economy tend to put their money in bank accounts paying interest rather than burying their cash in vaults,
But it's economically illiterate to pretend that gold price crashes haven't been a far more serious wealth destroyer over the last couple of years than the relatively stable and predictable inflation in developed countries, despite all the predictions that QE was going to make the sky fall in.
You can't eat gold. I'd be more interested to see their value measured in loaves of bread, apartments, or hours of human labour - the kind of thing I'm actually going to want to buy with my store of value.
I see where you are coming from, but as these numbers are inflation adjusted the USD isn't really the frame of reference, the purchasing power is - as a result of adjusting for inflation the purchasing power represented by one USD stays constant, so USD can be cancelled out on both sides of the equation.
The 97% loss in value of the dollar is brought up again and again as if it's some shocking fact. But that drop happened over a century, and fiat money is not expected to be s long term store of value. So really, that "shocking"drop is a non-issue unless your retirement savings account was a bed mattress.
There's got to be some threshold though - it's not best prepared. A few years ago we wouldn't use much cloud storage because there weren't many options to do so. Right now, if you are a terrorist and carry your data with you, unencrypted, you're a complete idiot and will likely fail in some other way.
> Simply make an encrypted backup and wipe everything before traveling through airports and borders.
Which helps against a border guard installed hardware keylogger how…? There's been reports of border guards flashing laptop firmwares (no idea how credible they are), which would make "wiping everything" rather difficult (you can re-flash the main firmware, but what about e.g. the Intel Management Engine firmware? That thing is a hardware rootkit by design).
> Simply make an encrypted backup and wipe everything before traveling through airports and borders.
True, but in some countries (such as the UK, under RIPA) it's illegal to refuse to give authorities your password or decryption key. You'd really want to use a decoy disk image with some content; an empty disk on an otherwise used-looking laptop arouses suspicion and would probably lead to further scrutiny.
Or keep your data on a server somewhere and hide the address and key, accessing your data remotely when you get to your destination.
With a decoy account you wouldn't need to go through the wiping rigamarole every time you travel. Just have the decoy account's login trigger a wipe of the primary account.
Of course, there's the question of how to make a realistic-looking decoy account that doesn't look suspicious on account of not having any files created in the past year or two, but with a little creativity you could pull it off.
Computers aren't free, so it'd impair the flow of information, to say nothing of the hours it'd take to download hundreds of gigs from the cloud every single time you travel (given the typical hotel wi-fi, you wouldn't be able to use your computer, so might as well advise people to never travel with a computer)
I'm job-hunting currently and most companies demand you know Objective-C with Swift as the icing. Many don't even care about Swift at all.
Many frameworks are written in Objective-C and have not been ported over.
I think you'll find it very frustrating if you only know Swift because there's just so much Objective-C out there and they're by no mean deprecated.
You should learn the basics of Objective-C at the very least.
Edit:One thing I forgot to mention, knowing just Swift means you have next to no experience with iOS comparatively speaking since Swift hasn't been around that long. There are companies that expect us to know pre-ARC Objective-C just to let you know where the bars are in this game.
Get your hormones level tested first, specifically testosterone.
I'm not sure what you're shooting for but self-help books don't really work. It's like teaching a blind man to see.
Being social is much more about what -not- to say than what to say.
Some guys have low testosterone and struggle with chronic anxiety.
It's nerve-wracking talking to people in this state and you end up with a messed rhythm.
On the topic of talking to strangers, it's really important to not come off as having an agenda.
It's too easy to make the mistake of coming off as needy (creepy is the derogatory term that Millennials use) and it makes the other person feel awkward or "embarrassed to be talking to this weird person".
There's a constant stream of physical cues that has to be processed real-time during a conversation, it's not easy.
One mistake I see often is a person offering up too little or too much during an interaction.
Someone offers a few words and they respond by showering this person with too much attention.
Or, they barely respond at all, which comes off as anti-social and extremely unlikeable. Not saying this is a good or bad thing, but a lot of intellectuals act this way and that's OK if they don't care about everyone disliking them.
Voltage-gated ion channels are non-deterministic. Meaning they don't always open (or not open) when they should. In order to stuff more neurons into the same volume of space, you have to shrink them. The problem is, those ion-channels become more and more unreliable as the size decreases. I would argue that they're already too unreliable in many humans.
Second problem, as the size of the axon and myelin sheath decrease, signal reliability and latency will suffer. Yes, the current can die out part-way to its destination. As the brain is less globally connected due to the sheer lack of space, poor signal reliability and increased latency, it will begin to favor local connections over global ones. In other words, specialization and usage of signal superhighways to compensate, just like a crowded city. The problem with a crowded city is, even with great public transport, many people never leave their neighborhoods.
So what to do about it? You can leave neurons the same size and make more room instead of trying to shrink them.
First problem with this, difficulty of childbirth due to skull size. Second, increased development time, it's already too long as it is. Third, latency and signal reliability will still suffer due to increased distance. Fourth, increased use of resource. You also need to support those neurons and that support system will eat up more and more space.
If you try to blow up the size of the axon and myelin sheath to fix the latency and reliability problems, it will eat up even more space. In other words, less room for neurons and you're back to square one. Another problem is, you need a bigger body to support that huge brain. More neurons will be dedicated to processing touch instead of higher-level abstract thoughts.
One last thing you can try is, decrease body size, increase brain volume slightly. The lower level of violence, abundance of food, modern healthcare (c-section) and longer lifespan (more time to mature) in modern human societies allow us to do this already. Dedicate more resource to higher levels of the brain associated with abstract thoughts, planning, reasoning, etc. Over-myelinate those areas to increase signal speed and reliability.
At the end of the day, there's not much more mother nature can do without deep structural and material change. Reengineer the myelin materials to increase their insulating property and decrease the size. Make the ion-channels more reliable so you can shrink neurons even more, although you still have to worry about quantum tunneling. Or better yet, do away with ions completely and switch to photonic computing.