121–130 of 279 posts
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I see, but those MEMs mirrors were already invented.
Inventions can be useful recombinations or applications of other inventions. They don't need to be wholly unique unto themselves. Indeed, the vast majority of them are not wholly unique.
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until... """ “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?” My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder…
I am positively excited about the upcoming first generation of humans who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand, and as often and many of them as they want – and what that is going to enable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also needs a bit of biology. Our eyes don't have a flat response over frequency, they're more sensitive to blue than violet. Violet gets scattered even more than blue, and the violet light does shift our perception of the color. But it does so less than it would if we had photoreceptors more sensitive to violet , so the resulting perceptual color depends not just on the intensity of the light at different frequenc…
The real question is, is the sky blue for everyone? Some creatures can see ultraviolet. Some lack color at all…
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until... """ “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?” My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder…
"Could you be more specific" is a great question to find out more what the person knows and how they thing. You give an answer that, just due to the nature of knowledge and the limitation of language, has some black boxes. And "could you be more specific" is basically asking to go through the black boxes. Its like asking how does Java work or something like that? You can go from "The JVM interprets java byte code" to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am positively excited about the upcoming first generation of humans who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand, and as often and many of them as they want – and what that is going to enable.
The same anticipation of great things happening preceded the arrival of widely available internet, but all we really got was cat videos initially, and doomscrolling more recently. I don’t have much hope for great things anymore.
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until... """ “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?” My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder…
I am positively excited about the upcoming first generation of humans who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand, and as often and many of them as they want – and what that is going to enable.
Startup wise, there's old work on conversational agents for toddlers, language acquisition, etc. But pre‑literate developmental pedagogy, patient, adaptive, endlessly repetitive, responsive, fun... seems a potential fit for LLMs, and not much explored? Explain It Like I'm 2-4. Hmm, there's a 3-12 "Curio" Grok plushie.
I dislike with passion the answer "because Rayleigh scattering". When someone asks why, especially if a child asks, the default answer should be the simplest correct answer : Because it's the color of the atmosphere, specifically nitrogen and oxygen! It's technically correct to state this. Gasp! But aren't nitrogen and oxygen usually described as "colorless"? Well, yes but... If they were perfectly colorless, the sky…
I think we can simplify the answer to this question for most audience and say "the air is blue". If they say, the air appears to be clear when I stare at something other than sky, the answer is you need more of air to be able to see its blue-ness, in much the same way that a small amount of murky water in your palm appears clear, but a lot of it does not. If they ask, why don't I see that blue-ness at dawn or dusk, t…
If you took a large column of air into space and shined white light through it, it would be blue.
The sky isn’t blue. It’s transparent. That’s why you can see stars that aren’t blue at night. When struck by sunlight at the right angles it appears blue, but saying it is blue is like saying the ocean is green when a bucket of it clearly isn’t.
Also, if you took a sufficiently large quantity of air and put it into empty space and shined very bright white through it, it would experience rayleigh scattering—-meaning that air, when you have enough of it and shine a bright enough light through it, is blue.
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until... """ “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?” My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder…
It also needs a bit of biology. Our eyes don't have a flat response over frequency, they're more sensitive to blue than violet. Violet gets scattered even more than blue, and the violet light does shift our perception of the color. But it does so less than it would if we had photoreceptors more sensitive to violet , so the resulting perceptual color depends not just on the intensity of the light at different frequenc…