Back then I wasn't reading Asimov yet, just a child and so young that I still thought everyone had enough new ideas every single day to pick any day and it could take a lifetime to explore.
>I here assume that Rumford's directions for the construction of kitchen fireplaces and economy of fuel are carried out. We are in these matters still a century behind his arrangements of 1790, and nothing short of a coal-famine will punish and cure our criminal extravagance.
Looks like for quite some time the high energy density of fossil fuel exacerbates the amount of energy wasted.
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
To fully function within the system you need to be a corporation your dang self.
That doesn't mean you have to be a capital corporation, you can go forward without any of Other Peoples' Money and therefore not be an actual capitalist yourself. Even if you make more money per invested dollar that alone does not make you a capitalist, regardless of how much true capitalists can admire the returns. Without capital you would be merely an entrepreneur, sometimes that's a better choice, sometimes not.
Beyond that you still need to function in a capitalist market either way, no matter what because that's what dominates.
Which could be overwhelming too, and the kind of thing that would make a promising alternative seem very attractive also :\
The system is so totally dominated that you can't enumerate anything that is not . . . corporate-controlled.
That's creative and could probably be crafted so it turns out better than it is now.
OTOH how about commercial websites paying ISPs for access to the ISP's valuable customers' eyeballs?
And structuring it so that it more than covers everything, then the ISPs can pay the non-commercial websites to be there. If nothing else but to have an abundance of relief for tired eyeballs :)
If the average commercial websites aren't rolling in the dough well enough to afford supporting the non-commerical, what are they doing there anyway, find some that are ;)
So many people tend to forget what made the internet great.
>The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads
Roger.
I guess you had to be there, either that or have above-average powers of observation, but That's. The. Foundation. Of. The. Internet.
And that's how "doesn't suck" has always been defined, except for people who are just trying to make shit up that is quite a bit removed from reality. Now I've accepted ads when I feel like it although lots of times I prefer none, regardless commercial websites have always been less worthwhile than non-commercial, it's not like there's any question. This was settled way before the 1990s were over.
I know perfection can not be achieved and I settle for less as much as anybody, plus "absolutely doesn't suck" may not be reached either but it is not a movable goalpost, more like a brick wall where the closer you get the better. If you are willing and able you might be able to do an outstanding job. Otherwise you're going to end up some distance away on the spectrum of "sucks more than it should."
You were always already paying plenty to your ISP, and last time I checked you still are.
Anything less has always been less than the whole internet you were paying for.
People in many kinds of situations should read this and see how much of it applies to completely different things besides media capital allocation.
For instance I'm not a capitalist (just an entrepreneur) simply because I don't have a habit of leveraging other peoples' money, i.e. I have no capital and you can't be a capitalist without capital :)
I still end up getting involved with artist rights but so far as an amateur effort I negotiate directly with the artists and there is no capital involved.
So I was naturally interested, and among the Nobel Prize-winning philosophies you present I was pleasantly surprised to find I can correlate so many of your paragraphs very closely to my professional scientific work, not only as an employee but also after I incorporated my own ideas into a business structure based mainly on my own experiments decades ago.
That's way different than the film business :)
Now I'm coming out of retirement to take a different place in the same food chain that is still neglected more than most things I've seen recently.
There's a continuity among diverse businesses sometimes where a thread runs between single-handed consulting and multi-national (or Hollywood) scale. And can tie loose things together like nobody was doing for who knows what reason.
I found the deficiency that bothered me most was the analog portion of the ADC. Once that has muddled through the capture process there's not much that can be done regardless of DAC upon playback.
Besides that, the original engineers, working closely with the classic rock musicians (or scrutinizing conductor) during the original recording & mastering of their potential smash hit record, were probably paid about 10x relative to a digital mastering re-engineer decades later. Or if the artists were not established hitmakers, worked about 10x as hard to try and make it come true. Sometimes both, since you need to improve the odds all you can technically if you want to better leverage the fundamental popularity contest.
Naturally the analog section on playback can also be a nasty issue for both digital and vinyl sources.
I think we're all aware of the number of vehicles out there having the strongly reinforced solid hardtop plus the heavy-duty luggage rack, who never seem to be carrying any luggage up there. Obviously to mitigate a potentially more damaging brontosaurus incident.
