eliazar 's Public Library

Today, I see young people sabotaging themselves all the time by being cheap about the wrong things. "I'm not going to buy that book! It costs $27.95!" they say, not realizing that the book could inspire them to do something that would make them $10,000. That's a 357x return. Or, "I'm not going to spend $15.00 on the more expensive cellphone plan--that's ridiculous!" No, what's ridiculous is you then not monitoring your usage and ending up spending $58.00 in overage fees in one month.

"But Ramit," you might say, hiding behind a wall because of the mallet I am holding on this angry Tuesday, "how do I know that $30 book will pay off? What if I don't get anything from it?" Jesus Christ, you don't know! That's called taking a risk! Unfortunately, I see a lot of people nickel-and-diming the really important things that could pay off explosively.

Trucking companies are using virtual-reality simulators around the country to train drivers before they take their driving tests.

The virtual cab, which in some cases is attached to a motion platform, enables drivers to practice turning, parking and docking and puts them through driving scenarios in cities, the suburbs and rural areas, said Ron Tarr, a program director at the Institute for Simulation & Training at the University of Central Florida, who has designed applications for the simulators.

Since the technology was rolled out two years ago, more than 450 drivers have used it, at truck depots in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. In some cases the virtual reality is a little too real. Some drivers get carsick.

Werner Enterprises, an Omaha, Nebraska-based trucking company with 12,000 drivers, sends 30 drivers through a simulator each week to improve their skills. In the simulator, winds blow hard, ice and snow fall, accidents happen and deer run across the highway.

"The drivers love it," said Della Sanders, the company's vice president of safety compliance. "A truck will pass on the other road and they'll wave at them."

AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

 

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This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Terry Semel has come full circle -- and not in a good way. When he took over Yahoo in 2001, he was laughed at for being a technological neophyte. But the new CEO quickly silenced his doubters, streamlining the management structure, making savvy deals and acquisitions, and improving the company's image, earnings, and stock price.

Indeed, Semel has run the company like a souped-up movie studio: Find stars -- be they actors or engineers -- and use them to make content that people want to watch or use. Once you have the content -- whether it's movies and TV shows or tools like email, search, and news -- you sell it directly or sell advertising against it. His view of Yahoo's culture has always been that technology is an important thing but not the only thing. "Growing up, I didn't know how a television worked," he likes to quip. "I just knew you hit On." For all but the geekiest of geeks, that's a line that resonates. Most people can't explain how a TV works, but they understand how much pleasure and value they get from it.

Female guppies, quail and finches tend to mate with males that look like the males they have seen other females paired with. Such “mate choice copying” can pay off. If it is difficult to choose the best mating material, or takes a lot of time and energy, it makes sense to go with what works for the other girls.

Yet although human mate selection suffers just such difficulties, there has been little evidence that women do this, until now.

Ben Jones at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and colleagues, showed 28 men and 28 women pairs of male faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photos had been already been rated by 40 women as of about equal attractiveness.

Striking difference

The researchers then showed the same faces alongside a third photo of a female face in profile, positioned so she was looking at one of them, and smiling – or not. The viewers were asked to grade the faces again.

Women found the men who were being smiled at suddenly more attractive, while men who apparently elicited no such smiling approval were pronounced less attractive.

Men, meanwhile, behaved in a strikingly different manner. They rated men who had been smiled at as less attractive. ”Within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,” the researchers conclude.

 The tension between the optimists and the pessimists concerning Moore's Law largely seems to revolve around whether an individual sides with engineers or with the laws of physics. Physics dictates that transistors can only get so small. (Shrinking transistors is the principal mechanism for doubling the population on a piece of silicon.) Engineers, though, have typically found workarounds. 

 "I remember thinking 1 micron (a milestone the industry blew past in 1986) was as far as we could go" because of the wavelength of visible light used at the time, Moore said. Engineers then switched to ultraviolet light.  

 Progress was then supposed to stop at 0.25 microns, but it didn't. Now, the lines drawn on chips are smaller than the wavelengths of light used to draw them, which Moore likened to "breaking the laws of physics."

 Moore's Law--which states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years--has been the guiding principle of progress in electronics and computing since Moore first formulated the famous dictum in 1965. And, for the same amount of time, people have predicted it would hit a wall. 

 So far it hasn't, meaning chips and computers have become simultaneously more powerful and less expensive. The number of transistors produced annually is now roughly equal to the number of letters and/or characters printed annually--and they cost about the same to produce, Moore noted. The amount of transistors produced each year outnumbers the worldwide ant population by 10 to 100 times.

 Moore's Law, after all, is not a law of physics. It is merely an uncannily accurate observation on what electrical engineers, when organized properly, can do with silicon. Companies that can keep their tech teams humming will reap profits and power. Those that can't will fade away.

"For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce."

At the idea of a pharmatronic, Pajitnov laughs. "Many people say that, but my feeling is it's more like music. Playing games is a very specific rhythmic and visual pleasure. For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can't stop."   

   This is true - I couldn't stop - but I was still mystified as to how Tetris slyly manages to interface with the neural net in the human skull. At the University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Richard Haier did the demystifying. In 1991, Haier scanned the brains of Tetris players.   

   In Tetris, Haier sees "a tremendous learning curve. The question became: When the stimuli are faster and the decision making is harder, does the brain require more energy?" Haier found, as he suspected, that the brain requires less energy to play higher levels of Tetris. This is "counterintuitive," he says, "but consistent with a brain efficiency idea."