The parent believes there's parallels between the demography-driven expansion of radical Islamism in certain countries (I'm guessing in Europe, although he didn't specify) and and the demography-driven expansion of Mexican nationalism in the American Southwest.
I meant to remove it, it's a distraction. There are Mexican political groups who advocate for a similar policy to regain control of many western states, who they believe were unjustly ceded from Mexico.
These folks are very much in the fringe, and I shouldn't have mentioned it,
I think is a great article because it provides the perspective of an "outsider". It was pretty refreshing to read the ideas of somebody trying to get into the software business. What makes it more interesting is that it is a sales person, the type of people that many coders dislike because they kick our butt in, well, selling ourselves.
Many times sales people do better then engineers in a big company because they are better able to impress people and forge political alliances. Note that I also think that a sales person is closely related to a business person. If you've ever been to a large corporation, many times the engineering offices are some of the crappiest while the business offices are some of the nicest.
yes, in fact I think this is the perfect time for it. Google has hit a wall. It has not really gotten that much better in years.
Any new player cannot be just as good as google. It must be much better than google. If you manage to build something that is objectively better you can expect investors to shower you with money. Would not be surprised if google, facebook, MS would enter a bidding war to buy you. Don't know if Apple would be interested though.
The only way google can improve search is to drastically change their search algorithms. Perhaps throw away whatever they are doing right now and approach it from a new direction. This is the opening I believe new players have. A new approach to search, like contextual search will probably be enough to seriously threaten google.
I think human powered search could be achieved by Google. All they need to do is track our clicks on the serps and interpret which sites are good. Rotate all sorts of sites in the serps and gradually build a database. The whole thing would be like a wiki, with everyone contributing a little, and benefitting from the whole. The only way to accurately beat spam and low quality is to use human feedback. They probably do use human feedback already, just in a different way.
I'm wondering if reddit and Facebook could use this approach to build search engines. They do have large databases of human preferences.
The machine learning (AI) approach:
Another idea would be to distill information from the web Watson-style and try to answer many questions directly instead of redirecting to external pages. So far Siri, Watson, Wolfram Alpha are ahead in this field.
Thank you for this. Even though I consider myself pretty average now you've made me feel like I have some secret power. It helps a lot when I visualize things. Also, writing ideas out in a narrative also helps. So, I guess I can do both. Genius Here!!! (Standing up, wide eyed, looking proud with an idiotic smile)
p.s. I don't actually believe that you cannot visualize images. Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it.
p.s I guess inability to visualize something could be something similar to dyslexia?
It's frustrating when people suggest I can visualize and just don't know it. The way one thinks is the most first-personally obvious thing in the world, and I've been sore about the way I do it since I was in elementary school wanting to imagine strawberries to count with.
Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.
"Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it."
Yes I can draw a stick figure. I'm not an idiot, and nothing pops into my head other than the sound of the word and some xkcd affect.
Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker? Imagine a flower -- ok, which, a rose or a marigold? Do you decide or does it just happen? How many different flowers can you visualize, and how quickly? Do they appear embedded in soil or just floating free? How many different varieties can you see at once? What prevents you from seeing more?
Re: dyslexia -- I drew this link too, as I have very mild dyslexia. My father is profoundly dyslexic but claims vivid imagery.
Well, for me imagining a tiger is basically recalling what it's like to look at a tiger (or picture of a tiger). I can have a photo of a tiger right in front of me, and know it's a tiger, yet not know how many stripes it has without counting. I might also not notice how the back paws look if I'm focusing on the front paws. Same thing when it's in my head (except less consistent, since it's just a memory).
> how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker?
This is no different from other senses. If I tell you to imagine the smell of soup, do you smell minestrone or pho? (Have you cooked those dishes? When you smell soup, can you tell what spices are in it?) If I tell you to imagine the sound of a violin, is it a six year old scratching away or Yehudi Menuhin playing a Beethoven concerto? (Depending on your musical training/listening habits, you may be able to imagine a concerto all the way through, or maybe just fragments of it?)
The interesting thing is, at one point I thought, like you, that I couldn't think visually. I tried practicing it, and either that worked or I adjusted my definition of visual thinking (or a bit of both), because I definitely consider myself at least partly a visual thinker now, and it's difficult to imagine it any other way. I've noticed that my visualization ability is sensitive to how much sleep I get though.
If you can think of chocolate, but not how it tastes, how it feels in your mouth, what a square looks like, what sound it makes when you bite into it ... maybe you just need to pay more attention the next time you eat chocolate :) And my ability to imagine other things - like music or food - depends strongly on how much time I spend on such things.
I appreciate the vividness of your minestrone, pho and chocolate examples, but I can't seem to do what you describe. I can't imagine smells or tastes -- both are as foreign as the visual modality (though much less missed). When I read the example I hear the words "imagine the smell of soup" I simply hear (in my head) my voice say the word 'soup', then, when asked to elaborate 'minestrone - pho' -- more words. I can sit with my eyes closed for the rest of the afternoon but the thoughts go no deeper, or I can silently direct my attention at the memory of the last auditory image, or repeat 'pho' in my head, or say something like 'curly noodles, light broth, deep green basil' and list off favorite attributes of pho, but it's low bandwidth audio and not cumulative in the way my dreamed pictorial representations are.
With respect to music, I can occasionally imagine a few concertos most of the way through in rich detail, but more often just in detailed fragments. I don't seem to have much control over how it sounds, what it is (usually Beethoven or BWV 1004), or when I can do it. I listen to a hundred contemporary songs for every one classical and I can't so much as summon the tunes or lyrics of any of them. Truth be told I don't listen to much music as I find it impossible to think while doing so, as if it's all on the same metaphorical channel.
edit: on the tiger, I'm not expecting the person to solve the speckled hen problem. People with stable mental images can count the stripes off the picture, none should simply "know" how many are there. Some believe (until confronted with such a challenge) they think in fuller, richer pictures than they actually do.
It sounds :-) like you may have more sensory representation than me - as you have some auditory representations.
I remember emotions but I don't remember my bodily sensations.
With regard visual images (in response to words) it is like part of my brain sees it but I have no conscious access.
However, I have had one intense conscious dream where in that dream at least I had full sensory representation in every dimension. It was wonderful! I remember playing with my dreamscape and transforming things visually before I woke up...and so I - at least - have some idea of what being able to visualise means to others
Are you saying you can't hallucinataste chocolate? The soft melting of a piece of milka, the soft stickiness of your tongue against your teeth, the feeling in your throat, and of course, the sweet cacao taste on your tongue? I don't know why, but if I think really hard about it, I can actually vividly imagine the experience of eating chocolate, but I can't have any other flavour in my mouth at that time. I can mix it with other imaginary flavours though, which is why i roughly know how a sauerkraut hot dog tastes despite not having eaten one ever. (Sauerkraut ufm wurstbrötl? Sapperlot no ma!)
One really curious thing that happens to me though is that when I smoke and smoke gets into my nose, the burn in my nose might trigger one of my taste memories, leading to me tasting some random thing in my mouth, from Apple Juice to seared steak. I do get some weird stares though when I suddenly say that taste out loud.
>>>Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.<<<
I'm not a freaking computer.
"imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter"
You might as well tell me to add 182748+37638373 in my head. The reason I cannot do this is that it requires short term memory and I don't have much of it. I can only remember four, five, maybe even six number in a row at a time in short term memory. You giving me a bunch of instructions to visualize exceeds my short term memory so I cannot do it. In other words, I'm not a computer, neither are you.
>>>Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in.
Well if nothing pops into your head then I guess you really cannot visualize. The stick figure is usually standing up straight.
Is great that you at least admit that your problem is part laziness. I'm sure ADHD must be true for some people but I wonder if too many use it as an excuse for their failures.
<half-joking>Even I've wondered if maybe I suffer from ADHD since is really hard to keep my attention on a project past the prototype stage. That is, once the last 10% starts. </half-joking> All joking aside, it feels almost like pulling teeth when working on that last 10%. Don't really know how to fix it other than to just force myself to keep at it.
Well, at least in my case, they're pretty closely related. It's complicated, and rather hard to explain, but I might say I'm addicted to distraction. It's very hard for me to do something I don't get any stimulation out of.
Why should Tesla do all the work for all the other car manufacturers. They have a lot more money and yet they do nothing. I say fuck them. Tesla is doing the right thing. It is picking a battle that has a chance of succeeding.
You are preaching to the quire. I do not disagree with you. Also, we should have world peace, nobody should die of hunger. etc. etc. Is easy to talk idealistically but the reality is that Tesla cannot change the status quo on its own and you saying all or nothing is not constructive at all.
Because, it is at moments like these where new things happen, that old rules have a shot of changing. Everything that lasts is "idealistic", but people settle for "me" and deviate into hyperbole because its easier.
Huh? Care to explain how did Mexico come into the picture when talking about Al-Qaeda?