SCIENCE and things like that

[GreenGoo]

The real crime is how these billionaires achieved their billions. It's possible some of them earned their money through smart and ethical behaviour, but most, including Gates, have done things that Smoove or any federal employee would be immediately fired for.

The point being, it's super easy to be a philanthropist after you've squeezed billions out of society first. I don't have any opinion about the video in question. In fact I haven't bothered to watch it, but defending Gates seems misplaced.

In any case, I can't bring myself to care much about potentially unfair criticism directed at billionaires. They seem to be doing alright in any case.

[Jaymann]

My favorite part was when she initially read Atlas Shrugged she considered it satire.

[LordMortis]

My favorite part was when she initially read Atlas Shrugged she considered it satire.

Mine too.

[disarm]

The real crime is how these billionaires achieved their billions. It's possible some of them earned their money through smart and ethical behaviour, but most, including Gates, have done things that Smoove or any federal employee would be immediately fired for.

The point being, it's super easy to be a philanthropist after you've squeezed billions out of society first. I don't have any opinion about the video in question. In fact I haven't bothered to watch it, but defending Gates seems misplaced.

I only 'defend' Gates because he's one whose current behavior I actually know a little about.

If you watch the video, you would see that she's someone who is taking a lot of comments by billionaires out of context just to make her own angry point. For example, she shows multiple clips of Bill Gates with a woman who is clearly a math savant and they're being asked to solve large-number math problems quickly in their head. The woman comes up with the answer almost instantly and Gates just stands there saying "You're right" or "That's it!" like he knew the answer just as quickly and is confirming. When I watch the clip, I see him trying to be funny because he clearly can't do what she can, but that woman (and a lot of people commenting on the video) treat it like he's seriously trying to fake knowing the answers and be a jerk.

I won't deny that Gates and others have done some pretty ruthless things to get where they are now, but that doesn't negate more positive behavior now. Success, money and fame can sometimes change people for the better (or not in the case of a certain richest man in the world).

[GreenGoo]

Ok.

[Kraken]

Have you ever wished your electronics could perform at the speed of thought? Maybe reconsider that. Human thought is far slower than your internet connection.

In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.

Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 25 million bps. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps.

Now researchers have estimated the speed of information flow in the human brain: just 10 bps. They titled their study, published this month in the journal Neuron, “The unbearable slowness of being.”

“It’s a bit of a counterweight to the endless hyperbole about how incredibly complex and powerful the human brain is,” said Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the study. “If you actually try to put numbers to it, we are incredibly slow.”
...
In 2018, a team of researchers in Finland analyzed 136 million keystrokes made by 168,000 volunteers. They found that, on average, people typed 51 words a minute. A small fraction typed 120 words a minute or more. Dr. Meister and his graduate student, Jieyu Zheng, used a branch of mathematics known as information theory to estimate the flow of information required to type. At 120 words a minute, the flow is only 10 bits a second.

“I was thinking, of course there must be faster behaviors,” Ms. Zheng recalled. She suspected that championship videogame players might have a higher information flow when they are competing. “You can look at them on YouTube, and their fingers are so fast that they’re just blurred on the videos.”

Though gamers move their fingers quickly, they have fewer keys to choose from than a typist does. And so, when Ms. Zheng took a close look at the performance of gamers, she ended up with the same estimate for their rate of information: 10 bits per second.

Counterpoint:

Britton Sauerbrei, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University who was not involved in the new study, questioned whether Dr. Meister and Ms. Zheng had fully captured the flow of information in our nervous system. They left out the unconscious signals that our bodies use to stand, walk or recover from a trip. If those were included, “you’re going to end up with a vastly higher bit rate,” he said.

But when it comes to conscious tasks and memories, Dr. Sauerbrei said, he was convinced that very little information flows through the brain. “I think their argument is pretty airtight,” he said.

[Jaymann]

But we run circles around computers when it comes to choosing which pictures have a traffic light in them.

[Kraken]

But we run circles around computers when it comes to choosing which pictures have a traffic light in them.

Speak for yourself. I usually fail CAPTCHAs on the first try. There's a nonzero chance that I'm a robot.