hah, technologies always seem obvious after they are created! Certainly an iphone like device was eventually inevitable - most inventions are. But Apple introduced it with a speed and quality that the rest of the industry would likely have taken many years, perhaps even a decade to innovate without Apple leading the way.
I am not sure how helpful most of these supplements really are. I'm more into exercising and "eating food, mostly plants, not too much". Beyond that, is there really that much that supplements can do?
Do you believe in eschewing certain foods and favoring other foods because of their health benefits? I don't see it as a huge leap in logic to believe that certain supplements - properly prepared, packaged, and delivered into the body - can confer similar health benefits.
I disagree. Outside of a few specific situations (folic acid for pregnant women, etc.), most first world people satisfy their nutritional requirements. Micronutrients aren't a "if a little is good, a lot is better" situation. Once you meet your daily requirement, you're just passing most of what you take.
Further, of all the science done on CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicines), only a couple of studies have shown a positive impact.
I don't doubt Kurzweil is a smart guy. However, there are plenty of smart people who have had theories like this. Eg., Linus Pauling and Vitamin C megadose theory. (see wiki for more info).
It may not seem like there's a stretch. But your perception of the logical continuum doesn't really matter. Most supplements are nothing more than snake oil. (Again, assuming you have an otherwise balanced diet).
Also, you have a fallacy -- eschewing certain foods is removing potentially harmful nutrients from your diet. Why would it logically follow that adding something would necessarily confer a health benefit?
I never said removing something from your diet is equivalent to adding something else. Nor did I propose "if a little is good, a lot is better".
I did say this: If the consumption of a particular food can be shown to have a net positive impact on one's health and longevity, and the properties that generate that positive impact can be distilled and consumed, it behooves us to do so.
Well, you said, "Do you believe in eschewing certain foods...because of their health benefits?" Then went on to state how it wasn't a huge leap to go from that to health benefits. I was just pointing out the logical inconsistency (irrespective of the CAM/supplement issue).
The evidence I have seen overwhelmingly states that taking supplements has little to no measurable effect in people with a sufficient diet. The reason that I wouldn't add it to my diet is the same reason that I don't take oxygen supplements -- as long as you generally have enough oxygen, there's just not a whole lot of evidence that you need MORE.
So, youre right -- chances are that there's not reason to NOT take them. But there's not really a reason to take supplements, unless you've identified yourself in an at-risk population. But those groups are few and far between compared to the number of people who take nutritional supplements.
Then again, I'd rather save my money than buy the modern equivalent of snake oil tonics.
The "eating foods, mostly plants, not too much" is a Michael Pollan line. One of Pollan's many points is that there is quite a bit of difficulty in separating out the good stuff from the bad stuff in foods due to chemical interactions.
His general reasoning is along the lines of "There are x thousand different chemical compounds in an orange, it's very difficult to say, well it's the Vitamin C that's the important one." (scurvy notwithstanding)
A good example of something like that is B12 and Iron Deficiency. You can be ingesting a good amount of Iron supplements but not have your actual Iron levels increase much if you lack B12.
That's not to say that there aren't some pretty clear wins (Vitamin D comes to mind) from taking supplements, just that the actual benefits are often less clear than some of the literature would state.
The article doesn't mention MIT, but it does mention other efforts such as Mathletics. What makes Khan Academy and Mathletics stand out from MIT is that they are MUCH more than just a collection of videos. Khan and Mathletics increasingly represent entire ecosystems with points systems, competitions, tracking of your performance, and so on. That is why Khan exemplifies the future of education vs simple collections of videos like MIT.
MIT's Open CourseWare project or OCW can hardly be described as a simple collection of videos. Each and every course at MIT has put up all their educational documents including slides, exercises, tests, audio, video, schedules etc for free. Many courses also include video and other multimedia artefacts.
The key differentiator is that these are aimed at under-grad and grad students and are simple conversion of what happens in a course, where the internet is only incidental.
Khan Academy videos are aimed primarily at school students and are much shorter, more focused and completely based on the internet. The tests are geared for online testing, the metrics collected are then displayed online etc.
> Each and every course at MIT has put up all their educational documents including slides, exercises, tests, audio, video, schedules etc for free. Many courses also include video and other multimedia artefacts.
Just to prevent readers from taking that statement literally, only a small minority of courses offer all these materials. (e.g., see [1]--you can see by the icons on the left which materials are available for which courses.) Most only offer lecture notes, and even those are generally very incomplete.
What MIT has done with OCW is outstanding, and I personally have learned a lot from many courses already, but they still have quite a ways to go to meet such a comprehensive claim. More funding and enthusiasm for the effort is still very much needed.
Just as an additional note, MIT came up with a set of OCWs for introductory courses back in January that are specifically intended for independent learners (IIRC, one of the MIT's original aims for the OCW project was to provide materials for educators rather than learners). These 'OCW Scholar' courses contain complete course material, and I'm guessing we'll have more of these as time progresses.
The writer doesn't have anything mixed up. Most of the chips were large value denominated and hence nearly all of the stolen chips were worthless the moment the thief walked out the door.
Also, the article is not claiming the thief was captured because of the RFID. The article is simply highlighting how the RFIDs in the chips foiled the thief by making the chips worthless almost immediately, and then goes on to highlight how RFIDs within chips are enabling casino operators to track user behavior in new and novel ways. The focus of the story is not that RFID was used to catch the bad guy, rather the focus is on how RFID tech within these chips has changed casino operation, from user tracking, to "turning off" stolen chips on demand.
What do you consider "large value denominated" and where did find out what the breakdown was? In my book "large value" in a 1.5 mil heist would be $5,000 and higher. My guess would be that most chips were $100, $500 and $1,000 chips. But AFAIK, Bellagio hasn't released any of that information.
The fifth sentence of the first paragraph of the linked article is "Thanks to RFID tags embedded inside them, the chips with denominations of $100 to $25,000 could be immediately deactivated rendering them unredeemable for cash value."
I think that is pretty short sighted of you. The applications for this stuff expand way beyond simply linking to your facebook profile. Especially from a marketing perspective, these codes seem to have real potential for promotions, etc.
The codes themselves are cool, I've got some idea for projects using them. Sticking them on t-shirts is a novelty though. Sticking them on business cards I'm also not quite sold on, the benefit over a short url eludes.
Not every website has a short URL, especially if you wanted to link to, say, an individual employees page in the middle of a site. Also, relying on a URL shortening service introduces the problem of link rot. Lastly, I think the novelty of simply taking a picture of a QR code and being instantly taken to a site rather than typing out a URL makes them more likely to be used. It's still a good idea to include a URL, but a QR code could certainly have some additional benefit.
As you say, it's the novelty of taking a picture of a QR code to go to website.
The long URL problem can be solved without URL shortener, just make your urls shorter :)
I'm really not arguing that the idea of using QR codes to indicate URLs (or, more interestingly, for other things) is totally without merit. Just that current usages seem to be mere novelties to me.
Actually, I feel there's one other non-novelty use of QR codes: Android apps. Most sites with Android apps have a QR code to the market in them. If you're browsing on a computer/laptop/not your phone, you can just point your phone at the screen and be taken instantly to the app's Market page. It's a case where the URL problem can't be handled by teh user, and where typing in a URL seems odd.
I agree that QR codes aren't fully useful, but I have seen some decent use of them. They certainly have more potential in my opinion, although the augmented reality demos of them I've seen are pretty cool.
