Dr. Bob

Agreed. These are genuinely difficult problems that aren’t going to get solved by our current crop of silicon valley “geniuses”.

CRISPR is the closest we get It might be the honorary winner since it was wasn’t fully exploited until the 21st century, even though it was cloned and being used in the 90s.

We had a 3d printer in the 90s at my Uni. It built layers with laser cut paper lol. It was the cheapest version available and it lived in the engineering department for rapid prototyping. This link says they were invented in 1981, metal sintering was added in 1988 and fused filament in 1989. https://ultimaker.com/learn/the-complete-history-of-3d-printing

You’re not wrong. But there are counter examples. I was going to use the example of the jet engine in my last answer as a true paradigm shifting development that had immediate impact. And in the mid-century period too! Or the first powered flight occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and had an immediate impact. The transistor and solid state electronics would be another example.

So let me flip it around and say we’ve had a quarter century without a major technological breakthrough. There’s been progress, but it feels incremental. I spent a night with a physicist a few years ago who was arguing that progress is slowing because we are still relying on the exploitation of Newtonian physics. There are a few technologies that have made the leap to nuclear physics. But we’ve had the basics of quantum physics for a century now and haven’t been able to exploit it in a useful fashion.

OLEDs were built in 1987 I saw my first VR demonstration in the 90s (and it wasn’t cutting edge then). I saw my first AR demonstration then as well as part of an undergraduate engineering fair. And so on. I just looked up maglev trains - in commercial use since 1984.

I don’t disagree that there hasn’t been refinements, improvements, or commercialization of technology, but there hasn’t been a technological leap or invention that I can think of in the 21st century.

I’m genuinely not sure that anything has been invented in the 21st century.

Detachable penis if you’ve never heard the song.

But we had Dick Nixon, Dick Cavett, and Dick van Dyke during that period.And lots more. So I don’t think that’s it.

Penis.

Cauda

Penis is derived from the Latin for “tail”. As penis came to mean schlong over time, Latin switched to cauda. Dick only became a euphemism for the fuckstick in the 1980s. Why? I have no idea. But other proper names are/have been used including “Peter”, “Johnson”, and “John Thomas” that I can think of off the top of my head.

It’s a stupid meta-joke. The video is how to turn color illustrations into a moody B&W.

I will never not upvote Everett True.

There are layers of variability there that can’t be captured with a line plot. The data density is too high to even capture the decanal progression in a useful way, forget about monthly and annual variability . So no.

This is a really interesting visualization. I love the density of the data and the way it captures the year over year variability by month while allowing the annual variability to plainly stand out. This is really good.

That ain’t Boomer Humor. The oldest of them would be…4 years old then. It’s Greatest Generation humor. The ones whose work the Boomers killed.

Measure differences in what? We can’t ask *c. elegans * about it’s state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.

It’s an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.

A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”

The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”

The point of the analogy is not that one can’t get close enough so that the ear can’t detect a difference, it’s that in theory analog carries infinite information. It’s true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It’s also true for magnetic tape etc. But don’t mistake the metaphor for the idea.

Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it’s not your consciousness?

Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.

There’s an old joke about how long it takes to prepare a talk in academia. Want an hour? I can do it right now. 30 minute presentation? I’ll need a few weeks. 10 minute presentation? Better give me one or two month lead time.

God’s honest truth. 5 minutes of reading content gets stretched into 30 minutes of &$#@ video.