“You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.”
“Er, five,” said the mattress.
“Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
For me, the Apple Watch is about reducing notifications to mere glances at my wrist. That instead of interrupting what I’m doing to pull my phone out of my pocket I can at a glance categorize what, if anything, I need to do in response to that notification. That and always accurate time to me was worth getting a watch. I upgraded from a series 3 to a series 6 when the sensor tech advanced enough to convince me to update. The 9 has some new stuff, but not enough to convince me to upgrade.
That looks like a type of Thin film interference, like you’d see on an oil slick or a soap bubble. Wikipedia says:
Thin-film interference is a natural phenomenon in which light waves reflected by the upper and lower boundaries of a thin film interfere with one another, either enhancing or reducing the reflected light.
I’d guess the display uses a thin film on one of its layers causing this rainbow interference pattern that shifts depending on viewing angle.
It really is that old. According to their Supreme Court amicus brief: “Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.” Seriously though, read that brief. It’s a masterful piece of satire.
Quern - Undying Thoughts tickled that genre for me. As did Haven Moon and The Eyes of Ara.
What are your underlying models of the world built out of?
As a Bayesian, my models of the world are built on priors. That is, assumptions I’ve made based on my existing information. From that, I make an educated guess about the world with that model and see what the world does. If my guess doesn’t match reality, I update my assumptions to rebuild my model and repeat the process until it’s close enough.
This is the way the best science is done, and I fell it’s the way that humans really work. Language is just a type of model we use to communicate the world to others, each of us may have a slightly different Bayesian understanding of the language yet we can still communicate.
The game went to no monthly fees a long time ago. They only charge for new accounts and characters. If you have an old account you can just log in and play. There’s a player run news and link site here, that has a link to ‘Clieunk’, a client for modern macs and news since 2001. Though we haven’t always been the best at sending in news.
Clan Lord. It’s a place that’s special in my heart. I’ve been playing on and off since 2001.
Universal Paperclips, mentioned in the book, is a journey. What starts as a clicker game turns into so much more. It’s a free browser game, but in that old-time sense of freeware.
It’s just so heartwarmingly cute.