bfrs
Joined 15 years ago
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Comment · 13 years ago
a simple autostereogram:
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3
4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
5 5 5 5 5 5 5
6 6 6 6 6 6 6
7 7 7 7 7 7Comment · 13 years ago
If you are having trouble with this, wikipedia has some good instructions which helped me. First try autostereograms [1] (these are more simpler to see), and then simple random dot stereograms (RDS) [2], and finally magic eye static and moving stereograms.
BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!
Comment · 14 years ago
worth rewatching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrIrcV9Bgmc
Comment · 14 years ago
Vicarious (http://vicarious.com/) which recently got $15 million from Peter Thiel & Dustin Moscovitz would be a 9 on your scale.
Comment · 14 years ago
Here's a recent anecdote:
A few months back I got a stomach ulcer and before going to the doctor, I decided to do some research. I came to realize that the primary cause is not stress or excess spicy food, but a particular stomach bacteria, H. Pylori, going rogue and attacking the mucus lining of the stomach that protects underlying tissue from the strong acid [1]. For this discovery, Drs. Marshall and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel prize in medicine [2], as it meant that ulcers were curable with the use of suitable antibiotics.
However, my doctor (and good friend) insisted that there was no permanent cure for stomach ulcers and they could only be managed by taking acid reducing medication (Prilosec) everyday for as long as I lived. I couldn't help wondering if his information was corrupted by big pharma, who always want to keep you hooked onto some drug or the other. So, I had to use extra persuasion and tact to get him to prescribe antibiotics for H. Pylori elimination (and thus permanently curing the ulcer).
I'm a bit skeptical that big pharma's tentacles will NOT reach Watson's doctor successors [3].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptic_ulcer#History
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phys...
[3] http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_healthc...
Comment · 14 years ago
Looks like you are forgetting manual override.
Comment · 14 years ago
In winner-takes-all games, being even in the top 99th percentile is worse than useless.
To use your own example, true you might get better than half the regulars in basketball if you spent 1 hr a day at it, but you'd make exactly $0 being in the top 50th percentile of basketball players. You would be far better off if you had spent that 1 hr/day for a year on improving your coding skills further.
bfrs is now sort of like xkcd, meaningless. It was the first handle I came up with when HN asked for one. At that time, it stood for Ben-Franklin:Richard-Saunders (Franklin’s pen name). Ben "a dollar saved is a dollar earned" Franklin is the mascot of my passport photo web app (http://freepassportphoto.dyndns.org/).
gmail: bfrs1739