Would you copy your mind to a robotic body-double?
George Dvorsky, io9.comA central theme of the recently concluded GF2045 Congress was the idea of achieving a kind of immortality by transferring our minds to avatars or robots. Indeed, as Japanese professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s presentation clearly showed, our robotic…
This is what Rebecca and I are waiting for.
File this under “you think you know someone”. Dr. Taylor is the assistant director of the Famous Maroon Band, which I was a member of for 8 years and helped conduct for five of those years. I spent a lot of time with Dr. Taylor. He is a very nice, sensible, and intelligent person, but this dramatically lowers my opinion of him. I gave up counting the number of fallacious arguments he uses, so I simply present it as is.
This series is a continuation of my conversations with an atheist friend of mine. These are my edited responses from that conversation. The forty-sixth through fiftieth entries deal with introversion/extroversion, social interaction and popularity.
Before we talked about what makes someone popular, and I entertained everyone with how I view myself in social interactions. In this closing chapter of the popularity series I take one last look at how I view myself in social situations, specifically how I view myself as an introvert.
I am definitely a introvert when it comes to spontaneous functions. I must know in advance that something is going to happen or I just won’t go to it. Impromptu events make me nervous and uneasy, which is classic introvert behavior. I can’t just have people over; it must be planned at least multiple hours in advance and preferably days. If it is 11:30 and I’m invited to lunch I usually decline, even if I might want to go otherwise. Being confined by my personality is somewhat annoying, but it means decisions are sometimes already made before I’m even confronted with them. It makes life much easier, and I’m all about that.
I’ve written on this before, but I’ll say it again. When I first meet a group of people I’m very shy. I hate meeting new people, not because I don’t like people, but because I don’t know how to act. It takes me some amount of time to get used to the group so that I know that they accept my level of awkwardness. After the initial trial period I go through I open up pretty quickly. As a consequence of my delayed release extroversion I hate interacting with strangers or making small talk with acquaintances. Of all the social interactions I dread it is being thrown into an icebreaker type of situation with people that I’m never going to interact with again; that fills me with the most dread. I’d rather sit in a corner and people watch than be forced to get to know people with whom I’ll never have a relationship. Unfortunately people watching has become associated with being a creeper or being just plain weird. That’s a darn shame. People I don’t know are interesting when I don’t have to talk to them. (Rereading that, that sounds terrible, but I’m not going to delete it.)
Closing this chapter of the series I have to say that people are interesting to me but I certainly don’t completely understand how to act around them.
Next time we begin a whole new chapter on overpopulation.
I know that most people are freaking out about iOS 7, but I’m more excited about Mavericks, the new OS X release (stupid name, I know). There are going to be some really exciting features that are going to change how I work with the OS. The full support of multiple screens is awesome. I’ll definitely be buying a second monitor once the OS is out. Tags sound very convenient, and tabs for the Finder is something we’ve needed for a decade. I’m looking forward to the next ten years. I’m hopeful that Mavericks is just the first step in a long line of new features.
iOS 7 looks amazing. It isn’t as rich a feature set update as I wanted, but I was expecting almost no new features and simply a skin change. Thus, I’m satisfied. Calling it beautiful is a bit of an understatement. I hated skewmorphic design, so what they have done is amazing. The new gestures are really going to help with navigation. Overall, I would agree that recently Android got ahead of iOS feature while, but now iOS has caught back up and set a new bar of excellence.
I’m pretty excited. The next big things I expect for the rest of the year are touchscreen computers. Also, since they introduced parallax into iOS 7, I think that sort of wizardry like that will be incorporated into OS X.
If I can afford it, I’m buying a Mac Pro.
This has been hashed out many times, but it cannot be repeated enough. Funding the sciences funds the country.
This article talks about social security not being enough for people with even $1 million retirement account to draw down. That seems so greedy to me. The benefit for a 66 retiree is $31,000 a year from social security alone. That’s $7,000 more a year than what I make working as a research assistant. I pay a mortgage and have money left over. What are you people doing with all of this money?
I’m rather concerned about this. I also agree with the NYT that the president has lost all credibility on this issue. I just don’t trust him anymore of any sort of spying issue. I wouldn’t say he is lying to us (unless you call lies of omission actual lies), but he is walking a very thin line. And I don’t know that the administration hasn’t crossed it already.
I want a Waffle House in College Station so badly. IHOP is just so terrible and expensive.
