On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins offers that the mind is a prediction machine. We predict. We predict more than you may think.
Bayes' Theorem is Nate Silver's key to managing predictions.
Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio talks about how homeostasis comes about and how predictions are essential. The brain began to predict "good" by sensing the molecules like dopamine or oxytocin. Three very enlightening and enjoyable books
"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In the 1870's the legendary steel driver, John Henry, took on the machine in the form of a steam powered hammer. He won, but at what cost. Fast forward to the late 1990's where one Grand Master of Chess, Gary Kasparov takes on the culmination of hundreds of thousands of man hours in brain power are compressed into a single machine -- IBM's Deep Blue.
IBM's Deep Blue defeats Chess Champion Gary Kasparov. Nate Silver has a wonderful discussion of the match in his book, The Signal and the Noise. What do intelligent men do well, what do computers do well, where is one better than the other. Brute force it what the computer does better than any man, yet is that enough to win at chess. Yet, as pointed out in Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, the Chess Master isn't better at memorizing the individual pieces on a board, the Chess Master is memorized a huge collection of patterns. And he know the significance of each pattern. Twitter: Joshua Foer @joshuafoerNate Silver @fivethirtyeight
Bob Dylan thought "Times, they are a changing" back in the 60's. If he were alive today, what would he think about the robotic technology in today's manufacturing. Okay, so he is alive, but that's not the point.
Phrases like "3D Printing" are all the buzz now. WorldSkills International hosts an Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies contest to highlight the State-of-the-Arts in this field.
For an in-depth look, catch Russ Robert's interview with former Editor of Wired and current CEO of DIY Drones, Chris Anderson, on Makers and Manufacturing.
For the price, the OptiShot by Dancin' Dogg appears to be the best quality simulator with budget pricing. Would be curious to hear if anyone has actually used the OptiShot or other golf simulators. The demo below looks interesting.
Reviews of the OptiShot appear positive in general:
The web is your own personal database. All the information is out there, you simply need an efficient way to access it. YQL is the Yahoo Query Language and goes a long way toward bring your data directly to you in a well structured format.
So how do you get started in YQL and do you need to be a programmer? Let's start here: try grabbing some stock quotes. Sure, it looks a little imposing with angle brackets and keyword tags, but play around with it -- test it, give it a go.
Yes, the data is out there and someone might already have your data in a YQL table -- check it out.
The old way of downloading web information used what is called a screen scrapper or some other form of parsing the HTML from a web page. The problem here, if the web page changes, the data access is broken. Or you could grab a spreadsheet like format, like the Yahoo stock quotes in CSV format and use a programming environment like the Windows .NET framework to parse the data in a proprietary fashion.
Now you can get the stock data using a standard YQL approach.
It is hard to imagine what our potential can NOT be!
The Maximise Potential Podcast delves into the lives and practices of individuals attempting unique feats or accomplishments. It should be obvious from the spelling that this is a British podcast. The Warrior Mind Podcast addresses the "How" of our potential.
Always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.
-- Og Mandino
What makes us healthy, wealthy and wise?
The Harvard Grant Study - 70 Years of Research on a group of young men of the 1940's. The study provided psychologist with a large body of individualized data over a wide range of years. A similar database involves the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program developed for the Army with the help of Martin Seligman.
