Jeff Liebermann wrote in
:

On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:26:42 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Einstein had no time for that kind of 'thinking', he
directly asserted several times that clarity and simplicity will get you
there better.

Yeah, but simplicity and sometimes clarity usually fail to get
funding. Seen any government money go to the myriad of simple fusion
schemes?
http://www.fusor.net
Nope, even though some of them may actually eventually work. It all
goes to gigantic fizzix experiments which are anything but simple and
to my limited intelligence, not very clear.


Gubmint won't touch it till private efforts start working. Was the same with
canals and railways. And mining. And hospitals. And, perhaps, large scale
space explorations. Very cool site, I'll try to follow some of that stuff. I
suspect small scale fusion will be the answer to many problems, far more than
it's likely to cause.

If the public had a better understanding of engineering and science,
things like Betamax, apparently better tech than VHS according to most
who discuss this issue, would have won, to the advantage of most people,
not just the few who forced the 'war'.

Beta is often used as the poster child of technology versus cost. Sony
wanted license fees for Beta, while VHS was essentially free. The
public voted with their dollars and VHS won.

Moral: The GUM (Great Unwashed Masses) are cheap.


Gubmint by GUMint? I amuse myself.... I guess FireWire might suffer the
same way, it wants royalties in the price of every plug. I think that one
will be a survivor though, it is very good. But it won't be as common as USB
which doesn't.

Incidentally, the same thing sorta happened with the battle between
the RCA all electronic and CBS color wheel schemes for color
television. The FCC almost went with the color wheel scheme because
RCA hadn't really shaken all the bugs out of their system.

Fast forward a half century and we have the same FCC voting on digital
television standards. If technical superiority were the criteria,
COFDM should have won over 8VSB. However, such decisions are not made
on the basis of technical superiority. The public could have been
better educated on the issues, but the decision was made by a
committee of politicians, not the public.


That never helps, but people are getting very wary of politicians, which
might help, if they realise they have to think that bit more for themselves.
I can accept that pure technical superority isn't always a vital
justification, too. For example, cost, to me, is a vital engineering
parameter. As in not over-riding, but never to be ignored. Substitute 'cost'
with 'ease', 'readiness', and it quickly gets convoluted. Even 'self-
interest' creeps in obviously, but I guess it depends on whether it's
enlightened or not that matters most. The other main problem is short-
sightedness. Most really successful tech-driven economies are LONG sighted,
they don't make expensive errors they can't fix later. That said, even the
best of those can rest on their laurels and lose ground, as Japan seems to
have done.

AM stereo and HD radio, versus satellite radio (XM and Sirius) is an
oddity. HD Radio, AM stereo, and DRM should have been the winner,
because they are the cheapest and simplest. Yet, satellite radio is
far more popular. The real difference is that satellite radio started
out with no commericals, and slooooowly infested the programming with
them. People were willing to pay for what they preceived as
commercial free programming. I guess the GUM isn't very well educated
on the the technology, but it's certainly not stupid.


Interesting. I sometimes use a similar argument in my defence of Usenet when
debating with people who think it's dying. Given how fast it loads, I think
we can expect many 'web2' refugees, as it happens.

Conflict is bad enough, but the one thing that can most
effectively redeem it is if it is won by whatever was most right, or
useful, or helpful. And if enough people grasp that well beforehand, the
conflict probably wouldn't happen so much.

I presume you've never attended (online or in person) a standards
committee discussion. It's fortunate that the technical debates are
mostly done electronically or at a distance, as I'm fairly sure some
of the proponents of extrememe technologies would settle their
differences in the parking lot.


Nope. But I have seen infighting over ideas in forums. I've seen experts
stamp on good ideas then try to assert their own ideas which were weaker, and
because they had a strong academic background, most bystanders were quick to
curry favour with them. I figured the best answer was to go alone when I have
a good idea. First, they muscle in only when someone's already staked a
pitch, so the easiest way to undermine that is to break camp and move out.
Second, asking them for assistance will either result in conflict, or stolen
credit. Even systems like patenting invented to solve such issues fails
because legalistic presentations seem more to do with emotive attempts at
squatters' rights than any real defence that might as easily be done with
copyright law. None of which stops acrimonious court squabbles. So things
like those small scale fusion experiments will only reach success by being
done, repeated, by those who will do it without waiting for support. I think
the main reason 'big' science gets the funding is actually simple: it's too
big to actually be done at all without it.

Maybe I should shut up now, but this has got to be THE slowest day of
the year. And I include most of the last one in this assessment.

Not for me. For some odd reason, I'm getting a series of customer
calls asking for help with various Christmas toys and gadgets. They
apparently have stared at them for a week, given up, and now call me
for help. For example: "I got this iPod thing. How do I make it play
tunes?" I just finished an over the phone Netflix appliance (Roku)
setup. My guess is public understanding of engineering and science
has a very long way to go.


Yep. Though given the speed, I have to sympathise with both 'sides'. I loved
to take stuff apart and put it together (especially when the latter saved me
from punishment if the former would otherwise have gotten noticed), but when
confronted with bloated complex operating systems that have been cleaved from
the roots that led to their existence, I balk too, the same way many do when
told that only maths, and not human observations, will tell them anything
new about reality. And I'd rather stay with something whose engineering I can
grasp well enough to stand some chance of maintenance.

Actually I strongly suspect that this distance between science and tech
development and public comprehension won't be reduced until the tools enabled
by quantum mechanics start showing us things that shift the current paradigm
so much as a result of their new obervations, that people have something
really big and new to think about instead of being compelled to beleive that
all is run by chance. I think quantum theory largely got us into this mess,
but I also think it will get us out. But I have no clue how, other than what
I just said.