The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh. The escapist experience was paid for by pricing the goods to cover the overheads.
When the department store migrated to being the anchor store at the suburban mall, its role as an escapist haven was diluted by the mall's amenities and by the proliferation of boutique shops lining the corridors.
On-line shopping now offers a wider selection of goods at lower prices. And social media offers an alternative mechanism to escape their present reality.
> The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh.
I guess it was that way at some time in upscale neighborhoods, but what I remember as a kid is linoleum and cheap worn out commercial carpet floors, the stink of cleaning chemicals, low ceilings and dim light, and unceasing elevator music. It nonetheless kept women zoned out ambling through the halls for hours. John Romero got it right when he portrayed it in his zombie movies.
The low energy music, the spread out merchandise, the allure of "sales" that could be down the next aisle, no visible windows to the outside... these stores were engineered to get people zoned out and lose track of time. Like casinos with less bells and flashing lights.
The benefits of a research project as described to the funding authority and the benefits of a research project after it is done are often not the same.
See page 10, Figure 5: Price of paper/CPI in England, 1356-1869, and the Netherlands, 1450-1800.
This shows that the price of paper declined exponentially from 1350 to 1650. The decrease in the cost of paper made printing economical. Printing on vellum was not. They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.
>They point out that each Gutenberg Bible printed on vellum required the skins of 300 sheep.
Even that doesn't say much about its value. I have no idea the scale of the sheep industry in these times. Presumably people were growing up sheep to make use of the entire sheep, not merely to create bibles. It might be better to consider what that sheep leather might have been used for otherwise if it didn't have a buyer in the form of a printing press.
The causality can easily run in the other direction, with the desire to print things pushing people into using cheap, shoddy paper instead of quality vellum.
The cost of the hides and the labor of turning them into vellum dominated the labor of inscribing a page. Printing would not decrease the cost of finished pages, especially for small numbers of copies.
The decrease in the cost of paper resulted from the increased availability of linen rags, use of wind power in production of rag pulp, and the larger volumes of rag paper used for commercial records and correspondence before the invention of printing.
Your logic is that the drive to produce more books wouldn't lead to using cheaper paper... because paper was, at the beginning of the process, extremely expensive?
It's not clear whether it is desirable to build a new Göttingen. Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits.
"Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture"
https://www.quantamagazine.org/monumental-proof-settles-geom...
is an interesting article that describes the multi-year effort to obtain this important result. The final proof has nine authors affiliated with seven institutions: Denis Gaitsgory, Max Planck Institute; Sam Raskin and Joakim Færgeman, Yale University; Dima Arinkin, University of Wisconsin; Nick Rozenblyum, University of Toronto; Dario Beraldo, University College London; Lin Chen, Tsinghua University; Justin Campbell and Kevin Lin, University of Chicago.
If I remember right Deep Work by Cal Newport talks about Bell Labs and how that came to be such an epicentre of invention back in the day. The author reckons that the architecture of the building had a lot to do with it. It allowed the employees to do uninterrupted, concentrated work when needed but then when exiting their offices the design of the building facilitated lots of chance encounters with other people in other departments which meant a lot of exchanging of ideas and knowledge. You don't get this kind of "hive mind" effect with remote work.
> Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of assembling brilliant minds in one place, other than temporarily for conferences and visits.
Lmao. Only someone who has never been a part of a high performance team with excellent mentors available in person throughout the day, can possibly believe this.
Alternatively, try this sentence: "Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of a married couple living together in one place to raise a family."
I have to agree, high performance teams need to be together in proximity to do world changing stuff (or maybe in AR worlds that are as natural as real worlds in the future). Remote work is for big standard work that doesn’t require too much innovation or if 1 person is capable of carrying the team. Yet to see counter examples to this
The analogy is a bit hyperbolic but not off base at all.
In my field, there is a lot of discussion over whether conferences should go virtual to ensure "equity", "inclusion", and all that; and to save pollution and CO2 from plane travel. According to the defenders of that take, current technology makes meeting in person totally unnecessary and online conferences can replace physical ones just fine. But curiously enough, everyone who I've seen defend that position are at elite universities in places like California where they have a high concentration of top figures in the field within a short drive. Almost no one from more remote areas (like myself) defends that... largely because many of us have stories where those polluting plane tickets helped us connect with relevant people in the field, learn and boost our career.
But back to the marriage analogy... when those people from top universities make that comment, I usually tell them that if they are so interested in equity, diversity, not polluting and all that jazz, and since according to them online interaction is enough and getting together physically is just a luxury, they should then take remote PhD students (which would even let them select from a larger pool!). It's an obvious conclusion of their position, right?
There's truth in both. For countries with little research funding (Eastern Europe in my case), travelling to top conferences is often prohibitively expensive. Top AI conferences are regularly in places like Hawaii. This excludes many regions and those researchers must submit to lower tier conferences, or - as already commonly happens - they have to move to a richer country and do research there.
Remote conferences and lower publishing fees definitely help people at these underfunded places. But it is true that being there in person is still much more valuable. Informal face to face interaction at posters, joint dinners between different research groups, mingling during coffee breaks etc. are not replaceable by a Zoom Q&A.
With all the intelligence built in to current cars, the salesman should be able to send a group text to the cars on the lot asking whether any of them has all or most of the desired features. And if so, what are its GPS coordinates. Or turn on it's emergency flashers and sound horn in five minutes.
In college I was struck by a housemate's law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be extremely tedious and boring.
Later, another former housemate, a math major who was developing software, went to law school for a JD. It was his opinion that many of the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.
How you think may be a significant factor in whether you are a good match to certain occupations.
> the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.
I've sometimes thought that certain aspects of law (e.g. contracts) are very similar to the strict rule-based thinking required in programming, and that the same basic logical thinking is required. It's just that some concepts have been formalised differently between the fields, and also that law has inherent fuzziness due to incomplete specification of its programs, the ambiguity of some language/phrasing, and the changing societal environment.
With programs, the computer interprets the rules deterministically (generally speaking), and we programmers are forced to draft our regulations accordingly or we'll get unwanted results. Whereas contracts are a bit less deterministically interpreted, and human incentives and potential interpretations have to be considered in drafting.
In the modern day, there's almost no way to decipher the true precise meaning of a law just from its text. What really matters is case law - how the law has been applied in practice by courts over the years.
I was the only one in my class in law school who used mind maps and spaces repetition (back then on a Palm Pilot).
After I graduated, new professors came in who now are popularizing such methods, writing books about it, etc..
I think it’s a zeitgeist thing. If you’re too early, nobody will take you seriously. But at some point the tide is strong enough to break through.
Kinda the same as with AI/automation. I tried selling this to lawyers in 2020 and failed miserably. Three years later, ChatGPT became a thing, and now every lawyer wants a piece of AI.
It’s not the better mousetrap. It’s not people wanting new things that moves the world. It’s people not wanting to be left behind.
Given adequate rainfall and the right range of soil acidity trees will seed and grow themselves. This town was farm fields in the 1930s. Some trees were planted when the streets were laid out and houses built. Others, particularly ornamentals, continue to be planted. But there are a great number of trees that are volunteers that have been allowed to mature over the last century. Norway maples, sweet gum, tulip poplar, and red oak are particularly good at volunteering.
We have mullberry, maple, boxelder, and sometimes oak trees that spring up everywhere and basically need to be weeded before they get too big. Mullberry is particularly "weedy", a common sight at the edge of fences or in hedges.
Mexico has about half as many TikTok users as the US. I would think that ByteDance would continue that operation, as well as other major user populations in Indonesia, Brazil, etc.
It seems unlikely that Byte Dance would divest of all of TikTok, since the US users are only about 10% of global TikTok users.
They would more likely either shut down the US operation, support US users from outside the US, or sell the US users to one of the other social media networks.
My recollection is that the operating telephone companies paid AT&T 1% of revenues as the license fee for use of AT&T's patents. This funded AT&T's engineering department as well as Bell Labs research, systems engineering and advanced development. Th other main chunk of civilian work was development engineering funded by Western Electric. Prior to the end of the anti-missile systems military work, the military budget was greater than civilian work.
Sometime prior to divestiture, the 1% may have been raised a little. There may have also been additional operating company funding for Bell Information Systems, which developed administrative software for their use.
The notion that Bell Labs was an idyllic competition-free environment is incorrect. In the development organizations there was fierce competition between developers of analog versus digital transmission systems, microwave versus coaxial cable systems, space division versus time-division switching, etc. There may have been less in the basic research, but having worked later with ex-research staff, I'm pretty sure there was considerable competition for resources, funding, and scientific credit and internal/external recognition.
When the department store migrated to being the anchor store at the suburban mall, its role as an escapist haven was diluted by the mall's amenities and by the proliferation of boutique shops lining the corridors.
On-line shopping now offers a wider selection of goods at lower prices. And social media offers an alternative mechanism to escape their present reality.