The variety of banana (Gros Michel) that was commonplace when the "slip on a banana peel" comedic device was invented was a different breed than the one that is commonplace today (Cavendish.) The Gros Michel peel was reportedly very slippery.
as an addendum to that, the reason you don't see Gros Michel today is because "Panama disease" (a wilt fungus) wiped out most of the plantations in South America/Africa. You can still find Gros Michels in Thailand today. Someone should write myth busters, maybe they could import a gros michel to test it.
That wouldn't test for whether we evolved for it. We could, at best, simulate early human societies with various levels of violence and see if one led to large jaws. (Though currently we have insufficient information to model such societies.)
Most people grossly underestimate the forces of genetic drift and personal preference on phenotypical evolution. The null hypothesis for any gender-linked trait having evolved should probably be "it made them more attractive to a fertile population of the opposite sex."
Even if you can show experimentally that lots of face punching will lead to stronger jaws, that doesn't prove that it's what happened historically. We could have evolved the same strong jaw for a completely unrelated reason.
I got one and I'm starting to experiment. I discovered that soldering can be a problem. First, I had to buy a solder. Second, physics is merciless and a mistake can toast your card (didn't happened to me yet) vs the run-fail-debug loop we're used to in sw development.
Anyway, some hw modules have been tested with Espruino and the web site explains how to use them. My understanding is that you can plug almost anything into it, you just (!) have to know its specs and how to wire it to the board.
No, it only has an AA battery. I also have a remote control from a Sharp radio system which still works after 24 years with its original batteries! But this one is used very rarely, say 2-3 times every year.
No because they both have these japanese batteries that most japanese electronics come with but you can't find them anywhere in the stores. If someone had replaced them, it would be with a known brand. Besides the calculator is always on my home office and I live alone.
I was very surprised too when I found out about a year ago.
Yeah it's basically a holodeck. Exciting stuff. It's funny how on the shows the holo-deck was always something that took a whole lot of electricity so they could only have one or two on the ship, and you'd have to book time on it. It looks like in real life holodecks are much less power hungry than faster than light starship engines, and that more people desire their own holo-deck than want to go to space. Makes sense. Entertainment has historically been much more popular than exploration.
A holodeck is just another means of exploration. Spatial exploration (be it space, underwater, etc) is not really that interesting. If we went to Mars right now, we'd be really, really, really bored. There's nothing there except rocks.
Using the Oculus Rift (and associated VR technologies like the Leap), I can experience all sorts of amazing things that I've never experienced before. Like fighting aliens for the survival of humanity. Or jumping through floating sky scrapers. And I can create new experiences for others.
Exploration has never been more popular. It's just moved from the spatial to the conceptual.
Honest question? Why is the first example use case always killing? I'd probably be a lot more into video games if there was anything beyond Mario maturity games that wasn't a murder fantasy.
I don't want to fight aliens. I'd love to interact with real aliens though. That's an exploration that you could never have virtually.
I wish it wasn't, but that's just what's already there. Two reasons why:
1. Killing is a very easy interaction to implement. It's much simpler to make an AI that tries to kill you than one that tries to engage you in meaningful conversation.
2. The intensity of violence compensates for the disassociation that resulted from the interface. In other words, you were just watching the game on the monitor. You didn't real feel "there" like you do with VR. What I find, is when I'm playing violent games with VR, it's less enjoyable and more stressful. Fighting becomes an unpleasant necessity.
I think as the technology progresses, we'll see more games focus much less on violence. Like that Voyager bridge demo for the Oculus Rift. If someone made the whole ship with the same level of detail, and had no people or enemies or violence, I could still spend many hours just walking around and exploring, and I would probably enjoy it more than shooting things.
Portal, paper mario, braid, flight sims, sim city, tropico, civilization(? you do kill people in that), kerbal space program, etc.
I'm not by any means going to deny the flood of games that are based on violence. Most of the mentioned games were off the top of my head, but when I went looking for more, I was definitely a little surprised by just how tough it was to find well known contenders.
I can see how a casual brush with games might not bring a lot of the good ones to the front, though. I like games that really change how I think about a problem (portal, braid, paper mario), let me experience things I can't pragmatically experience right now (flight sims), or complex strategic games with some satire (civ/tropico).
I'm interested in games because I think they can be a really valid art form and a powerful way to convey concepts and ideas.
I'm incredibly excited for how far the oculus rift and new motion tracking techs will let me take that.
I remember the first time I played Assassins Creed. I mean, the game is about murder. It's in the title. My brother got frustrated at me after an hour of watching and yelled "STOP CLIMBING SHIT AND EXPLORING. KILL SOMEONE." I think he left after I spent another fifteen minutes exploring the ancient middle east.
I think more about, say, sending a probe places, having it scan the area with minute detail, and then broadcasting it back so we can walk through it virtually. We've talked about theoretical wormholes existing at an atomic level. If you could transmit data back and forth through a wormhole to an interstellar probe with insanely high resolution laser scanning, then recreate that world virtually, how far off are we from actually visiting the place in question? Really does make you wonder how important our senses are in the grand scheme of reality.
If we can transmit information through space instantaneously, our physical location becomes almost meaningless.
Who cares where your brain is if you can send and receive data somewhere 2000 lightyears in the same time it would take to send and receive data from somewhere 40cm away?
Sadly, even the theory behind such a concept is still in its infancy - and of course it may eventually be proven to be absolutely impossible with the same great certainty with which we've defined the mass of an electron.
