Re: Question about General Relativity
- From: "Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 14 May 2006 17:45:33 -0700
jmfbahciv@xxxxxxx wrote:
<...>
One of the problems with this medium may be that a majority
of people may only be able to learn from watching other
people do the work. THis can't be done via English ASCII.
After all, newsgroups are text...like text books are text.
Some people cannot learn from reading books.
And text without pretty textbook pictures, at that.
What I always found to be the most appealing aspect of learning from
Usenet, was that it was text you could talk back to, and would, just
occasionally, give you an intelligent reply. Text books, in my
experience, never do that. At least not without the right drugs.
Of course what this is approximating is the paradigm of a tutor. I've
always thought that was the most efficient way to learn -- an expert,
like a professor, who is however bound to you in a one-on-one
relationship, and hence, among other things, can be coerced into giving
you timely feedback. Of course the problem with tutors is, they are
terribly expensive -- and become more so, the more advanced, hence
scarcer, the tutelage. Thus, I have long thought, and will continue to
think, until they pry it from my cold dead cortex, that the next great
revolution in human learning (the last being printing with moveable
type), will be the advent of universal artificial tutors. In that
case, everyman could have Richard Feynman tutor him in quantum field
theory. If he wanted.
Come to think of it, we are going through revolution 1.5 right now --
movable type morphing into computer documents which can be disseminated
via the net and printed locally, cheaply. This already is taking
libraries to another level of personal convenience.
Regarding pretty pictures, I've also long thought, and will continue,
and etc., that a next generation USENET, and one which is certainly
quite technically feasible now, would be one with pictures. I don't
mean photos, but line drawings made on digital sketch pads, linked to a
post via some universal standard.
I've proposed this before (though not of course to the right people or
persistently or forcefully enough, nor did I have sufficient motivation
to try to learn the required technicality to propose such a standard
myself), and met some expected poo-poos... increasingly weak, I think.
Bandwidth is mentioned first, and of course any standard which _wasn't_
pure text would exclude my hypothetical great groundswell of educated
third worlders conversing as equals on discarded IBM XT's, but as I
say, this argument becomes weaker as bandwidth becomes cheaper, and
what I propose comes within the reach of 10 year old technology. And
the standard could limit the graphics linked to a post to what would
make a moderate amount of equation writing and sketching attachable,
but rule out high resolution images -- indeed, the standard could be
for some kind of compression which specifically supports black and
white line drawing, which are exactly what is needed. Heck... I'm not
sure some kind of graphics couldn't be supported within the more
"advanced" terminal emulators, which would bring the universal vision
back to people running discarded IBM AT's.
I find you are harder to understand than I remember. Either I'm
getting dumber, you're getting smarter, or some orthogonal shift in our
thinking is underway. Most likely, through years of cerebral abuse, I
am getting dumber. Though, I hasten to add, not than most of the
people who post around here...
.
- References:
- Question about General Relativity
- From: lugita15
- Re: Question about General Relativity
- From: tdp1001
- Re: Question about General Relativity
- From: Edward Green
- Re: Question about General Relativity
- From: Edward Green
- Question about General Relativity
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