Re: Question about General Relativity

jmfbahciv@xxxxxxx wrote:

In article <1147653933.728809.283830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Edward Green" <spamspamspam3@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

But that leaves a lot for the imagination. This could be
helpful.

Physics needs pictures.

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.

Yes. Another plus is this medium allows the intelligent to
think before writing.

Text books, in my
experience, never do that. At least not without the right drugs.

Drugs?

I would assume if my textbook began talking back to me, that I was on
drugs. Of course, it might be garden variety dementia.

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.

I don't know. A large part of the learning on higher planes has
to do with thinking styles. You choose bits and pieces of
all your tutors until you evolve your own style. I'm not sure
that kind of tacit instruction can be had with an artificial tutor
without a constant personality underneath.

They would have to be very good artificial tutors.

I wonder if it is possible, in principle, to have highly intelligent
and even creative beings who would not become bored talking to any
dolt. It might not be. It has been suggested that boredom is a
debugger which looks for loops, into which behavior might otherwise be
trapped. Perhaps intelligent robots without the ability to cease
communication based on repetitive futility would become slightly
derranged... like regular USENET posters.

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.

Oh, honey. Not cheaply. My library now charges a US$1/page
and the text isn't bound.

Well, you can do a lot cheaper than that at home. There are already
virtual libraries of stuff out there in .pdf format which can be had in
hardcopy for the cost of printing, which, even with inkjet, is a lot
less than $1/page. And if you have the right laptop, you can dispense
with the printing (I have an old one I've tried to use as an e-book...
at least it allows me to lie in bed and read, but it's still not as
comfortable as a bound volume).

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.

My nephew is installing this as we speak for a couple of college
profs. I've been told that he hates this tech but I don't know why;
the gossip was second-hand and filtered through a person who
doesn't know the computer biz.

I'd like to know more about what he's doing. I was going to add "and
why he hates it", but that's not important. I take it he is young, and
it offends some variety of purism he is subject to. Like the groups in
Brooklyn who cobble together bizarre double height bikes out of
cast-offs, and are vehement that no such bike can be bought or sold,
ever, and you must make it with your own two hands, and forage for food
in garbage bins to prove you are worthy, and not wasteful. Merely an
extreme example. Your nephew no doubt has some milder form of the
syndrome.

There is a bug in your plan. You'ld have to wait a whole generation
for penmanship to become important in grade schools again.

I'm not talking about writing out posts in long hand. I'm just talking
about adding sketches or equations in a natural way -- as if you were
writing on a pad. That's an essential part of communicating in science
or mathematics, and it's what's missing here.

I've also been studying subjects such as history, finance,
foreign policy, statesmanship, government, military, and
am now trying to wade through government monetary policy.

I told you you're getting smarter.

.