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An idea worth spreading

We don't need full employment to be happy. Rather than having 10% unemployment right now, we could instead have full employment with everyone working 10% fewer hours. We need more job sharing and we definitely need a benefits and health-care system that supports part-time work.

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• A reply on Talk: VS Ramachandran: 3 clues to understanding your brain

  Jun 4 2013: Exactly. When a computer hangs, hardware is only a distant theoretically possible cause nowadays. It is virtually always a software bug.
  
  On a tangent, it's interesting that faulty RAM, which used to be a cause for hardware errors (in the 80's and early 90's) improved to the point that few people ever experience RAM errors now not so much because the hardware was improved but due to greatly improved error correction mathematics. Again, the software is the key.
  
  We seem to be a long ways from understanding the software that runs on the brain, but I have a gut feeling that Jeff Hawkins is onto something in his TED talk on this subject.
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  A reply on Talk: Andres Lozano: Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off

  Apr 21 2013: It is really great that we can help people who already have late stage diseases with this, but I agree with you. We need to find the cause. I've personally been going down quite a rabbit hole with information about mycotoxins in relation to my own Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (often mis-diagnosed as CFS). And now we have a very strong link between mold exposure and CFS:
  
  http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6651/5/4/605
  
  Yes, 93% of 112 CFS patients have mycotoxins in their urine while 0 of 55 controls have any. I've also heard through the grapevine that other doctors are getting similar results (> 90% correlations). There are of course other scientific explanations *possible* than "mold causes CFS". But to me basic common sense would say: start looking hard at mycotoxins as a possible primary causative factor.
  
  But where I start feeling like Neo in The Matrix is this: it could be that the neurotoxic, immunotoxic and endocrine disrupting properties of biotoxins (and mycotoxins in particular) are responsible for everything from MS and other autoimmune disorders to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism and depression. It could even be behind the rise in gluten intolerance and it could explain the obesity epidemic. Now, each of these diseases is going to differentiate as it develops and they may need to be treated in different ways once they get out of control, but the toxicity of mycotoxins on their own could account for the origins of all these chronic illnesses. Suppress the immune system, toxify the nervous system and disrupt endocrine function and basically anything and everything can go wrong, in my opinion. And unfortunately, right now the medical community is stuck looking for their keys under the lamppost.

• A reply on Talk: Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs

  Mar 23 2013: Not soon, but yes, I think scarcity and economic systems in general will end and we will all need to find something else to do (well, not you or I as we'll be dead, but our descendants). As Sam says, all our current problems are reducible to issues concerning energy. However, I'm incredibly optimistic that those problems are solvable given the right finesse. Self-organizing, self-replicating systems all around us get energy for free today, and the giant fusion reactor in the sky we call the sun will be pouring out vast quantities of energy for millions of years into the future. The real problem right now isn't that there's not enough energy, but that we're too stupid to know how to use the more than adequate resources we already have. BUT we're learning. Our technology is really pretty dumb right now, but I think it will eventually be as smart or smarter than the natural world. How long? Maybe fifty to a hundred years? Maybe 200. But the end of scarcity (and therefore of economics) is definitely coming.

• A reply on Talk: Saul Griffith on everyday inventions

  Mar 23 2013: Actually, I find this question very interesting. Computational objects are actually sometimes models of things in reality that we call domain models (although sometimes there is no real-world reference point as well). And as you say, the relationship is purely notional. However, it seems very likely that running programs on atoms is going to have the same organizational and complexity problems that running programs on bits currently has. It seems probable that we will evolve a kind of "atomic OOP" parallel, simply because reusability, encapsulation, testability and all the other wonderful properties of object systems are actually part of an underlying universal law regarding complexity, which is this: the only tool we really have for conquering complexity is divide-and-conquer. Take a complex problem and divide it into two or more simpler problems. This is what the OOP method is all about, creating models by dividing up complex problems into cooperating components. You can call it something else when it relates to atoms, but it's going to be the same method (BTW, If you want to read more about this and other OOP topics, I go on for a few pages on this subject in my book "Coding: On Software Design Process").
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  A comment on Conversation: "Why Can't We Solve Big Problems?"

  Mar 9 2013: We fail to solve big problems by misapprehending them. To solve any problem is to see how it is simple.