If you are having trouble with this, wikipedia has some good instructions which helped me. First try autostereograms [1] (these are more simpler to see), and then simple random dot stereograms (RDS) [2], and finally magic eye static and moving stereograms.
BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!
A few months back I got a stomach ulcer and before going to the doctor, I decided to do some research. I came to realize that the primary cause is not stress or excess spicy food, but a particular stomach bacteria, H. Pylori, going rogue and attacking the mucus lining of the stomach that protects underlying tissue from the strong acid [1]. For this discovery, Drs. Marshall and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel prize in medicine [2], as it meant that ulcers were curable with the use of suitable antibiotics.
However, my doctor (and good friend) insisted that there was no permanent cure for stomach ulcers and they could only be managed by taking acid reducing medication (Prilosec) everyday for as long as I lived. I couldn't help wondering if his information was corrupted by big pharma, who always want to keep you hooked onto some drug or the other. So, I had to use extra persuasion and tact to get him to prescribe antibiotics for H. Pylori elimination (and thus permanently curing the ulcer).
I'm a bit skeptical that big pharma's tentacles will NOT reach Watson's doctor successors [3].
Google employees pay attention to the road as the cars drive because that's their job. Consumers will read the paper and go to sleep while the cars drive. Manual override is not a solution to this problem. A panic mode that alerts the driver to take over in uncertain situations could help.
The cars will be programmed to always ensure that there is enough room to stop the car safely when something unexpected happens. BMW already has a system to automatically stop the vehicle safely if the driver is suddenly incapacitated. And Volvo has one that stops you rear-ending someone. Pretty soon we'll have cars that are pretty tough to crash, even though the human will still drive it almost 100% of the time.
Which is precisely why the 'hey we won't need insurance' call is completely wrong.
As long as people can override the function, people will make mistakes and cause damage. And this will always be the case, nobody wants to be stuck on an isolated road, unable to proceed because their lane is partially blocked, but it is safe to cross the lane and proceed.
In winner-takes-all games, being even in the top 99th percentile is worse than useless.
To use your own example, true you might get better than half the regulars in basketball if you spent 1 hr a day at it, but you'd make exactly $0 being in the top 50th percentile of basketball players. You would be far better off if you had spent that 1 hr/day for a year on improving your coding skills further.
Fortunately, neurons are still orders of magnitude above atoms in terms of volumetric density. So it is not that bad. Simulating all of the atoms in the volume of a brain individually might be a pain.
@zanny: A lot of the action in the brain seems to take place at the synapses. These are much smaller structures, and a useful brain scan will need to make precise measurements of the strength of each synapse. I need to study this more closely, but at the moment, I think these measurements maybe impeded by the uncertainty principle.
My guess is that the politicians were sold on the unlimited energy that successful controlled fusion would provide.
As somebody once said: Any problem on Earth can be solved with the careful application of high explosives. The trick is not to be around when they go off.
"Defaults aren't usually in the best interests of those on the bottom (e.g., Ph.D. students), so it's important to know when to reject them and to ask for something different. Of course, there's no nefarious conspiracy against students; the defaults are just naturally set up to benefit those in power."
That Greenspun essay makes me angry every time I read it. The kind of clubhouse mentality of "we don't invite girls to our club because they wouldn't be stupid enough to join our dumb club anyway" is nothing but thinly veiled paternalism. He makes a good point about pay, but the way he frames it as a paternalistic pat on the head to women is insulting, at best.
You should rebut Greenspun's arguments, not slander him by words in quotes and pretending they paraphrase what he wrote.
How is this paternalistic or uninviting to women?
> A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?
BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-dot_stereogram