How much does it cost to be an audiophile?

[firedog]

14 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Often when I think of the exactitude required in engineering, I'm reminded that it was not that many years ago when everything (including the Tacoma Narrows bridge design) was calculated using a slide rule. When I was in college, the slide rule was still a major part of the curriculum. Unlike scientific calculators, and computer programs, slide rules give the engineer, at best, an approximate answer, and I have often noticed with awe, how some engineers can look at a slide rule and extrapolate very little actual information into 5 or 6 figures! It's a lot like measuring something with a yard-stick graduated in 16ths of an inch and from looking between the graduations, coming up with a measurement out to a 10 thousandth of an inch! That inexactitude might be why common engineering practice is to over-design almost everything. Look at the hundreds of thousands of miles of interstate highway built in the 50's and 60's. All done with a slide rule and material stress specifications gleaned from a materials handbook chart. Very few overpasses in this vast network have ever failed (the ones that did fail, failed due to seismic activity, not engineering errors). Look at the Boeing B52. Designed with slide rule accuracy and still in service 60 years (this year) after the last one rolled off the assembly line. Now that's engineering for the ages!   

The reason you can do good engineering with a slide rule (including going to the moon - see pictures of the Apollo program people with slide rules in the shirt pocket) is the concept of "significant digits". Simply put, all those additional decimal places are often irrelevant to the answer needed. What's important is knowing when they are relevant and when they aren't. 

[firedog]

13 hours ago, semente said:

 

The food is rubbish here, a gastro-invasion would be most welcome.

Every time I visit there I eat fine food. Lots of fresh locally sourced products. I guess it depends where you eat. There certainly is a lot of poor food there, if you want to buy that. 

[firedog]

On 6/7/2018 at 4:49 PM, Jud said:

 

New Mexico comes real close.  

No American fast food in New Mexico?

[firedog]

 A few points:

there is definitely selection ongoing among humans today, but the selection pressures are different than thousands or millions of years ago. The conditions that hunters and gatherers faced changed in a fundamental way when humans moved over to agriculture thousands of years ago. In the last century or two they've changed again.

IQ: intelligence is complicated and has lots of facets. We tend to overemphasize language skills and math as intelligence. That's not all there is to it. 

Dogs have skills we don't, and some that chimps/primates don't - including some involving abstraction and reasoning. 

I'd wager that if a dog based intelligence test was set up - with problem solving tasks based on the ability to smell, for instance - we'd fail. Just one example. 

 

Even octopi, that don't have what we call a brain, have been shown to have reasoning powers, and possibly even to understand the concept of zero. No present day scientist understands how their ""nervous system" works to do these tasks - but it does. 

 

My experience with all types of animals tells me that they are very intelligent when it comes to the things they need to survive. Those things don't always match a human conception of what's important. 

[firedog]

1 hour ago, Kal Rubinson said:

What are some of those current selection pressures in first world societies?

If you understand how evolution works, everything is a selection pressure at some level.  I'd imagine that modern selection pressures have to do with environmental changes/ pollution, changes in diet, and living in a more high paced society than humans have known before, etc.

Some people are going to live longer and reproduce better in modern conditions. There is, for instance, lots of scientific speculation that environmental factors/industrial food additives,  have something to do do with falling fertility rates.

 

[firedog]

3 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Not exactly.  You need more than just differential mortality or fertility (or increased parental care leading to higher offspring fitness even in the face of LOWER fertility - the so-called K-selected organism)...  you also need a change in gene frequencies before you actually have evolution caused by selection.

 

 

Yes of course. I was merely speculating about areas where those types of mutations could have an effect. I'd imagine abilities related to success in urban environments could also be such an area.

[firedog]

9 hours ago, gmgraves said:

 Jud, I was referring to a "test"; the standard Stanford-Binet IQ test given in the United States to most school children. It's the test upon which the averages are calculated; the test that gives standard reference for statistically figuring the "Bell Curve" that puts the average IQ at 100. 

What's lost in these discussions about groups and their average intelligence: even if the numbers are correct, they are irrelevant. Decisions should get made about individuals. The group IQ means nothing about the abilities of an individual from that group.