Book Review: Timewalkers

Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization

by Clive Gamble

View all my reviews

It’s a difficult question. Why did earliest man leave Africa and migrate to new areas. Mostly, animals evolve suited to their environment and they don’t stray far. They may have several areas they frequent, but they return to each, not leave them entirely.We had already accommodated ourselves to ravel more than 12 kilometers for raw materials, which is less than modern hunter-gatherers, but more than other primates.

How to Crack the Google Interview

I came across this Wall Street Journal article discussing Google interview questions. It’s fascinating. They want not only intelligent people, but those who think outside the box and problem-solve as part of their daily experience.

I’ve posted the first part of it and a link to the balance. Enjoy!

How to Ace a Google Interview

By WILLIAM POUNDSTONE

Imagine a man named Jim. He’s applying for a job at Google. Jim knows that the odds are stacked

How do you get out before the blades start churning? Photo illustration photography by F. Martin Ramin for the WSJ

against him. Google receives a million job applications a year. It’s estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 high-school students applying to Harvard gets accepted.

Jim’s first interviewer is late and sweaty: He’s biked to work. He starts with some polite questions about Jim’s work history. Jim eagerly explains his short career. The interviewer doesn’t look at him. He’s tapping away at his laptop, taking notes. “The next question I’m going to ask,” he says, “is a little unusual.”

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

The interviewer looks up from his laptop, grinning like a maniac with a new toy.

“I would take the change in my pocket and throw it into the blender motor to jam it,” Jim says.

The interviewer’s tapping resumes. “The inside of a blender is sealed,” he counters, with the air of someone who’s heard it all before. “If you could throw pocket change into the mechanism, then your smoothie would leak into it.”

“Right… um… I would take off my belt and shirt, then. I’d tear the shirt into strips to make a rope, with the belt, too, maybe. Then I’d tie my shoes to the end of the rope and use it like a lasso.”

Furious key clicks.

“I don’t mean a lasso,” Jim plows on. “What are those things Argentinian cowboys throw? It’s like a weight at the end of a rope.”

No answer. Jim now realizes that his idea is lame, but he feels compelled to complete it. “I’d throw the weights over the top of the blender jar. Then I’d climb out.”

“The ‘weights’ are just your shoes,” the interviewer says. “How would they support your body’s weight? You weigh more than your shoes do.”

Jim doesn’t know. That’s the end of it. The interviewer begins ticking off quibbles one by one. He isn’t sure whether Jim’s shirt—shrunken with the rest of him—could be made into a rope that would be long enough. Once Jim got to the top of the jar—if he got there—how would he get down again? Could he realistically make a rope in 60 seconds?

Read more…

Book Review: Timewalkers

Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization

by Clive Gamble

View all my reviews

It’s a difficult question. Why did earliest man leave Africa and migrate to new areas. Mostly, animals evolve suited to their environment and they don’t stray far. They may have several areas they frequent, but they return to each, not leave them entirely.We had already accommodated ourselves to ravel more than 12 kilometers for raw materials, which is less than modern hunter-gatherers, but more than other primates.

Did You Know: Web Business Helps Magazine Turn a Profit

The 153-year-old Atlantic magazine will turn a profit this year for the first time in at least a decade thanks to advertising revenue from online ads this year.

 

The Formula for Happiness

I got most of this–a succinct formula for happiness–but the lower left corner, there’s an if-then I don’t get. Can anyone explain?

A New Idea Why Man Stood Up

Almost all mammals walk on four limbs. Those that occasionally stand or walk bipedally, do so awkwardly and for specific and short-term reasons (i.e., a threat gesture).

Of all mammals, only humans are fully developed bipeds. We do everything (almost) on two limbs. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have come to agree that upright posture is the crucial adaptation that accounts for the divergence of the human lineage from the African apes.

“The fundamental distinction between us and our closest relatives is not our language, not our culture, not own technology;” said Richard E. Leakey, a paleontologist and son of Mary Leakey and the late Louis S. B. Leakey; renowned fossil hunters in Kenya. “It is that we stand upright, with our lower limbs for support and locomotion and our upper limbs free from those functions.”

Why did we rise up? Most paloeanthropologists cite the following reasons:

• to travel distances by walking. Arguably, one of man’s great defining characteristics is his stamina–his ability to travel distances. A bipedal locomotion serves that skill better than a quadrupedal one

Sunday Statistics: Is Torture Justified

A recent Pew Research Center survey asked 742 U.S. adults whether the use of torture against suspected terrorists can be justified.

The overall results (leaving out the popular rarely justified category to keep this simple. Full results here.):

• Can often be justified: 15%
• Can sometimes be justified: 34%
• Can never be justified: 25%

Here’s more detail:

Five Great Science Websites You May Not Have Heard Of

Here are five science blogs that I visit for inspiration. They cover a myriad of topics, but always force my brain to think, work, stretch its boundaries.

Sunday Stats: Does Homeschooling Work?

According to a study conducted by Dr. Lawrence Rudner, Homeschooled Children Continue Outperforming Their Public School Counterparts as Homeschooling Increases in Popularity

Fermat’s Last Theorem–Extreme Sports for the Brain

I love exercising my brain. I don’t like health clubs or running, so the only

350 years ago, in the margin of this text, Fermat claimed he could prove this theorem

way I get exercise is by thinking. To me, this is one of life’s traits that separates human from non-. Have you ever seen a dog sit quietly and think. No. He falls asleep.  Most animals hunt, play or sleep. Their critical problems–those that might cause their extinction, those that might make their life easier–are solved by evolution. They are replaced by a different species that adapts better to the environment.

Not true with the human species, Homo. When we aren’t hunting or playing, we are as likely to be thinking through a problem as sleeping. We have adapted to our environment as much through our own big brain’s problem solving abilities as by evolution’s incremental process of replacing one species with another.

Extreme sports for a thinker is solving unsolvable mathematical problems. And one of the most extreme is Fermat’s Last Theorem. It took 350 years and over 150 pages to solve the first time, making it a worthy exercise for the brilliant human brain.

In the novel I am currently working on, my antagonist sponsors a competition between a brilliant mathematical scientist and a unique problem solving AI to see which can come up with the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Even for an eidetic mind, memorizing 150 pages of obtuse equations would be close to impossible. But if you know the logic that provides a blueprint for the solution, you could reproduce it.

It’s Not Just StarTrek That Gives Us a Blueprint For the Future

Read this

‘Star Wars’ meets reality? Military testing laser weapons

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Are we finally witnessing the dawn of the “death ray”?

Five decades after the creation of the laser, the ubiquitous technology of the modern era may be ready to serve up that Star Wars science-fiction staple: the laser blaster.

The Devil is in the Details: The Arizona Immigration Law

There’s a lot of emotion swirling around the new Arizona immigration law. Arizona feels a desperate need (made critical when illegals killed a popular rancher on his own property and shot then left for dead a law enforcement officer) to protect their borders. The Feds have a law but they’re not enforcing it, so Arizona has stepped up to the plate and agreed to use state resources to enforce the Federal law.

Why Can’t We Read Minds?

Mind reading makes sense, if you think about it. Thoughts are energy (everything’s matter or energy). Energy can be picked up by machines. Therefore, thoughts can be read by a properly-programmed device. Carnegie Mellon has done research to pick up brain waves via an enhanced MRI machine. They found they could identify what the client was thinking about by identifying the brain waves involved. The Bernstein Center in Germany measured intent by reading from the brain–not words or body language. Here’s a 60 Minutes segment on this topic:

How’s a DNA Computer Work

You’ve probably read a lot about DNA computers. The next generation of

computing power. Based on the idea that our cells program our entire genome with DNA and its six bases. All our bodies do is rearrange the position of the bases and the length of the message. Kind of like the bases are letters, strung together into words, or sentences (without the space between the words). A high school senior won a scholarship by programming the Declaration of Independence into a DNA molecule. She described it as counterintuitively easy.

Scientists accept that DNA computers are the future. DNA is the most common molecule on earth. A DNA computer that fits in a drop of water, carries its own energy pack , stores millions of times the data of a personal computer, operates hundreds of thousands of times faster than conventional silicon computers–and performs ten trillion operations at once.

A typical problem that a DNA computer excels at is the so-called “burnt pancake problem”:

I am Part of a Lost Generation. I Refuse to Believe…

I love palindromes. I named my AI Otto. My favorite girl name is Hannah.

But I never thought of a palindrome movie. Watch this.

A Scentific Love Story (Kind Of)

–thanks to xkcd

What Causes CO2 to Rise

If not man, what is causing CO2 to rise, raining disaster and doom on our modern world? It’s convenient to blame the Western World. Muslims hate us for our self-indulgent, wasteful attitudes. We hate ourselves for that.

But the goal here is to solve a problem, not lay blame, so it’s important to discover the true cause and then determine the fix. Since less than 2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by man and industry, here are other causes of the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere:

Since When Was Competition a Bad Thing in America?

I was surprised to read this article, Is America competing?

America still produces some of the most well respected science, but with the growth seen in Asia, that may not be the case for much longer, according to new data released from the National Science Foundation (NSF) today (15 January).

What’s wrong–in the NSF’s opinion–with foreign scientists? Worse, why the fear-mongering conclusion that America can no longer compete? If it was meant to get me to read the article, I didn’t go too far. Opinions and science are a bit oxymoronic. Scientists report non-emotionally, based on facts and observations.

Sunday Stats:Who’s the Better Judge of Economic Issues?

…Obama with his Harvard degree or the average American? This might surprise you (from a Rasmussen Poll).

DARPA Challenges American Ingenuity–Again

DARPA–the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency–is the research and development office for the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA’s mission is to maintain technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security. We also create technological surprise for our adversaries.