“Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way.” Additionally, the study finds evidence that subjective color perception is actually normalized between individuals by some internal mechanism.
Frodo: What are we holding on to Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
Sam: [The good folk] had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Good advice for times when evil men possess destructive power in a dark and dangerous world.
Sometimes you need earplugs for concentration, but music is too distracting. Enter Noise.app, an OS X appliction for generating white or pink noise. Pink noise is noise with an “even power distribution on a logarithmic frequency scale.” Basically, low-end-weighted noise. Works great in my cubicle farm.
This is an undeveloped thought, in response to an essay by Paul Graham, in which he takes on the idea that enormous variations in wealth are a social evil. First, an excerpt:
Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they’re identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it’s probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It’s probably because you have no Thomas Edisons. In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.
I agree that technology has the ability to magnify differences in productivity. It’s the unwavering fact behind catchphrases like “the digital divide.” There are individual technologists and business folks who have brought the world innovations that have created enormous good to the whole of society. Life-extending pharmaceuticals are a good (and entirely unquantifiable) example. But what material rewards should accrue to those individuals?
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