The Logical Adventure of the Zoombinis and Reader Rabbit are so nostalgic parts of my childhood. I so vividly remember trying to teach myself boolean logic at age 7 or 8 because of the "boolies".
I, too, grew up on the first-ever Zoombinis game. I actually recently played through it again almost 15+ years later. Everything from the sound effects to the visuals is seared somewhere deep in my neural wetware like a permanent ROM chip. Funnily enough, some of the puzzles still confused me! I guess my colorblindness certainly hasn't been magically cured over time...
Ooh, I remember Zoombinis! Our teacher loaded it up on the classroom computer used to use it as a way to keep kids busy once they finished their math assignments. This, of course, led to everyone rushing to finish their work and crowding around to watch whoever managed to be the first to do so and kept them from bothering the teacher when she was helping the kids who needed more help.
It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.
I try to find the quieter places... I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. It completely throws me off the conversation I'm trying to have with the person I'm with.
> I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones.
I can't even reliably pick out one voice in a largely empty room if there's other sources of noise (ie music playing in a pub, etc.) It makes things like meetups impossible and working in an open plan office a nightmare.
Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each other, but I really cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at least not if I want to have a conversation.
Visit an audiologist for a test. I recently had a hearing test for the reason you described and was told there were no problems.
I started to ask people if they could actually hear or understand while with them at a loud place and many told me they couldn’t - they were mostly pretending to understand after eventually giving up.
I can't hear in such places without these: https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/hearing-protection/er20xs-...
They don't improve the signal, obviously, but your ears just don't get tired in the same way, so you can make out what people are saying - just about.
Test your hearing on higher frequencies, those are usually the first lost when hearing degrades. Normal headphones/loudspeakers can go way higher than people can hear, so you can do basic test yourself.
I have something similar - normal conversations are OK, but in loud environment it becomes very hard. Its not great to be the only one in group who doesn't understand what others are saying. I blew my hearing probably in front rows on metal concerts.
(I realize that online hearing tests aren't reliable, but they would have false positives, not false negatives)
Frustratingly, I've done those online hearing tests which test your ability to hear human voices amidst background noise and they tell me I have no hearing loss.
However, my hearing cuts out around 9khz, which is low. Definitely not my listening equipment because my wife can hear >9khz just fine on the same gear.
I can attest to that. I am deaf from my left ear and when I walk on the street I need to be on the left of any person walking with me, it is impossible to hear anything. In restaurants, pubs, bars, I have already given up and I know that I will miss most of the conversations.
Same here. I'm not usually deaf, but from time to time one ear blocks for a few weeks.
When that happens, I totally know what you mean about being unable to hear conversations in restaurants, bars, etc.
Even when my talking partner is aware, localising their voice from the din with one ear is really difficult. (Btw, there's some really impressive research at using AI techniques to help with that, which will makes it way into hearing aids eventually.)
Its at times like that I find it's way too easy to maintain a conversation with nods and yes/nos without having a clue what it's about. I've even done it in languages where I don't understand a word. I feel it says something about the speaker, that they can talk for ages without any confirmation that it's understood and no meaningful talk the other way :)
I can't help but think that these problems won't be solved until there's an obvious, short term incentive for our lawmakers to actually tackle these problems in any tangible way.
The public outcry has been constant for decades. The information and alarmism has existed for just as long. There's no shortage of reasons why we shouldn't tackle these issues. Those in the power to enact significant change to environmental and economic models aren't incentivized to. How do we shift perception to incentivize sustainable growth, rather than growth in isolation. How do we incentivize politicians to feel rewarded for methodical long term changes rather than short term successes at the cost of finite resources?
The public outcry that you mention is not even close to large enough.
Sure, everyone is for reducing pollution and against climate change in the abstract, but then in my country coal miners rally (successfully) to avoid their mines getting shut down, drivers complain when car lanes or parking space are replaced with bike lanes or sidewalk, half of the population buys diesel cars to save a few bucks, many go to live in suburbs and plan their life around the car, and people give close to zero weight to environmental proposals in elections.
There are countries with more environmental consciousness than mine (I'm from Spain and sadly it's very far from being a model country in this...), but anyway, public outcry is worthless if it is hypocritical and near the bottom of people's list of priorities.
By the way, the answer to your question is that elections provide a great way of incentivizing long-term thinking in politicians: just don't vote those that don't exhibit it. It's the voters' fault if we don't take that into account and instead vote based on stuff like "unemployment has gone down 2% in the last 4 years" (probably more due to global trends and long-term decisions of previous administrations than to whatever the current one recently did...)
Interesting approach. I'd like to also see a transparent system where campaign funds are kept in escrow until specific goals are achieved, those goals set by the donors
This is a great idea but I'm not sure it will work out.
Numbers are touched up all the time, both in politics (e.g. few governments will admit to lowering the employment rate, if things are not working, usually a new way of counting the unemployed is introduced) and in large companies (managers who report "everything's fine" up the chain until it's too late).
Applied to your idea, donors will have to come up with KPIs to meet. Whatever the situation, the KPIs will magically look good. And if there are no KPIs, nobody will dare take the job.
In my experience, politicians find new ways to massage the numbers but the civil service keeps collecting the old ones. But, I live in quite a democratic country:
The Rest and Spread operators are interesting, I think they're cool syntactic sugar and they've got reasonable use for some types of functional programming, but they feel like a ticking time bomb. It doesn't exactly promote resilience if objects are being passed around many different contexts. It seems like it promotes clunky boilerplate checks over more explicit logic
The safe community spaces on college campuses are honestly doing the opposite of what you suggest, generally giving people the opportunity to speak without fear. An example being communities where LGBT students can speak without fear of being targeted by homophobia, transphobia or otherwise. It's not unusual for communities to create rules to help foster dialogue and make its members feel safe being in that community
Uh, safe for the minority perhaps, but not safe for anyone who would dare to express any contradicting views. Imagine if someone said they thought their was no such thing as being gay, or said that they didn't think being trans was a real thing. Do you think the "safe zone" would be "safe" for them? At least in my perspective it's a very one-sided, anti-freedom of expression movement. It seems ignorant of me for so many which support them to overlook this.
To pick a hopefully neutral example, should it be "safe" for you to go to a chess club meeting and diss everybody there because you think Go is superior? They'll ask you to leave, and rightfully so.
It's a good thing to have these small "bubbles" for all sorts of minorities in which they get to define the rules.
Where it gets more interesting is when it affects the broader public sphere. That said, the particular examples you gave are ones where you'd be rightfully excluded depending on how you approach the subject. The evidence seems pretty clear that being gay or trans are real things. It took me some time to figure that out, but I found that as long as I approached the topic in a civil way, others responded in kind.
The problem is that the kind of people who complain about "anti-freedom of expression" or "excessive political correctness" are usually not the kind of people who approach those topics in a civil way. They have a certain foregone conclusion in their minds, and aren't ready to accept anything that contradicts that conclusion. So naturally, they end up being (justly) excluded from the discussion.
Unsuccessful attempts, maybe, although I doubt it. These kinds of stories tend to be greatly exaggerated, so: citation needed.[0] Meanwhile, there have been actual laws (not attempts!) that criminalized deviation from the heterosexual norm not so long ago -- or even today in not-so-nice countries.
The point is: Yes, the public sphere is also changing, but it's changing slowly, and the participants of the discussion who see a danger to freedom of speech are >95% hysterically exaggerating.
Meanwhile, it's good to keep in mind that there are <5% crazies in every group, including chess players and LGBT people. Listening to them is never a good idea.
[0] When you dig down, what you usually find is some minor committee discussing whether they should change the language used in their own bylaws and/or publications. I.e. it's not legislation, nobody is being forced to do anything, and most of these initiatives don't even pass in the first place.
> a. Intentional or repeated refusal to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun or title. For example, repeatedly calling a transgender woman “him” or “Mr.” after she has made clear which pronouns and title she uses
[snip]
> And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.
If that were literally all it was about, nobody would have reason to complain. Instead, the concept has expanded out to encompass political views which can be debated in good faith. Supporting certain candidates has resulted in public shaming, if not outright violence.
Do our college students really need to be kept "safe" from mere disagreement?
When "mere disagreement" is something like "I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different" then, uh, yes. E.g., depriving LGBTQ people marriage because of your "religious" beliefs is not a political view. This can be hard to understand if you come from a position where you've never had to deal with any issues like that. But for people in those groups, it's important to have a place where you can be with like-minded people and talk about those issues without someone taking over the conversation and making it about themselves and /their/ group.
"I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different"
Quite the opposite. Typically safe space warriors are demanding that people have different rights in public based on their genetics, not the same rights.
E.g. "You're a white man so shut up, I should have a special right to speak over you because of [XYZ]."
> When "mere disagreement" is something like "I don't think you should have the same rights as me because your sexuality/gender/class/religion is different" then, uh, yes.
Part of maturing is learning how to stand for one's ideas and beliefs, as well as learning how to deal with (bigoted) opposition to those. Isolating yourself, locking yourself in the echo chamber will make you unprepared for dialogue with those outside of it, or worse, will end with you radicalizing because you'll grow up with your standing never contested.
This is also going the other way. If you'll remove yourself from discourse, you will willfully marginalize yourself. How can local population know that LGBT people are living among them and are their friends/relatives/normal folk, if those people will lock themselves up in their safe spaces?
My favorite example when it comes to LGBT is polish activist turned politician, [Robert Biedroń](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Biedro%C5%84), who has spent life being vocal and visible activist for LGBT rights - extremely courageous feat in mostly catholic and conservatist Poland. The culmination of his work was gaining enough popular support to become mayor in 100k large city.
If this guy ran in my city, he'll get my vote. Even if I disagree with 90% of what he says because politically he always aligns himself with socialists and I'm moderate, I believe that what he does for making our society less bigoted is worth every support.
Now ask yourself, how many such Biedrońs will not come to be because they'll close themselves in their small worlds in fear of their feelings being hurt by some bigots?
If you disagree with 90% of his policies, but you vote for him anyway because of his LGBT activism, you're no better than racists could also disagree with 90% of a white man's policies, but still vote for them because their opponent was black.
I know you'll argue against that point, but I mention it not for you, but to put what you said into context for other readers.
Actually, I fail to see the point you are making. I'm arguing that people should be active in shaping popular discourse of their societies while honing and validating their opinions as they clash those with other opinions.
Is your argument "oh, but racists are also shaping discourse of their societes"?
It's not even that far in the past that these games were running on bare metal. The Nintendo Wii didn't have an OS running underneath the games, each piece of software had access to the entire range of memory and CPU unrestricted. I'm pretty sure the 3DS has a very minimal OS running underneath software.
Entirly true, it's kinda cool to see the evolution - Though it makes sense the games would run bare metal, since that would give the best bang-for-your-buck, and presumably it didn't matter at the time.
The 3DS actually has a somewhat complicated architecture - My understanding is that it has a dual-core CPU, but one core is dedicated to running the OS kernel, and the other is used for games. Thus, there is also a 'kernel-mode' 'user-mode' split in a way, because the core dedicated to running games doesn't have full access to everything, and doesn't have full access to mess with the other core. You can kinda see this in action when you note that the 3DS can only ever have one game running at a time, but certain home-screen applications can be run while a regular game is suspended - Due to the application running off of the OS kernel's core and not the game's core.
This also means that an exploit in a game doesn't automatically result in full-system control - A separate exploit in the kernel is necessary to gain full control over the system. This is completely different from the Wii's setup as you noted - I'm not sure if the Wii had the OS running while games did or not, but regardless since games ran with full privileges a single exploit in a game resulted in full-system control.
