An interesting read related to this is the following article, which begins with von Neumann's comment that ``Nobody really knows what entropy really is."
I wonder if this is a skill that must be learned before a certain age, something like what happens for learning a language [0] and possibly learning the natural numbers [1]. It is also interesting that they have learned to be able to solve problems that require mentally rotating shapes.
Noob here. Is FB really the powerhouse it is thought to be in terms of active users? In the iPhone app store there are 712K reviews, while TikTok has 8M and Instagram has 20M. I know that these are ratings, but you would think there would be some (rough) proportionality with their usage.
This is a prescient article given the state of computing at the time it was written. In reading it I also wondered if this explains Steve Jobs insistence of using the name iPad (he was pressured to change the name because the default reference of "pad" was to something rather different). But, the author really blows it at the end (the last two paragraphs) when he claims that ubiquitous computing will mean the decline of the computer addict and of information overload.
This idea that we have a database that covers all possibilities for anything that would qualify as alien is delusional. It's like Neatherandals claiming that they have a complete database for hard things, and it contains exactly two entries: rock and stick. If they somehow stumbled across an iPhone, and ran a few tests, they would decide it is a rock (since it can skip across water - just like other flat rocks). In the very near future we will have complex dynamic alloys that do not fit neatly into any database because their characteristics will be change depending on the surrounding conditions. This is by a species that can't even build a space elevator. Who knows what is possible for a species capable of interstellar travel.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228935581_How_physi...