Likewise, where does that tree in your backyard come from? It is the product of carbon dioxide and water.
edit: The significance of this thought is when a child is asked where a tree or plant comes from, at least in the US, they inevitably answer the ground when the answer should be rain that falls from the sky and air. With the naive notion a tree comes from the ground we miss the obvious which is the ground doesn't sink when a tree grows from it.
One fun variant of this story is: A tree is made of CO2 from air, water and minerals from the ground, and sunlight. If that wood is burned in a campfire, you get back CO2 in air, and water as vapor, and minerals as ash, and (some of) the sunlight as redder light and heat.
A related common misconception is to forget that plants, like us and most life, burn carbohydrates to CO2. Rainforest trees for instance, are only net consumers of CO2 for a couple of hours around noon.
I'd like to see science education content that weaves stories like this into a coherent tapestry. A rough-quantitative tapestry. Enabling transferable understanding. But we're a long long way from that. If anyone knows of a community pushing in that direction, I'd love to hear of it.
Yet another angle on the same story: The oxygen that makes this cycle possible wasn’t always available on Earth. It was the cycle itself (specifically photosynthesis in microbes) that created our oxygen rich atmosphere. [1]
I’ve heard of Big History [2] as one effort to weave lessons into a coherent tapestry. Agreed that this is a great way to learn.
> Yet another angle [...] oxygen [...] wasn’t always available
Yes! For example, flammability scales with oxygen concentration, so at peak, wildfires could be continent-scale. And oxygen as toxic bio waste, which our own cells still struggle to handle safely, ties a bunch of stories together.
> Big History as one effort to weave lessons into a coherent tapestry
Just looking at its solar system intro[1], sigh. Creating content that is correct, accessible, and insightful, is hard. Really hard. And since it's not incentivized, it rarely happens. Introductions to the solar system are often so misleading, engendering so many misconceptions you would need to fight with later if you actually cared, that viewing them is arguably net-negative learning.
Coherence regrettably requires correctness. Else instead of a tapestry of understanding, one has a tangled mess of misconceptions. Having tapestry, connections, helps prune misconceptions, by making it easier to see that something isn't fitting. And by making it easier to explore and thereby spot them. But tapestry also seems more vulnerable to misconceptions. Mangle a bit of tangle and you still have tangle, but not so with tapestry. And misconceptions are pervasive in science education. So it seems both broader scope and better quality are needed. A daunting challenge.
>"People look at a tree and think it comes out of the
ground, that plants grow out of the ground, " he says, but "if you ask, where does the substance [of the tree] come from? You find out ... trees come out of the air!"
How did the farmer get his donkey out of the deep ditch? He filled it in with dirt. This is just Aesop's fable. But it falls into the same abstract thinking as where does fat go, C55H104O6+78O2 --> 55CO2+52H2O+energy[0], or what happens to a tree when it burns, CH4+4O2→CO2+H2O (plus heat!)[0]. We have a hard time seeing air (sic) as something tangible. Also, this inability to visualize abstract concepts leads to political points of view such as whether or not aerosol of breath contains disease or invisible gases causes global warming.
It’s really cool to observe, e.g. placing white stems of scallions in water and seeing green leaves materialize within days. The underlying biochemistry is fascinating too. [1]
Off topic. When something is on the tip of my tongue, I don't search for it because I have a strange belief that what my mind is trying to do to remember it is fire off neurons associated with the thought or idea, near it, to create the action potential. It is strange that I will eventually remember it within hours or the next day. When the action potential fires the neuron, dendrites are formed between neurons strengthening the memory.
I wonder if there is any truth to that notion? That to solidify a memory, there can't be outside help, that electric chemical signal has to trigger firing the neurons associated with the memory to strengthen their connections.
I seem to remember reading about how thinking about something on the tip of your tongue and failing makes it harder to remember in the future, because concentrating on trying to remember it strengthens pathways that don’t lead back to the memory. So when you try in the future, those failed paths are stronger and more likely to be used again, further reinforcing the wrong association. Letting it go and hoping it comes to you also might not work, but it doesn’t strengthen bad pathways, so is more likely to allow you to remember in the future.
I feel like if this were true (searching doesn’t strengthen the original memory), it would lead to a dramatic difference in a cohort’s ability to remember trivial information that they learned a long time ago, but it also seems really hard to perform a trial for something like this.
When I started learning programming, my French became much easier to recall. This was after ~ a decade of very infrequent French language use. Much of it has subsequently come back to me.
Sample size of 1, yadda, yadda. Make of it what you will. I think it is interesting.
I wonder if the Cheesecake Factory and Applebees use A/B testing with their menus the same way Netflix uses A/B testing? There is probably a huge demand for data driven decision making for restaurants rather than these spares studies mentioned in the article which most likely are anecdotal. Simply have four different menus with the same items and look at the analytics provided by point of sale system. That is a fun start - up idea.
Most of your favorite restaurants in places like San Francisco, Portland, and New York City engineer their menu by removing least popular menu items once a month or once a season and replace them with what they think their customers currently demand at a price to insure that the restaurant is running at the point of highest efficiency. There are other considerations such a cost of product but most restaurants increase overall demand by using analytics from the point of sale system and the most profitable dishes are not always the most popular. Engineering a kitchen -- and dining room for that matter -- to be efficient without cooks tripping over each other is another whole discussion nonetheless even this ties into what can be added to the menu.
The two biggest mistakes an independent restaurant can make is hard coding a menu and putting the word in Bistro or Basserie in the restaurant name -- the restaurant can't evolve after that. Have any of you been to La Folie on Polk and Green in Russian Hill? That restaurant first opened as a casual French Bistro but the demand was for their caviar by the ounce and Tournedos Rossini which oddly enough was not only their most popular menu item but also not on the menu. So in the mid nineties the average customer was spending $150 - $300 instead of $40 per person.
They even have revenue forecasting models that take into account: weather, time of year, holidays etc and that article is from 2012.
PS I highly recommend that article for both the medicine to restaurant comparisons and the parallels one can draw to complicated systems in general like IT.
It is interesting that recipes are not art but rather fact. The same with fashion. I think that SpaceX has trade secrets rather than patents because there is nothing stopping China using the information in a patent whereas a trade secret is obfuscated.
So, given current US patent law, if SpaceX has some system/method/etc that is patentable material, but that they've chosen to retain as a trade secret, and someone else comes along and rediscovers the thing and patents it, then absolutely, SpaceX may then be in violation of that patent.
That's because, as of 2011, the US (and basically the rest of the world) works on a first-to-file basis:
Meaning: "In a first-to-file system, the right to the grant of a patent for a given invention lies with the first person to file a patent application for protection of that invention, regardless of the date of actual invention."
Obviously this is not without controversy! The upside is it drastically simplifies patent filing, litigation, etc, since there can be no debate about who was the first to file a patent for an invention. But, as you point out, there are significant downsides.
I would claim FITF ultimately encourages patenting and thus public disclosure of inventions, which is overall better for the world than one dominated by protections with trade secrets. But I can't claim to have put a lot of thought into that position...
Do you think that documenting the tech and publishing a hash of the document would help? I've seen some services that offer to do this, but I'm not sure if this would work in a court of law.
First off, some background. In order to prevent someone else from patenting your idea, absent being the first to file it yourself, you need to disclose it in such a way that it qualifies as "prior art", thereby rendering invalid any subsequent attempts to patent the invention.
Now, what does that disclosure look like? First, let's talk about the Enablement Requirement:
Quoting from that section: "The information contained in the disclosure of an application must be sufficient to inform those skilled in the relevant art how to both make and use the claimed invention."
This is a general requirement both for patents, and for relevant prior art. In particular, with respect to prior art specifically, if you look at 2121 part III of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2121.html
) you find the term "enabling disclosure":
"A prior art reference provides an enabling disclosure and thus anticipates a claimed invention if the reference describes the claimed invention in sufficient detail to enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to carry out the claimed invention"
There's also some rules about a POSITA being able to find the prior art. For example, with respect specifically to publications, in section 2128.2 of the manual (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2128.html) we find:
"'A reference is proven to be a "printed publication" "upon a satisfactory showing that such document has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art, exercising reasonable diligence, can locate it."'
So just writing down the invention and sticking it a drawer doesn't count! The inventor must have been able to find the prior art.
Anyway, this is all to say: Simply publishing a hash of a document to prove you have it is almost certainly not sufficient to invalidate a patent application, since such a disclosure clearly doesn't meet the Enablement Requirement for prior art, nor does it meet the requirement for being discoverable.
As a random aside: this touches on why the idea of defensive patenting or defensive publication exists. Suppose you come up with an invention where protection of the invention (either patent protection or trade secret) has no value to you, but where you want to avoid being sued by someone else in the case of independent invention.
In that case, it's not at all uncommon to file a patent application or otherwise disclose the invention in a notable publication (like, say, a journal) so as to prevent someone else from acquiring a patent on that invention. And note I say "application". You don't need to be granted the patent! The application is enough to qualify as prior art (and in fact it's not at all uncommon to see abandoned patent applications cited as prior art by patent examiners in patent prosecution wrappers, which are publicly available to anyone via the USPTO Public Pair system).
If you have read any sufficiently advanced patent, you'll easily see they're very hard to replicate without insider knowledge, bastardizing the principle behind protection due to publication.
> If you have read any sufficiently advanced patent, you'll easily see they're very hard to replicate without insider knowledge, bastardizing the principle behind protection due to publication.
I've certainly read my fair share of patents, and bluntly, I don't understand how you can make that claim. (har har)
Yes, patents are written with a POSITA (person having ordinary skill in the art) in mind, meaning you need familiarity with the area to understand them. A large part of the patent prosecution process is ensuring that the patent meets that standard. So I don't immediately buy that they're "very hard to replicate" for such an individual.
Heck, that would work against any individual patenting an invention, as if the patent cannot be understood by a POSITA, then it can't be easily enforced in a court of law. The entire Markman hearing process would fall apart if the judge couldn't form a coherent understanding of the claims.
Do you have examples where you believe this to be the case?
> I admittedly struggle with is knowing when to create a new Nest Module versus a new service in an already existing module
I use the same logic as where to put a font end component. If I'm creating a component for the first time, it sits in the same folder as the parent component. If I need to use it with another component, I refactor it into a common folder. If I create a string transformation function, it exists in the same file that is using it. If I need to use it somewhere else, it gets refactored into utils/strings.js which is a starting place for creating a library.
It solves the problem of 'where does this go?' and 'where did I put it?' 95% of code that I need to find will be physically next to the code that uses it in a file system. If not it will be neatly organized into a common use directory.
For the few times I need to refactor functionality, at that point, I will invest time to make a clear and adaptable API input and output contract.
This is like saying building an abstraction of assembly language like C will put all the software developers out of a job. Rather it creates more opportunities.
That's like asking, "could Enron have been an honest energy company..." sure, with a different board, different executives, different strategy, different technology, different IP, different market sector, and if they sold ice cream cones for fair prices at the local pool.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egypt-l...