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Justin and Jason discuss Jason’s recent near-death experience and how his brother’s childhood friend has a small part on The Walking Dead, the Reddit button, how Jason is trading coding hours for Robocraft hours with Colby, kids and electronics, the iWatch and why people are always checking their phones, the essence of peopling, automatic birthday wishes and thank yous on Facebook, why everything that can be automated eventually will be, Patrick McKenzie’s new startup – Starfigher, remote working and productivity, the relationship between wealth, power and fame, the two federal agents who were indicted for stealing Bitcoins, the movie The Imitation Game, why the Caltech visit was postponed a week, negative social patterns and the heritability of personality traits, iZombie, how the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology are no longer accepting p-values, the Reproducibility Project, why null results tend not to be published as often, the latest with MVCC and Justin’s new workout regime at CATZ.
It is an Irish expression. It’s a little old-timey and culchie but begorrah, I have to side with Justin. 😉
It’s kind of used as an ironically complimentary pronoun. It’s like calling to someone as His Eminence.
@nethy Do you mean “himself” 🙂
@nethy – Okay, fine, we’ll let Justin off the hook for speaking Middle English or Old Irish or whatever, but what’s with the “Google have” in place of the “Google has”? Don’t tell me that’s acceptable, but just old-timey. 😉
@Jason as I’ve said before in the UK we think of a company as a group so we say “Google have done xyz” and in the US you think of a company as an entity so you say “Google has done xyz”…
@jason Check this out, written by a UK tech reporter: https://twitter.com/TechCityUK/status/586476304578572288
“#Google have announced the launch of their #DigitalGarage project in Leeds to help tech entrepreneurs, find out more: “
Regarding time with kids.
Making time for kids? Study says quality trumps quantity
Justin is correct, it is possible to inherit learned behaviors, but Jason is also correct, in that the DNA is not changed (in every study that I’ve come across on inherited learned behaviors). An example with mice: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html
This is an extension of behavioral epigenetics — the idea is that life experiences sometimes change the way genes are expressed (through mechanisms like DNA methylation and modification of histones), and it turns out that sometimes those changes can be inherited.
Also it is possible to insert new DNA sequences into cells, through enzymes like reverse transcriptase (some viruses do this) although I’ve never heard of anyone proving inherited behaviors due to this mechanism. Theoretically it’s possible, though 🙂
@Joe – Very cool. Thanks so much for the great explanation!
Only half way through the podcast but I have to say, as an Irish person, Justin is correct about the Himself saying. In my understanding it’s used to underline the importance of the person to the conversation, as in, “..and then the man Himself arrived”.
I have to agree with himself, it’s definitely an Irish colloquialism 🙂
Also I think this might have been what Justin was talking about with the transfer of memory http://www.radiolab.org/story/goo-and-you/
@all – Thanks very much for the backup. This is the most I’ve been righter than Jason in one show! It feels good 😉
(See what I did there)
I checked out that Robocraft game Cody is obsessed with and I’m quite impressed by the physics simulation. When you lose pieces of your craft the new center of mass and recoil and everything what what you feels about right.
Normally I see detailed physics like this only in single player games where you don’t need to synchronize the physics between the client and server, or in multiplayer games where they just punt on the problem and only detailed physics for things where it doesn’t matter if all the clients aren’t in sync, an example being ragdolls, explosions, etc. Since they don’t effect gameplay they can punt on the problem of keeping all clients together.
I really wonder how they got it work as well as they did in for a twitch based multiplayer game like this. Not an easy problem!