It all comes down to glutamate and gaba again. It's been really interesting to see how fundamental these two molecules are as I have learned more about medical biology/neurology. They are implicated in so many medical and psychiatric conditions, yet you tend to hear much more about the monoamine transmitters (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc). But they are also hard to target for therapeutic purposes because gabaergics (barbituates, alcohol, z-drugs, etc) are often dangerously addictive; gaba just feels good... until the bill comes due. Maybe someday we will find a way to upregulate gaba activity in the body/brain without the inevitable crash. Hopefully we will, at least for the sake of people that suffer from over/under-excitatatory diseases.
Have you heard of GlyNAC? It targets glutamate excitotoxicity and as glycine + NAC + glutamate form glutathione, it also delivers both molecules needed to assemble it alongside glutamate.
It's because it's the other neurotransmitters that have neuromodulatory functions, often with specific subreceptors that perform specific roles.
In contrast GABA and glutamate mainly just handle the general information processing across the entire brain, there isn't a whole lot to do other than inhibit GABA which happens to reduce anxiety (as well as your entire brain's cognitive health)
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.
I have two existence proofs in mind that this isn't true.
One of them runs a very large venture backed company and is active right here on this site, the other you've likely never heard of, is super modest and absolutely blew me away with their ability while still in high school, by which time they'd been programming for more than a decade. Some kids really are amazingly capable.
I wasn’t a child prodigy but I wrote a word processor (on a Wang PCS II) that was used for years later by (high) school administration when I was in the tenth grade. By the 11th grade my first after school job was writing commercial software.
I wonder what everyone else thinks about this claim made by the article:
> The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.
The writer claims that a command economy gives them an advantage over a free market economy. Top-down production targets and price controls didn't really work for the Soviet Union, but maybe the more immediately-available and granular data available nowadays makes it feasible? The US already has a way to encourage production through various methods (e.g. subsidies). It seems to me the real difference is not the economic system, but that the Chinese government is less beholden to existing interests (that aren't the CCP). The US seems to often be unable or unwilling to accept the temporary pain of a big change, even if it would be better off in the long-term.
Modern China isn't a full Soviet-style command economy, it's an attempt to blend some aspects of a command economy into a market-based system. The government effectively sets priorities, but lets the market figure out how to do them.
This is a new thing, and we don't really know how well it works yet.
The way I see it, it isn't so much about which system is more efficient -- it's about which implementation of either system has less corruption.
The Soviet system failed because of rampant corruption, just like the American system seems to be failing. China seems to be succeeding because they have managed to clamp down on corruption at least as much as has been necessary to keep their economy productive and focused on ascendancy.
If the American people can't get a handle on the open corruption that infects all levels of the system from small town cops to district attorneys to state legislatures to the White House then the debate over the efficiencies of free market capitalism vs. a command driven economy are moot.
There do seem to be parallels to America's rise to the dominant global power. In particular, they have so much of the global manufacturing infrastructure, like the US did after WW2 destroyed much of Europe's, and I don't see a way for the US to compete with China's cheap labor and agglomeration economies. And they are generating more and more of the research in high-value sectors, kind of like the US scooping up all of the physicists during the war.
There are other roadblocks that the US didn't have to be sure, their very top-heavy population pyramid and they have less arable land (which probably doesn't matter so much except in wartime or as a national security concern). It still feel like the only things that might derail the current trends are internal social unrest or a major war.
The lectures and assignments for Oregon State's CS475 (Parallel Programming) are all available online. [0] There are lectures [1] and a project [2] about SIMD. I really enjoyed the entire course as a survey of parallel and high-performance computing. The full course covers multi-processing, multi-threading, caching, SIMD, GPUs (CUDA and OpenCL) and MPI. The projects are in C/C++ (along with OpenMP, CUDA and OpenCL). FYI, I think the last two projects use some large research GPU bank that you have to have special access to use, so you'd be out of luck on implementing the projects for those.
lol, so was I. a slide rule enthusiast myself I own several linear and circular slide rules. that said, I have come across an 8foot x 18inches linear slide rule used for teaching but a 45 meter drum shaped slide rule would be awesome.
