I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Another interesting fall in prices is reflected in the $60-$80-ish prices of VHS in the 1980s and the current $18-ish price of DVDs now.
ReplyDeleteDisregarding rise in quality, we still find prices to have fallen by more than 75%. Were there a numerical way of measuring video and sound quality (there might be), then who knows how much of a price fall we have seen with respect to the same level of quality.
You are being unfair, the market is even better at lowering digital storage costs than you say. Calculate based on non-portable storage i.e hard disks. You'll find a 2TB drive costs you as little as $100
ReplyDeleteThat miracle came at the expense of the enslaved industrial worker.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Avram -- that is why I noted the portability of my memory stick.
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