Vibrating Pyra?


I don't see the difference between positive and negative.
If you hit something with a hammer and it breaks, that proves that hitting something with a hammer will break it.

If I hit something with a hammer and it didn't break, that only proves that it didn't break that time, it doesn't prove that it is impossible to break with a hammer. Even if I hit it a million times and it doesn't break that still only proves that it didn't break after a million hits, you can't guarantee it won't break on the million and oneth hit.

It is possible to prove a positive, it is impossible to prove a negative.

I've given several reasons why I don't know enough about the topic to be sure the smart phone comparison is applicable.
We aren't even discussing the phones directly anymore, we're now discussing whether it is possible to prove that it is safe to the degree that you and sebt3 want, specifically with respect to sebt3's disagreement with the use of assumptions. It is not. It is impossible to prove a negative without making at least some kind of assumption. If I hit something with a hammer a million times and it doesn't break it can only be assumed that the thing is strong enough to withstand at least one million hammer blows. If that's not good enough, if you want some kind of proof that doesn't rely on assumption, then you are literally asking the impossible.
 
I don't see the difference between positive and negative.
If you hit something with a hammer and it breaks, that proves that hitting something with a hammer will break it.
No it doesn't. Not without some basic assumptions.Hit something 10^9 times with a hammer and each time it breaks. It could still stay intact the next time.

Hit something 10^9 times with a hammer and it never breaks. It could still break the next time.
 
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I don't see the difference between positive and negative. Both are based on several impossible to proof assumptions.
 

Well, eh...

It is a bit more complicated than that. The base case is proof of existence. In an empirical system, we can prove general existence, because that can be proven by specific appearance. "I can prove horses exist, because look here - Horse!". We cannot prove general non-existence. "I can prove unicorns don't exist, because look here - No unicorn!" doesn't work. The unicorn might have its day off and be down on the pier playing the slot machines for all we know. 

In that way, it is easy to prove that there is (specific) damage to something - "Look here, cracked board". It is not possible to prove that there is (generally) no damage to something - "Well, this is ok, and this is ok, and all seems ok, but, well...". That is, unless you have enumerated all the possible cases of what constitutes damage and have a test for each end every one of them. Which is the equivalent of having enumerated each and every possible hiding place for the unicorn, and checking all of them. In the general empirical world, stuff is not enumerable. 

But this is still all proof of existence. When it comes to proof of causation, it gets a bit more complicated. Strictly speaking, we can prove that a particular something does not cause a specific effect. That is general falsification, Popperism, call it what you like. You have a theory about the world ("All red objects fall sideways because of the redshift effect"), you logically deduct a specific testable consequence of this ("If I drop this red marble, it will fall into the wall on my left"), and then you test it. If the consequence holds, you really cannot be sure that it really means your theory holds - there could, for instance, be a hidden electromagnet behind the wall - but if it doesn't hold, and the marble falls straight down, then you've proven that your theory is wrong. So, we can prove a theory false, but not true. This is down to the specific/general thing again - We're looking for a general explanation for all of these cases of falling marbles, and there is a multitude of possible general explanations whilst we're checking a specific one. But that also mean that that specific one can be struck of the chart when we see that it fails.

Science never proves. Science always disproves, and when it doesn't, we've just made it a little more likely that our theory is true. Likely, not proven.

So, strictly speaking, we cannot generally prove that a vibration motor causes damage to a board. We can experiment - We can mount the motor, run a typical usage test, and find a broken solder joint. We can fix it, rerun the test, and find another broken solder joint. We can repeat this ad infinitum and never have actually proven that it is the vibration that breaks the board. It could have different causes - a small earthquake the first time, an unseen lightning strike the second, a bad joint to start off with the third...It could also be a systematic but unmeasured cause - It could, for instance, be a telekinetic pulse that your brain emits every time you think the thought "now I shall start the vibration test". However, in practice, we tend to accept induction as a practical proof method - Even though a million marbles falling straight down does not prove that the next one will do the same, it is rational to assume that it will, even at the lack of a proper logically sound proof. We have a specific effect we're looking for, and we've seen it so many times that we inductively assume the theory of gravitation is correct. Or the theory that vibration causes board damage, as was the case. Particularly when we have supporting theory in mechanics (transfer of vibrational energy) that would explain the mode of causation

However, if proving the positive is slightly logically dodgy, proving the negative is several magnitudes worse. And it goes back, again, to proof of existence. For the positive, we need to see a specific effect. Any specific effect. For the negative, we need to not see any of the multitudes of possible effects. That is, a general theory for the causation of a general effect.

In the first case, we could be sure of the outcome (That is cracked, therefore something was broken, therefore the experiment was a success), although we couldn't be logically certain of the cause. Here, we can't even be sure of that - We think nothing is broken, because we can't see anything broken, but we can't be sure because that is a general statement - so we can't even, logically speaking, be sure whether our experiment came out a success or a failure. Where we could have a fairly good induction going rather quickly in the positive case, here we can't.

So: It is impossible to prove a negative. And while it is also true that strictly speaking it is impossible to prove a positive, too, that does not mean that those two impossibilities are on equal footing. Proving a negative is a lot more impossible than proving a positive. 

All this, of course, in the empirical realm. If we go into formal analytic subjects like mathematics, then it is a different thing.
 
No it doesn't
I hit it with a hammer. It broke. Ergo you can break it with a hammer.
Hit something 10^9 times with a hammer and each time it breaks. It could still stay intact the next time.
It doesn't matter. I hit it once, it broke once, that is all it takes to prove that it is possible to break it with a hammer. If I then hit it a million times and it never breaks again it doesn't change the fact that one time it broke so the possibility of it breaking from a hammer blow still exists. You can reduce it to a probability of not breaking but it doesn't matter, we aren't setting out to measure probabilities, the question that was asked was "can it be broken" and the answer is a definite "yes".
Hit something 10^9 times with a hammer and it never breaks. It could still break the next time.
Yup, and you will never prove that it will never break.
 
With sufficient skepticism, nothing at all can be said about anything: it is possible to imagine a logically consistent world in which you are connected to a Matrix-style neural interface such that your entire perceived universe is specifically designed by some flying spaghetti monster to fool you into believing all kinds of stuff like the basic laws of physics and the existence of billions of non-broken electronic devices with a built-in vibration motor. All of earth's history including all of science could be just part of some cosmic-scale prank. Perhaps even time, space, causation, matter and energy are not 'real'.

If you inject that much skepticism in any discussion, the debate becomes kind of pointless. This is more or less what happens when you're discussing with young earth creationists: if you're prepared to dismiss the fossil record, radiometric dating, etc. with no better argument than "God made it look like that to test us", then you can just as well postulate the existence of a flying spaghetti monster who created the bible just to test us, or that we're living inside the Matrix and it just got started 2 minutes and 37 seconds ago -- all your earlier memories are false ones. Or any other nonsense.

Even Descartes "cogito ergo sum" only shows that you exist, but not that you are what you think you are. Perhaps we are all just a figment of someone's imagination, some kind of simulated beings, or some kind of individual brain cells from a larger organism where we feel like being an individual conscious being but actually the real organism is at a higher level -- like the cells in our body each have their own metabolism and may very well not 'know' they're part of something bigger. Or whatever.

The only thing we can rule out is a completely empty universe in which there is literally nothing at all. There has to be 'something'. Or maybe not even that. Maybe we all exist only in the mathematical sense, like the natural and the real numbers 'exist'. There is a real number whose decimals encode an extremely detailed history book of everything that ever happened in all of the universe (assuming time and space are at most countably infinite), and there are real numbers corresponding to all possible alternative universes. So maybe we are ultimately nothing but some rather long (but finite) subsequence of digits of one of those real numbers.

Philosophically this kind of stuff can be quite interesting for a while, but it gets boring quite soon.  With respect to the choice of components in the design of a handheld computer, all of this stuff is quite irrelevant though.
 
Okay, I'm just responding to the vibrating part...where a tiny (remotely controlled) part of a computer/cell phone can make it trumble...so it's an easy part.  Very cheap, and if you're a decent engineer?  You can place it in the bottom of the device to make it feasible.

I don't like the whole idea of it.
 
I love _wb_'s rants and/or just his (obvious) ideas on computers and society or whatEVR....He's crazy smart.  Brilliant, and to learn more about poop-filled pants, please contact Binky.  He loves wearing boots in the mud.
 
With sufficient skepticism, nothing at all can be said about anything: it is possible to imagine a logically consistent world in which you are connected to a Matrix-style neural interface such that your entire perceived universe is specifically designed by some flying spaghetti monster to fool you into believing all kinds of stuff like the basic laws of physics and the existence of billions of non-broken electronic devices with a built-in vibration motor. All of earth's history including all of science could be just part of some cosmic-scale prank. Perhaps even time, space, causation, matter and energy are not 'real'.

If you inject that much skepticism in any discussion, the debate becomes kind of pointless. This is more or less what happens when you're discussing with young earth creationists: if you're prepared to dismiss the fossil record, radiometric dating, etc. with no better argument than "God made it look like that to test us", then you can just as well postulate the existence of a flying spaghetti monster who created the bible just to test us, or that we're living inside the Matrix and it just got started 2 minutes and 37 seconds ago -- all your earlier memories are false ones. Or any other nonsense.

Even Descartes "cogito ergo sum" only shows that you exist, but not that you are what you think you are. Perhaps we are all just a figment of someone's imagination, some kind of simulated beings, or some kind of individual brain cells from a larger organism where we feel like being an individual conscious being but actually the real organism is at a higher level -- like the cells in our body each have their own metabolism and may very well not 'know' they're part of something bigger. Or whatever.

The only thing we can rule out is a completely empty universe in which there is literally nothing at all. There has to be 'something'. Or maybe not even that. Maybe we all exist only in the mathematical sense, like the natural and the real numbers 'exist'. There is a real number whose decimals encode an extremely detailed history book of everything that ever happened in all of the universe (assuming time and space are at most countably infinite), and there are real numbers corresponding to all possible alternative universes. So maybe we are ultimately nothing but some rather long (but finite) subsequence of digits of one of those real numbers.

Philosophically this kind of stuff can be quite interesting for a while, but it gets boring quite soon.  With respect to the choice of components in the design of a handheld computer, all of this stuff is quite irrelevant though.
Are you familiar with the works of Robert Anton Wilson and friends?
 
Could ED give a quick response, if there would be kinda free solder pads for an optional rumble motor? Would be nice :)
 
With sufficient skepticism, nothing at all can be said about anything: it is possible to imagine a logically consistent world in which you are connected to a Matrix-style neural interface such that your entire perceived universe is specifically designed by some flying spaghetti monster to fool you into believing all kinds of stuff like the basic laws of physics and the existence of billions of non-broken electronic devices with a built-in vibration motor. All of earth's history including all of science could be just part of some cosmic-scale prank. Perhaps even time, space, causation, matter and energy are not 'real'.

If you inject that much skepticism in any discussion, the debate becomes kind of pointless. This is more or less what happens when you're discussing with young earth creationists: if you're prepared to dismiss the fossil record, radiometric dating, etc. with no better argument than "God made it look like that to test us", then you can just as well postulate the existence of a flying spaghetti monster who created the bible just to test us, or that we're living inside the Matrix and it just got started 2 minutes and 37 seconds ago -- all your earlier memories are false ones. Or any other nonsense.

Even Descartes "cogito ergo sum" only shows that you exist, but not that you are what you think you are. Perhaps we are all just a figment of someone's imagination, some kind of simulated beings, or some kind of individual brain cells from a larger organism where we feel like being an individual conscious being but actually the real organism is at a higher level -- like the cells in our body each have their own metabolism and may very well not 'know' they're part of something bigger. Or whatever.

The only thing we can rule out is a completely empty universe in which there is literally nothing at all. There has to be 'something'. Or maybe not even that. Maybe we all exist only in the mathematical sense, like the natural and the real numbers 'exist'. There is a real number whose decimals encode an extremely detailed history book of everything that ever happened in all of the universe (assuming time and space are at most countably infinite), and there are real numbers corresponding to all possible alternative universes. So maybe we are ultimately nothing but some rather long (but finite) subsequence of digits of one of those real numbers.

Philosophically this kind of stuff can be quite interesting for a while, but it gets boring quite soon.  With respect to the choice of components in the design of a handheld computer, all of this stuff is quite irrelevant though.
Are you familiar with the works of Robert Anton Wilson and friends?
No, I was not. Looks like a colorful figure, with perhaps some interesting ideas, but his basic position appears to be extreme paranoia and extreme skepticism. While I think that can be philosophically somewhat interesting, I think it's a poor starting point for science and politics.

He attempts to maintain a perfect agnostic balance between philosophical materialism and idealism, between ratio and occult stuff. In a sense he reminds me of Isaac Newton.

I'm a firm materialist myself, so in that way I disagree with Robert Anton Wilson.

Of course it could very well be the case that the essential filament of our material reality is a quantum-mechanical superposition of pure information (cf. Wheeler's "it from bit"), behaving chaotically such that even at the collapsed, classically deterministic macro-level it is for all practical purposes unpredictable. But that does not at all imply idealism.
 
Could ED give a quick response, if there would be kinda free solder pads for an optional rumble motor? Would be nice :)
Since the motors are cheap and small - I'm in favor of adding one or more then letting those who are paranoid about the seismic vibrations from the Pyra causing the roof of their domicile to suddenly give way can simply turn them off.

They're great for phone/message/text/email notifications.
 
I assume it's probably already too late unless they are already included in the main PCB v3.

@the discussion I started: Yeah, we weren't really talking about the same things (there was at least one clear misunderstanding when I read back), but I just really don't feel like writing an in depth-answer. I agree with most of what you wrote.

It depends on what you want to proof - and here actually we don't need proof it can't happen, but we need proof it won't happen very often.
 
It doesn't take a very high education of science to know nothing is 100% possible or impossible, at best things are very very (very X100) likely or dislikely.


You can bounce a rubber ball on a wooden table and it will bounce back, it could also go straight through the table, the issue is the chance of it going through the table is crazily unlikely. Just how unlikely this is to happen is too hard to comprehend.


In the case of the vibrating motor, it feels logical vibrations could cause problems, we don't have any similar device to compare against, Zodiac is possibly closest but we can't answer a lot of things (how much design and testing was put into making vibration possible in the Zodiac? Given when Tapwave went under, perhaps a lot of units did die from vibration but the support community had long since dried up so it hadn't been heavily reported? How similar is the Zodiac board design to the Pandora? Etc).


For what it is worth, I like the idea of having vibration support. Liked it on Zodiac and would like it on Pyra, particularly with the phone potential capabilities on Pyra.
 
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With sufficient skepticism, nothing at all can be said about anything: it is possible to imagine a logically consistent world in which you are connected to a Matrix-style neural interface such that your entire perceived universe is specifically designed by some flying spaghetti monster to fool you into believing all kinds of stuff like the basic laws of physics and the existence of billions of non-broken electronic devices with a built-in vibration motor. All of earth's history including all of science could be just part of some cosmic-scale prank. Perhaps even time, space, causation, matter and energy are not 'real'.

If you inject that much skepticism in any discussion, the debate becomes kind of pointless. This is more or less what happens when you're discussing with young earth creationists: if you're prepared to dismiss the fossil record, radiometric dating, etc. with no better argument than "God made it look like that to test us", then you can just as well postulate the existence of a flying spaghetti monster who created the bible just to test us, or that we're living inside the Matrix and it just got started 2 minutes and 37 seconds ago -- all your earlier memories are false ones. Or any other nonsense.

Even Descartes "cogito ergo sum" only shows that you exist, but not that you are what you think you are. Perhaps we are all just a figment of someone's imagination, some kind of simulated beings, or some kind of individual brain cells from a larger organism where we feel like being an individual conscious being but actually the real organism is at a higher level -- like the cells in our body each have their own metabolism and may very well not 'know' they're part of something bigger. Or whatever.

The only thing we can rule out is a completely empty universe in which there is literally nothing at all. There has to be 'something'. Or maybe not even that. Maybe we all exist only in the mathematical sense, like the natural and the real numbers 'exist'. There is a real number whose decimals encode an extremely detailed history book of everything that ever happened in all of the universe (assuming time and space are at most countably infinite), and there are real numbers corresponding to all possible alternative universes. So maybe we are ultimately nothing but some rather long (but finite) subsequence of digits of one of those real numbers.

Philosophically this kind of stuff can be quite interesting for a while, but it gets boring quite soon.  With respect to the choice of components in the design of a handheld computer, all of this stuff is quite irrelevant though.
Are you familiar with the works of Robert Anton Wilson and friends?
No, I was not. Looks like a colorful figure, with perhaps some interesting ideas, but his basic position appears to be extreme paranoia and extreme skepticism. While I think that can be philosophically somewhat interesting, I think it's a poor starting point for science and politics.

He attempts to maintain a perfect agnostic balance between philosophical materialism and idealism, between ratio and occult stuff. In a sense he reminds me of Isaac Newton.

I'm a firm materialist myself, so in that way I disagree with Robert Anton Wilson.

Of course it could very well be the case that the essential filament of our material reality is a quantum-mechanical superposition of pure information (cf. Wheeler's "it from bit"), behaving chaotically such that even at the collapsed, classically deterministic macro-level it is for all practical purposes unpredictable. But that does not at all imply idealism.
I don't have time to get deep into this atm.  Maybe I will remember to return to this thread later.

I think it might be dangerous to assume that either paranoia or skepticism are what he is really pushing, although it depends on the book.  Some of his stuff is very much a part of a larger collection of works and ideas by others, so that will be reflected to some degree.  As for his own declared agnosticism, yes that is also present, but I don't think that someone who is able to understand what he was getting at with certain things should be put off by that.  A lot of it comes down to playing with your reality anyway.  His views on science and politics, while fun for some, should be the start of a thought experiment, imo.  Honestly, I can't tell you what precisely I think his views are as a whole, since there was so much that was contradictory at times, but those were admitted to in his case, and a part of the game, I think.  I also think that he may have just been trying to take people along with him while he explored and thought about things, and that he had few if any die hard beliefs.

Perhaps what reminds you of Isaac Newton is why I like him.  I am not one of his hardcore fans, but I like that variety in his material.  I disagree with a lot of what RAW says, but I have never found anyone I fully agree with.  I do like that he gets you thinking, even if you sometimes find yourself thinking about really pointless or silly stuff.

I think I agree with what you said in your last paragraph, but this is a discussion for another time.  I am not knowledgeable of Wheeler's ideas, and idealism itself is a bit deep for me to disregard if we are not on the same page, which could very well be the case since it is not something I have messed around with or researched to any real degree by itself (but have gone down somewhat similar roads before, maybe).
 
As said, some controllable pads with 3V max like the kb_bl pads on the Pandora would be fine.
 
The most RAW-ish I've read is the Principia Discordia, which I'm not sure how much is just him and how much are the others (and who those others actually are, and so on), but that is in sections completely brilliant.
 
The most RAW-ish I've read is the Principia Discordia, which I'm not sure how much is just him and how much are the others (and who those others actually are, and so on), but that is in sections completely brilliant.
Over the last decade a lot of information on the history and development of Principia Discordia has been publicised.  Very little of it is by RAW.  I was quite surprised to learn that one of the more memorable parts was by Camden Benares, as I thought it was mostly Thornley and Hill, with little bits and pieces by others, not whole sections.

RAW (and friends) has some fiction books if that might be more appealing.  Some of them might be considered science fiction or something.  I still can't stand that Dan Brown got rich and famous writing books about the same stuff RAW did, as I wish he was more well known.
 
On the topic of vibration, I've dealt with home repairs of automotive electronics damaged by vibrations and it only seems to affect the connectors and heavier components. Also, through hole components seem to be much more likely to suffer from vibration damage.

In the Pyra you would have a much more controlled environment, but I think special care would still be needed with regards to vibrations. Connectors need to be attached to the board by other means than solder alone and support structures might be needed for large capacitors or coils (not sure if the Pyra will have any). Smartphones are definitely designed with this in mind and also have very little through hole components, if any.

That being said, vibrators have other issues. Pretty much all of them need a motor driver circuit (since they draw way too much power for a CPU pin), which will mean more components and another redesign of the board. Moreover, as I mentioned already, they do use a fair bit of power. Despite the low duty cycle they would probably have a significant impact on the battery life.

I would propose another solution; add an angled header on the board for i2c/spi/uart so that a separate vibrator module can be attached. It would result in a separate board with a vibrator for (roughly guessed) about 20-30 euros. Basically a small microcontroller, a small power circuit and some software glue.
 
Motor driver circuit? A single tiny transistor is enough. A common mechanical vibrator for mobile devices only takes around 60mA @1.5V (well, at least 6 years ago - eventually they got more efficient, or piezo ones got cheap enough that they would be worth it).
 
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