Post by: TheBiggerFish on May 08, 2017, 10:08:07 am
1. Talk about science.
2. Keep it civil.
3. [citation needed].
Post by: inteuniso on May 08, 2017, 11:08:23 am
Post by: redwallzyl on May 12, 2017, 10:34:12 pm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/nodosaur-national-geographic-dinosaur-suncor-1.4113462
:o
Post by: Eric Blank on May 13, 2017, 02:06:18 am
Post by: Egan_BW on May 13, 2017, 02:20:25 am
Post by: martinuzz on May 16, 2017, 04:28:06 pm
Or rather, they used a 3d printer to print a gelatinous mold, about 2mm in diameter with a chicken fence structure. In this, they placed several genetically engineered mouse follicles. The follicles adhered to the mold, and grew support cells that spread over the mold. After 4 days the researchers implanted the mold in a mouse whose ovaries had been surgically removed. The mouse started ovulating not long after, and became pregnant, although the litter size was below average. After giving birth, milk production started as it should, and the mouse pups proved to be fertile themselves.
The researchers inserted fluorescence genes into the follicle cells. When the offspring proved to have fluorescent cells, they were certain that they were produced by the artificial ovaries, and not by any residue from the original ovaries.
They hope the technique will prove succesful in humans as well. Women who have had chemotherapy often suffer from ovary damage, casuing them to become infertile. The new technique could help them grow new ovaries.
The gel used to create the 3d printer mold dissolves naturally after implantation, leaving just the new ovaries in place.
http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/werkende-muizeneierstokken-met-3d-printer-gemaakt-op-termijn-wellicht-ook-voor-mensen~a4495193/
tldr; order your 3d printed ovaries now
Post by: ChairmanPoo on May 16, 2017, 04:56:45 pm
Read a news item a couple of weeks ago about Organovo intending to move a liver patch they're working on into clinical trials.
Post by: Max™ on May 16, 2017, 06:21:49 pm
Side benefit of the above: ignoring any humanitarian "think of the animals" bullshit (yes I love animals btw, I adopt them on sight as a ward essentially, but associating with terrorists or worse like peta won't help anything) there are environmental boons here. Reduced water/feedstock consumption, reduced runoff from said feedstock, and hey if you're in a panic over CO2 you should be freaking about the CH4 which cows blast out of their asses all day, right?
Post by: gogs2 on May 20, 2017, 05:51:52 am
Scientists Are Close to Cloning a Woolly Mammoth
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a25263/scientists-are-close-to-cloning-a-woolly-mammoth/
Would be nice to see these walking around (well at least not in the cities) hahaha
Post by: ChairmanPoo on May 20, 2017, 05:53:14 am
Post by: Sergarr on May 20, 2017, 06:03:34 am
Quote
VLF signals are transmitted from ground stations at huge powers to communicate with submarines deep in the ocean. While these waves are intended for communications below the surface, they also extend out beyond our atmosphere, shrouding Earth in a VLF bubble. This bubble is even seen by spacecraft high above Earth’s surface, such as NASA’s Van Allen Probes, which study electrons and ions in the near-Earth environment.
The probes have noticed an interesting coincidence — the outward extent of the VLF bubble corresponds almost exactly to the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts, a layer of charged particles held in place by Earth’s magnetic fields. Dan Baker, director of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, coined this lower limit the “impenetrable barrier” and speculates that if there were no human VLF transmissions, the boundary would likely stretch closer to Earth. Indeed, comparisons of the modern extent of the radiation belts from Van Allen Probe data show the inner boundary to be much farther away than its recorded position in satellite data from the 1960s, when VLF transmissions were more limited.
With further study, VLF transmissions may serve as a way to remove excess radiation from the near-Earth environment. Plans are already underway to test VLF transmissions in the upper atmosphere to see if they could remove excess charged particles — which can appear during periods of intense space weather, such as when the sun erupts with giant clouds of particles and energy.
Well it appear that we accidentally a planetary shield. Wonder if that's going to help against the solar storms?
Post by: martinuzz on May 20, 2017, 06:55:33 am
Post by: Strider03 on May 20, 2017, 07:17:55 am
Post by: Starver on May 20, 2017, 08:13:43 am
Post by: martinuzz on May 20, 2017, 10:33:28 am
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/19/15666206/arctic-seed-vault-flood (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/19/15666206/arctic-seed-vault-flood)
I've always thought to myself 'why the fuck did they build that there, and not on the south pole, anchored to rock bottom?'. Cause you know, when the North Pole melts, it's bye bye seed bank (which btw has recently been expanded to be collective human knowledge bank as well)
EDIT: the article confuses me. How can something be both on the North Pole, and inside a mountain? Do they mean a mountain of ice, or is it a landmass within the polar circle, but not on the North Pole?
Post by: Dorsidwarf on May 20, 2017, 11:02:09 am
Post by: Starver on May 20, 2017, 11:21:46 am
And Scott-Amundsen base sits above land that is ~135m above sea-level. But between that land and the base is a further 2.7km of ice-sheet (vertically!). Imagine the problems with that. Especially as the ice moves. Perhaps one of the ice-free (desert) parts of Antarctica would be a better place to dig down, away from meltwater threat, but digging into the treaty-protected landmass is discouraged.
Instead, they dug into (and significantly upwardsly, which mitigates the problems of meltwater) a hillside in the Arctic, expecting some meltwater effects from the bits of the tunnel punching through the surface layer, but not with this worrying (for climate, not necessarily for the vault) amount of leakage. Very dwarfish.
Given the designed-in ability to be left unmaintained as a passive repository, I'd be surprised if this kind of problem is any more than an issue for access (and power/ventilation) for the benefit of staff, but if they leave it alone it'll just sit there with an initial sump of water or ice as it awaits future visitors rediscovering its existence and ensuring their own access is sufficiently possible to see what there is of the legacy material carefullly preserved inside.
(That said, the plan is not to just file away and forget. They bring seeds out and put seeds in all the time, AIUI, so that the best and most viable stock is ensured at the moment the unspecifiable impending doom ends the process, so that any futuristic Lara Croft-wannabees might have a better chance of finding something worthwhile disinterring from the facility.)
Post by: ChairmanPoo on May 20, 2017, 11:36:17 am
Post by: Starver on May 20, 2017, 11:37:18 am
Post by: inteuniso on May 20, 2017, 01:15:15 pm
On the planetary/spacecraft shield front, THz transmitters are less than five years away. They would DEFINITELY be a much stronger shield than radio waves.
I'll keep working on bringing the raw materials into existence required for said transmitters. (Going to try to make a glass fun in a few months, should be fun)
Post by: martinuzz on May 21, 2017, 12:38:23 pm
The magazine, ASSHOLE, or 'Adaptation, Sexual Selection and Harmony of the Oceans and Living Earth', is a parody on the many specialist journals that exist in the scientific community. With his magazine, he wants to show that it currently is way too easy for anyone to found a new so called specialist journal.
The umpteenth spam mail of yet another unknown specialist magazine offering subscription prompted him to take action.
Apparently specialist magazines have become the Nigerian prince of the academic society.
tl;dr subscribe to ASSHOLE now
http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/tijdschrift-asshole-toont-aan-een-vakblad-oprichten-is-veel-te-makkelijk~a4496220/ (http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/tijdschrift-asshole-toont-aan-een-vakblad-oprichten-is-veel-te-makkelijk~a4496220/)
Post by: Akura on May 21, 2017, 01:44:49 pm
and hey if you're in a panic over CO2 you should be freaking about the CH4 which cows blast out of their asses all day, right?
Mouth, not ass. About 90% of the methane cows produce is burped out as food ferments in its stomach.
Post by: Max™ on May 22, 2017, 03:00:11 am
Post by: Rusty Shackleford on May 22, 2017, 10:10:31 am
Reminds me of this huge stock of military vehicles in caves also located Norway. Seems the ideal place for a post-apocalyptic warlord to restart civilization after all the cows ruin the planet. Probably coincidence.
Underground structures are hard to keep dry, especially if you intend to just abandon them and its in a place covered with water. I would think a place like Yucca Mountain would probably work better?
Post by: Starver on May 22, 2017, 10:57:41 am
Post by: Reelya on May 22, 2017, 11:03:46 am
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-04-21/seaweed-fed-cows-could-solve-livestock-methane-problems/8460512
Quote
Research last year showed that in a laboratory setting, adding dried seaweed to a cow's diet could reduce the amount of methane it produced by up to 99 per cent.
...
This trial is based on similar research with sheep which showed impressive methane reductions after the animals were fed algae. That trial showed a 60 per cent reduction in methane emissions, even though some sheep in the trial only had 1 per cent of their diet as seaweed.
"There was a 60 per cent methane reduction for a 1 per cent diet of seaweed, but a 2 per cent seaweed diet caused a 70 per cent reduction, and a 3 per cent diet caused an 80 per cent reduction," Dr Kinley said
...
"What we are really interested in is what the effects are of seaweed on performance, because if less methane is being produced, that energy can go into live weight gains," he said.
Post by: sluissa on May 23, 2017, 10:57:24 am
Heh interesting. I wonder if that could be downsized to space ship size, and used to keep the radiation out.One thing someone on Reddit was asking is if that could be used to help shield Mars from radiation. It wouldn't be as effective as a functional core, but anything that helps would be good.
Slightly old old news at this point, but I just wanted to state, I think people are overstating the power of this factor. VLF transmissions are *POSSIBLY* affecting the distance at which the van allen belt occurs around the earth.
Even if this were proven to be the case and we have control over it, it's not a producible shield, it's simply a way to manipulate a natural and with our current abilities, unreproducable feature.
To use a very crude analogy. You have a pond and the shore of that pond and the trash that washes up on the shore of that pond. Think of the van allen belt like that line of trash that forms from the relatively constant wind blowing things onto it and it getting stuck there. It sounds like what we've realized is that maybe we can make waves big enough to wash things a little further up onto the shore. That's not to say we've figured out how to make the pond itself. That's beyond our abilities. But we can maybe, just maybe, play around with what already exists.
I wouldn't hold out hope for Mars it's core is solid and stationary. With no magnetic field, it has no pond to play in, just an empty pit where water once might have been ... but something that's exciting maybe is the gas giants and their moons. Jupiter and Saturn both have extremely powerful magnetic fields. And Jupiter's moon Io, at the very least, seems to have a molten iron core and could be generating it's own magnetic field. So far, aside from the distance, the radiation considerations of the gas giants has been one of the major concerns of sending humans there. If we could manipulate their magnetic fields to provide humans with safe(r) zones to live in, that's an exciting prospect. But that's also way down the line... a couple of decades on SpaceX's timeline... which in real time would mean I MIGHT see it before I die... but probably not.
Post by: Max™ on May 23, 2017, 12:08:53 pm
Best case, we figure out how to turn Jupiter into a railgun or something, PEW PEW PEW, TO THE STARS BITCHES!
Post by: martinuzz on May 25, 2017, 01:45:43 pm
The Electron Rocket is innovative in more than one way.
For one, it's motor's turbopumps are driven by electric motors, making them cheaper and more reliable than combustion engines.
Also, parts of the engine are made by 3D printing, further reducing costs.
But what's really special about the rocket is it's size. It's only 17 meters high, and 1m in diameter, much much smaller than the giants used by NASA, ESA, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX.
For comparison, NASA's current rocket in development, the SLS, which is supposed to be capable of bringing astronauts to Mars, is 64 meters high.
The big downside of large size, is cost. Telecommunications sattelites orbiting at 36000 km above the earth are big, and heavy. They need big and heavy rockets to bring them up to their orbit, with enormous launch costs. The expected cost of launching an SLS is one billion dollars, and even the 'cheap' commercial SpaceX charges 100 million for a single journey to geostationary orbit.
Electron will be able to bring sattelites up for a mere 5 million, albeit it smaller satellites, and in a lower orbit.
Improvements in electonic miniaturization enables those lower orbt satellites to do much of the tasks the old high orbit satellites can do.
This is one of the reasons that Facebook, OneWeb, SpaceX and others have shown interest in using them to create a worldwide wireless network. A few hundred would be needed to provide global coverage.
Now a few hundred SpaceX rockets are just plain unaffordable. A few hundred rockets like Electron however, and things become feasible.
Rocket Lab has high ambition. They want to start launching 100 rockets per year, one every 3 days. They claim their flights have been already booked full until the end of next year.
http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/succesvolle-eerste-lancering-van-deels-3d-geprinte-raket-vanuit-nieuw-zeeland~a4497002/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11862250
Post by: inteuniso on May 25, 2017, 01:49:01 pm
Post by: Reelya on May 25, 2017, 02:05:04 pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Semple_tank
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Sempl_2.jpg)
What you're seeing there is literally a tractor with corrugated iron roofing material stuck on, to make a "tank". There are probably handguns that could pierce that thing's armour.
Quote
It was decided that a 'tractor-tank' would be an adequate design, as if the need for defense arose, a large tank superstructure could be bolted upon a tractor base within a few hours, allowing for quick transformation and deployment of the tanks.
e.g. they thought it was handy since you can keep farming with the tractors right up to just before they're needed for battle then tack some armor and guns on, and bob's your uncle. If they could also train sheep as panzer grenadiers then NZ's panzer divisions would have been unstoppable.
Post by: martinuzz on May 25, 2017, 02:10:44 pm
<mental image of Maori warriors screaming WAAAAAAAAGH>
Post by: Reelya on May 25, 2017, 02:14:51 pm
Quote
Due to the lack of armour plate, corrugated (manganese) plating was used in the expectation it would deflect bullets. The crew of eight included one gunner who had to lie on a mattress on top of the engine to fire his Bren gun.
Shit, they had a mattress in there. It's basically the first shagwagon.
Quote
The tanks were constructed without the use of any formal plans or blueprints. Working from an American postcard depicting the conversion of a tractor to a 'tractor-tank',
And shit, it's definitely an Ork Mekaniak style invention. They designed it based on a postcard!
(BTW it's spelled Maori)
Post by: wierd on May 25, 2017, 02:19:38 pm
Let's hope it goes better than their escapades in the tank-building sphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Semple_tank
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Sempl_2.jpg)
What you're seeing there is literally a tractor with corrugated iron roofing material stuck on, to make a "tank". There are probably handguns that could pierce that thing's armour.QuoteIt was decided that a 'tractor-tank' would be an adequate design, as if the need for defense arose, a large tank superstructure could be bolted upon a tractor base within a few hours, allowing for quick transformation and deployment of the tanks.
e.g. they thought it was handy since you can keep farming with the tractors right up to just before they're needed for battle then tack some armor and guns on, and bob's your uncle. If they could also train sheep as panzer grenadiers then NZ's panzer divisions would have been unstoppable.
If they did it right, they could have used the sheep as suicide shock troopers.
Here's the skinny:
Wear enemy uniforms when feeding the sheep.
Replace the sheep bells with live grenades
Pins in grenades get removed via a pullstring, activating the time delay fuse.
When sheep see enemy soldiers, they thing "FOOD TIME!" and bum-rush the infantry. When that happens, they run away from their staked area, which pulls the pins. They begin exploding when they get in proximity of the enemy infantry.
The infantry would never suspect the little bleating balls of fluff rushing at them as being deadly guided ordinance.
Post by: Eric Blank on May 25, 2017, 02:39:07 pm
Shove a remote detonated c4 pack up a kiwi birds ass and let it roam near the enemy base. Itll just look like a female with a developing egg, still adorable. Then it explodes
Guerrilla warfare in kiwiland would be interesting to say the least.
Post by: Starver on May 25, 2017, 02:45:34 pm
Haha that tank. It would fit right in with a WH40k Ork army. With a bit more spikes perhaps.More Dakka.
(Everyone needs More Dakka. All the time.)
For a(n indiginous) first-generation design, they probably weren't that bad. They were probably going to be as effective as various LDV ideas, over in Blighty, against their hypothetical opponents. (See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_armoured_fighting_vehicle) and (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_concrete_armoured_lorry)...) Would have been a stop-gap/buffer for a concerted defence, only.
Post by: Egan_BW on May 25, 2017, 02:48:54 pm
Post by: sluissa on May 25, 2017, 02:52:27 pm
That's almost 60x the payload on a falcon 9.
Electron rocket costs about $23,000 per kilogram.
Falcon 9 costs about $7,692 per kilogram.
Now for an extremely specialized mini satellite that has to go into a weird orbit for some reason and simply CAN'T share a rocket with another sat. Okay, fine. But for everyone else that doesn't mind carpooling. Falcon 9 is still the way to go. They also have to compete with things like the Pegasus. A very successful design that already works well, and could likely have its price dropped to compete with things like the Electron and it still carries almost double what Electron does.
Electron might have niched itself out of any sort of viable market by making their launcher so small.
Still, any competition in the market is good. So I hope they do well. I just don't have much hope.
Post by: Reelya on May 25, 2017, 02:52:45 pm
;_; can we go back to talking about rockets nowOk, tractor rockets:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2477079/Photographs-Free-Syrian-Army-fighters-firing-home-rockets-Assad-forces-tractor.html
Post by: martinuzz on June 01, 2017, 02:54:21 pm
A team of researchers from the TU Delft will publish a paper in SCIENCE tomorrow which might make completely secure internet connections reality, using the power of quantum mechanics.
In the article the team of Ronald Hanson of TU Delft, and partners from Oxford university give an example of how quantum internet could look like in practical application. The great strenght of quantum networking lies in that it is impossible to intercept the signal to listen in on it. The observation would instantly destroy the information carried. So far the main problem has been that is was deemed impossible to get the signal amplified enough to make it from sender to reciever.
With normal glass fibre signal transmission, the signal is measured, amplified and rerouted between nodes until it reaches it's destination. This is not possible with quantum signals, because measuring would break the quantum state.
What the Delft team has accomplished, is that instead of measuring and amplifying, they copy the unobserved quantum bits into a diamond raster. Experiments in the lab show that this diamond raster establishes ever improving connection with other diamond rasters in the network. Weak signals are filtered out.
Carlo Beenakker, quantumphysicist from Leiden university, himself not involved in the research paper, says "the paradox is that you have to blindfold yourself to be able to amplify the signal correctly. A metaphorical description of the process would be 'destillation'. By continously repeating the procedure, the end product gets stronger and stronger."
He adds "What's interesting is that the Delft team's experiment took place within a chip-like system. We could already do this with light, but electronics are much closer to practical applications in telecommunication".
So far, the network experiments of Delft University only show it's effectiveness over a few meters. However, according to team leader Hanson, upscaling is very much possible. The same Hanson showed in earlier experiments on the TU Delft campus that quantum connections can easily reach several kilometers, as predicted by Einstein.
The work on unbreakable quantum connections is part of a larger project of, amongst others, the university of Amsterdam, university of Leiden, university of Delft and university of the Hague. Last year, the dutch government granted an additional 19 million euros to the project.
One of the project's aims is to have the first experimental, working quantum internet in the world, between the participating universities, within 5 years. They will make use of existing fibre optic networks, supplemented with new quantum nodes.
Dutch telecom company KPN and the ministry of Defense are following the project with great interest.
http://www.volkskrant.nl/tech/spionnen-opgelet-er-wordt-gewerkt-aan-een-volledig-onafluisterbaar-internet~a4498404/
Post by: Sheb on June 02, 2017, 08:51:16 am
Post by: Sergarr on June 02, 2017, 11:54:50 am
What habbened to the old scienc ethread?AI revolution. We've quarantined the place, to avoid it spreading further.
Post by: TheBiggerFish on June 02, 2017, 11:57:22 am
(Take that, NSA!)
(Hey, how does this network work?)
Post by: Starver on June 02, 2017, 12:14:47 pm
(Hey, how does this network work?)(Like a net..?)
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 02, 2017, 12:55:41 pm
I think it should rate as some kimd of achievement.
... for the record, there is a rumor about two contemporary myeloproliferative neoplasm gurus engaging in a fistfight over the ideal monitoring protocol for chronic myelogenous leukemia. So there are precedents.
Post by: Sheb on June 02, 2017, 01:51:58 pm
... for the record, there is a rumor about two contemporary myeloproliferative neoplasm gurus engaging in a fistfight over the ideal monitoring protocol for chronic myelogenous leukemia. So there are precedents.
Is that real?
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 02, 2017, 04:16:10 pm
I wouldn't be too surprised if it went beyond that though. IMO people tend to come out of medical school a bit kooky. I've heard stories of fights for sillier things than who gets the say over a workgroup's protocol.
Post by: Sheb on June 03, 2017, 07:25:33 am
I've heard two different accounts of the story, both by people supposedly present when it took place. The first one was friends with one of them, and actually was with him after the scuff, and while admitting there WAS a scuff she said it wasn't all that bad. The other was (supposedly) an eyewitness account, and claims it got more physical. Then again, said eyewitness (a guru himself ) is quite prone to exaggerating these kind of tales for drama's sake. So I tend to think that it didn´t go much further than a shove.
I wouldn't be too surprised if it went beyond that though. IMO people tend to come out of medical school a bit kooky. I've heard stories of fights for sillier things than who gets the say over a workgroup's protocol.
Oh, if it was an actual protocol and not a theoretical argument I can totally see it.
I mean, we scientist can get a bit physical during thesis defense too. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrlro3YJ15o)
Post by: martinuzz on June 03, 2017, 12:53:06 pm
Wouldn't any hostile party just say 'screw it, if we can't read your messages, we'll just disrupt them by trying, so they're useless to you too'?
Post by: Starver on June 03, 2017, 01:03:04 pm
(That eventual message can be the uniquely-generated 8192-bit key that protects your non-quantum communications, beyond any reasonable chance of decoding the non-quantum system that you don't have to care about being eavesdropped-upon1 because any security breach is likely to be within your 'green zone' ends of the network, and thus proof against all your communication precautions.)
1 Save for the value in the metadata that Alice and Bob are having communications.
Post by: Max™ on June 03, 2017, 03:41:38 pm
On the topic of quantum networks. So if the big advantage of quantum encryption is, that no one can listen in on it, because that would destroy the information carried, isn't that at the same time a huge weakness?I mean, that's kinda why the internet was made into a distributed network, and why things like Tor and such are floating around. If someone has enough access to your network that they can identify when you send any message out, they're your ISP or sitting beside you.
Wouldn't any hostile party just say 'screw it, if we can't read your messages, we'll just disrupt them by trying, so they're useless to you too'?
Post by: Starver on June 03, 2017, 08:31:28 pm
Post by: Reelya on June 03, 2017, 09:04:46 pm
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/01/scientists-discover-how-the-brain-recognises-faces-by-reading-monkeys-minds
Post by: Egan_BW on June 03, 2017, 10:43:19 pm
Post by: Mech#4 on June 03, 2017, 11:17:36 pm
Post by: Neonivek on June 03, 2017, 11:37:24 pm
They got images as clear as that from just 205 neurons? Kinda hard to believe, to be honest.
I think they are doing some... fudgery on the images.
Likely they guessed certain details... and the "Guess" is a mockup of how close it was in terms of shape.
Post by: Bumber on June 04, 2017, 05:00:33 am
Post by: Sergarr on June 04, 2017, 06:31:30 am
Post by: Bumber on June 04, 2017, 10:27:22 am
You could simplify the shape mathematically, but then you'd lose sight of the important information.
Not sure if it's claimed that it maps directly onto 205 neurons. It could just be that the scientists can extrapolate enough based on measuring (at most) 205 (monkey) neurons to identify (non-deformed, human) faces. Measuring more neurons might give greater fidelity.
Now I'm interested in if we can tell monkey faces apart.
Post by: Askot Bokbondeler on June 04, 2017, 12:05:01 pm
Post by: Max™ on June 05, 2017, 09:20:50 am
(http://i.imgur.com/OEYhdGv.png)
Post by: Eric Blank on June 05, 2017, 11:29:56 am
Post by: martinuzz on June 05, 2017, 01:16:59 pm
"SpaceX program terminated after horrible swollen death of cameraman"
Post by: Khan Boyzitbig on June 05, 2017, 01:38:40 pm
Post by: martinuzz on June 05, 2017, 01:58:01 pm
The European hornet is harmless enough though as long as you don't go near their nest. Not agressive at all, and also not hunting for sweets like the annoying wasp do in late season. There's just a handful of them roaming my garden in summer, most likely hunting bees. They're quite pretty, with red legs, and red/black neck shields.
EDIT: they're also proficient navigators. While bees, bumblebees, and the various type of hoverflies regularily fly through my backdoor and get themselves stuck flyng between the front and back window until I catch them in a glass and release them back outside, the hornets, despite them seeming particularily fond of the white painted wall next to my backyard door, never fly inside and get themselves trapped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_hornet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_hornet)
Post by: Max™ on June 05, 2017, 02:19:55 pm
Fuck bald-faced hornets, and fuck yellowjackets, they get backhanded and stomped and the nest gets burned, they exist to fuck your shit up, so fuck theirs up first!
"But they help control pest insects" so what, I'll leave that to spiders thanks, they're chill, never had a spider decide to come chase me and send a horde of their buddies after me, which to be fair would be horrific, but hornets and wasps do that shit as a matter of course so they get to live in the woods away from me.
Post by: Khan Boyzitbig on June 05, 2017, 02:41:47 pm
Yeah, I think it was actually just wasps near the camera, but in this part of the country and over where spacex is, hornet is just as likely to refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald-faced_hornet who are not chill, I will straight up pet bumblebees, politely relocate bees, and rescue mud-daubers that get stuck in the pool by scooping them up so they can dry and fly off.Killing hornets/wasps without using something to mask their pheromones is bound to draw their attention. And every single one for miles around even from different hives will head straight there and be angry little stripy bastards.
Fuck bald-faced hornets, and fuck yellowjackets, they get backhanded and stomped and the nest gets burned, they exist to fuck your shit up, so fuck theirs up first!
"But they help control pest insects" so what, I'll leave that to spiders thanks, they're chill, never had a spider decide to come chase me and send a horde of their buddies after me, which to be fair would be horrific, but hornets and wasps do that shit as a matter of course so they get to live in the woods away from me.
Bees are so much nicer. Hard to imagine they are related distantly.
Post by: Reelya on June 05, 2017, 05:30:20 pm
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Post by: redwallzyl on June 05, 2017, 05:40:42 pm
This interactive graphic on the measured warming/cooling effect of all major factors is masterfully put together. I know it's old but I just camne across it due to it being posted elsewhere:I like it, thanks. unfortunately wont stop the nutters screaming about conspiracy and how its the natural cycle or some shit about volcanoes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on June 07, 2017, 12:24:56 am
Post by: Starver on June 07, 2017, 12:36:41 am
A plausible explanation for the Wow! Signal has been found - the hydrogen trails of passing comets. (http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a26767/wow-signal-mystery-solved/)6EQUJ5!
Post by: smjjames on June 07, 2017, 12:40:25 am
A plausible explanation for the Wow! Signal has been found - the hydrogen trails of passing comets. (http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/solar-system/a26767/wow-signal-mystery-solved/)
Now they just gotta figure out which comet it was that the Wow! signal came from in order to confirm for sure.
As a side effect, this could actually be a pretty good detection method of that particular type of comet.
Post by: Max™ on June 07, 2017, 08:46:06 am
Post by: wierd on June 07, 2017, 10:31:27 am
This is like a bunch of cave people asserting that they cant hear drumming or see smoke signals coming from New York, and concluding that the people of new york either dont exist, or that they dont want to communicate. The fact that the cave people dont have cellphones never dawns on the cave people.
To put it bluntly, we cave people dont have cellphones. We wont be hearing ET any time soon. We might see their tire tracks, or hear their whizzbang spaceships as they cruise around if they make a lot of noise, but we wont be able to clearly identify them we we did.
Post by: Khan Boyzitbig on June 07, 2017, 10:35:05 am
Post by: wierd on June 07, 2017, 10:48:40 am
Passive examination of our current communications should be more than sufficient for any nearby vessels to determine that we are just not worth contacting at this time. Without "cellphones", we wont hear them phoning home to their superiors, reporting in on their passive observation based anthropology any time soon.
That is assuming they are even bothering to be watching us at all, for that matter.
Post by: Khan Boyzitbig on June 07, 2017, 10:54:48 am
We can wipe out all life on an entire planet if we wanted to. Thats a good enough reason to keep a watchful eye on us.
Post by: Max™ on June 08, 2017, 05:44:33 am
Post by: Starver on June 08, 2017, 06:06:35 am
(Some methods are noisy, but if we don't expect someone to have trekked onto the inaccessible peak/god-mountain that overlooks us then base-jumped down into our secluded grove on a freak gust of wind then we're probably both going to be surprised by the resulting encounter.)
Also, assumes lifespans like ours. With more longevity (and/or any of the pause-and-revive, or scan and duplicate at need, methods, or just a Generational Ship) a casual non-relativistic passage between stars might be easily their type of jaunt.
Not that I think it has happened/is happening, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 08, 2017, 08:01:15 am
Post by: Max™ on June 08, 2017, 10:37:40 am
Back to the Caveman analogy, those people from New York certainly couldn't get to our cave-village any other way than on the narrow track between the turbulent river and the unclimbable cliff, it's not like they can fly, parachute, abseil, jetboat, etc into our front yard... Deliberately or otherwise.The relativistic brachistochrone at 95~99% of c is dropping down out of nowhere in a jetpack, we're talking about vastly superior understanding and exploitation of the laws of physics, plus probably needing some sort of fuckery from beyond the standard model like conversion of dark matter into a usable form for thrust, or maybe doing some sort of might-as-well-be-magic nonsense involving quark-gluon plasma analogues for susy-partners or something, because otherwise you hit a "please purchase the full version of physics to continue playing" screen.
Basic "20th century world travelers" from the "we're cavemen" perspective means they can do stuff like fusion torches or valkyrie drives to push up into the 10~25% of c range because that's the point where you start being able to really plan out trips to another star. We can have super clever cavemen figure out possible ways to do this, but we can't do it right now.
That would be "wow, look at that huge canoe, how do you move it?" type of encounters, and noticeable from a good distance.
The "ok, technically that should maybe be possible, but how did you get around ____?" types would be noticeable from much further because there's no such thing as stealth in space, much less at high fractions of c. The engines to achieve that make all of our WMD's look positively adorable by comparison, and best of all: they can serve as a WMD from a whole other star system since the only way to possibly launch some sort of sneak attack is to ramp your ship up as fast as it can go... and then simply leave out the "turn and slow down" portion of the trip.
Quote from: Pellegrino and Zebrowski
The gamma-ray shine of the decelerating half was also detectable, but it made no difference. One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...Sleep tight!
...
In the forests below, lakes caught the first rays of the rising Sun and threw them back into space. Abandoning the two-dimensional sprawl of twentieth-century cities, Sri Lanka Tower, and others like it, had been erected in the world's rain forests and farmlands, leaving the countryside virtually uninhabited. Even in Africa, where more than a hundred city arcologies had risen, nature was beginning to renew itself. It was a good day to be alive, she told herself, taking in the peace of the garden. Then, looking east, she saw it coming -- at least her eyes began to register it -- but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen.
It was quite small for what it could do -- small enough to fit into an average-sized living room -- but it was moving at 92 percent of light speed when it touched Earth's atmosphere. A spear point of light appeared, so intense that the air below snapped away from it, creating a low-density tunnel through which the object descended. The walls of the tunnel were a plasma boundary layer, six and a half kilometers wide and more than 160 deep -- the flaming spear that Virginia's eyes began to register -- with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts, and still its destructive potential was but fractionally spent.
Thirty-three kilometers above the Indian Ocean, the point began to encounter too much air. It tunneled down only eight kilometers more, then stalled and detonated, less than two-thousandths of a second after crossing the orbits of Earth's nearest artificial satellites.
Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst toward her. Every nerve ending in her body began to record a strange, prickling sensation -- the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backward. No shadows were cast anywhere in the tower, so bright was the glare. It pierced walls, ceramic beams, notepads, and people -- four hundred thousand people. The maglev terminal connecting Sri Lanka Tower to London and Sydney, the waste treatment centers that sustained the lakes and farms, all the shops, theaters, and apartments liquefied instantly. The structure began to slip and crash like a giant waterfall, but gravity could not yank it down fast enough. The Tower became vapor before it could fall half a meter. At the vanished city's feet, the trees of the forest were no longer able to cast shadows; they had themselves become long shadows of carbonized dust on the ground.
In Kandy and Columbo, where sidewalks steamed, the relativistic onslaught was unfinished. The electromagnetic pulse alone killed every living thing as far away as Bombay and the Maldives. All of India south of the Godavari River became an instant microwave oven. Nearer the epicenter, Demon Rock glowed with a fierce red heat, then fractured down its center, as if to herald the second coming of the tyrant it memorialized. The air blast followed, surging out of the Indian Ocean -- faster than sound -- flattening whatever still stood. As it slashed north through Jaffna and Madurai, the wave front was met and overpowered by shocks rushing out from strikes in central and southern India.
Across the face of the planet, without warning, thousands of flaming swords pierced the sky...
Post by: Reelya on June 09, 2017, 12:32:07 am
Unless they make a deliberate attempt at communicating in a way we would understand. Such an attempt would likely be from close by (I.E. Inside the Sol System) and very obvious.
Or ... their knowledge is so advanced that they don't really need to dial each other on the phone so much. Consider that we can already detect planets 100s of lightyears away with our shitty tech, then super-advanced aliens would have already mapped out whole solar systems thousands of years before they decided to go there, there might be almost no reason to even have probes, and even then, a tight beam signal back taking eons might not seem like a problem for them. After all if there's something cool somewhere then it will take eons to get there, and you can scan and probe an unlimited number of star systems at once. It's not like you're going to be in too much of a hurry, and once probes arrive and detect anything interesting (that you didn't already know about from your deep-space scanners) then you're going to be getting more interesting places to visit than you can keep up with.
(consider that if you send a probe somewhere 1000 light years away and you can do e.g. 10% light speed on average, then it will take 10000 years for the probe to arrive, and then if the probe finds something, another 10000 years for you to get there. 1000 years to hear back from the probe at light speed then isn't much overhead).
Post by: wierd on June 09, 2017, 02:37:07 am
The author neglected to describe what would have happened after the object's shockwave penetrated the Earth's crust-- which it would have. It would have still created a crater of impossible size, just from the energy emitted from it detonating in the atmosphere. The vaporized gas pressure alone would have impacted the Earth's surface with so much force, that a kaiser bomb would look quaint. It would shatter the mantle at that location, cause intense pressure waves within the Earth, and rain lavabombs all over the planet. Just something the size described, travelling at 92% of C, would have more impact than over 100 T-K boundry events. It would end all life on earth, even microbial. It could even blow the Earth apart.
Post by: martinuzz on June 09, 2017, 03:05:35 am
Post by: wierd on June 09, 2017, 03:28:08 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Misremembered the name. that's all. It was the largest nuclear device ever detonated.
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on June 09, 2017, 03:36:38 am
Post by: Sergarr on June 09, 2017, 08:46:21 am
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 09, 2017, 09:19:56 am
Post by: inteuniso on June 09, 2017, 12:48:20 pm
truly advanced cultures favor ludicrous speed for space travelI wonder if we cna use rockets in warp bubbles.
Post by: Telgin on June 09, 2017, 01:14:40 pm
That's all if warp bubbles can be made in the first place. I don't think anyone seriously claims to know how they'd work even if they're possible. Creating negative mass or energy is kind of a problem in that we don't know such a thing exists and really don't have any reason to believe it does as far as I know.
Post by: inteuniso on June 09, 2017, 02:23:02 pm
If warp bubbles can really be made, I think the prevailing fringe theories are that you wouldn't need any kind of conventional propulsion to move. The warping of spacetime itself would move the ship. In fact, using a rocket while inside of a warp bubble might cause issues, but I'm hardly versed in the math involved.
You're correct. Warping space time would shorten the distance between two points, and if the warp could be large enough the travel time would be instantaneous. The question is, even if we got through the challenge of creating negative energies, how would we deal with balancing it out with the rest of existence? The existence you warp out has to be compensated for somewhere.
If you take the renormalization formula out of quantum physics, we're left with infinite energy that might help explain the constant expansion & entanglement: current fringe theory (holographic fractal principle) is hinting towards an infinity of wormholes linking everything everywhere for all time; the quantum fueling this is the Planck Spherical Unit (https://academy.resonance.is/ufaqs/what-is-the-difference-between-planck-units-and-the-planck-spherical-unit-psu/).
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 09, 2017, 02:32:29 pm
background energy level of the cosmic strings enough, and stability soon follows.
Post by: inteuniso on June 09, 2017, 02:47:43 pm
With a powerful enough doppleganger gruntmaster achieving such a balance would be child's play. It's just a matter of increasing the
background energy level of the cosmic strings enough, and stability soon follows.
... Keep adding fuel to the fire and it will work itself out?
Post by: Il Palazzo on June 09, 2017, 03:28:39 pm
You'd be better off staying away from the Resonance Project - they're selling snake oil. Unless you really need to deepak your chopras.If warp bubbles can really be made, I think the prevailing fringe theories are that you wouldn't need any kind of conventional propulsion to move. The warping of spacetime itself would move the ship. In fact, using a rocket while inside of a warp bubble might cause issues, but I'm hardly versed in the math involved.
You're correct. Warping space time would shorten the distance between two points, and if the warp could be large enough the travel time would be instantaneous. The question is, even if we got through the challenge of creating negative energies, how would we deal with balancing it out with the rest of existence? The existence you warp out has to be compensated for somewhere.
If you take the renormalization formula out of quantum physics, we're left with infinite energy that might help explain the constant expansion & entanglement: current fringe theory (holographic fractal principle) is hinting towards an infinity of wormholes linking everything everywhere for all time; the quantum fueling this is the Planck Spherical Unit (https://academy.resonance.is/ufaqs/what-is-the-difference-between-planck-units-and-the-planck-spherical-unit-psu/).
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Haramein
Post by: ChairmanPoo on June 09, 2017, 03:32:05 pm
Post by: inteuniso on June 09, 2017, 03:45:34 pm
Doppleganger gruntmasters can burn snake oil with 110% efficiency and feed the surplus force into the cosmic superstringsSlow down there, God.
You'd be better off staying away from the Resonance Project - they're selling snake oil. Unless you really need to deepak your chopras.If warp bubbles can really be made, I think the prevailing fringe theories are that you wouldn't need any kind of conventional propulsion to move. The warping of spacetime itself would move the ship. In fact, using a rocket while inside of a warp bubble might cause issues, but I'm hardly versed in the math involved.Myquote.dat
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nassim_Haramein
Fair enough, although this is the science thread so I expect that everyone has their salt shakers prepared for the brain-eating slugs.
Do I think Haramein has gone off the deep end? Absolutely. With world politics at large, it's clear the patients are running the asylum, although that's not a surprise seeing that all of our medications have ended up (In trace amounts, we're just microdosing!) in our water supply. (http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/drugs-in-the-water)
However, seeing that a 30-year old debate about glass was settled by 30 pages of human-performed(Mentats!) algebra that was easier to calculate in infinite dimensions (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530115019.htm) than arbitrarily fixed numbers of dimensions shows that renormalization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization?wprov=sfla1) is more than likely holding us back.
I expect science to become far easier when people can vicariously experience hallucinogenics through VR/AR recordings & will be able to wrap their mind around strange geometries & "spooky actions at a distance" while simultaneously being able to voluntarily stop experiencing said experience at any time they wish. In der zukunft.
EDIT: Crazy ideas now being entertained on Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071114/full/450330a.html), but we went off the deep end five years ago.
Post by: martinuzz on August 01, 2017, 01:48:19 pm
The energy company of the German city of Hamburg, in cooperation with Siemens Gamesa, will start the construction of a test version of a stone battery this fall.
The stone battery works on the same principle a stone grill uses. Certain types of rock are very good at retaining heat for a long time.
Engineers have now come up with a way to incorporate 2000 cubic meters of basalt gravel into a hill in such a way, that hot air blowers can be used to heat the gravel up to about 600C (1112F), and the heat can be retained up to a week.
Combined with a solar and wind park, the thermal battery's heat can be used to generate electricity when solar and wind input is low, while charging up when there's surplus energy.
Siemens Gamesa says the method is extremely well suited to replace coal plants. Just demolish the coal plant and replace it with a stone battery.
To run a 500MW plant for four hours, a lot of basalt gravel is needed: 111 thousand cubic meters. This *would* fit though, on the premises of your average 500MW coal plant.
Siemens isn't the first company to experiment with stone batteries. The Norwegian company EnergyNest uses a special kind of concrete, which can be stacked as modular blocks. In Abu Dabi their design is used in a water desalination plant.
According to Siemens however, using basalt is much, much cheaper.
And the world right now needs cheap ways to store fickle green energy. Much simpler and cheaper than basalt rock it will probably not get.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/hete-steen-mogelijk-uitkomst-voor-opslag-overtollige-groene-energie~a4509047/ (https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/hete-steen-mogelijk-uitkomst-voor-opslag-overtollige-groene-energie~a4509047/)
Post by: Egan_BW on August 01, 2017, 01:57:22 pm
Post by: martinuzz on August 01, 2017, 01:58:11 pm
Post by: Madman198237 on August 01, 2017, 02:13:04 pm
Post by: Egan_BW on August 01, 2017, 02:20:21 pm
Post by: Starver on August 01, 2017, 05:59:35 pm
The truth of the gravel-beds-in-caverns technology (looks like a hybrid version of some of these technologies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage)) is probably between this. But I think that a pleasantly warm ground, that is not mostly the fading remnant of the daytime Sun's energy, would indicate not enough thermal lining... As a pure guess, that is, without even a back of an envelope being calculated upon.
Post by: redwallzyl on August 01, 2017, 06:23:41 pm
Post by: martinuzz on August 05, 2017, 02:58:48 pm
They discovered that by adding liquid tin to a spongelike structure made of wolfram, not only did the divertor (basically, a fusion reactor's exhaust) stay cooler, it also gained the ability to self-repair.
The liquid tin furthermore forms a cloud of tin gas, acting as a shield barrier, catching the high energy outburst from the reactor before they can hit the actuall wall, and dispersing the incoming energy evenly.
Sadly the breakthrough comes too late to be incorporated in the Iter test reactor, scheduled (after many delays and setbacks) to first start testing in 2025. If further testing proves viable, it might very well be used in the Demo test reactor planned for 2050.
Post by: Starver on August 05, 2017, 03:04:00 pm
Post by: Arx on August 16, 2017, 09:44:06 am
Which is being treated with cautious optimism at the moment, as far as I know.
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on August 16, 2017, 10:12:55 am
Post by: Arx on August 16, 2017, 10:54:46 am
And don't feel bad about not following. My sister spent about an hour working on the paper and made it seven pages in, as someone who's studied this kind of thing before. :P
Post by: Max™ on August 16, 2017, 11:28:31 am
Post by: Arx on August 16, 2017, 11:55:06 am
The reason the computing world is not collectively flipping all the way out (although this is causing a bit of a stir) is that it's possible that a) the problem is not, in fact, NP-complete and/or b) the assumptions used to prove the lower bound are flawed and thus there may be still be a polynomial lower bound.
Post by: Telgin on August 16, 2017, 12:43:59 pm
I wish I'd studied this material more in grad school, but my focus was on HPC instead so I probably couldn't parse the paper fully if I even had the academic energy left in me to read all 38 pages of it.
Post by: smjjames on August 16, 2017, 11:59:12 pm
Dutch Scientists from the Eindhoven institute for fundamental energy research, 'Differ', might have found the solution to one of the big problems with fusion energy reactors: keeping the reactor walls cool, or in other words, finding a material that can withstand being exposed to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun for long periods of time.
They discovered that by adding liquid tin to a spongelike structure made of wolfram, not only did the divertor (basically, a fusion reactor's exhaust) stay cooler, it also gained the ability to self-repair.
The liquid tin furthermore forms a cloud of tin gas, acting as a shield barrier, catching the high energy outburst from the reactor before they can hit the actuall wall, and dispersing the incoming energy evenly.
Sadly the breakthrough comes too late to be incorporated in the Iter test reactor, scheduled (after many delays and setbacks) to first start testing in 2025. If further testing proves viable, it might very well be used in the Demo test reactor planned for 2050.
I don't suppose they could share that knowledge so that others who can apply it to their reactors can do so? And yeah, I know everybody is in a race (insofar as the whole thing can be called a race) to build a functioning reactor with power output and don't really want to share their stuff.
Post by: Eric Blank on August 17, 2017, 12:29:50 am
I'm not asking if you'd cook, I'm asking if it would feel pleasant to sleep on the ground on a cool summer night. For reasons.
No, because basalt gravel is uncomfortable as fuck.
Post by: martinuzz on August 17, 2017, 05:17:24 am
I'm quite sure they will share it. Government is pushing hard over the past few years even to make Dutch scientists publish their research in open access media.Dutch Scientists from the Eindhoven institute for fundamental energy research, 'Differ', might have found the solution to one of the big problems with fusion energy reactors: keeping the reactor walls cool, or in other words, finding a material that can withstand being exposed to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun for long periods of time.
They discovered that by adding liquid tin to a spongelike structure made of wolfram, not only did the divertor (basically, a fusion reactor's exhaust) stay cooler, it also gained the ability to self-repair.
The liquid tin furthermore forms a cloud of tin gas, acting as a shield barrier, catching the high energy outburst from the reactor before they can hit the actuall wall, and dispersing the incoming energy evenly.
Sadly the breakthrough comes too late to be incorporated in the Iter test reactor, scheduled (after many delays and setbacks) to first start testing in 2025. If further testing proves viable, it might very well be used in the Demo test reactor planned for 2050.
I don't suppose they could share that knowledge so that others who can apply it to their reactors can do so? And yeah, I know everybody is in a race (insofar as the whole thing can be called a race) to build a functioning reactor with power output and don't really want to share their stuff.
Don't know what makes you think they wouldn't share it. The Netherlands isn't China.
Post by: sluissa on August 17, 2017, 10:53:18 am
Can someone explain the P=/=NP thingymajig?
I have no fucking clue what it's on about, and the paper summary didn't help.
No expert myself, but based on what I understand you basically have two things they're trying to prove are or are not equal.
You have problems that can be solved by a computer. And you have problems that if a computer is given the answer to a question, the computer can verify that answer.
The challenge was to prove definitively whether those two sets of problems overlap completely (P = NP) or do not overlap completely P != NP.
As to the use or importance of this proof. I can't say. But from what I understand it's more of a academic thing than anything else. There was also a $1,000,000 prize attached to solving it, which gave it a bit of a higher profile than most of these sorts of problems.
Please though, someone explain it better than I because I feel like I'm only partially grasping it.
Post by: Draignean on August 17, 2017, 11:29:39 am
Well, something to keep in mind. There are 116 proofs (http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm) of either P=NP or P≠NP as of September 2016.
Although we can be reasonably certain that the ones of P=NP are bunk since the writers do not (as yet) rule the cybersecurity world.
Post by: Trekkin on August 17, 2017, 11:46:18 am
We're looking at two sets of problems here, categorized by computational complexity; i.e. how much longer it takes to solve a particular kind of problem as you make the input set bigger. This is related to the idea of big-O notation; for a toy example, if I am looking for the biggest number in an unsorted array, I need to check every number, so it's O(n); it takes twice as long for an array twice as big. If it's sorted, though, it's O(1); no matter how big the array is (and ignoring the speed at which it can be accessed), it's going to take the same amount of time to pull up the first (or last) element.
P refers to the set of problems for which the big-O notation is O(n^k) for some constant k; in other words, they are solvable in polynomial time for a deterministic computer. These problems, among which number selection sort and maximum matching, are (loosely speaking) efficiently solvable, or at least solvable with predictable efficiency, by computers we can actually build.
NP is P but for a computer that isn't deterministic; that is to say, for a computer that can choose to do two different things based on the same input -- and magically choose the more useful one. Naturally, we do not have these computers -- and before anyone brings it up, no, quantum computers are not the same thing as nondeterministic computers. If we did, though, have computers that could intelligently choose to do different things with the same input and always pick the right thing, we could solve what are called NP-hard problems in predictable time. Instead, NP-hard problems can be solved by generating random solutions, the verification of which is not itself NP -- but nobody knows how long that's going to take. NP-hard problems are interconvertible, too, so a polynomial solution to one of them could solve all of them.
P=NP, it would utterly break most of the cryptography people use day to day (although not all of the cryptography we could use); primality testing is P but factoring is NP, so if P=NP we can determine everybody's private keys and read encrypted messages and destroy our current ability to securely send and receive information. One-way functions also depend on P != NP, so all our password hash functions would be useless too. It would allow for efficient solutions of traveling salesman, though, and some folding problems, so that would be nice. There are other implications but they're mostly too arcane to explain here.
On the other hand, if P != NP (as is increasingly likely)...not much changes, except that we don't need to worry about if P=NP. We may not need to worry about it anyway; just because a problem is polynomial does not mean it is easily solved with computers we actually have.
In the most banal of "practical terms", it won't matter to people outside of STEM either way; the kinds of problems a constructive proof of P=NP would make it more efficient to solve aren't the sorts of things most people solve, and we have stochastic ways of solving specific cases of NP-hard problems now, much as we do for problems in P where k is too large to bother solving optimally.
Post by: Trekkin on August 17, 2017, 12:14:43 pm
I think the matter wasn't one of trying to put an explanation of P versus NP into layman's terms, but that earlier paper.
Ah. I assumed that by
Can someone explain the P=/=NP thingymajig?greatorder meant "the unsolved problem of P ?= NP", not that particular paper.
Post by: Starver on August 17, 2017, 01:04:13 pm
S'obvious!
(jk)
Post by: Egan_BW on August 17, 2017, 01:42:40 pm
Post by: wierd on August 17, 2017, 05:50:41 pm
Adding a few bits to the depth of a crypto schema exponentially increases the search scope you would need to comb to be assured you have found their key, if using a brute forcer, for instance. That is an NP task. If you have the keys, and are given a cyphertext block, reconstructing the message is simple arithmetic; it is solved with an algebraic equation, in polynomial time, so P.
It need not be encryption that is the topic though, there are many things that are NP that hold up the wheels of progress. Take for instance, trying to simulate the folding of a protein. A general proof that P=NP would open more doors than it closes.
Post by: Max™ on August 17, 2017, 08:09:33 pm
Just scifi but still an idea of why P=NP would be a case of "oh yay we can do x now, oh shit, what about y and z though?" can be found in: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/toast.html
Polynomial time problems can be solved reasonably quickly by current computers, Non-Polynomial time problems can be verified by current computers if given a solution, but finding said solution could take orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe in some cases.
Accordingly if I give you answer_a and used key_a to produce it, you can check and find what input_a was if you have key_a, but asking you to take answer_a and find which input_a and key_a were used to produce it? Good luck!
There are more complex permutations of that idea which form the basis for various public key encryption schemes, and whether you have secrets you want to keep or not, you need public key encryption to hold if you want to be able to trust that anything you receive from a page is what you requested from said page. Without it, would you be eager to order something online? Sign up for real world services online? Discuss meetings and such in real life with people online?
That there is no current way to convert P to NP is good news for how we use the internet, if we find one we're going to need to completely redesign everything from the ground up basically.
Post by: Trekkin on August 17, 2017, 11:16:06 pm
P doesn't mean fast; it often just means predictably slow. Likewise, NP doesn't mean impossible. It just means we solve it stochastically for specific cases.
If P=NP, it is possible -- indeed, probable -- that the proof won't be constructive, because the polynomial solution to NP-hard problems could take longer than the stochastic solutions. Encryption wpuld be fine, one-way hashes safe, and proteins would still take a long time to fold; even just scoring them using cut-down pairwise function is O(n2) where n is the number of heavy atoms.
P versus NP is engaging fodder for techno-thrillers and a nice thing for armchair scientists to opine about on Wikipedia, but the odds that a proof either way changes anything for laypeople are low to nil.
Post by: wierd on August 18, 2017, 12:00:05 am
Well, how about that. P problems are simple and NP problems are impossible; I guess I should stop running my protein folding simulations, then?
P doesn't mean fast; it often just means predictably slow. Likewise, NP doesn't mean impossible. It just means we solve it stochastically for specific cases.
If P=NP, it is possible -- indeed, probable -- that the proof won't be constructive, because the polynomial solution to NP-hard problems could take longer than the stochastic solutions. Encryption wpuld be fine, one-way hashes safe, and proteins would still take a long time to fold; even just scoring them using cut-down pairwise function is O(n2) where n is the number of heavy atoms.
P versus NP is engaging fodder for techno-thrillers and a nice thing for armchair scientists to opine about on Wikipedia, but the odds that a proof either way changes anything for laypeople are low to nil.
I did not say that the simulation of a protein was impossible; I said it was an NP task, and that its NP-ness is a holdup to very exciting science and medicine. Currently, the computational needs to perform the research requires the use of donated compute time on distributed compute clusters, such as Folding@hHome. If the researchers had to PAY for that compute time, the research would grind to a screeching halt.
A constructive P=NP proof, that reduces the computational burden for finding the valid solutions in the space, would allow the existing distributed compute farm to simulate many times its current output, on the same processing budget. The rate of research would increase dramatically.
The argument that sufficiently complex problems in the P class take inordinate amounts of time, does not mean that the NP version where P=!NP, is not an exponentially greater task to tackle, where the degree of burden grows exponentially with increase in N. With P=NP in effect, that increase is only linear, not exponential. Linear CAN be computationally challenging, yes-- but exponential will always be more.
Post by: Max™ on August 18, 2017, 01:08:52 am
Post by: Trekkin on August 18, 2017, 02:17:14 am
I did not say that the simulation of a protein was impossible; I said it was an NP task, and that its NP-ness is a holdup to very exciting science and medicine. Currently, the computational needs to perform the research requires the use of donated compute time on distributed compute clusters, such as Folding@hHome. If the researchers had to PAY for that compute time, the research would grind to a screeching halt.
Have you ever worked in research computing, weird? Or talked to someone who has? We pay for compute time by the CPU-hour all the time, and I haven't heard any screeching lately. Folding@Home isn't even the most cost-efficient way to fold proteins unless you use their multi-processor Markov processes to break up the problem, which requires making assumptions about the folding pathway that usually need ad hoc adjustment. It's just the one that's best advertised, since they need people to donate computing time.
Also, an exponential increase in computing complexity (time, if you like) for an increase in input is exactly what it means for a problem being in P. That's why their big-O notations have exponents in them. That exponent being 1 (and thus indicating a linear increase) is a subset of P.
I'm genuinely curious how you have come to think you know these things.
Post by: Il Palazzo on September 04, 2017, 02:10:43 am
Cosmological horizon is receding, but galaxies are still leaving it (although they don't disappear*). These are two separate things.I'm a bit confused by that, but it seems that the paper doesn't back you up.You know how the cosmological horizon is constantly approaching?It isn't. It's receding.
See Fig.1 here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808QuoteMost observationally viable cosmological models have event horizons and in the ΛCDM model of Fig. 1, galaxies with redshift z ~1.8 are currently crossing our event horizon. These are the most distant objects from which we will ever be able to receive information about the present day.
I don't know whether this means that it's possible to go past the point where the cosmological event horizon will someday be, and thus cut yourself off whence you came. But things do disappear past the cosmological horizon.
...which isn't actually what you claimed. You claimed that the cosmological horizon is receding. I'm just confused now.
The cosmological horizon is the distance from the observer from beyond which no signal can ever reach the observer, no matter how long a time passes.
On the graphs it is marked as 'event horizon'. As you can see (focus on the top graph - it has the 'everyday-meaning of distance' scale), the extent of the horizon grows with time (as you go up on the graph).
Today's horizon distance is approx. 16.5 Gly. This means that a galaxy today at the distance of 17 Gly is already beyond the horizon, and will not ever be able to send us any signals, or vice versa.
However, later on, when the horizon will have receded to 17.5 Gly, some other galaxy which will then find itself at 17 Gly will be able to send a signal that will eventually reach us.
Note that this will be a different galaxy. By the time the horizon recedes to 17.5 Gly, the galaxy today at 17 Gly will have been carried away by the expansion, and the galaxy that will then find itself at 17 Gly will be a galaxy which today is much closer.
On those same graphs you can see dotted lines marked with present-day redshifts (1, 10, 1000). This can be thought of as illustrating some test galaxies moving with the Hubble flow.
As you can see, these galaxies are constantly leaving the event horizon (their paths flare out with time). So, as time progresses, there are less and less galaxies whose signals sent TODAY can ever reach us.
And yet, this does not mean that the event horizon is approaching - it will always be moving measurably further and further away (asymptotically approaching 17.5 Gly).
This apparent incongruity, between galaxies leaving the horizon and the horizon receding, comes about as a result of the fact that when we're talking about signals being sent from galaxies, we're talking about light, which has nett velocity towards us, so it doesn't move with the Hubble flow like galaxies do.
*this is because the closer a galaxy is to the event horizon, the longer it takes for a signal sent from it to reach the observer. This time reaches infinity at the limit of the horizon (same as with black holes). As galaxies cross the event horizon, they leave behind images of themselves that will be in principle observable for the rest of the history of the universe.
Post by: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 04, 2017, 10:23:59 am
To make sure I understand the graph: the width of the event horizon line on the graph at any given height is the maximum distance a body can be from Earth, at that time, without being so far away that light emitted from the body at that time will never reach Earth, right?Cosmological horizon is receding, but galaxies are still leaving it (although they don't disappear*). These are two separate things.I'm a bit confused by that, but it seems that the paper doesn't back you up.You know how the cosmological horizon is constantly approaching?It isn't. It's receding.
See Fig.1 here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310808QuoteMost observationally viable cosmological models have event horizons and in the ΛCDM model of Fig. 1, galaxies with redshift z ~1.8 are currently crossing our event horizon. These are the most distant objects from which we will ever be able to receive information about the present day.
I don't know whether this means that it's possible to go past the point where the cosmological event horizon will someday be, and thus cut yourself off whence you came. But things do disappear past the cosmological horizon.
...which isn't actually what you claimed. You claimed that the cosmological horizon is receding. I'm just confused now.
The cosmological horizon is the distance from the observer from beyond which no signal can ever reach the observer, no matter how long a time passes.
On the graphs it is marked as 'event horizon'. As you can see (focus on the top graph - it has the 'everyday-meaning of distance' scale), the extent of the horizon grows with time (as you go up on the graph).
Today's horizon distance is approx. 16.5 Gly. This means that a galaxy today at the distance of 17 Gly is already beyond the horizon, and will not ever be able to send us any signals, or vice versa.Why is this different from the Hubble sphere? How do we know that it is 16.5?
However, later on, when the horizon will have receded to 17.5 Gly, some other galaxy which will then find itself at 17 Gly will be able to send a signal that will eventually reach us.That galaxy which someday will be at 17 was previously nearer than 16.5, right?
Note that this will be a different galaxy. By the time the horizon recedes to 17.5 Gly, the galaxy today at 17 Gly will have been carried away by the expansion, and the galaxy that will then find itself at 17 Gly will be a galaxy which today is much closer.Expansion of space, right? That's related to the increasing scale-factor on the right side of the chart?
On those same graphs you can see dotted lines marked with present-day redshifts (1, 10, 1000). This can be thought of as illustrating some test galaxies moving with the Hubble flow.Wait, the event horizon will be asymptotically approaching 17.5 Gly? That's the furthest it'll ever be? Why?
As you can see, these galaxies are constantly leaving the event horizon (their paths flare out with time). So, as time progresses, there are less and less galaxies whose signals sent TODAY can ever reach us.
And yet, this does not mean that the event horizon is approaching - it will always be moving measurably further and further away (asymptotically approaching 17.5 Gly).
This apparent incongruity, between galaxies leaving the horizon and the horizon receding, comes about as a result of the fact that when we're talking about signals being sent from galaxies, we're talking about light, which has nett velocity towards us, so it doesn't move with the Hubble flow like galaxies do.But why is the horizon even receding?
*this is because the closer a galaxy is to the event horizon, the longer it takes for a signal sent from it to reach the observer. This time reaches infinity at the limit of the horizon (same as with black holes). As galaxies cross the event horizon, they leave behind images of themselves that will be in principle observable for the rest of the history of the universe.
Post by: Madman198237 on September 04, 2017, 10:37:13 am
Post by: TheDarkStar on September 04, 2017, 10:45:58 am
Does cosmological horizon refer to the expansion of the universe? Specifically, to the fact that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is perceived to be moving? And that a galaxy beyond a certain distance from us would be moving, relative to us, faster than the speed of light (Away from us) and thus impossible to contact?
Yes. Things outside the nearby region of space are too far away to ever interact with because the space they're in is moving away from us faster than the speed of light and so they will never be able to interact with us.
Post by: Madman198237 on September 04, 2017, 11:12:25 am
So, to clarify the entire discussion: The cosmological horizon is a sphere around us. Light from outside that sphere will never reach us, because of the ever-accelerating expansion of space. This expansion is increasing the distance that the emitted light must travel to reach us, and because space is expanding evenly, it moves the photons away from us faster than the speed of light (This is allowed because it is space that is expanding, and not a material that is moving).
At present, the furthest distance we can see is about 13.7 billion ly, in other words the distance light can travel over the entirety of the age of the universe. The light from anything past that distance has yet to reach us. Theoretically, however, the expansion of the universe means that there is a sphere, where the sum of the expansion of space is so large that light can't outrace it, and theory puts this sphere at about 17 Gly or whatever. Past this point, light emitted TODAY from that galaxy will never reach us. Light emitted BEFORE a galaxy crosses that line *will* be seen by us at some point, however as soon as it crosses that sphere it will not be heard from unless we do some serious travelling in that direction.
The Hubble sphere appears to be equivalent to said horizon, since both are affecting the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.
Post by: TheDarkStar on September 04, 2017, 11:20:50 am
On the other hand, the cosmological horizon appears to be the furthest distance at which mutual interaction is still possible.
Post by: Madman198237 on September 04, 2017, 11:24:22 am
The observable universe is, right now, 13.7 billion ly in diameter. It will keep growing as the universe gets older and more light reaches us, but we will never see ANYTHING that happens beyond 17.5 Gly. In fact, you and I and everyone else on the forum are not likely to see anything that happens beyond 13.7 billion ly away, simply because humans don't live more than about a Planck time unit on the universe's clock.
Post by: Il Palazzo on September 04, 2017, 11:28:29 am
To make sure I understand the graph: the width of the event horizon line on the graph at any given height is the maximum distance a body can be from Earth, at that time, without being so far away that light emitted from the body at that time will never reach Earth, right?Yes.
The Hubble sphere is the present-day distance where the recession velocities reach 1 c. Numerically, is the inverse of the Hubble constant.Today's horizon distance is approx. 16.5 Gly. This means that a galaxy today at the distance of 17 Gly is already beyond the horizon, and will not ever be able to send us any signals, or vice versa.Why is this different from the Hubble sphere? How do we know that it is 16.5?
It would be equivalent to the event horizon, if we were living in a universe in which the Hubble constant does not decrease with time - i.e. in a universe with no matter or radiation, and solely with dark energy, or in a universe in which matter and radiation have diluted sufficiently to make it functionally equivalent.
Since we're living in a relatively young universe, in which H is still significantly decreasing due to the self attraction of its contents, it results in the Hubble sphere growing. This means that light emitted today at the Hubble radius will have 0 net velocity towards us, effectively hovering at a constant distance. But tomorrow, when H will have decreased ever so slightly, that light will find itself on our side of the Hubble sphere, and will be able to start approaching us.
That's why the Hubble sphere does not mark the event horizon - you can observe signals emitted from beyond it, as long as the emission wasn't too far away (within the actual event horizon).
The distance to the event horizon is determined by the composition of the energy density of the universe - for it to exist at all, the universe must have some dark energy content. Otherwise we could just wait sufficiently long and observe any signal we want, as recession velocities of any galaxy would never increase.
Yes. Otherwise it would have already been beyond the event horizon, and as such - by definition - would never be able to communicate its current state, no matter how long we waited.However, later on, when the horizon will have receded to 17.5 Gly, some other galaxy which will then find itself at 17 Gly will be able to send a signal that will eventually reach us.That galaxy which someday will be at 17 was previously nearer than 16.5, right?
Yes, these galaxies are carried away by the expansion of the universe.Note that this will be a different galaxy. By the time the horizon recedes to 17.5 Gly, the galaxy today at 17 Gly will have been carried away by the expansion, and the galaxy that will then find itself at 17 Gly will be a galaxy which today is much closer.Expansion of space, right? That's related to the increasing scale-factor on the right side of the chart?
That's the distance at which in a universe with no matter or radiation, which has only dark energy in it, the recession velocities reach c. I.e., it's coincident with the Hubble sphere in such a universe. But in this universe, the rate of expansion (another name for the Hubble constant) does not decrease, and the resulting expansion is exponential.On those same graphs you can see dotted lines marked with present-day redshifts (1, 10, 1000). This can be thought of as illustrating some test galaxies moving with the Hubble flow.Wait, the event horizon will be asymptotically approaching 17.5 Gly? That's the furthest it'll ever be? Why?
As you can see, these galaxies are constantly leaving the event horizon (their paths flare out with time). So, as time progresses, there are less and less galaxies whose signals sent TODAY can ever reach us.
And yet, this does not mean that the event horizon is approaching - it will always be moving measurably further and further away (asymptotically approaching 17.5 Gly).
A hypothetical light beam emitted at the Hubble sphere in this universe will always hover in place, never making any headway towards the observer, since for every light-second it travels, the dark energy expands the remaining distance by one light-second.
Our universe gets diluted with passing time - matter and radiation are progressively less able to retard expansion. On the other hand, dark energy remains constant (as fas as we can see) over time, so given enough waiting it will completely dominate the expansion, and the Hubble sphere in infinite future will coincide with the event horizon - whose distance is dependent on how much DE pushes the universe apart.
For it to grow beyond that, the dark energy would have to not be constant. If it were growing, that horizon would decrease without limit (leading to big rip). If it were decreasing, the horizon would always recede.
Because matter and energy are less and less capable of keeping dark energy from doing what it wants - i.e. expanding space exponentially, with some constant percentage rate per unit time.This apparent incongruity, between galaxies leaving the horizon and the horizon receding, comes about as a result of the fact that when we're talking about signals being sent from galaxies, we're talking about light, which has nett velocity towards us, so it doesn't move with the Hubble flow like galaxies do.But why is the horizon even receding?
At present, the furthest distance we can see is about 13.7 billion lyThere is no sense in which that distance is equivalent to light travel distance.
Here are the few distances that do make sense to talk about:
46 Gly is the present-day distance to where the regions that emitted CMBR are now (what is normally referred to as observable universe).
44 Mly was the distance to these same regions when they emitted CMBR.
~5 Gly is the farthest any of today-visible galaxies was at the time of emission of the light we receive.
Yes. Things outside the nearby region of space are too far away to ever interact with because the space they're in is moving away from us faster than the speed of light and so they will never be able to interact with us.
The Hubble sphere appears to be equivalent to said horizon, since both are affecting the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.No, this isn't correct. Hubble sphere and event horizon are not equivalent. See the rest of this post. Or better yet, look at the graphs linked to earlier.
edit: I've got work to do. Be back later.
Post by: Gentlefish on September 08, 2017, 03:19:33 am
Post by: inteuniso on September 14, 2017, 11:10:13 am
No idea what this means, but I always enjoy spending even five minutes looking at the most recent papers. Far more interesting than checking any newspaper imo. My most interesting reads I found today are the geometric and physical bounds that lead to sinus cavities being shaped the way (https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08966)they are (also learning that they are best described as biological air humidifiers present within all vertebrates), the initial experimentation of stretchable CMOS interconnects (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04434), and bouncing/oscillating universes to explain cosmogenesis (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04055) instead of a singularity.
Post by: Max™ on September 14, 2017, 04:49:29 pm
Post by: Paxiecrunchle on September 15, 2017, 04:08:06 am
Post by: Il Palazzo on September 15, 2017, 11:09:10 am
Ekpyrotic universe theory isn't it?As far as I can see, that's a different kind of cyclic universe model - in particular, the paper has no oscillations for flat universes, unlike the ekpyriotic model.
Post by: inteuniso on September 25, 2017, 02:45:12 pm
Quote from: Evolution of Altruism and Spite study, Yanling Zhang & Feng Fu
Accordingly, we have explicitly shown that
altruism inhibits the evolution of fairness, whereas spite promotes the evolution of
fairness. Fairness first gains an advantage over selfishness when the fair strategy with
the non-monotonic rejection is added, and thus we have found that the non-monotonic
rejection can cause fairness to overcome selfishness, which cannot happen without the
high-offer rejection.
On the Neuroscience side, we have the modeling of the transition from linear to chaotic systems for memory storage in random networks and the optimization of such (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.01880.pdf) i.e. neurons
Finally, on biochemistry, we have a study providing a structure for non-zero steady states of Chemical Reaction Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01364), like continuous-time markov-chains of stochiometric variability.
Quote from: Supriya Krishnamurthy and Eric Smith
We show, for non-trivial examples, that in this manner we can predict to high accuracy, any moment of interest, for CRN's with non-zero deficiency and non-factorizable steady states.
Post by: Paxiecrunchle on September 25, 2017, 11:35:41 pm
And any rate I had recently read a bit about zebra stripes having a repelling effect on biting insects, and that an scientific paper was written about this, I just can't quite remember the name of the authors, has anyone else heard about this? I think it was from a few years ago?
Post by: Reelya on September 25, 2017, 11:37:11 pm
e.g. inteuniso is talking about something that's rejected if too high or to low, so the optimal value is in the middle and both left and right extremes are valued lower, so it's not monotonic.
Post by: bloop_bleep on September 26, 2017, 01:13:07 am
Monotonic means it only goes in one direction, e.g. a graph that goes up, down, then up again, is not monotonic.
e.g. inteuniso is talking about something that's rejected if too high or to low, so the optimal value is in the middle and both left and right extremes are valued lower, so it's not monotonic.
In precise terms, a given function f is monotonically increasing if for every x,y in the domain of f such that x>y the statement f(x)>f(y) is true. Monotonically decreasing is the opposite.
Post by: Bumber on September 26, 2017, 04:47:21 pm
In precise terms, a given function f is monotonically increasing if for every x,y in the domain of f such that x>y the statement f(x)>f(y) is true. Monotonically decreasing is the opposite.Shouldn't it be f(x)≥f(y)?
Post by: Madman198237 on September 26, 2017, 04:49:27 pm
Post by: Bumber on September 26, 2017, 04:54:47 pm
That depends, does it count as "Always increasing" if it plateaus completely at any point? (i.e., is neither increasing nor decreasing)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function
"A function that increases monotonically does not exclusively have to increase, it simply must not decrease."
f(x)>f(y) describes a "strictly increasing" function, which is a subset of monotonic functions.
Post by: bloop_bleep on September 26, 2017, 06:06:26 pm
Yes, that's right.In precise terms, a given function f is monotonically increasing if for every x,y in the domain of f such that x>y the statement f(x)>f(y) is true. Monotonically decreasing is the opposite.Shouldn't it be f(x)≥f(y)?
Post by: Starver on October 12, 2017, 02:09:57 pm
Post by: Reelya on November 17, 2017, 02:33:20 am
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/genes-of-small-indiana-amish-community-carry-mutation-that-could-be-the-key-to-antiageing/news-story/56096b9b9c607db02a104e6e2654a955
Quote
A SMALL Indiana Amish community might hold the key to the genetic fountain of youth.
Scientists found members of the Old Order Amish community carry a copy of what is being described as the first ever anti-ageing genetic mutation.
Medical researcher Douglas Vaughan first started studying the group after noticing a high occurrence of a rare bleeding disorder caused by a mutation on both copies of the SERPINE1 gene, which prevents the regulation of a protein called PAI-1 — needed to dissolve blood clots.
However, those members with the mutation on only one copy of the gene — not both — were found to not have the bleeding disorder.
In fact, those with the single mutation appeared to actually gain advantages from it.
It was discovered Amish carriers of the single mutation lived on average to be 85, which was about 10 years longer than their peers.
Carriers of the mutation also had a zero rate of Type 2 diabetes, while those without had a rate of seven per cent. This was despite leading the same lifestyle and consuming similar diets.
...
The suggestion of anti-ageing was furthered by the fact those with the mutation also had 10 per cent longer telomeres — the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes like the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces.
Basically, if one copy of this gene adds 10 years to your life, but two copies are bad then we could probably arrange a gene drive that makes sure you only carry one copy. So all those "only good if you have exactly one copy" genes could be utilized. Or, if we knew more about how the whole thing works than that, we could reverse-engineer it so that it works all the time with 1 or 2 genes.
Post by: Starver on November 17, 2017, 08:55:27 am
Post by: Trekkin on November 17, 2017, 09:36:00 am
It's lucky, then, that the Amish are notorious Early Adopters of new scientific and technological developments!
Given the average understanding of genetics, it's only a matter of time before someone's trying to peddle Amish blood as an anti-aging cream or something.
Post by: Jopax on November 17, 2017, 11:24:58 am
Post by: Madman198237 on November 27, 2017, 08:34:51 pm
It is still pretty noneuclidian...Yes, so it is. Welcome to modern physics. Curved spacetime is, itself, non-Euclidian, yet it is the basis of the most important large-scale theory of physics that we have.
No amount of three-dimensional space will let a one-dimensional path be less than a one-dimensional path.We've moved on from three dimensions, RAM.
What is far more likely from that perspective -snip for brevity-I'm...not entirely sure you picked up on it, but we're talking about one extra dimension here. Picture the Z dimension, that dimension that protrudes out of the paper when you draw out a classic Cartesian graph (graph of x and y, with x being the horizontal axis). Now, fold the picture into a cylinder, any way you choose. Now, if you were a dot on that paper, you would have to travel pi radians times the radius of the cylinder in order to go from a point on the top to a point directly opposite it on the bottom, right? For simplicity, let's say the radius is 1 cm, and thus the point must travel ~3.142 centimeters to get from point A on top to point B on the bottom. However, now we're going to imagine that a second point is three-dimensional, and can travel along the Z dimension, travelling a distance of 2 cm (The diameter of the cylinder) to reach point B. Can we agree that this has shortened the distance you must travel?
It also doesn't apply if you go the "alternate dimensions" -snip-Luckily for our collective sanity, none of those is on the table as a reasonable, physics-supported option, so far as I know. Just *leaving* our dimensions would probably require you to go to a new universe, which might be possible with a wormhole in the center of a black hole, but good luck, I guess. Also, good luck getting back. As for teleportation, quantum teleportation works, but can't be done faster than the speed of light and definitely isn't a good option for actual movement, since you need a complete copy of whatever you're sending to already be "there" anyway.
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 08:48:49 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on November 27, 2017, 08:49:41 pm
Is there any specific method of FTL that you were discussing? You mentioned wormholes and it sort of sounds like you're talking about wormholes but you also sound like you might be talking about warp travel.The proximal case was Alcubierre, but we were discussing other forms as well.
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 09:03:54 pm
Post by: Madman198237 on November 27, 2017, 09:04:55 pm
Post by: Trekkin on November 27, 2017, 09:56:20 pm
Oh don't worry, it's clearly not hard sci-fi at *all*. It went to a mention of false-vacuum collapse, and then things went somewhat debate-like from there.
Did no one bring up the Alcubierre drive's prohibitive exotic matter requirements?
Or how it's a time machine?
Post by: Madman198237 on November 27, 2017, 09:58:14 pm
However, it doesn't really matter, the other side of the argument/discussion has...dissolved. Nothing more is likely to be gained from the discussion.
Post by: Maximum Spin on November 27, 2017, 10:01:33 pm
Or how it's a time machine?That was actually the source of the conversation.
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 10:03:33 pm
Oh don't worry, it's clearly not hard sci-fi at *all*. It went to a mention of false-vacuum collapse, and then things went somewhat debate-like from there.
Did no one bring up the Alcubierre drive's prohibitive exotic matter requirements?
Or how it's a time machine?
I thought the Alcubierre was a type of warp drive and that it doesn't time travel because it doesn't touch the time dimension or attempt to circumvent relativity?
Post by: Trekkin on November 27, 2017, 10:05:56 pm
Oh don't worry, it's clearly not hard sci-fi at *all*. It went to a mention of false-vacuum collapse, and then things went somewhat debate-like from there.
Did no one bring up the Alcubierre drive's prohibitive exotic matter requirements?
Or how it's a time machine?
I thought the Alcubierre was a type of warp drive and that it doesn't time travel because it doesn't touch the time dimension or attempt to circumvent relativity?
Causality, relativity, FTL: pick two.
Or, more informatively, anything that lets you travel from inside an event's light cone to outside it necessarily either breaks causality (if you arrive because of something somewhere it hasn't happened yet) or relativity (if you just ignore their frame of reference entirely.)
Post by: Max™ on November 27, 2017, 10:22:10 pm
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 10:28:59 pm
Though technically a warp drive which stretches/compresses the fabric of space isn't a FTL drive in the absolute definition because you aren't physically trying to move faster than light.
If you can move faster than light it isn't a matter of "time travel" being difficult, you can simply plot a course and end up in your past light cone, poof, time machine.
The universe does this all the time already, we don't see stars exploding right at the moment they explode, we see them centuries later when the light reaches us. Betelguese could go supernova right now but we won't see it for another 640 years (give or take a year or so).
Also, this isn't quite time travel in the sense it gets portrayed in science fiction.
Also. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say light sphere than cone? I get what you meant by cone, but unless you were shining a flashlight, it'd be a sphere of everywhere from that point.
Post by: TalonisWolf on November 27, 2017, 10:50:25 pm
Post by: Madman198237 on November 27, 2017, 10:50:52 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on November 27, 2017, 10:53:24 pm
Also. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say light sphere than cone? I get what you meant by cone, but unless you were shining a flashlight, it'd be a sphere of everywhere from that point.Light cone is a different concept, the axis of the cone is time. (The cone shape is what you get when you simplify to two spatial dimensions, of course, you get a four-dimensional hypercone otherwise.)
Anyway, you're misconceiving the rest, but I'm too tired to explain right now, so please accept this promise to clarify further later if you want.
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 10:56:19 pm
We have lots of !!SCIENCE!! threads, but only this one science thread.
Yeah, there's the space thread and tech/engineering/automaton/environment thread further down.
Post by: Trekkin on November 27, 2017, 10:59:39 pm
Though technically a warp drive which stretches/compresses the fabric of space isn't a FTL drive in the absolute definition because you aren't physically trying to move faster than light.
People love to bring that up, but that the ship itself is not physically moving faster than light relative to the bubble doesn't mean that the bubble and ship aren't moving at FTL speeds as seen by an outside observer (granted, you don't see the bubble, but still). The bubble is just there to facilitate movement at FTL speeds without dealing with acceleration to/past lightspeed. It's a separate problem.
And yes, seeing an unexploded star that you watched explode breaks causality. In the simplest case, let's say you warp from the exploding star to another faraway star around which your friend orbits. From your perspective, the star exploded, you left (after it exploded, having observed the light from its explosion), and you arrived at their star. From their perspective, given a sufficiently powerful telescope, the sequence of events is reversed: you arrived, you left, and then the star exploded. Causes cannot follow effects. Now, you can see unrelated events happening differently from different perspectives just fine; to return to our exploding star example, let's say we have four stars in a line A-B-C-D and stars B and C explode simultaneously. A would see B explode followed by C; D would see the reverse. That's allowed by physics.
However, if A launches a (subluminal) ship to destroy stars B and C, all the stars will see that ship launch (and arrive) before stars B and C explode. The same cannot be said of a superluminal ship, and that's what breaks causality.
This isn't time travel as portrayed in science fiction, no, because science fiction writers would rather write good stories than physics textbooks.
Regarding light cones, by the way: it's a ball (that is, a solid sphere) at any one time, but it looks like a cone in Minkowski spacetime and that's what matters here. If you were to look at 2d space and display time along the third axis, as you watched the ball expand and move along time its edges would describe the light cone.
EDIT: If you just wink the light on and off, then yes, it's a sphere at any one time, but for our purposes it might help to think of the ball of space that knows you turned the light on rather than the sphere currently experiencing the flash.
Post by: smjjames on November 27, 2017, 11:02:58 pm
Also. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say light sphere than cone? I get what you meant by cone, but unless you were shining a flashlight, it'd be a sphere of everywhere from that point.Light cone is a different concept, the axis of the cone is time. (The cone shape is what you get when you simplify to two spatial dimensions, of course, you get a four-dimensional hypercone otherwise.)
Anyway, you're misconceiving the rest, but I'm too tired to explain right now, so please accept this promise to clarify further later if you want.
I was thinking of cone as in like a gamma ray burst, quasar/supermassive black hole jets, and pulsars where the light we see is originating from a tight cone that we only see because we happen to be in line of sight of it. So, I was thinking of the wrong thing.
Post by: Maximum Spin on November 27, 2017, 11:08:18 pm
I was thinking of cone as in like a gamma ray burst, quasar/supermassive black hole jets, and pulsars where the light we see is originating from a tight cone that we only see because we happen to be in line of sight of it. So, I was thinking of the wrong thing.Yeah, I figured that was what you were imagining. Sorry if I didn't convey that well enough, like I said, I'm very tired and I have a headache. :P
Post by: Max™ on November 28, 2017, 12:40:22 am
Also. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say light sphere than cone? I get what you meant by cone, but unless you were shining a flashlight, it'd be a sphere of everywhere from that point.
Imagine a sphere of light expanding from a point, then make a flipbook out of it.
Each page has a slightly larger or smaller sphere relative to the adjacent pages.
Spread the pages out and line them up from left to right, then call the left <-> right direction time.
You're sliding along that axis as you read this, and at any point you could check how far a sphere of light could have expanded since you were at an earlier or later position along it.
The series of ever larger spheres extending ahead of you towards the future can all be overlapped into a hypercone, as can the ones going upstream towards the past.
You will always be found within those cones relative to any time you specify, as you are unable to move faster than light.
Introduce some method of FTL into the game and you can now choose which way your path intersects with a given light cone because you can start inside one, cross outside of it, and return at your leisure.
Figure out the right trajectories and you end up bumping into yourself in the past, or worse, end up becoming your own grandfather... I wouldn't wanna do that again.
Post by: Reelya on November 28, 2017, 01:33:19 am
Post by: Starver on November 28, 2017, 09:10:02 am
From your perspective, the star exploded, you left (after it exploded, having observed the light from its explosion), and you arrived at their star. From their perspective, given a sufficiently powerful telescope, the sequence of events is reversed: you arrived, you left, and then the star exploded.Arrive, explode then leave, you meant.
(i.e. To be seen leaving prior to the explosion you observed, you must have observed the explosion by a superluminal method that itself got you moving before the light arrived at your position, if you were directly between star and observer. Even more in advance if you aren't, and from every point equidistant (perpendicular) and further (behind) you additionally need it to be a time-travel-viewer (that predicts things beyond any sort of observable simultaneity) in order to have any chance of of out running the explosion-observation wavefront.)
Post by: Trekkin on November 28, 2017, 09:29:48 am
From your perspective, the star exploded, you left (after it exploded, having observed the light from its explosion), and you arrived at their star. From their perspective, given a sufficiently powerful telescope, the sequence of events is reversed: you arrived, you left, and then the star exploded.Arrive, explode then leave, you meant.
(i.e. To be seen leaving prior to the explosion you observed, you must have observed the explosion by a superluminal method that itself got you moving before the light arrived at your position, if you were directly between star and observer. Even more in advance if you aren't, and from every point equidistant (perpendicular) and further (behind) you additionally need it to be a time-travel-viewer (that predicts things beyond any sort of observable simultaneity) in order to have any chance of of out running the explosion-observation wavefront.)
Yes; apologies for the error.
In any event, it should probably be pointed out that FTL is only problematic when it's FTL relative to an outside observer. You can move between two points at relativistic speeds and experience a shorter trip time than the speed of light would indicate is the minimum, but that's just time dilation and only affects the ship; importantly, everyone will still see you arrive after you left. This is about the point in the discussion, bikeshedding about light cones aside, where someone usually confuses the two.
Post by: redwallzyl on November 28, 2017, 07:07:18 pm
Soft and squish robots. quite cool.
Post by: Bumber on November 29, 2017, 07:02:39 pm
However, if A launches a (subluminal) ship to destroy stars B and C, all the stars will see that ship launch (and arrive) before stars B and C explode. The same cannot be said of a superluminal ship, and that's what breaks causality.Am I right in assuming:
A: Sees superluminal ship travel to B, blow up B, travel to C, then blow up C.
B: Sees ship appear at B, blow up B, simultaneously travel to C and backwards to A, then blow up C.
C: Sees ship appear at C, blow up C, remain at C while a copy travels backwards to B, blows up B, then travel backwards to A.
D: Same as C.
And in all instances, the ship looks like it's traveling at only the speed of light?
It's interesting, but I don't see it as all that problematic, nor time travel.
Suppose the ship returns to A after successfully destroying C.
From A's perspective, the ship departs towards B, and is on route when suddenly two ships appear out of nowhere, one of which is flying backwards in the direction of C.
The remaining ship's pilot reports mission complete, stars B and C destroyed. The two ships traveling to B and C won't respond to hails, not even FTL messages.
Now we get to the good part. C's FTL capacity just isn't as great as A's. They learned of A's new weapon that can destroy stars, and sent a ship to declare their surrender.
It was too late, as we know, and their star was destroyed minutes later. Back on A, where the mission has been reported completed, but is not confirmed, a ship arrives declaring C's surrender.
A observes their ship still on route to B, and decides to use an experimental faster FTL drive to outrun their ship and call off the destruction of C.
Unfortunately, what the pilot of the new ship experiences is this:
As he travels to intercept the original ship, it suddenly accelerates and he can't keep up with it. He sees B and C destroyed before he can reach them.
Dejected, he returns to A and reports his failure. A is very upset and confused why their pilots are reporting the destruction of C while the original ship is still clearly on route.
Post by: Trekkin on November 29, 2017, 07:40:02 pm
I'll draw the Minkowski diagram for the exploding stars as soon as I can, but the problem mostly comes up when, for example, B sees the ship appear at B before it leaves A; you can easily set the time, distance, and loiter time at B so it experiences two ships at once, for example*, and even if that's not a problem, when the ship leaves from A to travel to and explode B (from B's perspective), where is it going? Bear in mind we have to care about B's perspective even after it's exploded, because that's relativity, and it has to make sense according to causality for physics to make sense at all.
*incidentally, before someone brings up anything to do with rubidium and laser grids, that's not this thing.
Okay. Assuming the ship travels ~4x the speed of light, the stars are 10 years apart from each other in a line ABCD, and it lingers motionless for five years at each star in a trip going A->B->C->A, (and omitting the actual destruction events to simplify) each of them sees this:
Ship: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. All good so far.
A: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive A, Arrive C, Depart C. Oh hey, two ships at once.
B: Arrive B, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. It arrives before it leaves! It leaves before it leaves!
C/D: Arrive C, Arrive B, Depart C, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive A Good grief! The ship's in two places at once and it's arriving before it leaves besides!
See the problem? Mass-energy equivalence isn't conserved, effects precede causes... I can post the diagram if you want.
Post by: McTraveller on November 29, 2017, 08:33:21 pm
Post by: Trekkin on November 29, 2017, 08:51:22 pm
<morbo>Causality doesn't work that way!</morbo>
It gets even better if you have two spaceships and can talk to your own past. EDIT: or go round-trip, actually...
Or are you saying my explanation was wrong?
Post by: wierd on November 29, 2017, 11:40:39 pm
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24659
(and a fluff article about the paper)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/29/cells-with-lab-made-dna-produce-a-new-kind-of-protein-a-holy-grail-for-synthetic-biology/?utm_term=.2591c40aa383
Remember those artificial base pairs created some time back, the ones that didn't do anything other than take up space in the genome? Well--- NOW they DO something, and produce a novel protein in a living organism! (Very exciting! Even just one more functional base pair increases the number of transcribable amino acids by many times!)
Post by: Trekkin on November 29, 2017, 11:58:35 pm
I dont know about you guys, but I find this very exciting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24659
(and a fluff article about the paper)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/29/cells-with-lab-made-dna-produce-a-new-kind-of-protein-a-holy-grail-for-synthetic-biology/?utm_term=.2591c40aa383
Remember those artificial base pairs created some time back, the ones that didn't do anything other than take up space in the genome? Well--- NOW they DO something, and produce a novel protein in a living organism! (Very exciting! Even just one more functional base pair increases the number of transcribable amino acids by many times!)
I never thought I'd see you posting Nature articles given your disapproval of their fees, but anyway: no. No it does not. You still need to engineer in the tRNA synthetases to actually accommodate the expanded codon set, and that still means dealing with whatever weird chemistry you want to incorporate. Otherwise it's just a de facto stop codon. There's a reason most ncAAs are close to canonicals chemically, and it's not because we don't have uses for the other ones.
Yes, this is a better way to add noncanonicals than the standard, but it's hardly revolutionary. Making novel proteins is nothing new, and ncAAs aren't really news either; this is just a lot more overhead to do something with marginally more utility in certain cases given an entirely separate engineering project. Much like CRISPR/Cas9, it's exciting until you read the fine print.
Post by: wierd on November 30, 2017, 12:27:15 am
While they have not fully integrated the synthetic components, (as you point out, it requires artificially added transcription factors), the demonstration that the base pairs are theoretically functional should additional features be incorporated into their sample's genome (said tRNA frameworks) is still a big thing. The devil lives in the details, yes-- but that is what they are showing here-- one of the details claimed to be a devil has been shown to not be. (Specifically, the different bond structure of this base pair, since it is not based on hydrogen bonds. It was argued that it would cause problems with transcription. This is now shown to not be the case.)
You dont win a marathon by jumping to the finish line, you do actually have to run the race. This is exciting, because the runner is still running, and has made a significant distance down the racetrack. The goal of synthetically assigned amino acids being added to a cell's vocabulary is just a little bit closer today. That is still pretty damn exciting.
Post by: Trekkin on November 30, 2017, 12:38:03 am
While it certainly is no secret that I greatly dislike paywalls, that does not make my interest in science any less, Trekkin. They published in Nature, so that is where I linked.
While they have not fully integrated the synthetic components, (as you point out, it requires artificially added transcription factors), the demonstration that the base pairs are theoretically functional should additional features be incorporated into their sample's genome (said tRNA frameworks) is still a big thing. The devil lives in the details, yes-- but that is what they are showing here-- one of the details claimed to be a devil has been shown to not be. (Specifically, the different bond structure of this base pair, since it is not based on hydrogen bonds. It was argued that it would cause problems with transcription. This is now shown to not be the case.)
You dont win a marathon by jumping to the finish line, you do actually have to run the race. This is exciting, because the runner is still running, and has made a significant distance down the racetrack. The goal of synthetically assigned amino acids being added to a cell's vocabulary is just a little bit closer today. That is still pretty damn exciting.
...no it doesn't, which might be why I never said it did -- and I'd appreciate you not putting words in my mouth in future, especially when you can't get them right. aminoacyl tRNA synthetases are not transcription factors. They do two completely different things.
Apparently you missed the part where noncanonical amino acids have been possible for years now. (Synthetic amino acids have been possible for even longer, but there's no real point outside of really weird NMR experiments.)
Post by: wierd on November 30, 2017, 12:46:17 am
Post by: Trekkin on November 30, 2017, 01:12:18 am
Trekkin, your argument "We have been able to do that for years", applies specifically to in-vitro, not in-vivo. But sure. disregard an advance. You are welcome to your opinion.
Wrong again, weird:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21404373
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3278164/
That took me a few seconds to confirm via Google, man.
And no, I'm not disregarding it. I'm placing it in its proper context: the problem it solves is contingent on solving a much more difficult problem to be of greater utility than our existing solutions to a degree that would justify the added work of implementing it, and actually loading the synthetases gets harder the more unusual an ncAA you want to incorporate. This is a better way to implement those solutions, yes, but in and of itself it's going to be a while before it's worthwhile and it's hardly as revolutionary as you seem to suggest.
But hey, get excited about whatever you want. Just...get informed too, maybe. These aren't things you need any kind of paid access to learn about.
Post by: Max™ on November 30, 2017, 01:36:03 am
Post by: Bumber on November 30, 2017, 03:46:59 am
Okay. Assuming the ship travels ~4x the speed of light, the stars are 10 years apart from each other in a line ABCD, and it lingers motionless for five years at each star in a trip going A->B->C->A, (and omitting the actual destruction events to simplify) each of them sees this:I'm assuming FTL by Alcubierre drive. I tried working it out by creating a table, but I ended up just confusing myself, and my brain has started shutting down for sleep.
Ship: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. All good so far.
A: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive A, Arrive C, Depart C. Oh hey, two ships at once.
B: Arrive B, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. It arrives before it leaves! It leaves before it leaves!
C/D: Arrive C, Arrive B, Depart C, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive A Good grief! The ship's in two places at once and it's arriving before it leaves besides!
See the problem? Mass-energy equivalence isn't conserved, effects precede causes... I can post the diagram if you want.
I'm thinking of making some kind of simulation where the ship releases labeled photons as projectiles at each time interval. Then we can know what each point sees by the available photons. Unity engine would be ideal.
Post by: Trekkin on November 30, 2017, 09:29:12 am
Okay. Assuming the ship travels ~4x the speed of light, the stars are 10 years apart from each other in a line ABCD, and it lingers motionless for five years at each star in a trip going A->B->C->A, (and omitting the actual destruction events to simplify) each of them sees this:I'm assuming FTL by Alcubierre drive. I tried working it out by creating a table, but I ended up just confusing myself, and my brain has started shutting down for sleep.
Ship: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. All good so far.
A: Depart A, Arrive B, Depart B, Arrive A, Arrive C, Depart C. Oh hey, two ships at once.
B: Arrive B, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive C, Depart C, Arrive A. It arrives before it leaves! It leaves before it leaves!
C/D: Arrive C, Arrive B, Depart C, Depart B, Depart A, Arrive A Good grief! The ship's in two places at once and it's arriving before it leaves besides!
See the problem? Mass-energy equivalence isn't conserved, effects precede causes... I can post the diagram if you want.
I'm thinking of making some kind of simulation where the ship releases labeled photons as projectiles at each time interval. Then we can know what each point sees by the available photons. Unity engine would be ideal.
You can do that, but a Minkowski diagram gives you exactly that information with much less work. They're well worth learning to draw if you have any interest in this kind of thing.
EDIT: here, I made a quick one.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Post by: bloop_bleep on November 30, 2017, 11:18:10 am
I'm thinking of making some kind of simulation where the ship releases labeled photons as projectiles at each time interval. Then we can know what each point sees by the available photons.
Hmm....
I'll get back to you on that.
Post by: Bumber on December 01, 2017, 04:53:20 am
Here's the executable: https://github.com/Bumber64/FTLsim/raw/master/FTLsim_x86.zip
Post by: Trekkin on December 01, 2017, 09:33:59 am
Incidentally, it might help you see explicit backwards time travel if you added a selector for reference frames that did the Lorentz transforms for you.
Post by: McTraveller on December 01, 2017, 03:11:30 pm
It's like when you throw a ball high enough in the air that you can catch your own throw after running for a while - you launched the ball (photon), but you moved faster than the ball so you could be there to catch it.
As for what types of time travel may be possible - I don't know. I'm not up to speed with that part of general relativity (wormholes and such).
Post by: Trekkin on December 01, 2017, 03:23:01 pm
To explain what I meant by invoking Morbo: That's not time travel though. That's just seeing photons arriving from when a ship was at a far place arriving later; a star won't "experience" a ship when the distant photons arrive, it will experience it when the actual ship arrives. I mean, we're not doing time travel when we use the Hubble - we are just watching a really delayed movie.
It's like when you throw a ball high enough in the air that you can catch your own throw after running for a while - you launched the ball (photon), but you moved faster than the ball so you could be there to catch it.
As for what types of time travel may be possible - I don't know. I'm not up to speed with that part of general relativity (wormholes and such).
The problem is not only that they're arriving later, but that because the events have spacelike separation their sequence depends on your observation point and that doesn't make sense for causally linked events. If one of us sees a line of dominos fall from A->Z and the other one sees them unfall from Z->A, one of us must be wrong, right? Except relativity says we can't be.
And yes, the star will experience the ship when the photons arrive, because all the other force carriers (gravitons, etc) propagate at the speed of light as well. You can construct a trajectory in which an arbitrary number of the same ship are interacting gravitationally with the same observer, which kind of breaks the conservation of mass, does it not? This is ignoring the energy coming from those photons and its effect on the conservation of energy.
Regardless, would you accept an FTL trajectory that permits photons from the end of its journey to reach it prior to launch to be time travel? Because you can do that, but you need a moving (ideally, relativistic) reference frame. I'll diagram it if you want.
Post by: McTraveller on December 01, 2017, 05:04:26 pm
I'm not sure what you mean here. "A trajectory that permits photons from the end of its journey to reach it prior to launch" sounds suspiciously like the Bootstrap Problem.
Regardless, would you accept an FTL trajectory that permits photons from the end of its journey to reach it prior to launch to be time travel? Because you can do that, but you need a moving (ideally, relativistic) reference frame. I'll diagram it if you want.
Put another way, your comments about violation of things like conservation of mass are, in fact, tantamount to the reason we say FTL travel is not possible if you remain in the standard confines of spacetime:
Consider this simple thing: if your gravitational and electromagnetic "image", which is the only thing that can interact with other bodies, is limited to the speed of light, how can you "outrun" this? If you are using something like an Alcubierre drive, which distorts spacetime, then the straight light cones do not apply. In fact, in your diagram below, what you would see is something like that lines 'Arriving C' and 'Departing C' would bend sharply so they all reached the observer on A exactly when the gravitational and electromagnetic presence of the ship shows up.
Put another way: you are your electromagnetic and gravitational interaction with the rest of the universe.
Post by: Trekkin on December 01, 2017, 06:03:19 pm
I'm not sure what you mean here. "A trajectory that permits photons from the end of its journey to reach it prior to launch" sounds suspiciously like the Bootstrap Problem.
Maybe this will make more sense: If you allow superluminal travel, you can send your FTL ship on a journey that ends within the past light cone of the ship at the time of departure -- so you could, if you want an easy-to-understand paradox, have the ship tell itself not to leave on the journey it just took. If you want, you can even put it in the same place in space but at an earlier point in time.
And no, those lines aren't going to bend. I explicitly drew the light cones at the ends of the time periods when the ship is motionless. Whatever distortion of spacetime you want to claim isn't going to happen when the drive isn't turned on in the first place, now is it? And yet C and D, among others, experience two ships at once. As you point out in bold text, this means there's now two of them, because
Put another way: you are your electromagnetic and gravitational interaction with the rest of the universe.
Incidentally, if you can't outrun your electromagnetic image you can't very well travel faster than light, now can you?
Post by: Bumber on December 01, 2017, 08:49:13 pm
Nicely done. Is there a way to color or otherwise label the photons according to the ship's position when they were emitted?The numbers on the photon represent the ship's position, and the time of creation is relative to Y-coordinate. My only regret is not having them represent the ship's heading at the time.
Spoiler: The results (click to show/hide)
Incidentally, it might help you see explicit backwards time travel if you added a selector for reference frames that did the Lorentz transforms for you.I don't know enough about Lorentz transformation to do anything like that.
And yes, the star will experience the ship when the photons arrive, because all the other force carriers (gravitons, etc) propagate at the speed of light as well. You can construct a trajectory in which an arbitrary number of the same ship are interacting gravitationally with the same observer, which kind of breaks the conservation of mass, does it not? This is ignoring the energy coming from those photons and its effect on the conservation of energy.Is this not just a mere fact of the propagation of gravity through space-time as a wave? Gravity is not mass, as a ripple is not a stone.
The energy of gravity is being stored up like a capacitor in the surrounding space and released all at once. The observer is not a closed system.
Post by: Trekkin on December 01, 2017, 10:28:43 pm
Incidentally, it might help you see explicit backwards time travel if you added a selector for reference frames that did the Lorentz transforms for you.I don't know enough about Lorentz transformation to do anything like that.
Well, if you can't do the math then you can't meaningfully accept or reject any proof I might provide, so we'd just be stuck throwing metaphors at each other until one of us gets bored without actually generating any real insight, so I guess we're done here.
Post by: McTraveller on December 01, 2017, 11:31:50 pm
Posting here will either cement or kill my chances to get in the history books of relativistic physics...
Consider three waypoints (starts, whatever) spaced 4 light years apart. I'll keep the trend going of calling them A,B,C. An FTL ship starts at A, then goes to B at 2c, waits a year, goes to C at 2c, waits a year, then returns to A at 2c. Check out the following...
Code: [Select]
ref obs A
p ---------- ----------
A 0 v0 ^10 v0 ^10!
1
2 v1 ^9 v3 ^11
3
B 4 v2|v3 ^8 v6|v7 ^12
5
6 v4 ^7 v10 ^13
7
C 8 v5 ^6 v13 ^14
So what we have there in the P column is "distance from station A". The v and carat indicate direction of motion of an object at that position, and the number by it is the time the object is observed at that location by the given observer. The reference observer shows that the FTL ship leaves A, stops at B, goes to C, then leaves and returns to A.
From the standpoint of A, we see something odd. We see a ship heading from B to C at time 10, AND we see a ship materialize back at A at time 10! But the observer at A never saw a ship approach - it had to have simply materialized. Furthermore, we also see that a "ship" appears to travel backwards to C starting at time 10 - its position gets farther away from A as time increases.
The interpretation I have is this: At time 10, an observer at A sees a ship - antiship pair spontaneously materialize. Think about it like pair production. The "conventional" part of the pair remains at A - this is the ship that arrived back at A from the standpoint of the people on the ship. The "antiship" travels backwards to C - where it happens to arrive just as an observer at C sees the "original" conventional ship ready to depart. The ship and antiship appear to the observer at A to annihilate at time 14. What's really notable - the time of apparent annihilation at time 14 for observer A is the same "time" that, if a ship were to have departed C at time 6, an observer at A would no longer be able to detect a ship at C. It is a wholly consistent interpretation, even if I can't say what mechanism would cause it.
This has several interesting aspects. One important one : because the ship is an "antiship" there is no loss of conservation of mass or charge - when the observer at A sees the pair produced spontaneously, there is still a total of one net ship in the universe (in this case, two ships and one antiship). Also, an observer at A cannot "retain" multiple copies of a ship - it can only have one, which is an interesting way to address the "passengers on the ship can't feel like they are in two places at once" paradox.
I actually worked out the same diagram for observers at B and C - and they are actually all consistent. B and C are interesting though, because each of them see two ship-antiship productions and two annihilations. It's super late here right now though, but if there is interest I can post those cases tomorrow.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Post by: Trekkin on December 02, 2017, 04:07:53 am
Posting here will either cement or kill my chances to get in the history books of relativistic physics...
I'm really hoping this was meant as a joke. Moreso than is normal for this thread, I mean.
As to your diagram (which is just half of a really coarsely quantized Minkowski diagram displayed as a table, by the way): I thought we decided that handwavium spacetime distortion meant the ship couldn't outrun its own electromagnetic emissions because Alcubierre = Star Trek warp drive according to the Internet?
And yeah, not having any mechanism for that is...not a great sign, man. I can make up invisible chronology protection ninja pirates that hijack ships approaching lightspeed (and hey, that's why they appear to gain mass, right?), but that doesn't mean it happens, or that it explains anything. Working backwards from the outcomes you want (in this case, that FTL is possible in a causal universe with special relativity) in the absence of empirical proof rarely gets you anywhere useful in science, let alone working without any math.
And actually you're right about the ship going backwards. If you just plot an FTL course crossing a stationary observer, you see that they see a ship flash into existence and recede as two ships, one going forward to its destination and one going backwards to its origin. No such thing as an anti-ship, though; it's just nonsense that happens when you selectively ignore part of physics.
Post by: McTraveller on December 02, 2017, 08:19:40 am
(Incidentally, I don't think this invokes any kind of chronology ninjas - it just says "pair production, antimatter, and annihilation seems to match the observations".)
Post by: Trekkin on December 02, 2017, 11:40:45 am
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Ship starts off motionless in the green reference frame. It accelerates in an arbitrarily short nonzero time to the red, moving reference frame, skewing its space and time axes but keeping them reflected around the edge of the light cone as normal. It now coasts a bit, then moves at FTL speeds; this part is in the bright red, and since every point along this path is farther along the red frame's time axis, from the standpoint of an observer in this reference frame it's moving forward in time. Now it stops in arbitrarily short nonzero time (so it's in the green reference frame again), waits a bit, and jumps back to its original space coordinate. That part is in green -- again, a stationary observer sees it moving forward in time per the green frame's time axis.
And yet it arrives back where it started but before it left, so now it's free to shoot its grandfather or whatever paradox-inducing thing you would like it to do. It doesn't have to just sit motionless like I've diagrammed, before anyone says anything about how "well clearly it's a closed loop!"
You might quibble about using two reference frames, but per special relativity that's valid to do -- and if you use a subluminal ship, you can watch any part of the trip from any number of reference frames and it's clear you can't get back to where you left. At most you can go arbitrarily close to not moving in time at all, which doesn't actually get you into the past. Superluminal paths, though, let you thread observations together in relativistically valid ways to get to causally invalid results, suggesting either relativity doesn't work (no) causality is optional (no) or there are no superluminal paths.
Post by: McTraveller on December 02, 2017, 03:40:07 pm
It now coasts a bit, then moves at FTL speeds; this part is in the bright red, and since every point along this path is farther along the red frame's time axis, from the standpoint of an observer in this reference frame it's moving forward in time
I follow what you are saying - but I must be missing something in that drawing. To me it looks like the FTL trajectory (bright red line) is moving in the negative-time direction in the red (skewed) reference frame. That is, taking "increasing time" to be in the direction of the t(relativistic) line moving up and to the right - because the portion that looks like it is 'coasting' in that frame is moving in that direction. The bright red trajectory does "always increase" if the relativistic time axis is in the direction of the blue line heading up and to the left, but I thought that was the light cone. Can you clarify the diagram there? I feel like I'm missing something obvious... and it's been a long time since I've had general relativity and I'd rather continue a conversation than just one-directional reading.
Incidentally I do agree that general and special relativity definitely seem to hold, and I agree that causality holds, so it does sure look like (sadly) there are no real-world superluminal paths.
Post by: Trekkin on December 02, 2017, 04:06:41 pm
I follow what you are saying - but I must be missing something in that drawing. To me it looks like the FTL trajectory (bright red line) is moving in the negative-time direction in the red (skewed) reference frame. That is, taking "increasing time" to be in the direction of the t(relativistic) line moving up and to the right - because the portion that looks like it is 'coasting' in that frame is moving in that direction. The bright red trajectory does "always increase" if the relativistic time axis is in the direction of the blue line heading up and to the left, but I thought that was the light cone. Can you clarify the diagram there? I feel like I'm missing something obvious... and it's been a long time since I've had general relativity and I'd rather continue a conversation than just one-directional reading.
That's kind of why I've been hoping to display this mathematically; it's obvious numerically but the diagram is nonintuitively skewed, so it looks confusing. Perhaps more so since I left the grids out. That said, I've added lines of constant time for both the arrival and the departure trips and labeled their intersections with the relevant time axes.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Post by: Max™ on December 02, 2017, 09:08:20 pm
Post by: Trekkin on December 02, 2017, 09:22:06 pm
Lorentz transforms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation#Derivation_of_the_group_of_Lorentz_transformations) shouldn't be foreign if you're discussing relativity.I've been saying that for days, but nobody's listened yet.
Post by: McTraveller on December 02, 2017, 09:46:07 pm
That whole "the order of events occurring at different locations is actually relative" thing... fun.
Also - don't be afraid to throw equations in here. I, at least, tend to understand those easier than images.
And yeah, I've got to really dust the cobwebs off my relativistic physics. It's only been 21 years since I had to know that stuff...
Post by: martinuzz on December 04, 2017, 11:14:14 am
Now, he succeeded in making artificial nano muscle fibers, powered by light.
In their experiments, they show how their nano-fibres are able to lift small pieces of paper.
The fibres are made by arranging the nano-engines used in the previous experiments with nano-carts into long braids. From the short molecules, microscopic fibres are formed using chemical tricks.
In water, the fibres form noodle-like strings.
The whole process can be classified as 'self-assembly'. Under the right conditions, the fibres automatically assume the correct position and fall into place.
The resulting complex consists of 95% water molecules, making it exceptionally applicable in biological systems.
A possible application could be using the fibres as support structures for growing organs from stem cells. The University of Groningen has already started a joint research with the team to try and force stem cells to grow into the right shape.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/nobelprijswinnaar-feringa-komt-met-nieuw-onderzoek-nanospiertjes-tillen-snippertje-papier-op~a4543216/
Post by: Egan_BW on December 12, 2017, 05:19:03 pm
Post by: smjjames on December 12, 2017, 05:48:53 pm
One possible explaination for the elongated shape is that it resulted from an enlongated string of hot rock that was spinning really fast and it cooled that way. Could be wrong. Another possibility is that the ends didn't get smashed off for whatever reason. There are enlongated asteroids and comets, but none that would envoke a spindle or needle shape description.
In what way is it spinning though?
Post by: bloop_bleep on December 12, 2017, 05:50:33 pm
Probably double, triple, and quadruple check your measurements plus confer with a bunch of other experts
In this publish-or-perish environment? Not a chance.
Post by: smjjames on December 12, 2017, 05:56:18 pm
Probably double, triple, and quadruple check your measurements plus confer with a bunch of other experts
In this publish-or-perish environment? Not a chance.
Looking bad when you get found out that you made a mistake on such a major thing might be a motivation.
I also saw some stuff about how the density of them among the stars would be too low or something for one to swing by or for us to spot it, or something, also, nobody was actively looking for it, it was discovered by pure chance.
It's a 'sample size of one' problem, if you're trying to look at a population of things, one data point tells you nothing about factors outside of that one data point.
Post by: Max™ on December 13, 2017, 01:03:32 am
Not that it's likely, but what would we do if we did find that it's probably artificial? Would be quite hard to actually go catch it at this point.If we had the ability to catch it, we'd be able to just launch missions off to other stars too, think the delta-v needed was 50+ km/s or something absurd like that when we're still plunking stuff around with chemical rockets mostly.
Post by: Egan_BW on December 13, 2017, 01:09:41 am
Post by: bloop_bleep on December 13, 2017, 01:45:14 am
Yeah, but the potential of looting alien technology seems like a good excuse to build an interstellar-scale mission, no? :PI'm not sure the aliens with access to said advanced technology would take kindly to that.
Post by: Greiger on December 13, 2017, 02:44:20 am
I like science. I consider myself more scientifically minded than the average middle class american, and can usually keep up with forum posts and the odd science magazine or casual conversation involving engineering, biology, chemistry and a bit of physics.
But leave it to bay 12 for me to skip to a few pages before the end of a thread to be up to my neck in diagrams, relativity, what I assume is theoretical physics, and the word 'in-vitro'. I am confident if I watch this tread and read a few posts every day I might learn something. :D
Post by: wierd on December 13, 2017, 02:47:40 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama
Maybe I am too nerdy.
(Do *I* think it is "Aliens!" ? No. Most likely not. Its very unusual shape is interesting though. It would be neat to get samples from it. Given extreme amount of time it has been in interstellar space, analysis of the surface material would reveal lots of interesting things about space weathering that could be useful for creating interstellar probes/spacecraft.)
Post by: TD1 on December 13, 2017, 02:58:24 pm
Post by: Doomblade187 on December 14, 2017, 11:38:18 am
Given the shape, and since we are talking about "Maybe aliens!"-- Just dropping this.That was an excellent book. Also, apparently the surface is red due to being exposed to just ambient space radiation and such. We could probably learn a lot from that for shipbuilding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama
Maybe I am too nerdy.
(Do *I* think it is "Aliens!" ? No. Most likely not. Its very unusual shape is interesting though. It would be neat to get samples from it. Given extreme amount of time it has been in interstellar space, analysis of the surface material would reveal lots of interesting things about space weathering that could be useful for creating interstellar probes/spacecraft.)
Post by: kingawsume on December 17, 2017, 10:28:31 pm
Hey, if it's a Type III civilization, what do they have to lose? A couple of terrajoules of energy in an infintely large universe? Technology that can be replicated in a matter of moments? Perhaps it was even meant to be "stolen;" a gift from beings of a higher existence?Yeah, but the potential of looting alien technology seems like a good excuse to build an interstellar-scale mission, no? :PI'm not sure the aliens with access to said advanced technology would take kindly to that.
The world may nevertm know...
Post by: martinuzz on January 26, 2018, 09:01:57 am
It's already called a 'milestone in the research of regenerative tissue'.
Axolotls are capable of regrowing full limbs, complete with bones, muscles and nervous system. Axolotls kinda need that, because they have a tendency to bite off each others limbs.
It is also the largest complete DNA sequenced in the world, so far.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25458 (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25458)
https://newatlas.com/axolotl-genome-sequenced-regeneration/53119/ (https://newatlas.com/axolotl-genome-sequenced-regeneration/53119/)
Post by: wierd on January 26, 2018, 09:11:53 am
http://www.axolotl.org/tiger_salamander.htm
The thing that is interesting about them in terms of tissue regeneration is the formation of the blastema. This is a structure that has some analogs to a scab in humans, however, the inter-cellular communication and coordination between fibroblasts in humans required to form a blastema, and then regenerate whole lot tissue systems (like whole arms) does not occur. Instead, the fibroblast migration and integration is chaotic and random, producing scar tissue.
There was some work done a few years ago about this, and many of the genes involved in why humans and other mammals create scar tissue instead of regenerating the way the axolotl does, are actually key tumor supressing genes that combat a variety of cancers.
This strongly suggests that the mechanisms employed by the axolotl would be very difficult to induce safely in a mammalian host.
Post by: Il Palazzo on January 26, 2018, 09:15:05 am
They also have a strange habit of turning terrestrial semi-randomly.This calls for the Axolot Song!
http://www.axolotl.org/tiger_salamander.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxA0QVGVEJw
Post by: Starver on January 31, 2018, 05:54:38 am
Post by: Reelya on February 06, 2018, 04:32:55 pm
This is actually an amazing read. Some home aquarium owner in Germany noticed a pet crayfish he bought overbreeding, they ended up having way too many of them and were soon giving them away to all their friends. It turns out that a mutant crayfish was born with 3 sets of chromosomes instead of two (e.g. the parents sperm or ova didn't divide properly), e.g. the kind of thing that normally happens with plants. But somehow the extra chromosomes didn't kill it, they made them grow larger than normal and pump out absolutely massive loads of eggs, which happened to also self-fertilize, due to the extra chromosome.
So the things just pump out clones like proverbial Tribbles without needing to mate, they ended up in every pet store, and of course, some idiots eventually dumped their excess crayfish into the wild, and these oversized mutant baby-pumping crayfish are now spreading across Eurasia, even to Madagascar and Japan. Technically, they're a completely new species (since they can no longer breed with the parent species), that came into existence instantly due to a copying error in one sperm or ova cell back in the 1990s. A whole new species coming into existence in a flash is something that's not uncommon in plants (e.g. some plant hybrids can breed with the same hybrid, but not the parent species), but I haven't heard of that in animals before.
Post by: RedKing on February 06, 2018, 05:51:07 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.htmlPlease tell me someone is going to name it the Horatio crayfish.
This is actually an amazing read. Some home aquarium owner in Germany noticed a pet crayfish he bought overbreeding, they ended up having way too many of them and were soon giving them away to all their friends. It turns out that a mutant crayfish was born with 3 sets of chromosomes instead of two (e.g. the parents sperm or ova didn't divide properly), e.g. the kind of thing that normally happens with plants. But somehow the extra chromosomes didn't kill it, they made them grow larger than normal and pump out absolutely massive loads of eggs, which happened to also self-fertilize, due to the extra chromosome.
So the things just pump out clones like proverbial Tribbles without needing to mate, they ended up in every pet store, and of course, some idiots eventually dumped their excess crayfish into the wild, and these oversized mutant baby-pumping crayfish are now spreading across Eurasia, even to Madagascar and Japan. Technically, they're a completely new species (since they can no longer breed with the parent species), that came into existence instantly due to a copying error in one sperm or ova cell back in the 1990s. A whole new species coming into existence in a flash is something that's not uncommon in plants (e.g. some plant hybrids can breed with the same hybrid, but not the parent species), but I haven't heard of that in animals before.
Post by: TD1 on February 06, 2018, 06:38:42 pm
Post by: RedKing on February 06, 2018, 10:27:25 pm
I don't follow? Shakespearean Horatio?Endless Space reference. The Horatio were a civilization of clones of one single individual.
Post by: Sheb on February 07, 2018, 03:17:58 am
Post by: wierd on February 07, 2018, 03:23:19 am
Post by: Greiger on February 07, 2018, 04:17:00 am
Post by: ChairmanPoo on February 07, 2018, 05:26:10 am
Post by: Reelya on February 21, 2018, 02:33:58 am
Hey this is pretty cool. A cave where they built an ancient temple dedicated to god's of the underworld was said to be a portal to hell that killed anyone who goes near it, including animals, this goes back to the Greek and Roman era. Now, scientists have measured deadly CO2 emissions of up to 91% purity seeping out of the cave.
Post by: Teneb on February 21, 2018, 07:55:51 am
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/underworld-that-kills-all-who-go-near/news-story/4c0a4127cb8cbdadbc3653137a03bde1I wonder if anyone'll send in an expedition (be it with a drone or just air tanks) to see where the source of the CO2 is.
Hey this is pretty cool. A cave where they built an ancient temple dedicated to god's of the underworld was said to be a portal to hell that killed anyone who goes near it, including animals, this goes back to the Greek and Roman era. Now, scientists have measured deadly CO2 emissions of up to 91% purity seeping out of the cave.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on February 21, 2018, 09:40:30 am
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/underworld-that-kills-all-who-go-near/news-story/4c0a4127cb8cbdadbc3653137a03bde1I wonder if anyone'll send in an expedition (be it with a drone or just air tanks) to see where the source of the CO2 is.
Hey this is pretty cool. A cave where they built an ancient temple dedicated to god's of the underworld was said to be a portal to hell that killed anyone who goes near it, including animals, this goes back to the Greek and Roman era. Now, scientists have measured deadly CO2 emissions of up to 91% purity seeping out of the cave.
Quote
HOW CO2 GETS INTO CAVES.
It is a proven fact that CO2 enters caves by several methods. Each method has a bearing on the gas ratio composition of the cave atmosphere and its variation to that of the above-ground atmosphere. The two main methods in which CO2 gets into caves are:-
1. CO2 is absorbed by the ground water as it passes through surface soil containing high concentrations of the gas, due to the decay of vegetation. This water percolates through the rock strata and enters the cave system, usually taking part in the calcite deposition cycle. In this instance the addition of extra CO2 to the cave atmosphere displaces O2 and nitrogen (N2).
2. Secondly, CO2 may be a by-product of organic and micro-organism metabolism or respiration by fauna such as bats or humans. Simply the oxygen concentration is reduced in proportion to the increase in CO2. The N2 concentration stays constant.
3. The other factor which one has to consider is that in deep caves where air movement is minimal, CO2 will build up in the lower part of the cave. So, even though the CO2 may have entered the cave by one of the two above mentioned methods, a very still cave atmosphere may allow CO2 to sink to the deepest part of the cave and displace O2 and N2. Thus building up the concentration of CO2 to a higher concentration, at the lowest point in the cave.
Even though CO2 is 1.57 times heavier than nitrogen and 1.38 times heavier than O2, it will have a tendency to disperse in an isolated volume of air, due to molecular diffusion. In other words a mixture of gasses will not separate into layers of various density gases if they are left for a long time in a still chamber. A possible explanation of the high concentration of CO2 in deep caves (with a relatively still atmosphere), is that CO2 is being produced metabolically or entering the cave via ground water at a greater rate than the gas can diffuse into the cave atmosphere, thus settling at the bottom of the cave because it is a dense gas.
Post by: Teneb on February 21, 2018, 10:11:28 am
Post by: ChairmanPoo on February 21, 2018, 10:52:49 am
Post by: Teneb on February 21, 2018, 11:32:25 am
what link?the news one provided by Reelya? I am now very confused
Post by: Madman198237 on February 21, 2018, 11:35:00 am
what link?what link?the news one provided by Reelya? I am now very confused
He wasn't writing out anything from that link, he was (presumably) quoting a DIFFERENT article that explains how gas gets into caves, since how the CO2 got into the cave isn't explained in the news article.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on February 21, 2018, 11:38:47 am
Before reading that I was guessing on some volcanic leakage...
Post by: bloop_bleep on February 21, 2018, 01:09:34 pm
He wasn't writing out anything from that link, he was (presumably) quoting a DIFFERENT article that explains how gas gets into caves, since how the CO2 got into the cave isn't explained in the news article.
Actually, it is.
Quote
He believes it is possible that the cave sits above the Babadag fault line which could release toxic gases from the Earth’s crust.
Post by: martinuzz on February 26, 2018, 12:12:21 pm
They managed to film condensin (the protein complex involved) in action, as it processed to DNA strands into loops.
Scientists have long wondered, whether condensin 'scrapes DNA together' from the cell, or rather uses a 'needle and thread' technique to form the loops of DNA that compact into chromosomes.
Their video and measurement now prove it to be the latter.
Condensin binds to the DNA, and coils it up in some kind of lasso technique, forming loops that are consequently packed into tight sausages, the choromosomes.
Team leader Cees Dekker, professor in molecular physics at TU Delft says the team learned a lot about the process the making of those loops.
For example, loops are made at a speed of 1500 DNA letters per second, and the process is asymmetrical. The protein complex only exerts force on one side of the DNA string.
Experts are enthousiastic.
"It is very likely that a cell uses this looping strategy more often. Condensin is part of a family of protein complexes that involve similar tasks. It is likely other complexes use the same looping mechanism to give structure to DNA. It could shed more light on gene expression. Knowing how and where proteins grab the DNA is important. A defect in the mechanism could also be the cause of some cancers. It really is a major breakthrough", says Benjamin Rowland of the Dutch Cancer Institute.
"The most important thing about it is just the fundamental knowledge", says team leader Dekker. "The cell has a really elegant way to organize DNA. And now we can see it with our own eyes!"
https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/how-fit-two-metres-dna-six-micrometre-nucleus
https://youtu.be/zd2I-Yq_35Y
https://youtu.be/3rB7RchZ2ew
https://youtu.be/Ce7gMNAOI1A
Post by: tonnot98 on February 26, 2018, 02:11:46 pm
That, and all directed-energy-weapons in general. With the lightspeed, armor ignoring, and electronics-frying capability that comes with most of these weapons, I really can't figure out why we're not doing more R&D into it!
Post by: Greiger on February 26, 2018, 02:34:25 pm
From my understanding most energy weapons like that either have problems with being directional(if you use it you will take out your own equipment too) being man portable, or reliable enough for use on a battlefield. That said I'm sure the US government isn't telling everyone and their mother what kind of weapons have been developed. They might actually have some functional and effective weapons like that, they just have not felt the need to deploy them and show the rest of the world how those work yet.
Post by: Starver on February 26, 2018, 04:14:03 pm
there is a reason I used the word neutralize instead of stun in that first sentence.Surely you can't neutralise, if pumping a large surfeit of charged particles to somewhere... ;)
Post by: bloop_bleep on February 26, 2018, 07:05:12 pm
Reminds me of the "Lightning gun" a guy made. It shoots very visible and noisy electrical arcs, but it has such a low ampage that you can put your hand to it and it only feels like a tickle.Yes, I saw that too. Basically a handheld Tesla coil. Tesla coils require very high voltage, so the transformer that is connected to the power supply has to reduce current a thousandfold to compensate.
The whole problem with these energy weapons is that the extremely high electrical resistance of the air means that you require absolutely gargantuan power sources in order to do anything at all. Plus the directional aspect of it, like Greiger said. The air pretty much has the same resistance everywhere, so the current doesn't really care which direction it goes in.
Post by: andrea on February 26, 2018, 08:29:34 pm
Post by: Egan_BW on February 27, 2018, 01:55:08 am
Post by: Starver on February 27, 2018, 07:54:10 am
Post by: wierd on February 27, 2018, 08:02:05 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator
It is kinda hard to put more energy into something than a high power explosive detonation can provide, without vaporizing the projectile in the process.
Despite that little issue, DARPA is of course, hard at work..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAHEM
Post by: andrea on February 27, 2018, 01:41:24 pm
Post by: bloop_bleep on February 27, 2018, 01:59:26 pm
Post by: redwallzyl on March 13, 2018, 11:44:11 pm
Post by: Max™ on March 14, 2018, 10:59:12 am
Post by: scourge728 on March 22, 2018, 01:11:20 pm
Post by: martinuzz on March 31, 2018, 05:33:52 am
With their first test they set a new record, when an intense beam of deuterium plasma at temperatures of 50000C (90032F) was aimed at tungsten matrix blocks for 18 hours.
This is equivalent to the amount of energy that the walls of the Iter test reactor would be subject to over the period of an entire year.
Project member Hans van Eck's first assessment is that the material withstood the extreme temperatures without any visible damage, but extensive analysis is still underway.
Up until now, the only way to predict how a material would respond to these temperatures, was by using computer simulation. The Dutch reactor is the only one in the world that can realistically reproduce the long term heat exposure within a fusion reactor.
Dutch fusion expert Marc Beurskens, who works at a German fusion reactor project in Greifswald, says '"This is an important moment. We could never reproduce the particle- and energy flux that we are going to have in the Iter and later, the Demo reactors. To make any meaningful estimates of reactor wall and exhaust wear, we really need linear installations like the Magnum-PSI in Eindhoven. It's really cool that they managed to get it to work".
Pretty awesome. We already had an underground particle accelerator ring (okok, a small one, but still), and now we are creating localized zones with stellar temperatures.
I just need to remember to run if ever a Gordon Freeman is employed at our High Tech Campus. And maybe I should start using a Geiger counter on my garden vegetables.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dit-lab-in-eindhoven-kan-temperaturen-zo-hoog-als-de-zon-aan-dat-is-een-belangrijke-stap-vooruit-voor-kernfusie~a4584768/ (https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/dit-lab-in-eindhoven-kan-temperaturen-zo-hoog-als-de-zon-aan-dat-is-een-belangrijke-stap-vooruit-voor-kernfusie~a4584768/)
https://www.differ.nl/news/magnum-psi-plasma-exposure-record (https://www.differ.nl/news/magnum-psi-plasma-exposure-record)
Post by: smjjames on April 01, 2018, 01:04:48 am
Could also see it as an application for re-entry heat shields?
Post by: wierd on April 01, 2018, 01:18:42 am
Also, shield material has different requirements. Re-entry ablative heat shields need to withstand some pretty extreme acoustic stresses.
Nuke reactor needs to withstand aggressive neutron exposure which causes embrittlement.
Post by: smjjames on April 01, 2018, 09:28:21 am
Also, I don't think the plasma in fusion reactors has free neutrons, all they were doing here is simulating being blasted with stellar plasma.
Post by: Starver on April 01, 2018, 10:56:59 am
2H + 3H -> 4He + 1n
Another version, Deuterium-Hydrogen, produces some neutrons:
2H + 2H -> either 3H + 1H or 3He + 1n
(Tritium decays to He-3 by beta decay, so may 'poison' the plasma of positive ions you pumped in there. Consult your local Fusion Physicist to find out if I'm on or way off the mark with this supposition. They are likely fast electrons, so may just escape to the side-walls of your reactor.)
You probably need to use Helium-3 (and not produced as above, hence the Iron Skies conflict for 'minable' lunar He-3 reserves) to get 'neutronless' fusion, undrer ideal conditions:
2H + 3He -> 1H + 4He
Or go for something where fusing a Hydrogen with a heavier atom provokes overwhelmingly alpha (He-4) breakdown of the (now even) heavier element, with just a smudge of neutron release from secondary decay paths.
There's going to be a neutron flux of some kind, pretty much, though some don't depend upon them for their energy-harvesting, while for others it's the main (and magnetically-untrappable) baryonic product that the reactor walls will directly encounter, as well as all the rest of the radiation. We've yet to work out which methods of fusion can be best tapped for energy, and in what manner, so it's rather up in the air wheher we can make it as contained as a Mr Fusion or would have to take it for granted that it's going to pepper its shielding with free neutrons and call that more acceptable (given the scale advantages over the various modes of fission-wastes) and worth the differnt hassle.
Post by: Trekkin on April 01, 2018, 11:52:37 am
Aneutronic fusion is theoretically possible, but designing a reactor to withstand bombardment by and recover energy from fast neutrons is a better-understood problem than efficiently sustaining a plasma temperature to permit aneutronic reactions.
Post by: inteuniso on April 15, 2018, 08:45:26 am
Stumbled upon this Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/) about how we miiiiiight not be the first industrial, or even spacefaring, civilization on this planet. Talk about a mainstream paradigm shift, right? Certainly could help explain why Sumerians say sky people gave them all their knowledge and technology and the Egyptians have a recorded lineage extending back 30,000 years.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on April 15, 2018, 09:07:41 am
Something I did not expect to see for a long time, let alone today.
Stumbled upon this Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/) about how we miiiiiight not be the first industrial, or even spacefaring, civilization on this planet. Talk about a mainstream paradigm shift, right? Certainly could help explain why Sumerians say sky people gave them all their knowledge and technology and the Egyptians have a recorded lineage extending back 30,000 years.
(http://media.giphy.com/media/ADr35Z4TvATIc/giphy.gif)
That´s not what the article says. At all.
Quote
It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization.
But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet
AKA: No there is no standing theory about ancient astronauts or whatnot. No, those scientists aren´t really saying saying that there were ancient astronauts on Earth or whatnot. They went from a thought experiment ("what kind of obscure evidence would a hypothetical past civilization leave?") to practical technological developments going from their hypothetical ("what kind of tools could we develop to search for obscure evidence?"). There is no paradigm shift, nor is this mainstream
Post by: Frumple on April 15, 2018, 09:09:07 am
Something I did not expect to see for a long time, let alone today.Uh. It kinda' does the exact opposite of helping to explain either of those, though. It's talking geological time scales, stuff that happened well before current-ish humans existed. Doesn't explain much of anything regarding more human time scale stuff, except posit (from the nth perspective) that maybe just maybe we're on the road to envirofucking ourselves into extinction.
Stumbled upon this Atlantic article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/are-we-earths-only-civilization/557180/) about how we miiiiiight not be the first industrial, or even spacefaring, civilization on this planet. Talk about a mainstream paradigm shift, right? Certainly could help explain why Sumerians say sky people gave them all their knowledge and technology and the Egyptians have a recorded lineage extending back 30,000 years.
Can't say it's much of a paradigm shift, either. Vague acknowledgement of the possibility's been around at least as long as I have, near as I can recall, and what that article describes is vague acknowledgement of the possibility.
And ninja'd, more or less. Eh.
Post by: inteuniso on April 15, 2018, 09:12:22 am
Uh. It kinda' does the exact opposite of helping to explain either of those, though. It's talking geological time scales, stuff that happened well before current-ish humans existed. Doesn't explain much of anything regarding more human time scale stuff, except posit (from the nth prospective) that maybe just maybe we're on the road to envirofucking ourselves into extinction.
Well, I've opened myself up to the idea that there can be civilizations that have come and gone on any planet in this solar system at any time before the last 200 years. Fuck, they could have habitats with millions of people in space and we would never know because we have no clue where to look.
You can't just deny the existence of something because you haven't see it. That's foolish.
That´s not what the article says. At all.QuoteIt’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization.
But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet
Seeing that every hypothesis exists to be disproven or proven and they did neither, I believe you have thrown down the gauntlet, sir.
Besides, do you really think everybody who reads the headline of that is going to think "Oh that's poppycock there's surely no way!"
Post by: Teneb on April 15, 2018, 09:14:45 am
You can't just deny the existence of something because you haven't see it. That's foolish.What are your thoughts on invisible magical unicorns?
Post by: ChairmanPoo on April 15, 2018, 09:14:54 am
(https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20140325.png)
Well, I've opened myself up to the idea that there can be civilizations that have come and gone on any planet in this solar system at any time before the last 200 years. Fuck, they could have habitats with millions of people in space and we would never know because we have no clue where to look.
You can't just deny the existence of something because you haven't see it. That's foolish.
Post by: inteuniso on April 15, 2018, 09:17:11 am
(https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20140325.png)Look, I don't know that's false. Is my field of view referring to this current universe, and the densely packed hitlers being everything else? Seeing that we can make Hitlers out of stardust and his DNA which I'm sure we can scrounge up/simulate from somewhere, this is a completely accurate photo.
Post by: Frumple on April 15, 2018, 09:17:55 am
Besides, do you really think everybody who reads the headline of that is going to think "Oh that's poppycock there's surely no way!"... of course they won't? There's an industry catering to (ripping off :P) that sort of outlook, after all. Plenty of folks that'll bite the hook. Can't recall if it's the science or history channel that's famous for it, these days.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on April 15, 2018, 09:20:26 am
both, I think. I once saw a science channel documentary on the psychic powers of ninjas.... actually lets leave that aside, because long before that a bigger problem became apparent: Their supposed "master ninja" wasnt even japaneseBesides, do you really think everybody who reads the headline of that is going to think "Oh that's poppycock there's surely no way!"... of course they won't? There's an industry catering to (ripping off :P) that sort of outlook, after all. Plenty of folks that'll bite the hook. Can't recall if it's the science or history channel that's famous for it, these days.
Post by: wierd on April 15, 2018, 09:20:40 am
Post by: inteuniso on April 15, 2018, 09:21:34 am
I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
Post by: Teneb on April 15, 2018, 09:26:58 am
West Rome was the last to collapse due to the consequences climate change. There haven't been any empires collapsing from such causes since, really. From other reasons? Sure, but human reasons like fucking up economically or invading the ol' graveyard of empires: Afghanistan.I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
Post by: wierd on April 15, 2018, 09:27:37 am
1) He mistranslated the cuneiform
2) He tried to take religious rhetoric literally
3) He could not account for his own confirmation biases/was not sufficiently impartial/had strong opinions he could not distance himself from.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on April 15, 2018, 09:37:03 am
... goths are a consequence of climate change?West Rome was the last to collapse due to the consequences climate change.I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
Anyways I´ve always found more convincing the "economic disaster" theories than the others. If the economy of the Empire wasn´t down in the gutter, they likely would have had enough resources to put up a defense against invading barbarians.
Post by: Teneb on April 15, 2018, 10:13:38 am
A lot of peoples, goths included, migrated towards the Empire due to decreasing fertility thanks to the world becoming a little bit colder. There were, of course, other factors such as political struggles within the Emprie between senators and generals, roman propaganda making the "barbarians" want to be roman (and thus moving into roman territory, also the whole fixation people had with proclaiming to be the heirs of rome for more than a thousand years after), and, of course, the Huns displacing people by murdering and enslaving anyone who didn't pre-emptively flee.... goths are a consequence of climate change?West Rome was the last to collapse due to the consequences climate change.I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
Post by: redwallzyl on April 15, 2018, 11:02:51 am
It did not help that the empire was at that point weak due to infighting and endless plagues combined with corruption. The west was almost certainly doomed in the long run.A lot of peoples, goths included, migrated towards the Empire due to decreasing fertility thanks to the world becoming a little bit colder. There were, of course, other factors such as political struggles within the Emprie between senators and generals, roman propaganda making the "barbarians" want to be roman (and thus moving into roman territory, also the whole fixation people had with proclaiming to be the heirs of rome for more than a thousand years after), and, of course, the Huns displacing people by murdering and enslaving anyone who didn't pre-emptively flee.... goths are a consequence of climate change?West Rome was the last to collapse due to the consequences climate change.I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
Post by: Kagus on April 15, 2018, 11:14:15 am
Also, I once dated a girl who showed me The Fourth Kind (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1220198/?ref=m_nv_sr_2), presenting it as hard proof of alien interaction with humans. We also watched Paranormal Activity 3 to prove that her apartment was haunted.
I've never before nor after had someone "un-like" my dating website profile while I was still at their house.
Post by: Max™ on April 15, 2018, 03:08:14 pm
Well, I've opened myself up to the idea that there can be civilizations that have come and gone on any planet in this solar system at any time before the last 200 years. Fuck, they could have habitats with millions of people in space and we would never know because we have no clue where to look.Yes, Russel has a lovely teapot, but he definitely doesn't have a technological civilization of teapots sharing a planetary system with us.
You can't just deny the existence of something because you haven't see it. That's foolish.
I mean, the first issue which kills the whole thing when you think about it is from the project rho site: there is no stealth in space. You want to hide a single ship from something like a passive sky survey that picks up brown dwarfs, you basically need magical technology, like straight up "fuck your laughable idea of what physics permits" magical. I mean, one of the highest tech civilizations in all of sci fi are the Xeelee, going from high Type IV all the way down to Type Omega-Minus on extended Kardashev Scales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Extensions_to_the_original_scale) and they don't have stealth ships unless you count folding something up inside of a pocket universe I suppose.
Accordingly you can call the hypothesis that there might be another advanced (as far as we are) civilization in the solar system falsified.
If you want to propose additional hypothetical considerations to prop up your model, well, that's on you, but if your speculation is driven by a desire to support a faulty model, rather than explaining a prior observation... maybe you should go into sci fi rather than science? New and interesting speculation is always fun in sci fi, even if it may be unfounded.
No, I don't know where you got the idea that science is about proving things, but the foundations of any such claims are not very sturdy, as it is easy to fool yourself if you aren't careful.That´s not what the article says. At all.QuoteIt’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization.
But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet
Seeing that every hypothesis exists to be disproven or proven and they did neither, I believe you have thrown down the gauntlet, sir.
At best an unfalsified hypothesis says this idea could be a reasonable explanation for an observation or experimental result.
Post by: Evil Knievel on April 15, 2018, 03:31:08 pm
Post by: Max™ on April 15, 2018, 03:41:47 pm
I'm ok with more albums of the same quality as Goths by the Mountain Goats. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anS6bcPpvoQ&list=PLu3luErhmiVW3tMKKcrPEZcfC6Vo1qoh9)... goths are a consequence of climate change?West Rome was the last to collapse due to the consequences climate change.I see somebody has read one of Sitchin's books without armoring up their mind first...
Sitchin was wrong about the timescale it's probably every three hundred-odd years, which explains our grand solar minimums and why our empires seem to collapse every three hundred years because of glacial periods and famine and disease and stuff.
I had to check who Sitchin was just now btw, and I saw quickly why I didn't recognize the name.
Post by: Loud Whispers on November 16, 2018, 09:52:33 am
Post by: Starver on November 16, 2018, 10:08:51 am
Post by: Kagus on November 16, 2018, 10:24:36 am
Also, "Le Grand K is usurped by die kleine h"... Looking at the differences between K and h, we can conclude that the kilo has lost its erection.
Post by: Loud Whispers on November 16, 2018, 10:46:14 am
Post by: Rowanas on November 16, 2018, 11:10:11 am
Post by: Kagus on November 16, 2018, 11:11:59 am
Electromagnets to measure the kilogram? It's really polarising the community, I battery stay well out of the ohm conversation.Resistance is futile.
Accept the new era of the Kibblegram.
Post by: Rowanas on November 16, 2018, 11:12:49 am
Electromagnets to measure the kilogram? It's really polarising the community, I battery stay well out of the ohm conversation.Resistance is futile.
Accept the new era of the Kibblegram.
Better or worse than the Tribblegram?
Post by: wierd on November 16, 2018, 11:27:10 am
Electromagnets to measure the kilogram? It's really polarising the community, I battery stay well out of the ohm conversation.Resistance is futile.
Accept the new era of the Kibblegram.
Dont worry, given enough pressure by the IBWM, I am sure that will reach critical mass. I expect that adoption would be explosive after that.
Post by: Max™ on November 16, 2018, 04:50:27 pm
Post by: bloop_bleep on November 18, 2018, 08:31:19 pm
Accept the new era of the Kibblegram.
So a Kibblegram is 1024 grams now, is it?
Post by: Telgin on November 18, 2018, 08:43:56 pm
Post by: Max™ on November 18, 2018, 10:01:06 pm
Paw, paw, paw, doggie.
Paw, paw, paw, doggies.
Paw, paw, paw, pack!
A kibblegram weighs as much as a pack of doggie treats.
Post by: Il Palazzo on November 20, 2018, 06:28:48 am
But eh, now some article or whatnot reminded me of it, so let me make my points.
This post was there too, for full context:For what, aridity being higher during glacials? For fucking carnot heat engine efficiency? I thought you knew this stuff man.Totally forgot the fucking aussie trees, and no, it has little to nothing to do with the climate for a simple reason: warmer climactic periods are LESS arid, sounds crazy but the reason we have large deserts now is because of all the water locked up in various ice caps. Just because the idea seems intuitively fine that hot=arid it doesn't matter if reality disagrees, same with the projections of increased storm intensity/frequency which somehow overlook that storms are driven by the magnitude of the local temperature differences from the equator to the pole, guess what goes down in a warmer planet?[citations needed]
Spoiler: spoiled for length (click to show/hide)
I don't have a problem with the claim in the first quoted bit that warmer globe = higher average global precipitation. That indeed seems to be the case.
I have a problem with almost everything else in there, because the connections and inferences you're making from that one fact seem to me unjustified, running contrary to what I've been reading.
In broader terms, in that post there are two claims, one about the fires vs humidity, and one from the left field about the storms.
But let's try and break them down into smaller bits:
(...), and no, it has little to nothing to do with the climate for a simple reason (<-1->): warmer climactic periods are LESS arid (<-2), sounds crazy but the reason we have large deserts now is because of all the water locked up in various ice caps (<-3). Just because the idea seems intuitively fine that hot=arid it doesn't matter if reality disagrees (<-true dat), same with the projections of increased storm intensity/frequency (<-4) which somehow overlook that storms are driven by the magnitude of the local temperature differences from the equator to the pole (<-5), guess what goes down in a warmer planet (<-6)?1.
This is an unjustified connection. It assumes the process at hand (fuel aridity) is driven solely by this one variable (global average precipitation). One would have to substantiate why it's a reasonable thing to assume. From I've read, w/r to the Canadian taiga fires some time ago, increasing temperatures cause increased evapotranspiration that easily exceed gains from increased precipitation. The precipitation would have to increase over 15% per degree Celsius to come out even. So existing forests get drier, even as the air may get more humid. This runs contrary to your claim.
(I think this (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/forests-fires-global-warming-boreal-nasa-earth-science/)is where I read it. It references the ABoVExperiment, but I don't know from where exactly.)
2.
This is one of the two claims you decided to focus on in your brief response. But it's nearly the only one I don't have a problem with. It's true and it's easy to confirm that it is so. It's not a problem, that is, as long as one remembers that it's global average humidity. Because if one starts to try and justify something, regardless of its validity otherwise, about local conditions - e.g. about frequency of forest fires in California or some other relatively small region - then one shows a lack of understanding of what average and global means.
So, even if it were true that higher precipitation=lower fuel aridity (and it doesn't appear to be, cf. 1.), one would have to show that this global and average trend governs fuel aridity in California, specifically.
I'm not sure if I really have to explain this further. In spatial terms, what does it matter for desertification (Arizonization?) of California, if Sahara gets all green? Would you tell a farmer in Syria that it's not true his crops don't get enough rain because more precipitation in the Arctic means the globe gets more moist? Same with the temporal dimension - e.g. get a lot more snow in winter, but relatively less rain during whatever is the driest season, and fire risk increases while average precipitation goes up.
3.
This is another odd connection that I don't know on what basis you're making. Why would the water specifically from disappearing ice caps end up watering the deserts? Why would it not just drain to oceans? Why would increasing global humidity be needing this water, instead of just ocean water and higher temperature permitting more water vapour in the air?
The way I understand it, quite a lot of river systems are supplied by seasonal melts of glacial caps in various mountains. Take away those glaciers, and the rivers drain fully or partially. You'll end up with higher global humidity, but with new deserts all the same.
It's again the same issue as with (2) - global warming causes local climate change.
4.
As long as this is about tropical cyclones, and not some other storms, the prediction is not that of increased intensity and frequency. It's that frequency on average goes down, but frequency on the high-intensity end of scale goes up. Less storms overall, but more strong ones.
5.
Are they, though? Are any locally forming storms driven by that? Like, again, how do you make the connection? Even tropical storms don't span the entire globe, and the explanations for how they emerge that I saw don't require a steep temperature gradient between the equator and the poles. What they (again tropical storms, because I think that's what's usually referred to in this context) need is an energy reservoir in the form of warm ocean water, together with calm winds so that the forming storm does not get disrupted and some other conditions described e.g. here: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/A15.html.
6.
Yeah, man, agreed. That temperature gradient goes down. Is that what you meant by 'Carnot engine efficiency'? Then it's again trying to apply a piece of physics where it's not applicable, and trying to reduce a complex systems to a single variable.
The way I see it, as far as reasoning goes, what you're doing is in the same category as the 'it's the sun, stupid' argument. It's learning some relatively simple but maybe obscure fact about some process, assuming that's all there is to know about it, and (mis)using this newly gained knowledge to prop up some pre-existing world view (which I think in this case is: climate scientists/IPCC are lying to children and/or being alarmist).
Climate scientists hate him. Use this one simple trick to quickly understand what professionals spend years to understand - is what I'm seeing.
The point is, reading a paper or a bunch is not sufficient, if one doesn't have the background to understand how it fits in the larger context of the relevant body of knowledge.
That's why we have experts - professional researchers working full time on understanding how this or that aspect of climate change works.
So if the experts tell me climate change contributed and will continue to contribute to Cali fires*, while Max tells me nuh-huh because he's got this silver bullet of a factoid, then I know which to believe.
*and they do. Here are the sources I got from just one article on the subject, discussing some (all?) of the CC-related contributing factors, published by a (non-English) public outreach website (http://naukaoklimacie.pl)for climate science:
Extremely low precipitation in California this season (http://cdec.water.ca.gov/images/WYPrecip/BAR_ESI.PNG)
Increasing precipitation volatility in twenty-first-century California (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0140-y)
Climate change projected fire weather sensitivity: California Santa Ana wind occurrence (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006GL025808)
Projected changes in persistent extreme summer weather events: The role of quasi-resonant amplification (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/10/eaat3272/tab-pdf)
Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests (https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF18/20180913/108679/HHRG-115-IF18-20180913-SD040.pdf)
I'm not actually suggesting anyone needs to read that. Rather, find a similar English-language public outreach project, led by actual climate scientists, that puts such research into digestible context. Because that's invariably going to be a better source than yours or mine shallow understanding.
Post by: Max™ on November 20, 2018, 11:35:40 am
Why do I say stronger storms and such need a steeper equator to pole temperature gradient? We have a couple handy experiments around us, Venus has no surface gradient at all apparently, and the surface is a hot still soup. Jupiter is basically made of crazy temperature gradients and it is a playground of stormy nonsense, fucking geometrical cyclonic procession bullshit. Reducing the energy difference between the extremes on our planet seems an odd way to increase the violence involved in redistributions of energy which are powered by said difference, does it not?
Regarding aridity and local drought spells, if you dig around in their various publications you'll be able to find that the IPCC does end up admitting in a roundabout sort of fashion that broadly it might not totally end up being possibly not dry in most locations, but you've gotta unpack that because they don't say it very loudly, nor do they seem fond of sharing ways they might be wrong. They do know that people link "hot=dry like a desert" and "it's getting hotter" in their head and seem content to let it happen, that seems wrong to me.
As for whether to believe me, I can help you there: don't.
I'd say don't believe anything if you don't have to, doubt is useful, belief is comfortable.
Science is a verb, after all.
Post by: Maximum Spin on November 20, 2018, 11:40:43 am
Regarding aridity and local drought spells, if you dig around in their various publications you'll be able to find that the IPCC does end up admitting in a roundabout sort of fashion that broadly it might not totally end up being possibly not dry in most locations, but you've gotta unpack that because they don't say it very loudly, nor do they seem fond of sharing ways they might be wrong. They do know that people link "hot=dry like a desert" and "it's getting hotter" in their head and seem content to let it happen, that seems wrong to me.I'd like to add a strong support to this along with the note that the IPCC has also admitted, in reports that somehow end up very difficult to find almost like they're intentionally buried or something, that there is no evidence for any trend in storm intensity, and that the perception of storm intensity increasing is entirely explained by the increased construction of expensive stuff in the path of storms.
Post by: Il Palazzo on November 20, 2018, 12:20:45 pm
Been following the subject for literally 30 years now, I've paid attention and studied and watched an entire base climate period worth of the discussion and research and so forthYeah, man. You and I.
Still, all that this makes us is particularly interested laymen.
We have a couple handy experiments aroundOne is a completely dry slow rotator, the other is a big ball of gas with high rotation. How do you even see those as sufficiently controlled experiments to draw such inferences is beyond me.
IPCC has also admitted, in reports that somehow end up very difficult to find almost like they're intentionally buried or somethingHow very odd. ::)
Post by: Hanslanda on December 07, 2018, 06:59:03 am
Post by: Kagus on December 07, 2018, 07:15:05 am
Bay12 is basically a bunch of very well informed lay-people that still are open minded enough to debate reasonably.I don't resemble this comment at all.
Post by: Hanslanda on December 07, 2018, 07:27:58 am
Post by: Egan_BW on December 07, 2018, 08:00:09 am
Bay12 is basically a bunch of very well informed lay-people that still are open minded enough to debate reasonably.
Let's see... well informed... lay person... open minded... debates reasonably...
Ah, guess one out of four is better than nothing.
Post by: Kagus on December 07, 2018, 08:05:30 am
25% is a quarter, and you can buy a piece of candy with a quarter.Bay12 is basically a bunch of very well informed lay-people that still are open minded enough to debate reasonably.
Let's see... well informed... lay person... open minded... debates reasonably...
Ah, guess one out of four is better than nothing.
Post by: Hanslanda on December 07, 2018, 09:13:09 am
Post by: Kagus on December 07, 2018, 09:49:41 am
Post by: Dorsidwarf on December 07, 2018, 10:13:37 am
Sources from ten minutes of searching: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/venus-temp20110926.html (https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/venus-temp20110926.html)http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/48596-the-shape-shifting-southern-vortex-of-venus/ (http://sci.esa.int/venus-express/48596-the-shape-shifting-southern-vortex-of-venus/)https://www.universetoday.com/36816/winds-on-venus/ (https://www.universetoday.com/36816/winds-on-venus/)
Post by: Gentlefish on December 07, 2018, 10:15:14 am
But you can afford a two-bit lyin' snake, which can either be put inside a boot or put outside a boot.But ain't two bits twice as much as one? Guess I'll take the head half
Post by: Kagus on December 07, 2018, 03:38:30 pm
partly due to the massive strong Windsor perpetually supplying heat from the hot(ter) sideI now see a giant castle laboriously hauling wagonloads of HOT over to the dark side of Venus.
The castle is wearing a necktie.
Post by: bloop_bleep on December 07, 2018, 08:34:36 pm
1 bit = 1/8 dollarBut you can afford a two-bit lyin' snake, which can either be put inside a boot or put outside a boot.But ain't two bits twice as much as one? Guess I'll take the head half
*retreats slowly into cave*
Post by: Starver on December 07, 2018, 11:48:38 pm
Post by: syvarris on December 07, 2018, 11:50:47 pm
Wait, what was the topic? Yeah, Venus. Uhh. Venus is super windy because hot stuff is windy, you can tell because models in commercials always have their hair flying everywhere. And Venus obviously has to be the hottest, so Venus must therefore also be the windiest. Yeah. Science.
Post by: wierd on December 08, 2018, 12:01:47 am
Post by: TD1 on December 08, 2018, 01:55:47 am
Post by: Kagus on December 08, 2018, 05:09:14 am
Huh. I guess that means one byte is one dollar. That's some clever marketing, you can get a piece of candy for one quarter, but then you've gotten buy three more before you can afford to eat them up.Or you could just buy two and have yourself a nybble.
Post by: Egan_BW on December 08, 2018, 10:03:50 pm
We should still build floating cities there, btw. It'll be rad. So rad.
Post by: Kagus on December 08, 2018, 10:11:25 pm
Huh. Never connected the planet named after the goddess of beauty also being like, super hot. Neat.The sequel to Mortal Engines: This time, we'll use sails.
We should still build floating cities there, btw. It'll be rad. So rad.
Post by: TD1 on December 09, 2018, 06:19:27 am
Post by: Starver on December 09, 2018, 07:27:57 am
*colonists* "we're penetrating her outer layers now, prepare to eject from the spacecraft!"Only one of them will ever get to colonise, though.
Post by: Kagus on December 09, 2018, 08:36:57 am
And, contrary to propaganda, it's not the first one in.*colonists* "we're penetrating her outer layers now, prepare to eject from the spacecraft!"Only one of them will ever get to colonise, though.
Post by: TD1 on December 09, 2018, 08:37:42 am
Post by: Hanslanda on December 09, 2018, 08:58:10 am
And just like that I regret my life decisions.
Regret nothing
Post by: wierd on December 09, 2018, 09:00:11 am
Post by: Hanslanda on December 09, 2018, 09:01:25 am
Post by: Kagus on December 12, 2018, 05:31:25 am
Okay, so... This is pretty big. I mean, one thing is effectively finding an entirely new biome of life here on earth, with survival methods we haven't really observed before... But just think of the implications this has for finding life on other planets.
We've more or less always based "habitability" of a planet on its surface conditions, but subterranean ecosystems that don't really care so much about surface water, winds, daylight cycles and such? That massively expands the number of viable planets.
Imagine finding subterranean microorganisms in one of our own solar system's planets, and realizing that they'd been there the whole time, effectively right under our noses.
Post by: TD1 on December 12, 2018, 09:34:40 am
Millennia? Flippin' 'ell.
Post by: Mech#4 on December 18, 2018, 05:10:49 am
Post by: Telgin on December 18, 2018, 09:36:56 am
Still, this is one of those things I fear most might happen to me in later life, so I'm always glad to see progress on this front.
Post by: TD1 on December 18, 2018, 09:41:23 am
That is promising looking, so hopefully the results are generalizable to humans. Oftentimes they aren't, so hopeful skepticism here for now.Seconded.
Still, this is one of those things I fear most might happen to me in later life, so I'm always glad to see progress on this front.
Post by: redwallzyl on December 28, 2018, 07:42:39 pm
hemimastigote, a whole new branch of life.
Post by: Madman198237 on January 25, 2019, 08:05:44 pm
Specific energy of any elliptical (i.e., bound, in-orbit as opposed to "just passing through" on a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit) orbit (energy divided by mass/independent of the mass of the orbiting body)
Epsilon is the specific energy, "a" is the semimajor axis, G is the gravitational constant.
Epsilon = -G*mparent/(2*a) = v2/2 - G*mparent/r
G * mparent is usually rewritten as a constant, applicable only when the orbiting body's mass mchild << mparent, and this constant is called "mu", so the equation gets a little neater and becomes:
Epsilon = -mu/(2*a) = v2/2 - mu/r
If you really want a derivation, Trekkin, I refer you to any intro-level orbital mechanics textbook, or possibly Wikipedia.
Oh hey look here it is yes I know, Wikipedia, but the equation is accurate. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy)
EDIT: Taking another look the Wikipedia one does in fact use slightly different definitions for some terms, but it's right in the general specifics and both are accurate when referring to anything humans could conceivably build in the next fifty years or more.
Post by: Trekkin on January 25, 2019, 08:29:47 pm
Per rather lengthy derail on Ameripol (More science conversations start there and then move to here than start here, it feels like...)
Specific energy of any elliptical (i.e., bound, in-orbit as opposed to "just passing through" on a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit) orbit (energy divided by mass/independent of the mass of the orbiting body)
Epsilon is the specific energy, "a" is the semimajor axis, G is the gravitational constant.
Epsilon = -G*mparent/(2*a) = v2/2 - G*mparent/r
G * mparent is usually rewritten as a constant, applicable only when the orbiting body's mass mchild << mparent, and this constant is called "mu", so the equation gets a little neater and becomes:
Epsilon = -mu/(2*a) = v2/2 - mu/r
If you really want a derivation, Trekkin, I refer you to any intro-level orbital mechanics textbook, or possibly Wikipedia.
Oh hey look here it is yes I know, Wikipedia, but the equation is accurate. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy)
EDIT: Taking another look the Wikipedia one does in fact use slightly different definitions for some terms, but it's right in the general specifics and both are accurate when referring to anything humans could conceivably build in the next fifty years or more.
Oh, I didn't want a derivation; I was mostly curious to see what you'd do when asked to put up or shut up.
You'd have had better luck using Kepler's third law, you know. Specific orbital energy's deliberately written to be, well,
independent of the mass of the orbiting bodyso it's not quite germane to your point that orbit will change by changing mass, and furthermore, as you point out, we're not likely to build anything that's going to violate the underlying assumption that satellites are much smaller than the bodies they orbit anyway.
Good try, though. It's remarkable that you'd put forth the effort in the first place.
Post by: Madman198237 on January 25, 2019, 08:38:13 pm
Let's review the discussion, shall we: I was NOT in fact arguing that mass could change orbits in reasonable ways...I was arguing that ENERGY is a valid measure of an orbit, which you disagreed with and then argued that if that was true then you could change mass to change orbits, hence my reply in the affirmative concerning that. Specific energy is the form of the equation I'm most familiar with and also proves MY point that energy is a valid and useful measure of an orbit.
Post by: Max™ on January 25, 2019, 09:44:27 pm
Post by: TD1 on January 26, 2019, 11:27:32 am
Post by: Max™ on January 26, 2019, 04:08:56 pm
Post by: wierd on January 26, 2019, 05:16:03 pm
Because something can't be without it being somewhere and if it is it can't not be is because something isn't nothing!
Clearly you have no conception about digital goods... :P
In all seriousness though; Any confinement of energy into a finite volume will result in that volume suddenly having actual mass equivalent to that energy. (EG, a perfectly reflective cube made of massless material, that has had some photons beamed inside such that they bounce around endlessly inside, will have actual mass equal to the energy of the photons inside. Yes. Even when the box, and the photons are massless.)
This means that trying to make a very curved spacetime to contain something you put inside as an attempt to trick the universe into hiding that object's mass will not work. See also-- Black hole. This is literally infinitely curved spacetime. Objects put inside STILL add to the effective gravitational mass of the hole.
Post by: Max™ on January 26, 2019, 06:41:32 pm
Post by: Eric Blank on January 26, 2019, 09:27:58 pm
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-a-newfound-kingdom-means-for-the-tree-of-life-20181211/
hemimastigote, a whole new branch of life.
That is one crazy looking little thing and i love it but that article also linked me to this one and frankly i cant get it out of my mind either; https://www.quantamagazine.org/worlds-simplest-animal-reveals-hidden-diversity-20180912/
These things are actually really interesting too. Its like a slime mold sandwhich; the top layer of cells is like protection from its environment, the bottom layer absorbs food and moves it around, and in the middle is it sounds like a mess of nuclei with dividing walls and fibrous structures but no internal cell membranes, making it kinda like a slime mold.
Post by: Reelya on January 27, 2019, 06:28:46 pm
Quote
People with extreme anti-science views know the least, but think they know the most: study
Recently, researchers asked more than 2,000 American and European adults their thoughts about genetically modified foods.
They also asked them how much they thought they understood about GM foods, and a series of 15 true-false questions to test how much they actually knew about genetics and science in general.
The researchers were interested in studying a perverse human phenomenon: People tend to be lousy judges of how much they know.
Across four studies conducted in three countries — the U.S., France and Germany — the researchers found that extreme opponents of genetically modified foods “display a lack of insight into how much they know.” They know the least, but think they know the most.
“The less people know,” the authors conclude, “the more opposed they are to the scientific consensus.”
There are some critics who say the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't exist, but stuff like this would seem to confirm that it does. However, it might manifest more strongly when you have a highly emotionally charged topic like this one.
Post by: Kagus on January 27, 2019, 06:38:26 pm
Seems like a teensy leap of logic, but I haven't read the body yet so I'm probably missing something.
Post by: Reelya on January 27, 2019, 07:27:19 pm
They're not measuring the absolute amount of right answers. Nor did anyone say that everyone in the study "didn't know shit". None of that makes any sense. Read the excerpt more carefully.
What happened was this:
- they got a bunch of people in 4 countries
- some turned out to be GM skeptics, others not
- they got each person to self-assess on their level of knowledge
- GM skeptics consistently self-assesed themselves as better than normal people
- they then got everyone to fill in a general-knowledge quizz
- the "super smart" GM skeptics actually scored a lot worse than the normal people
Nobody is saying "we made a test for GM skeptics and they weren't good at it, therefore GM skeptics are dummies". The point is, not all the participants were GM skeptics, so we can say that some things are true of GM skeptics relative to the general population.
The results were: how did GM skeptics fare on general science knowledge compared to the average (a lot worse it turns out) and how did GM skeptics rate themselves compared to the average (they rated themselves as highly superior). It's this discrepancy between self-assessment (relative to the group) and actual ability (relative to the group) that is the stated result. Whether the test was too hard or too easy is therefore already calibrated out, since we're only talking about relative rankings.
Post by: Loud Whispers on January 27, 2019, 07:38:09 pm
Post by: ChairmanPoo on January 27, 2019, 08:18:45 pm
Post by: Reelya on January 27, 2019, 08:42:57 pm
That's what you use to detect replicants, right?
In the case of replicants, you ask them complex probability questions and if they get them right, they are replicants.
Post by: Egan_BW on January 28, 2019, 12:18:27 am
Post by: Kagus on January 28, 2019, 05:20:37 am
It doesn't say anti-GMO views, it says anti-science. If they're testing them on GMO knowledge, and then extrapolating from that that they don't know science in general, then that's a leap in logic.
And it also just says "know the least", which is probably related to keeping the headline short and snappy; but is also open-ended and could apply to everything, including the topics they were actually tested on (rather than being specifically directed at the topics they were tested on, which is the only thing the tests can prove).
Technically the number of questions does matter, because the smaller the number of sample questions, the higher the chance that they might end up falling into a "gap" in an otherwise-educated person's knowledge, or similarly fits very neatly into the small subset of knowledge an otherwise-uneducated person might possess (and this can be more pronounced when those fifteen questions are divided up into multiple fields, as the article seems to imply). But we'll ignore that because it's not really relevant.
The article also briefly touches upon two other fields of knowledge that were apparently approached in the study, and how the trend fell apart in the third one (climate change), but doesn't really say much about the testing numbers for that, or how the quiz was changed, or really anything other than "it also worked for this one, but not for this one".
And then the whole thing is rounded off with a nice misspelling of "miscalibration".
So, really, I'm not pissy with the scientists conducting the study, I'm being pissy with whoever wrote that article.
In other news, genes associated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in strange places where they really shouldn't be. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/28/genes-linked-to-antibiotic-resistant-superbugs-found-in-arctic)
Post by: Reelya on January 28, 2019, 06:42:46 am
Quote from: Kagus
If they're testing them on GMO knowledge, and then extrapolating from that that they don't know science in general, then that's a leap in logic.
There's nowhere that it says " they're testing them on GMO knowledge". The article actually uses the phrase "science in general" for the content of the test, funnily enough. Now, you're asking whether such a test can be extrapolated to "science in general" which is hard to answer. Is it a leap in logic that a test of "science in general" can determine whether you know "science in general"? Only if we get really philosophical about it, I think.
Second, "know the least" is pretty clear. if people of a specific group scored the least correct answers on a "science in general" test then it's not much of a stretch to claim that people of this group generally "know the least" about "science in general".
You're saying "know the least" is problematic because it could apply to anything. But that's just deliberately being a jackass by ignoring the obvious context. For example if an article title was "people who don't listen to much music tend to know the least" then it's just being a jackass to argue "know the least about what exactly?" About music, duh. That much is goddamn obvious. If the topic is science, "know the least" clearly refers to science, the noun in the same sentence.
Quote
and this can be more pronounced when those fifteen questions are divided up into multiple fields, as the article seems to imply
But wasn't your first point about how the test was too narrow? Now it's too broad apparently.
Quote
the higher the chance that they might end up falling into a "gap" in an otherwise-educated person's knowledge
That's why they had 2000 subjects. While with 15 questions, it's possible for what you said to happen ... for it to happen to 2000 people in a row in a way which systematically biases the results against "otherwise educated" anti-GMO people is astronomically unlikely.
Post by: McTraveller on January 28, 2019, 10:05:23 am
That is - human populations don't really follow the normal distribution (or whatever continuous distribution is used) that allows you to extrapolate total population characteristic from a sample is flawed.
Or maybe it's valid for some polls, but not others? More precisely, I think there is a huge dependence on geography and local influence when it comes to population characterization.
Post by: Max™ on January 28, 2019, 04:51:42 pm
Also fuck anti-gmo people, that fucking triscuits commercial is baffling to me, bunch of morons reading the side of the box where it says "non-genetically modified" but they're going "non-genenenamodibanana" "nanagenuhmamama" "nongenetimomodomoh whoops I shit myself" "nahnahnahmuhmuhmuhbutheremails" on and on and it's like, ok, who is this commercial supposed to be aimed at, do people like being told they're functionally illiterate goddamn mouthbreathers?
Post by: Kagus on January 28, 2019, 05:21:26 pm
You're saying "know the least" is problematic because it could apply to anything. But that's just deliberately being a jackass by ignoring the obvious context. For example if an article title was "people who don't listen to much music tend to know the least" then it's just being a jackass to argue "know the least about what exactly?" About music, duh. That much is goddamn obvious. If the topic is science, "know the least" clearly refers to science, the noun in the same sentence.You wanna get angry about this? Alright.
You have a different definition of what is obvious in those snippets than I do. The topical focus on GMOs in those statements does not make it immediately clear, in my opinion, that the first usage of a general term is specifically neutral and not just a continuation of the topic that was previously focused on.
But it's an article, not the study itself, so I suppose I shouldn't get too hung up on it dispensing with specification for the sake of broader terms that make for a headline with more punch and click potential.
Now, see, I thought it was obvious that my statement here was specifically in reference to the passage directly before it ("this"), about how a smaller number of questions on a given topic has the potential to fall through the cracks, so to speak. Which absolutely does apply when you ask even fewer questions about a given topic (such as in the case of spreading 15 questions across not just GMOs, but who knows what other areas of scientific fact). But clearly I was mistaken, as you've interpreted this in an entirely different way and even clipped that part of the quote in after this one.Quoteand this can be more pronounced when those fifteen questions are divided up into multiple fields, as the article seems to imply
But wasn't your first point about how the test was too narrow? Now it's too broad apparently.
Do you want to keep going, or do you agree that this discussion is ridiculous?
Post by: Trekkin on January 28, 2019, 05:35:52 pm
do people like being told they're functionally illiterate goddamn mouthbreathers?
In a word, yes. It's like the self-described deplorables back in 2016: denigrate people with something for long enough and some of them will own it just to spite you. There's a related phenomenon in Flat Earth discourse (and others, but I like watching these guys) in which people will proudly boast that they're just regular Joes with no scientific training just looking at the ocean and seeing how flat it is and so forth; while this is partly to distance themselves from the scientists they believe are in on the grand global conspiracy of vagueness (and, of course, it makes them seem relatable) it's also part of the general trend of anti-intellectualism extending from the honeybee aerodynamics myth through NOMA and beyond: the general idea that "experts" are some vaguely sinister other, and demonstrating an inability to understand their high-falutin tinhorn doubletalk is a way to signal you're on the side of everyone else.
Post by: Kagus on January 28, 2019, 05:46:46 pm
do people like being told they're functionally illiterate goddamn mouthbreathers?
In a word, yes. It's like the self-described deplorables back in 2016: denigrate people with something for long enough and some of them will own it just to spite you. There's a related phenomenon in Flat Earth discourse (and others, but I like watching these guys) in which people will proudly boast that they're just regular Joes with no scientific training just looking at the ocean and seeing how flat it is and so forth; while this is partly to distance themselves from the scientists they believe are in on the grand global conspiracy of vagueness (and, of course, it makes them seem relatable) it's also part of the general trend of anti-intellectualism extending from the honeybee aerodynamics myth through NOMA and beyond: the general idea that "experts" are some vaguely sinister other, and demonstrating an inability to understand their high-falutin tinhorn doubletalk is a way to signal you're on the side of everyone else.
Remember: Scientists never have sex. It's in the word; layman.
Post by: Hanslanda on January 28, 2019, 08:33:58 pm
Post by: TD1 on January 29, 2019, 09:03:25 am
Post by: birdy51 on January 29, 2019, 11:18:08 am
Post by: Greiger on January 30, 2019, 05:59:06 am
Post by: Trekkin on January 30, 2019, 12:17:19 pm
Flat earth for lyfe, whoo!
In fairness to Flat Earthers, the geoid is very close to conformal with the surface of the Earth at large scales, so in that sense the planet is flat: wherever you go on the surface, gravity pulls in the same direction relative to the horizon as far as you can detect casually. Earth's a flat sphere*.
Looked at in that light, Flat Earther rhetoric starts to make more sense: they were never taught the non-Euclidean geometry to understand their planet, so they cannot reconcile their own experience with what the photographs from space show, and their own experience has gotten them this far. The conspiracy theory is just an exigency of making that choice in light of all the indications that Earth isn't a flat plane.
*In preemptive response to the pedants: it's an oblate spheroid. So's your mom.
Post by: Hanslanda on January 30, 2019, 01:08:19 pm
Post by: Starver on January 30, 2019, 01:53:49 pm
Post by: Bumber on January 30, 2019, 02:09:26 pm
Is she not topologically a teapot? With ?four? extra handles?Yo momma's so fat, her topological teapot has more than four extra handles.
Post by: Gentlefish on January 30, 2019, 02:13:07 pm
Post by: Il Palazzo on January 30, 2019, 02:17:21 pm
Post by: Max™ on January 30, 2019, 06:27:45 pm
Post by: TD1 on January 30, 2019, 07:47:52 pm
Post by: Kagus on January 30, 2019, 07:58:17 pm
Post by: Starver on January 30, 2019, 10:49:44 pm
Topologically, we are all coffeemugs.Not true. A coffeemug would not have (or would only have) a nostril or the other nostril, to start with. Two-handled teapot, then. Before you add the tearducts (two more), and a woman technically has a trans-fallopian space that I don't think exists between tesyes. So teapot with four more handles than usual. Not sure about eustachian tubes. Probably not. Lungs don't change anything (unlike the vills of fish), nor normally belly-button, but an active piercing of the belly-button (or indeed other places, common or less so) would add to the count to arbitrary degree.
Post by: MrRoboto75 on January 31, 2019, 12:03:59 am
Post by: Trekkin on January 31, 2019, 12:27:12 am
They're developing pills to cure loneliness. Such an american way to solve the problem, really.
Technically "they" (by which we both mean Cacioppo's lab, but why start caring about who's doing research now?) are testing orally administered pregnenolone's effectiveness in reducing the exacerbating effect of loneliness on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease, but hey, if you want to boil everything down to "stupid Americans keep trying to solve problems with science", we have a pill for that too.
Post by: wierd on January 31, 2019, 12:33:26 am
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry
Post by: Trekkin on January 31, 2019, 12:40:44 am
I'd assume he wants some kind of nationally accessible database of lonely people, but dating sites already exist.
Post by: MrRoboto75 on January 31, 2019, 02:13:03 am
They're developing pills to cure loneliness. Such an american way to solve the problem, really.
Technically "they" (by which we both mean Cacioppo's lab, but why start caring about who's doing research now?) are testing orally administered pregnenolone's effectiveness in reducing the exacerbating effect of loneliness on cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease, but hey, if you want to boil everything down to "stupid Americans keep trying to solve problems with science", we have a pill for that too.
We throw pills at a lot of things, really. Opioid epidemic and all that. You can call it science, but American healthcare is a private operation that seeks profit. Pharmaceuticals are doubly that. Seriously time how long it takes between turning on the tele and some commercial prattling on some pills side effect list. If it isn't that its selling you insurance so you can ask your doctor if Prilozac OTC is right for you. Or you can look at how epipens and insulin can go up in multiples of price, because there's profit to be made when your consumer base is literally held captive with their lives.
Frankly, its treating symptoms, not disease. There's a societal problem when massive proportions of the population suffer from depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Tackling social issues typically isn't profitable in terms of short term quarters, so pill prescriptions it is.
Post by: Kagus on January 31, 2019, 03:26:10 am
Topologically, we are all coffeemugs."I'm a little per-vert,
short and stout.
This is my handle,
it's also my spout!"
Post by: Trekkin on January 31, 2019, 09:37:16 am
Tackling social issues typically isn't profitable in terms of short term quarters, so pill prescriptions it is.
Again, I have to ask: what, from the perspective of individual patients and care providers, is your alternative? You can't prescribe someone with low pregnenolone some friends or a better society any more than you can prescribe "having avoided allergens" to someone currently suffering from anaphylactic shock. You can tell them to do that going forward, to be sure, but it would be irresponsible not to treat patients with the quickest and most reliable means available, particularly when faced with ongoing risks of dangerous sequelae. Drugs may be offensive to you for being profitable, but they're profitable because they're more effective and faster than complaining.
Plus which, while drug prices are a gigantic problem with the American health care system, medical research isn't one of the causes, except in the trivial sense that if drugs didn't exist we couldn't sell them. Surely the problem is that poor people can't have the drugs they need, not that rich people can, all edgy posturing aside. Yes, FDA approval is too expensive. Yes, courting doctors is profitable and can also lead to overperscription. Yes, hospital chargemasters are insanely inflated. All those things can and should be addressed, but none of them are the fault of academia -- and while there are problems with how academic medical research is incentivized, an American preference for effective medicine is not one of them.
Nobody's making you take the pills, though, so if you really want to screw Big Pharma out of all the profit you can, you're absolutely free to switch to organic homeopathic vegan open-source sustainable free-range placebos.
Post by: Reelya on January 31, 2019, 09:50:09 am
Still better than Japan's "friends and family rentals."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/japans-rent-a-family-industry
Quote
Two years ago, Kazushige Nishida, a Tokyo salaryman in his sixties, started renting a part-time wife and daughter. His real wife had recently died. Six months before that, their daughter, who was twenty-two, had left home after an argument and never returned.
I don't think this is necessarily something we should be mocking. Lots of cultural things we take from granted as acceptable and going to seem weird to any other culture. Japanese are far more outright disgusted / freaked out that western people wear shoes in the house and even put their dirty outdoor shoes up on furniture, beds etc.
BTW often, how the West interacts with Japanese culture, what the West takes away, and what it ignores says more about the West's values than Japanese values: We think hiring companions is weird and screwed-up, but if you're paying to fuck them, it's perfectly normal.
Post by: Kagus on January 31, 2019, 10:03:54 am
BTW often, how the West interacts with Japanese culture, what the West takes away, and what it ignores says more about the West's values than Japanese values: We think hiring companions is weird and screwed-up, but if you're paying to fuck them, it's perfectly normal.Gods no, prostitution? Prostitution is amoral and illegal in all the civilized countries!
You need to film the act in order for it to be okay.
Post by: redwallzyl on January 31, 2019, 01:58:12 pm
Post by: TD1 on January 31, 2019, 02:09:26 pm
Post by: Kagus on January 31, 2019, 02:17:53 pm
Post by: Trekkin on January 31, 2019, 02:21:27 pm
I don't know why you'd want more than what you already have to put up with, let alone PAY for the privilege, but that's me.
I think the idea is that if you're unsatisfied with them, you can fire them, so they have an incentive to be an unrealistically caring family.
Post by: Starver on January 31, 2019, 02:40:12 pm
(Given the generational demographics of Japan, and various social effects developing alongside these, I'm not surprised it's happening. We've probably just as many occidental peculiarities, but we don't see them because we're deep within them. I suspect many a Hikikomori (the opposite issue, maybe, although they also (or their families, on their behalf) also hire 'big sisters', etc) doesn't see their situation as strange.)
Post by: Il Palazzo on January 31, 2019, 02:42:26 pm
Post by: Kagus on January 31, 2019, 02:50:37 pm
You US people are quite happy to hire people to act as mothers to your children while you're at work.You watch your tongue, young man! Eric was a wonderful wetnurse!
If you can get rid of them that easily, you're clearly not getting an authentic experience. You should ask for your money back.I don't know why you'd want more than what you already have to put up with, let alone PAY for the privilege, but that's me.
I think the idea is that if you're unsatisfied with them, you can fire them, so they have an incentive to be an unrealistically caring family.
Post by: MrRoboto75 on January 31, 2019, 05:33:52 pm
snip
You could have done preventative maintenance a long time ago. Maybe people would be less stressed and lonely if wages didn't stagnate for 30 years and people weren't forced into overtime or multiple jobs. Vast majority of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck at best, be that due to poor wages, bad housing market, or near-invincible student debt. If people were actually allowed leisure time and actual disposable income, they would practically be able to self medicate far far before we need to consider loneliness an epidemic killing people.
Sure not a single random family doctor can do anything realistic about that. Hell, I'd say we're at the point of no return as is, if just one corp backs out and actually tries to treat human resources like humans instead of resources, they are playing Capitalism suboptimally and the lose the game. Only winning move in this case is if everyone just stops playing the game. Good luck, there.
Post by: TD1 on January 31, 2019, 06:47:42 pm
You US people are quite happy to hire people to act as mothers to your children while you're at work.That's quite different, though, and motivated by need (or a perception of it). There's no emotional payoff in the exchange.
And you're right, Eric is quite the wet nurse. 10/10.
Post by: Starver on January 31, 2019, 06:57:37 pm
Quote from: Trump
A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.
Which obviously means much for Eric. Either way.
Post by: Loud Whispers on January 31, 2019, 07:09:19 pm
Doesn't this buffoon not know it is empirically determined that flat is justice? (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322530755_Analysis_and_Qualitative_Effects_of_Large_Breasts_on_Aerodynamic_Performance_and_Wake_of_a_Miss_Kobayashi's_Dragon_Maid_Character)Quote from: TrumpA person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.
Which obviously means much for Eric. Either way.
Post by: scourge728 on January 31, 2019, 10:14:12 pm
Post by: McTraveller on January 31, 2019, 11:15:13 pm
I will literally hunt around a room to find the source of quiet ticking sounds so I can suppress them. I have even used globs of clay to prevent the pull chain of a ceiling fan from ticking against the little grommet through which it passes.
Loud sounds - no problem. Clock ticking - no problem. But people picking their teeth, or biting nails, or a ceiling fan tick... GARAHRHGHAHFHGH.
Post by: Egan_BW on January 31, 2019, 11:57:14 pm
I don't know why you'd want more than what you already have to put up with, let alone PAY for the privilege, but that's me.
I think the idea is that if you're unsatisfied with them, you can fire them, so they have an incentive to be an unrealistically caring family.
Maybe the fact that you can fire your existing family and hire a replacement one could encourage that existing family to be more friendly. :V
This way you gain the benefits of the market without having to pay anything! Thanks, Capitalism!
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2019, 02:11:40 am
Post by: Egan_BW on February 01, 2019, 02:27:47 am
Post by: Hanslanda on February 01, 2019, 07:16:44 am
Ah, so we can use people as microphones now. Neat. ;P
Orwell turns a little faster in his grave.
Post by: Starver on February 01, 2019, 07:23:49 am
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2019, 11:52:02 am
Ah, so we can use people as microphones now. Neat. ;P
Orwell turns a little faster in his grave.
At this point, we could attach turbines to him and aldous huxley and power a small city. :P
Post by: Kagus on February 01, 2019, 11:56:22 am
Ah, so we can use people as microphones now. Neat. ;P
Orwell turns a little faster in his grave.
At this point, we could attach turbines to him and aldous huxley and power a small city. :P
Or, rather, the electric fence around a small city.
Post by: wierd on February 01, 2019, 12:36:24 pm
Ah, so we can use people as microphones now. Neat. ;P
Orwell turns a little faster in his grave.
At this point, we could attach turbines to him and aldous huxley and power a small city. :P
Or, rather, the electric fence around a small city.
You can get all three, if you add in powering the cameras, microphones, telescreens, and cloning facilities. I hear the rate that each spins when they are used to directly enact one of the things they wrote so strongly about is geometrically proportional to the degree of brazenness and or atrocity involved, so throwing in those additional facilities should net a tidy energy surplus with which to run the city itself. Properly designed and implemented, this could easily make the 5 year expectation for generation without having to use the ministry of truth. The ISSUE, is getting them to STOP for routine maintenance, and or-- the appropriation of replacement turbine parts. Not that Oceana has ever suffered a shortage mind.
Post by: Bumber on February 01, 2019, 02:58:02 pm
Post by: Max™ on February 02, 2019, 04:30:06 am
Also, it's a little known fact that there was an attempt to use several of the greatest physicists in this century as well as the next and upon hooking Roy Kerr up to the turbines it ripped a hole in everything, thankfully the hole didn't hit much of import as it fell through the bulk of the planet, though it did entirely excise Lemuria from the southeastern indian ocean, replacing it with a slab of dusty rock from the elemental dimension of pain, along with creatures from the elemental dimension of horror... approximately 200 kiloyears before Kerr even died, much less the turbine connection event itself.
Post by: Gentlefish on February 02, 2019, 03:14:25 pm
Post by: Starver on February 19, 2019, 06:12:18 pm
(I've had FE videos suggested to me. Admittedly mostly "Debunk FE" ones, and then obviously from my interest more of them. I've not been deconvinced of my prior opinion. But then I've seen enough horizons in my time, already, to make the obvious conclusions about how there could/must be stuff beyond them.)
Post by: Kagus on February 19, 2019, 06:36:58 pm
I've had FE videos suggested to me. Admittedly mostly "Debunk FE" ones, and then obviously from my interest more of them.I thought this was in reference to Fire Emblem. Apparently, that was not the case.
Post by: wierd on February 20, 2019, 03:36:13 am
https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/JP276904
Scientists report that neural tissues can communicate through non-synaptic mechanism.
Post by: Egan_BW on February 20, 2019, 03:43:31 am
Post by: wierd on February 20, 2019, 03:57:08 am
More "Neurons are impacted by, and can impact, the voltage differentials of the extracellular medium, and can use this to communicate, even without a synaptic pathway."
This makes sense, as it could potentially be used to help guide dendrite migration and pals.
Post by: Trekkin on February 20, 2019, 08:44:47 am
Post by: wierd on February 20, 2019, 08:50:14 am
"The extent to which such ephaptic coupling alters the functioning of neurons under physiological conditions remains unclear."
The recently published paper is not mentioning that such coupling happens (as something new), but that there is a testable communication process that matches the mechanics of this phenomenon. (eg, they found out more about the functioning of neurons under those conditions. The paper you cited asserts that there is substantial entraining, and thus that these potentials are clearly being used. The new paper just builds on older findings)
Quote
In the present study, we show that slow periodic activity in the longitudinal hippocampal slice is a self‐regenerating wave which can propagate with and without chemical or electrical synaptic transmission at the same speeds. We also show that applying local extracellular electric fields can modulate or even block the propagation of this wave in both in silico and in vitro models. Our results support the notion that ephaptic coupling plays a significant role in the propagation of the slow hippocampal periodic activity.
Post by: Trekkin on February 20, 2019, 09:06:29 am
I believe the magic here is this statement from the abstract you cited Trekkin.
"The extent to which such ephaptic coupling alters the functioning of neurons under physiological conditions remains unclear."
The recently published paper is not mentioning that such coupling happens (as something new), but that there is a testable communication process that matches the mechanics of this phenomenon. (eg, they found out more about the functioning of neurons under those conditions.
That's just the identify-the-gap-in-the-field boilerplate you get when recycling grant applications into papers, though; you can tell by how the next sentence begins with "to address this question, we [experimental method]."
I think this has more to do with the Journal of Physiology having an impact factor of around 5 than anything else.
Post by: wierd on February 20, 2019, 09:09:48 am
Post by: Bumber on February 20, 2019, 10:02:05 am
"The extent to which such ephaptic coupling alters the functioning of neurons under physiological conditions remains unclear."I'm choosing to interpret this as neuroscientists/robots discussing what sex might feel like.
Post by: Kagus on February 23, 2019, 05:39:27 am
Why hello there, ethical dilemma!
Post by: Reelya on February 23, 2019, 06:05:16 am
Having said that, many possible mutations could have evolutionary downsides that we basically don't care about. i.e. things that make you objective better, but less inclined to have children.
Post by: wierd on February 23, 2019, 06:14:00 am
Expect to see some downside to that. If removing a single gene-sequence from the genome is an automatic win:win then you'd expect it to have mutated before, and have propagated through the population.
Having said that, many possible mutations could have evolutionary downsides that we basically don't care about. i.e. things that make you objective better, but less inclined to have children.
CCR5 delta 32 already DID spread through a human population. The European population. Through selective pressure of small pox.
Post by: TD1 on February 23, 2019, 08:21:56 am
Post by: Starver on February 23, 2019, 11:19:36 am
KHAAAAN!
Post by: Starver on February 23, 2019, 12:54:51 pm
Just sayin'!
Post by: scourge728 on February 23, 2019, 01:24:34 pm
Post by: Hanslanda on February 23, 2019, 01:26:08 pm
Why is everyone in that article of the opinion that enhancing the human brain is a bad thing? It seems like an amazing idea to me
This. Obviously we shouldn't do it randomly and without care, but making the species better would be a good thing...
Post by: Il Palazzo on February 23, 2019, 01:32:26 pm
Post by: Hanslanda on February 23, 2019, 01:35:46 pm
Post by: Telgin on February 23, 2019, 07:30:31 pm
Why is everyone in that article of the opinion that enhancing the human brain is a bad thing? It seems like an amazing idea to me
This. Obviously we shouldn't do it randomly and without care, but making the species better would be a good thing...
Yeah, I think we should try to improve our species but we've got a long way to go before we can do it ethically. We've got to make sure edits we make work as intended and actually improve things, and also that it doesn't become a thing that the have-nots never get because they can't afford it. Things like that.
Post by: Kagus on February 23, 2019, 07:38:21 pm
Why is everyone in that article of the opinion that enhancing the human brain is a bad thing? It seems like an amazing idea to me
This. Obviously we shouldn't do it randomly and without care, but making the species better would be a good thing...
Yeah, I think we should try to improve our species but we've got a long way to go before we can do it ethically. We've got to make sure edits we make work as intended and actually improve things, and also that it doesn't become a thing that the have-nots never get because they can't afford it. Things like that.
Pretty much. Socialism babies rather than designer babies.
...actually, I just remembered an audiobook I listened to a long time ago that had similar themes; someone had engineered a "superior" form of human and then set them loose after basically nuking the world to make way for the new strain.
One of the improvements he made was to pare down on the ambiguity of modern human sexuality and courtship. Instead, his new humans would simply sing loudly while their genitals swelled and turned bright blue (something very obvious, as his enhancements also made clothes unnecessary for these inheritors of the earth).
Very interesting book. Can't remember the title. Author included some passages about a video game, while clearly having no idea how video games function.
Post by: Starver on February 23, 2019, 08:57:21 pm
This book was from the library, the few shelves of sci-fi/fantasy shelves between the children's section and the mainstream adult fiction room, which I was totally devouring at the time (where I encountered the first couple of Discworld novels, and got hooked*). I suppose it (the shelving) was aimed at what these days would be termed Young Adult. Which doesn't explain how on Earth such a blatantly homoerotically-themed novel found itself within easy reach of unsuspecting readers of delicate ages. One assumes it never survived Clause 28 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28), if it even survived long enough for that without some more prudish reader complaining about it.
(I'd been crossing the corridor into the (age-wise) adult sections of the library for years before I was actually adult - there weren't any borrowing restrictions such as adult/child-specific library tickets. But I'd taken far too long to discover the interesting shelves with the SF on them.)
But as this is the Science thread and not a Reading Matters or Sexuality thread, maybe you could pick holes in the whole fully-formed in-vivo Horizontal Gene Transfer mechanism (and delivery system!) somehow evolving into reality in a single birth. Without deliberate (and competent?) design behind it.
* Plus L Ron Hubbard's fictional works, like the Mission Earth decalogy. Which had some of Elron's stranger ideas I later heard had been ploughed into his 'church' (see also Battlefield Earth) but also some rather extreme scenes of perversion that I probably shouldn't describe beyond the "Earth prostitute becomes sex-tutor on alien world" and "mad (alien) plastic surgeon basically creates human(sic) centipedes", because both those are dodgier than I've actually explained them. Anyway, all that livened my reading list up, certainly. Better than Piers Anthonthy.
Post by: Max™ on February 23, 2019, 11:29:22 pm
As for science, and science fiction, it's hard to explain exactly why this gives me a feeling like we just unlocked a gamebreaking tech tree: Running an LED in reverse to cool electronics. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190213132326.htm)
That combined with straintronics (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190211164018.htm) seems like a great area to invest development points.
Post by: Egan_BW on February 23, 2019, 11:37:08 pm
Post by: wierd on February 23, 2019, 11:53:14 pm
(Basically, uses thermal oscillations at JUST under the band-gap energy applied, so that the thermal oscillations provide the energy to kick the electron over, and then emit the photon. This results in more photons generated than can be attributed to the energy applied, along with local cooling of the environment.)
It has some potential in some applications, but since it predominantly emits low-energy photons, its applicability is kinda low. It might be useful for radiative cooling on a spacecraft or something though.
It's possible that running the LED backwards like this is just the same phenomena as above but with a higher bandgap to overcome. I would expect it to destroy the LED over time though due to dopant migration. The "over unity" method would work for very extended period.
Post by: Il Palazzo on February 24, 2019, 02:47:04 am
Very interesting book. Can't remember the title.Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. She's generally good.
Post by: Max™ on February 24, 2019, 08:53:52 pm
The "over unity" LED is kinda old news though. (https://phys.org/news/2012-03-efficiency.html)Different thing, this is literally cooling something by having a DEL close enough that any infrared photons emitted end up absorbed and pushing electrons back the wrong way.
(Basically, uses thermal oscillations at JUST under the band-gap energy applied, so that the thermal oscillations provide the energy to kick the electron over, and then emit the photon. This results in more photons generated than can be attributed to the energy applied, along with local cooling of the environment.)
It has some potential in some applications, but since it predominantly emits low-energy photons, its applicability is kinda low. It might be useful for radiative cooling on a spacecraft or something though.
It's possible that running the LED backwards like this is just the same phenomena as above but with a higher bandgap to overcome. I would expect it to destroy the LED over time though due to dopant migration. The "over unity" method would work for very extended period.
Post by: wierd on May 01, 2019, 03:20:17 am
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/science/microbots-robots-silicon-wafer.html
Got some ways to go before this has any real practical application, but the research has produced "mobile" flipper bots out of thin silicon slices. Paramecium is pretty large though, so keep that in mind.
Post by: Greiger on May 01, 2019, 04:31:15 am
Post by: Telgin on May 01, 2019, 09:34:27 am
Post by: scourge728 on May 01, 2019, 04:54:12 pm
Post by: Telgin on May 01, 2019, 06:07:57 pm
Not to mention if the things cause strokes because they block capillaries in the brain, that's going to lead to expensive lawsuits so even the money grubbing corporations have reason to be cautious.
Post by: Trekkin on May 01, 2019, 06:18:08 pm
Actually, this reminds me of something I saw at Columbia five years ago on putting nanoscale radio transmitters (trench-covered silicon cubes, really) into vesicles and tuning the pulse frequency by adjusting the membrane permeability. Optogenetics supplanted much of their utility, as I suspect they will here; the fabrication advantage is considerable.
The battery refurbishment use seems more plausible to me.
Post by: Eric Blank on June 12, 2019, 12:13:35 pm
Apparently the fossil record on the island of Aldabra in the Indian ocean reveals that a species of rail, believed to be direct descendents of the still-living white-throated rail of Madagascar, lived on the island up until ~136,000 years ago, when the island was submerged completely. Since these birds were flightless, because of a lack of incentive to fly, they all died. But 20,000 years later they reappeared again; as in, white throated rails once again colonized the now-vacant island and the colonizers once again adapted to identical living situations by losing the ability to fly, producing the modern Aldabra Rail, which is nearly identical to the one that went extinct.
Amusingly, many of the article titles and summaries on Google seem to read as if the mighty evolution gods enacted a divine miracle and resurrected these poor dead birds. The sciencemag article (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/evolution-brings-extinct-island-bird-back-existence) originally posted May 14 was edited to correct that very mistake; "*Correction, 17 May, 11:45 a.m.: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the repeated evolution of flightlessness by the white-throated rail on the Aldabra atoll produced two subspecies thousands of years apart, and not a single subspecies that disappeared and reappeared."
But the title of USNews' article still says: "Extinct Bird Re-Evolved Itself Back Into Existence On"
CBS News posted "An extinct bird species has evolved back into existence, study says"
News Atlas used the phrase; "Extinct bird resurrected as evolution starts over again"
CNN also used "Extinct species of bird came back from the dead, scientists find"
It's almost like they're trying to to communicate, but their language is stupid, and I do not speak it. :P
Post by: smjjames on June 12, 2019, 02:15:26 pm
Post by: Trekkin on June 12, 2019, 03:57:33 pm
Relevant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/6/11/18652225/hype-science-press-releases
You know, everyone talks about the public's "faith in science," but nobody ever talks about scientists' faith in the public.
I'm not just saying this to be edgy. The majority of my immediate colleagues openly consider outreach to be a waste of time, particularly in the post-Trump era; if the public wants to believe the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism and windmills cause cancer, why on (flat) Earth would they listen to us? Even when they're given papers, they just quote-mine them for trivial things with which they can justify disregarding them.
Post by: Eric Blank on June 12, 2019, 04:10:19 pm
Post by: smjjames on June 12, 2019, 05:47:27 pm
Relevant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/6/11/18652225/hype-science-press-releases
You know, everyone talks about the public's "faith in science," but nobody ever talks about scientists' faith in the public.
I'm not just saying this to be edgy. The majority of my immediate colleagues openly consider outreach to be a waste of time, particularly in the post-Trump era; if the public wants to believe the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism and windmills cause cancer, why on (flat) Earth would they listen to us? Even when they're given papers, they just quote-mine them for trivial things with which they can justify disregarding them.
Hasn't it kind of always been this way though? I mean, even in Galileo's time...
The Church was pretty pro-science at one point wasn't it? Because 'God would want us to learn how the world works' or something like that. Then they started finding things that contradicted God and whatever. Still, even though they've almost completly stopped being anti-science now, theres still a lingering stereotype of being anti-science. I was just sort of spontaneously wondering how it'd help things if The Church (and religion in general) was more pro-science.
Post by: Trekkin on June 12, 2019, 06:55:33 pm
(-snip-)
Hasn't it kind of always been this way though? I mean, even in Galileo's time...
The Church was pretty pro-science at one point wasn't it? Because 'God would want us to learn how the world works' or something like that. Then they started finding things that contradicted God and whatever. Still, even though they've almost completly stopped being anti-science now, theres still a lingering stereotype of being anti-science. I was just sort of spontaneously wondering how it'd help things if The Church (and religion in general) was more pro-science.
They generally dispute the conclusions rather than the process, though, and there are ways to reconcile that. Non-overlapping magisteria, for example. It's obvious bullshit, but it lets both sides work on what they care about.
I think the Internet has done a lot to unify individual cranks into a kind of reflexively nihilistic, narcisstic disbelief, though. If someone thinks the Earth is six thousand years old because their holy book says so, that's a falsifiable claim that we can, at least, argue about. However, there are plenty of people now who just reflexively demand to see proof about everything, call people "biased" with no explanation of how, say "I question these data" as though that means anything on its own, and generally have come to the conclusion that science is wrong because they want to sound smarter than scientists, however much they "love science". They tend to end their statements with "checkmate" a lot, and nitpick about fonts and statistical minutae. They don't need or want a coherent position to argue beyond "neener neener", and so there's no way to make them face facts because they'll deny them just to "own" you and then declare victory anyway. It's the "everybody's too scared to debate me" school of debate.
They've always been around, but now they're talking to each other and reinforcing each other, and they're not doing it with any kind of consistent logic, and we're powerless to disprove a disbelief in proof.
Post by: smjjames on June 12, 2019, 07:53:58 pm
Really though, it'd probably take a Phd in psychology to start figuring out how to combat those type of people, but the ones that aren't hardcore in it and still reasonable could still be coaxed away from that kind of thing. That's probably the group (along with stereotypical conservatives) that your colleagues are talking about, not the ones who just go 'HA HA! I OWNZ YU LIHBRUULSSHH!'
Post by: Trekkin on June 12, 2019, 08:26:31 pm
It suppose it might be possible to loopception them by saying that if they disbelieve proof, then they should disbelieve their own proof, then watch their heads explode from the logical 'DOESNOTCOMPUTE!!!!!'
Really though, it'd probably take a Phd in psychology to start figuring out how to combat those type of people, but the ones that aren't hardcore in it and still reasonable could still be coaxed away from that kind of thing. That's probably the group (along with stereotypical conservatives) that your colleagues are talking about, not the ones who just go 'HA HA! I OWNZ YU LIHBRUULSSHH!'
You'd think, right? There's a twofold problem with that, though. Not only does the backfire effect drive people further into believing wrong things rather than admitting they're wrong, but the social dynamics are backwards for that kind of transition. By the time people come to believe certain counterfactual things, they're used to being ridiculed and rejected for them except by fellow believers, which leads them to think that if they give up now they'll lose all their friends and still be mocked by the nonbelievers.
Now, that's not to say there aren't ways to fix this. It's just that, in our official capacity, we're absolutely not the people you want trying; they've already decided we're full of shit, and we're expected to make our case in ways they're already numb to. That's also why you can't trap them logically, by the way. They are used to finding other ways of making sense of things in preference to logic, so if what they believe doesn't make sense, that's only proof that they've slipped the mental bonds of the sheeple and started thinking for themselves.
Then, too, we're way outnumbered by people that "love science" as a way to get to call people idiots for not believing it, and they've become adept at skimming our output for new vocabulary without actually learning anything. I've watched it happen. So, when we come along and explain how we know various things not to be true, we sound a lot like the Internet experts whose thesis is "you're all idiots." If you want to stop the cranks, I think a good first step would be to stop the folks driving them into crankdom in their zeal to demonstrate what they know and figure out a way back for the quasi-cranks that doesn't involve them being ridiculed for having believed something stupid. Otherwise, we're fighting an uphill battle on quicksand.
Post by: smjjames on June 12, 2019, 08:56:47 pm
The link I posted earlier probably points to a large part of the problem on both sides since you mention the scientists coming off as 'Internet experts whose thesis is 'you're all idiots'' since it's about presenting it to people outside the usual circles that it would go around in. The article also mentions that sometimes it's the scientist doing the press release writing it badly without meaning to.
So, probably a good place to start would be on the communication end since that's probably where a good deal of the crankification and ivory-towerification is.
Post by: Trekkin on June 12, 2019, 09:49:33 pm
The first part wasn't actually serious, but I think you knew that.
The link I posted earlier probably points to a large part of the problem on both sides since you mention the scientists coming off as 'Internet experts whose thesis is 'you're all idiots'' since it's about presenting it to people outside the usual circles that it would go around in. The article also mentions that sometimes it's the scientist doing the press release writing it badly without meaning to.
So, probably a good place to start would be on the communication end since that's probably where a good deal of the crankification and ivory-towerification is.
I did, yes; I was responding mostly to the second part.
And yes, communication would be a good place to start, but ultimately, like I said, whatever we say can be aped stylistically by people with ill intent, and telling science apart from scientific-sounding gibberish is a hard job. It's one reason we have peer review. So even if we're perfect, we're still going to sound like the people copying us in order to say inaccurate things. Ultimately, if we want to fix communication, we need to recognize we're neither the only nor the loudest voice out there.
Errors are inevitable, too, if only because science isn't perfect. If those were all we had to deal with, I'd be way more on board with putting the onus on researchers primarily.
Part of the problem is also that outreach is volunteer work for us; it doesn't advance our careers nearly as much as publications do, and while it's emphasized in training it's ultimately not that important in hiring -- and we're in the process of being hired, continually, for most of our careers. People can claim scientists work for the public and demand more mandates, but really, we work for the people who fund us and they're mostly us, at least proximally, so people do outreach because they're enthusiastic.
And outreach is the best way we know to sap a graduate student's enthusiasm. It's all first- and second- years who go, at least here. Nobody above second year has any interest in the public except as minimally effective resume fodder.
So if you want more communication, better communication,and therefore more time spent on communication, it'd be nice if it was less of a soul-sucking horror show.
Post by: wierd on June 12, 2019, 11:42:06 pm
I hate to bring up the Vatican again so soon, but the august Cardinal Richelieu is attributed to the following quotation:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
This is basically the crux of your problem; and a good scientific paper contains much more than a mere six lines of text.
Consider the demographics that are normally implicated, and how they twist even their own "axiomatically true" doctrinal texts all out of context for such purposes. (I don't mean to pick on the religious conservatives, but they represent a statistically significant fraction of the demographic, and of that sample, a significant number engage in out-of-context biblical quotation bingo. It is my understanding that other conservative religious demographics have the same problem, but with their own doctrinal sources being misrepresented/interpreted for convenience of ideology.)
What is really important though, is to not lose sight of who you are ACTUALLY trying to reach; It is not the people that have already decided apriori that they need to mock, ridicule, and debase anything and everything you or your peers put on paper for the public (because they can). It is for the people that would like to know, but are being shouted at/against by the prior group, and who are kept in the dark as part of their indoctrination and cultural conditioning, but would much rather have a broader, and more meaningful understanding than just the straight diet of dogma they get at home. (if anything, the fact that these previously disparate groups have all joined up together into a siren's wail of terror, indicates that outreach is WORKING, rather than failing. They see you as competition in gaining mindshare, and have upped their game.)
Being harangued by the vocal gestalt of social idiocy is to be expected; When you get criticized by the genuinely curious young minds, that is when there is an issue.
And really, current academic publishing DOES have that issue. (See for example, the slew of really bad papers that have been getting accepted to peer reviewed journals in recent years that are literally nothing but buzzwords thrown together by a markov chain generator. 'sa truth sera.)
When you lose that demographic, you fail to replace your ranks as you age, and retire.
When you stop doing the outreach altogether, because of fear of the seething death cries of the willfully ignorant-- you guarantee the loss of the second as well.
Post by: Trekkin on June 13, 2019, 02:01:27 am
When you lose that demographic, you fail to replace your ranks as you age, and retire.
If this were true, you would expect that either we're great at outreach or we're short on people, and neither is true. We are infamously oversupplied with people and very few of them, at least in the scientific organizations I've been a part of who have cared to check, decided to go into science because they were forced into participating in an outreach program by their school. Voluntary outreach works better, to be sure, but if we're passively asking for highly motivated applicants we're not really recruiting anymore.
So we suck at convincing people to do this who don't already want to and we've got more than we can ever use anyway. Now, it is true that part of that oversupply is due to graduate school being so easy to get into, as it has been for a long time now, but even so, people really want to be scientists even without our prodding, which would lead me to believe that increased access to passive/voluntary outreach might help (not that we necessarily want it to), but our version of raising awareness really doesn't appear to be doing anything.
Actually, it's tempting (but an oversimplification) to say we're victims of our own success; so vastly many more people want to be scientists than can actually be scientists for any given value of "being a scientist" that a lot of the noise and misrepresentation is from cargo cult scientists and enthusiasts who are avowedly on our side but not actually helping. They're not generally from the "demographics normally implicated", either. When I say "ill intent", it's actually these people I worry most about; nothing drives people into dangerous levels of crankdom like someone who's very sure of themselves incorrectly proving them wrong and then braying about the Dunning-Kruger effect to make them feel stupid for thinking they knew something. You can go listen to flat Earthers who decided to enter the movement because the "pro-science" people got their facts wrong about carbon dating and things and called them idiots for disagreeing, for example. It's kind of like how anti-drug programs in school tend to backfire. Kids hear "if you so much as think about marijuana your life will be permanently ruined", know that's bullshit, and decide maybe the adults are lying about other drugs too and off we go.
So, yes, misrepresentation by our ideological enemies happens all the time, but what I see going on is more like our enemies being radicalized by the heretics claiming to be our allies.
Post by: wierd on June 13, 2019, 02:07:23 am
Quote
(if anything, the fact that these previously disparate groups have all joined up together into a siren's wail of terror, indicates that outreach is WORKING, rather than failing. They see you as competition in gaining mindshare, and have upped their game.)
The counter you raised is not a counter to what I said at all. I was merely alerting you to their tactic, which is to break your resolve, so they win through attrition. That they are so shrill, and have banded together into a faceless mass of unbearable mental anguish, is testament to the fact that your outreach IS WORKING.
As you yourself pointed out, continued outreach at this level of difficulty burns through grad students, because they lack the resolve. (and, as I pointed out, loss of interested minds results in fewer replacements later.)
I would suggest that your industry do what healthcare did;
Front-line patient facing care is not typically handled by doctors. (at least, not the lion's share.) Most of it is handled by people that specialize in that, which is nursing staff. There is a sharp divide between doctor and nurse, and it exists for a reason. Doctors are already overworked, they don't need the added stresses of constant patient exposure. (It's hard enough on them when their patients refuse their advice and care plans in favor of what they read on WebMD, or what some crank on the internet told them.)
Scientists doing the actual work of science, should be doing the actual work of science. Outreach is not really a part of that; Pushing the boundaries of the art is hard enough, and requires already almost inhuman levels of dedication.
Instead, you need to embrace a second-class into your profession. Scientifically literate people who can read your papers, and understand them, but do not themselves push the state of the art, and instead, do your outreach and public facing functions, because they have the drive and motivation for *THAT* instead.
Trying to burn through your grad students is very sub-optimal, as you have noted.
Post by: Trekkin on June 13, 2019, 02:39:45 am
Instead, you need to embrace a second-class into your profession. Scientifically literate people who can read your papers, and understand them, but do not themselves push the state of the art, and instead, do your outreach and public facing functions, because they have the drive and motivation for *THAT* instead.
We have those already. They teach undergraduates at little out-of-the-way colleges where their research, if any, is more of an afterthought. That's kind of what effective outreach looks like when just keeping up with the state of the art is a job unto itself. (Although as you well know, medicine has the same problem of a constantly evolving state of the art but more stubborn practitioners.)
We're full up on them, too. Advocates and advisors and consultants, as well. It's part of why a PhD is an absolute requirement to be taken seriously scientifically; low bar though it may be, it signifies that someone's at least minimally capable of demonstrably knowing what they're talking about, which is more or less the point of empiricism, and that's what we're being asked to sell to everybody, including the public.
If you want to call the shrillness of our opponents evidence that we've succeeded, fine, but 34% of millennials not being sure the world is round is pretty damning evidence that we've also failed on a societal scale, and at a level that's not only well below the state of the art but well below what we might reasonably be expected to correct. This gets back to my main point: researchers have a role to play in making science more accessible, but there are major flaws in the system well outside our scope that are going to seriously hamper any efforts in that regard.
Post by: wierd on June 13, 2019, 02:50:58 am
As horrible a tool as IQ is, the basis of how it is computed holds sway here; The majority of people are not really capable of understanding the world around them as it truly is, or understanding that they have biases, or even that they should try to mitigate the influence of them.
That you have significantly higher than median levels of understanding in basic things like EARTH==ROUND, is actually quite reassuring.
Admittedly though, we DO need to keep the number of flat earthers someplace below 20%. Trend research has shown that numbers in the 30% range results in inevitable overturns of social dynamics, and that's terrifying-- But then again, look at how close the difference there is. It's why the shrill sound is so loud; they instinctually know that if they lose more mind share, they will be irrelevant.
Post by: Kagus on June 13, 2019, 03:04:07 am
"Sir, I'd like to show you what the boys have put together for that precision strike task. It's a drone-launched missile."
"Excellent, minimal collateral all around! What's the payload?"
"Knife." (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/dod-cia-developed-flying-ginsu-missile-to-take-out-single-targets/?amp=1)
Post by: Reelya on June 13, 2019, 06:22:37 am
The Church was pretty pro-science at one point wasn't it? Because 'God would want us to learn how the world works' or something like that. Then they started finding things that contradicted God and whatever. Still, even though they've almost completly stopped being anti-science now, theres still a lingering stereotype of being anti-science. I was just sort of spontaneously wondering how it'd help things if The Church (and religion in general) was more pro-science.
There's a reason the Church was pro-knowledge, not necessarily pro-science.
That's because then you have a monopoly on truth. If the church are the go-to people for scribes and the like, then the church controls the narrative. If the church on the other hand had said "we only deal with religious knowledge" then they'd be ceding authority to third-party knowledge bases which would grow and develop outside their direct control. So, instead you create vast libraries which store all types of books, under the watchful eye of the religious scholars, and people entering rely on the religious scribes to tell them what's what. That would make the monastic scribes like the Google Search of their era.
If all the books are catalogued in a library you control then you rarely need to actively suppress anything. The scribes are only going to make copies of books they want to make copies of, and they can just store and forget anything they don't like. Notice how the Gallileo case and similar all occurred after the widespread adoption of the printing press. That's probably relevant. The printing press ended the near monopoly of scribes to disseminate copies of texts, necessitating the church to take radical action to control their monopoly on ideas. An analogy here would be record companies freaking out about the rise of internet downloads and trying to create a punitive legal structure to deal with people using the new technology.
You see similar things in for example single-party dictatorships, where any knowledge-base that's outside party control is stomped on, even if their teachings don't really directly conflict party doctrine.
Post by: wierd on June 18, 2019, 03:59:38 am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=388&v=0ybLCfVeFL4
Very soon, we will be able to take arbitrary footage from any source (news anchors look very vulnerable here) and insert arbitrarily chosen text based dialog.
Post by: Reelya on June 18, 2019, 08:42:36 am
For example consider this possible project:
- grab latest headlines and summaries from Google News
- run through Talk-To-Transformer to generate additional text (possible format it with names
- generate some heads using the head-generating AIs
- generate videos of the heads speaking the T-to-T texts
- upload automatically to a youtube channel or just live feed it
There you go, all existing technologies and you could bolt together the most amazingly idiotic 24 hour TV news channel ever, which would basically involve zero manual labor from that point onwards.
Post by: scourge728 on June 18, 2019, 10:38:47 am
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 01, 2019, 03:31:22 pm
Post by: wierd on September 04, 2019, 09:22:13 pm
I hope it pans out. While exotic, it could lead to interesting developments in computing.
Post by: Superdorf on September 04, 2019, 09:26:16 pm
Post by: Reelya on September 04, 2019, 09:32:03 pm
Post by: smjjames on September 04, 2019, 09:46:58 pm
Edit: With one major catch, it needs to be under pressures only found in planetary cores, or the depths of gas giant atmospheres.
Post by: Superdorf on September 04, 2019, 10:00:31 pm
Ah well. Maybe somebody'll discover cybersteampunk some other time.
Post by: Bumber on September 04, 2019, 10:23:28 pm
Post by: wierd on September 04, 2019, 10:25:33 pm
https://www.sciencealert.com/french-scientists-believe-they-have-created-metallic-hydrogen
IIRC, they said it was meta-stable after releasing the pressure.
this material is meant to simulate metallic hydrogen in order to produce the superconductivity. If it obeys similarly to the claimed discovery of metallic hydrogen (The sample mysteriously got stolen/vanished), and is meta-stable after synthesis at normal pressures, it could be capped in a high pressure environment.
Not useful for powerlines, but computing is a different beast. (instead of a huge honking heatsink, it would have a reinforced internal-strain package.)
But if you insist on Jupiter's atmosphere... There's already jupiter-brains as a scifi fixture. ;P
Post by: Arx on September 05, 2019, 03:34:32 am
(The sample mysteriously got stolen/vanished)
"I swear, when we took the pressure off the hydrogen it was a stable solid! It can't have evapourated, it must have been theft!"
Post by: Reelya on September 05, 2019, 06:05:02 am
EDIT: I'd be very surprised if any samples of this stuff could be brought back to room temperature and pressure.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 05, 2019, 03:19:31 pm
C10H8O4 + 10O2(g) = 10CO2(g) + 4H2O
suggests?
source for where I got the balancing equation (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-chemical-equation-for-burning-melting-PET-plastic)
source for burning plastic being dangerous because of production of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, dioxins and furanes (https://www.carahealth.com/health-articles/digestive-liver-detox-nutrition-weight-loss/the-danger-of-burning-plastic)
I am not going to burn plastic, just curious if it could be done in a vacuum
Post by: Reelya on September 05, 2019, 03:32:27 pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-gas_shift_reaction
Post by: Iduno on September 05, 2019, 04:00:25 pm
I’m curious, I did research and found out that burning plastic can interact with the air and make carbon monoxide, but I’m curious what would happen if you put plastic in a vacuum and applied 100% oxygen, would it make CO2 and H2O like the balancing equation
C10H8O4 + 10O2(g) = 10CO2(g) + 4H2O
suggests?
Theoretically, but it's unlikely to actually work. Assuming it's actually a one-stop process like that formula shows (it's more likely a multi-stage process that's been simplified), it would require 10 oxygen molecules to hit one plastic molucule at the same time. If it's several steps, you'd need to have oxygen in the vacuum for an extended period of time with enough energy to keep the reaction going; long after it could be considered any type of vacuum. Doing it in a relatively-oxygen-rich environment like air would be more likely to get the results you're expecting. And we already know how that one turns out.
Post by: Trekkin on September 05, 2019, 04:10:50 pm
I am not going to burn plastic, just curious if it could be done in a vacuum
Well, to be pedantic, if you're adding gaseous oxygen, it's no longer a vacuum, so by definition no.
The more informative answer is mostly what Iduno said. Plastics are polymers, so as different subunits react, products of different lengths will form, which are sterically biased toward forming different compounds as the reaction continues. There is no guarantee that the reaction will run to completion before a volatile intermediate forms and evaporates away from the heat.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 05, 2019, 04:34:12 pm
I have a thought of an experiment involving raising flies and grasshoppers in the same environment, figuring out if fly eggs stick to grasshoppers, figuring out whether the larvae would eat the grasshoppers if they hatch on them, figuring out whether the adults who ate grasshoppers as larvae would selectively lay eggs on grasshoppers, since they hatched from grasshoppers? The idea is to test how insect parasitism may have evolved. Part of the idea is that there are some flies that parasitism crickets, and that the hawthorn fly sometimes lays eggs on apples and those that lived on apples will lay eggs on apples, so my idea was if something similar happened in various lineages of flies with grasshoppers and crickets.
Post by: Trekkin on September 05, 2019, 04:50:01 pm
Thank you for the information. I have another thought not connected to plastic
I have a thought of an experiment involving raising flies and grasshoppers in the same environment, figuring out if fly eggs stick to grasshoppers, figuring out whether the larvae would eat the grasshoppers if they hatch on them, figuring out whether the adults who ate grasshoppers as larvae would selectively lay eggs on grasshoppers, since they hatched from grasshoppers? The idea is to test how insect parasitism may have evolved. Part of the idea is that there are some flies that parasitism crickets, and that the hawthorn fly sometimes lays eggs on apples and those that lived on apples will lay eggs on apples, so my idea was if something similar happened in various lineages of flies with grasshoppers and crickets.
You know, you could do this in silico before you tried it in vivo. If flies are going to parasitize grasshoppers, they'd presumably need to be able to detect them, and so they'd need an olfactory receptor to pick up on something grasshoppers exude into the air much like how they can detect rotting meat to eat. You could try docking all the volatile small molecules grasshoppers excrete uniquely against the proteome of whatever fly species you wanted to examine; the hit rate would be low, but if they're going to do this the affinity will need to be high enough that you'd probably notice it.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 15, 2019, 05:51:44 pm
Viruses and cells intertwined since the dawn of evolution (https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-015-0400-7)
Viruses are not alive (https://www.ib.usp.br/inter/0410113/downloads/moreira_virus_2010.pdf)
Post by: ChairmanPoo on September 15, 2019, 06:16:11 pm
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 15, 2019, 08:06:10 pm
Post by: ChairmanPoo on September 15, 2019, 10:53:51 pm
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 16, 2019, 08:18:27 am
Post by: Madman198237 on September 16, 2019, 09:17:47 am
Its not even blurry it's semantics. The actual relevance is the same as determining the right pronounciation for potato 🥔
"Potato" is of course properly pronounced as follows: "PO-TAY-TOE? Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew?"
Post by: Trekkin on September 16, 2019, 02:07:26 pm
Ah. I understand now. thank you. The papers still give interesting info about virus polyphyly and possibly independent acquisition of capsid proteins.
If you would like to learn about more things that have been used as examples of the definition of life being fuzzy, you could look at prions. They're like viruses without genetic material.
EDIT: Oh, or the origin of organelles.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 16, 2019, 02:29:41 pm
Edit:
A paper about the origin of the nucleus (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955067414000052)
Post by: Trekkin on September 16, 2019, 02:39:15 pm
oh, yes, chloroplasts and mitochondria used to be bacteria, and I'm not sure we know exactly how to nucleus formed
Well, of the three primary theories, archaeal endosymbiosis has whole-genome analysis' indication of an archaeal origin of nuclear proteins in its favor. (https://www.cell.com/trends/cell-biology/pdf/S0962-8924(01)01951-1.pdf)
Post by: wierd on September 16, 2019, 02:50:23 pm
If unusual nuclei are your thing, look into dinoflagellates.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/protista/dinoflagmm.html
During cell division, their chromosomes remain compact, among many other unique features-- such as an apparent lack of histones. At one point, this was considered to be an ancient feature, but more recent work has suggested that this is the result of very advanced divergent evolution in nuclear function.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 16, 2019, 02:52:45 pm
Quite right. There's also the high degree of conservation/similarity of genes for mitochondria found in very divergent lineages to consider as well. (Even when those genes have migrated to the host's nuclear genome.) Not to mention that some species are able to "steal" organelles from other organisms, such as several marine plankton species that can incorporate algal chloroplasts after ingesting said algae.
If unusual nuclei are your thing, look into dinoflagellates.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/protista/dinoflagmm.html
During cell division, their chromosomes remain compact, among many other unique features-- such as an apparent lack of histones. At one point, this was considered to be an ancient feature, but more recent work has suggested that this is the result of very advanced divergent evolution in nuclear function.
Thank you bothoh, yes, chloroplasts and mitochondria used to be bacteria, and I'm not sure we know exactly how to nucleus formed
Well, of the three primary theories, archaeal endosymbiosis has whole-genome analysis' indication of an archaeal origin of nuclear proteins in its favor. (https://www.cell.com/trends/cell-biology/pdf/S0962-8924(01)01951-1.pdf)
Edit: Here is a video I found about how ribosomes evolved from Georgia Tech, NASA, and Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution (https://youtu.be/Z2XOhgRJVb4)
The paper the video uses for the information (https://www.pnas.org/content/111/28/10251)
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 28, 2019, 05:42:47 am
Another video by the same person about quantum mechanics (https://youtu.be/iVpXrbZ4bnU)
Video about the many different interpretations of quantum mechsnics. (https://youtu.be/mqofuYCz9gs)
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 28, 2019, 08:24:45 pm
Quote from: www.rebekkahniles.com › 2012/03 › word-box-sapience-vs-sentience
"Sapience," noun of sapient, is the ability to think, and to reason. It may not seem like much a difference, but the ability to reason is tied more closely to sapience than to sentience. Most animals are sentient, (yes, you can correctly say your dog is sentient!) but only humans are sapient.
How would one know if other animals could reason? What does thinking with reasoning look like on an fMRI vs non reasoning thinking?
Post by: Telgin on September 28, 2019, 08:50:41 pm
I haven't read the article so I don't know what the article is even arguing, but I do at least approve of people educating on the difference between the words sentience and sapience. It bugs me irrationally when people get them mixed up.
Post by: Qassius on September 28, 2019, 08:54:40 pm
We can look at brain activity, but we can't know if there is cognition occurring. EEGs and what have you could give us a detailed look at activity, but we can never know what exactly is going on. This is where the definition of reason comes into play, does brain activity in the frontal lobe or an analog truly display value judgments being made? Can reason occur without such structures as we understand them in humans?Quote from: www.rebekkahniles.com › 2012/03 › word-box-sapience-vs-sentience"Sapience," noun of sapient, is the ability to think, and to reason. It may not seem like much a difference, but the ability to reason is tied more closely to sapience than to sentience. Most animals are sentient, (yes, you can correctly say your dog is sentient!) but only humans are sapient.
How would one know if other animals could reason? What does thinking with reasoning look like on an fMRI vs non reasoning thinking?
We might say a dog has some rudimentary sense of ethics (and therefore reason/sapience?), but when do we distinguish a dog feeling bad after knowing it did something its owner didn't like and reasoning that they did an immoral act? Then one must wonder whether such a distinction is even important.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 28, 2019, 09:07:32 pm
This gets me thinking, are humans entering something similar with cultural selection? I don't think we are there yet because most individuals have the ability to reproduce. Eusociality is interesting to learn about
I found a paper talking about how eusociality may have evolved more than once in wasps (https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/35/9/2097/5040136)
Post by: Reelya on September 29, 2019, 12:20:19 am
Quote
EVERY DOG OWNER knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.
Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish.
If a dog is groveling to be forgiven for doing something, this shows a high level of emotional reasoning. They're aware they did something wrong, but it's wrong to say "but they only want to avoid punishment" as if that's the bar for reasoning.
What's going on here is
(1) the dog knows they did something wrong, which shows they're aware of the past, and they seem to be aware of the distinction: once you pooped on the floor, you can't un-poop
(2) they're aware of consequences - which proves they're aware of the future, too, which means they can imagine themselves in the future, and things happening to them, such as being smacked, and they wish for that not to happen.
(3) they know that you are the punisher, so they know that you know that they did something wrong. But ... importantly they know that you're not always the punisher. Even when you have that rolled up newspaper in your hands they're thinking about possible futures.
(4) the groveling behavior indicates that they're aware that their behavior can affect your behavior, so that proves that they understand social consequences and that they can affect the future, by affecting your emotional state, which means you won't actually whack them with the newspaper.
So they're aware of possible futures and they're reasoning on the best way to select the future they want, and they've decided that manipulating you emotionally is the best way to action that. Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 29, 2019, 02:56:11 am
Post by: dragdeler on September 29, 2019, 05:27:14 am
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 29, 2019, 12:09:09 pm
Yes. But what do you mean by dialectic reasoning? It’s possible to think without saying what is being thought, it’s possible to reason without saying the path for the reasoning. I don’t know what dialectic reasoning is, I thought it might have had something to do with dialog. About scripture, that is symbols, right? I wonder if it would be possible for humans to teach other animals that symbols can mean things, and maybe they could produce symbols as representations of objects AKA writing? Just thoughtsWe might say a dog has some rudimentary sense of ethics (and therefore reason/sapience?), but when do we distinguish a dog feeling bad after knowing it did something its owner didn't like and reasoning that they did an immoral act? Then one must wonder whether such a distinction is even important.
Ultimatively, there is no morality, only positive and negative reinforcement. To me it is without a question that mammals and most birds have sapience, actually it's a much better word thanconscienceconsciousness, which is by definition allready contentious in a human setting. I wouldn't say reason though, I think by that we strictly imply dialectic. But there are even cultures (which is the continuation of evolution by other means) besides the human ones; the thing is they're difficult to spot because they all take place entirely non-verbally and as such are obviously prehistoric. Who knows who would have invented scripture second if it wasn't for apes.
Post by: dragdeler on September 29, 2019, 12:34:21 pm
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 29, 2019, 12:45:44 pm
We allready did, there are apes that use sign language, other have been to taught to use a keyboard with about 300 words on it. (kanzi the chimpanzee, koko the gorilla etc)AhQuoteIt’s possible to think without saying what is being thought, it’s possible to reason without saying the path for the reasoning.
I see what you mean but I would classify that more as intuition, in the sense that in one is familiar enough with the thought process to not having to "think each word out loud"... It's fair to assume that hawks do something comparable when they dive. Dialectic would be more like the hawk talking to itself: it is as if my body was built to do this, so why should I ever bother to hunt any other way?
We can’t read thoughts from entities other than ourselves, so we can’t say for sure other animals don’t think to themselves in this manner.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 29, 2019, 12:50:55 pm
Post by: dragdeler on September 29, 2019, 01:54:26 pm
Post by: Reelya on October 17, 2019, 05:06:28 am
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-zoo-blob/paris-zoo-unveils-the-blob-an-organism-with-no-brain-but-720-sexes-idUSKBN1WV2AD
Quote
PARIS (Reuters) - A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday, dubbed the “blob”, a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on display to the public on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.
The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
“The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries”, said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.
“It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (...) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David added.
The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.
“We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really if it’s an animal or a fungus,” said David.
“It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom (...) it has the behavior of an animal, it is able to learn.”
It's this stuff btw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum
Quote
Physarum polycephalum has been shown to exhibit characteristics similar to those seen in single-celled creatures and eusocial insects. For example, a team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers have shown P. polycephalum can solve the Shortest path problem. When grown in a maze with oatmeal at two spots, P. polycephalum retracts from everywhere in the maze, except the shortest route connecting the two food sources. When presented with more than two food sources, P. polycephalum apparently solves a more complicated transportation problem. With more than two sources, the amoeba also produces efficient networks. In a 2010 paper, oatflakes were dispersed to represent Tokyo and 36 surrounding towns. P. polycephalum created a network similar to the existing train system, and "with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost". Similar results have been shown based on road networks in the United Kingdom and the Iberian peninsula (i.e., Spain and Portugal). Some researchers claim that P. polycephalum is even able to solve the NP-hard Steiner minimum tree problem.
EDIT: it's also unclear what they mean by "720 sexes". This is a single-celled organism. How do they even define a sex for one of those?
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on October 17, 2019, 05:20:57 am
Post by: dragdeler on October 17, 2019, 05:27:52 am
Post by: Bumber on October 17, 2019, 05:30:48 am
In french "le sexe" can mean gender as well as genital. So I'm assuming they meant it has 720 reproductive organs and Reuters translated that poorly.
I doubt that. The individual cells reproduce asexually, and it would be odd for a colony of any size to maintain exactly 720 reproductive organs.
There are probably 720 unique sexes that determine compatibility with a subset of the other sexes.
Post by: dragdeler on October 17, 2019, 06:17:05 am
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on October 17, 2019, 06:29:46 am
Post by: feelotraveller on October 18, 2019, 02:15:06 am
EDIT: it's also unclear what they mean by "720 sexes". This is a single-celled organism. How do they even define a sex for one of those?
I was just reading about this. :) The comment here: https://www.cnet.com/news/paris-zoo-unveils-mysterious-nightmare-slime-dubbed-the-blob/ (https://www.cnet.com/news/paris-zoo-unveils-mysterious-nightmare-slime-dubbed-the-blob/) is
Quote
And if you're hung up on the 720 sexes, well, that's just a fancy way to sell a story.
"They're not really sexes, they are mating types," says Latty. "Whether or not a slime mold can mate with another slime mold depends on its mating type which is determined by particular genes."
(Latty in above quote is "Tanya Latty, a slime mold researcher at the University of Sydney".)
Oh, the possibilities of pr0n in the slime mould world!
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on October 18, 2019, 07:27:22 am
Post by: wierd on October 18, 2019, 07:36:19 am
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-worm-with-three-sexes-and-a-tolerance-for-arsenic-found-thriving-in-a-nearly-lifeless-lake
This gives several "viable" combinations, Male + female, Female + Hermaphrodite, Male + Hermaphrodite, and Hermaphrodite + Hermaphrodite.
In the case of this slime mold, there are probably biochemically incompatible combinations, which is what gives rise to "mating types"-- For an example in larger species, see also "ring species"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
While there are several types which are mutually exclusive, gene flow can still occur. Because the slime mold is a composite organism of several (potentially genetically distinct) single celled organisms acting in aggregate in complex ways, that gene flow within the assembly is important.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on December 02, 2019, 01:20:52 am
Spoiler: this image of a star classification diagram (click to show/hide)
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 02, 2019, 01:55:24 am
Did I just miss it?Yes. See 'extended spectral types'. Pt. 5.2.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on December 02, 2019, 02:08:21 am
Post by: wierd on December 07, 2019, 03:39:27 am
So...
I hear the screams of the vegetables?
Post by: Egan_BW on December 07, 2019, 03:57:48 am
Post by: wierd on December 12, 2019, 05:48:32 am
Am I mistaken in thinking that this has some... Rather far-reaching implications?
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum-weirdness.html
Basically, Casimir effect radiation is capable of transporting thermal energy.
Shouldn't this have some pretty subtle but significant consequences?
Post by: Iduno on December 12, 2019, 09:04:08 am
So... Uhm...
Am I mistaken in thinking that this has some... Rather far-reaching implications?
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum-weirdness.html
Basically, Casimir effect radiation is capable of transporting thermal energy.
Shouldn't this have some pretty subtle but significant consequences?
We've known about radiant heating (the least effective form of heating, and also what we get from the sun) for a while, but maybe.
Post by: Telgin on December 12, 2019, 09:40:10 am
Post by: wierd on December 12, 2019, 09:48:56 am
So... Uhm...
Am I mistaken in thinking that this has some... Rather far-reaching implications?
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-energy-space-quantum-weirdness.html
Basically, Casimir effect radiation is capable of transporting thermal energy.
Shouldn't this have some pretty subtle but significant consequences?
We've known about radiant heating (the least effective form of heating, and also what we get from the sun) for a while, but maybe.
Radiant heating is the transfer of energy via blackbody radiation, which is a completely different mechanism to this one.
Post by: McTraveller on December 12, 2019, 12:55:27 pm
Maybe they meant to say that the heat transfer they observed didn't match the difference-of-temperatures-to-the-fourth-power that would be expected from radiation?
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 12, 2019, 02:35:44 pm
I don't understand why that article says that the heating from radiation was negligible because the membranes were "far enough" apart. I feel this is something that got missed in the media version of the article; heat transfer by radiation has no distance limit.I think it just means that they're far enough for the near-field heat transfer to be negligible or otherwise controllable.
Maybe they meant to say that the heat transfer they observed didn't match the difference-of-temperatures-to-the-fourth-power that would be expected from radiation?
Post by: feelotraveller on December 12, 2019, 07:32:45 pm
"Because molecular vibrations are also the basis of the sounds that we hear, this discovery hints that sounds can also travel through a vacuum ... Now, you can shout through a vacuum."
Shit, I'll have to break the habit of going into space to scream. >:(
Post by: McTraveller on December 12, 2019, 07:52:23 pm
There are experiments you can do by putting drops of food coloring in a viscous fluid like corn syrup, mixing them up, and then unmix them. :o
Post by: Max™ on December 12, 2019, 09:04:18 pm
I don't understand why that article says that the heating from radiation was negligible because the membranes were "far enough" apart. I feel this is something that got missed in the media version of the article; heat transfer by radiation has no distance limit.Think they meant "not far enough" because they mentioned hundreds of nanometers, which is shorter than the infrared wavelengths for black body emissions at temperatures this experiment was being conducted under.
Maybe they meant to say that the heat transfer they observed didn't match the difference-of-temperatures-to-the-fourth-power that would be expected from radiation?
I mean, I assume they weren't conducting this experiment hot enough for visible emission since the vacuum would be ruined by the membranes vaporizing.
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 13, 2019, 01:23:52 am
Besides, what you're talking about is resolution limit i.e one can't distinguish an object as separate if its size is smaller than the wavelength of probing light. It can be colloquially said that small enough objects are invisible to radiation of large enough wavelengths. But it does not mean invisibility in the sense that radiation passes through or stops exchanging energy between two surfaces if the separation is smaller than its wavelength. It just means that one couldn't use e.g. infrared radiation to detect a nanometer-scale gap.
Post by: Max™ on December 13, 2019, 02:47:29 am
Post by: Trekkin on December 13, 2019, 09:02:10 am
No, Max. I think they do mean far enough. Look up near-field radiative heat transfer. It can increase radiative heat transfer orders of magnitude above what one can get from black body radiation, providing the two bodies are close enough (on the order of hundred of nanometers or less).
In a broad sense, it's similar to Förster resonance energy transfer in that regard. People try to think of photon wavelength as size, but magnitude is a closer equivalent, and the difference shows up when you start looking at how they move across very small scales.
Post by: Max™ on December 13, 2019, 01:43:06 pm
Brain pulled up the thermal wavelengths and those gaps and went "ha ha, the fuck you smoking?"
Post by: McTraveller on December 17, 2019, 08:17:35 pm
It also avoids the annoying debates about "is it intelligent" or ethics or whatever. A "machine that has advanced pattern recognition and extrapolation capabilities" sounds way less existentially threatening than "an artificial intelligence".
Post by: feelotraveller on December 18, 2019, 01:08:00 am
I've decided that from now on whenever I hear "AI" I substitute the phrase "advanced pattern recognition and extrapolation." I think if they'd have called it that from the beginning people would not think it is so magic. After all, that's basically what every type of "AI" we have today does.(my bolding)
It also avoids the annoying debates about "is it intelligent" or ethics or whatever. A "machine that has advanced pattern recognition and extrapolation capabilities" sounds way less existentially threatening than "an artificial intelligence".
But even that use is context sensitive. Just about no game AI even aspires to such lofty heights...
Post by: wierd on December 18, 2019, 01:12:24 am
Take for instance, if I used the phrase "artificial life form", and was talking exclusively about creating synthetic single celled organisms using synthetic membranes, etc-- to try to tease out how life might have gotten started.
Some journalist hears the phrase, and thinks "EGADS! Dr Moreau!"
No, it's just a single celled replicator in its most simplistic of forms, and has features approximating those of a lifeform (eg, it undertakes the 5 life processes, and could be classified as a lifeform-- but is basically just a soap bubble with some special stuff inside it.)
Post by: feelotraveller on December 18, 2019, 03:04:47 am
That is unless the term artificial has nothing to with the substrate but is functionally equivalent to simulated. But then humans are also often AI! (Mind the sarcasm.)
But the term 'AI' as used in science, and elsewhere, is an advertising catchphrase designed for publicity rather than clarity. That much, I think, we all agree on. :D
Post by: Iduno on December 20, 2019, 09:46:32 am
Post by: McTraveller on December 20, 2019, 10:09:11 am
I can't think good today. Can someone explain this? https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1208020657583341569 (https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1208020657583341569)Cynically: Boeing has lost its mojo.
Technically: Some kind of bug somewhere - more likely a sequence of errors starting with systematic process issues - caused an incorrect burn that meant the Starliner did not achieve its intended orbit.
Post by: Arx on December 20, 2019, 10:40:02 am
Post by: Madman198237 on December 20, 2019, 01:57:53 pm
Post by: Trekkin on December 20, 2019, 07:03:41 pm
More specifically, the Starliner lost track of time and some piece of control software thought it was somewhere it wasn't. As a result, it had to burn more fuel than planned (not sure if that's because the bug burned fuel, more fuel had to be burned to correct the issue, or both) and couldn't get into a stable orbit to rendezvous with the ISS.
From what I understand, this is fundamentally correct: the main engine got an incorrect MET corresponding to after the needed burn, but the RCS got the correct MET and so was burning fuel keeping the nose pointed the right way during a burn that didn't happen.
Post by: Reelya on December 21, 2019, 12:48:20 am
I've decided that from now on whenever I hear "AI" I substitute the phrase "advanced pattern recognition and extrapolation." I think if they'd have called it that from the beginning people would not think it is so magic. After all, that's basically what every type of "AI" we have today does.(my bolding)
It also avoids the annoying debates about "is it intelligent" or ethics or whatever. A "machine that has advanced pattern recognition and extrapolation capabilities" sounds way less existentially threatening than "an artificial intelligence".
But even that use is context sensitive. Just about no game AI even aspires to such lofty heights...
There's a reason for that. It's not a lack of processing power or a lack of good algorithms, it's that the layman vs the game designer have a totally different idea of what the purpose of "game AI" even is. Game AI isn't put in with the goal of "optimal decision making to beat the stuffing out of the player", because that's not actually something that produces games that most people find fun, to the point they'll pay good money for it.
Game AI is about supporting the single-player experience and pacing they're going for. If you suck, it has to suck, if you git gud, it has to git gud. That's why you get RTS stuff like units that sit in a specific location, only attack in a certain range, and when you move away, they move back to their original spot. It works for the experience they're going for, and it works about as well for both sucky and good players.
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 12:51:13 am
The "Filthy casuals" are the ones that would balk. Better would be to give an option in the options menu about that.
Post by: feelotraveller on December 21, 2019, 01:10:56 am
The initial topic is about why the hell one would call that function/process an AI when it is clearly not ever intended to be one.
Post by: Reelya on December 21, 2019, 01:34:48 am
There's something to be said about "Nintendo Hard" though. Punishing game design, including "good AI" that does not cheat, but makes good and solid decisions based on the same kinds of data the player would get, would definitely appeal to some players.
The "Filthy casuals" are the ones that would balk. Better would be to give an option in the options menu about that.
Nah, that comes under the rubrik of "things the player can't even see".
A lot of the time they put effort into elaborate "properly simulated" stuff, but it ends up being a complete flop, since the inner workings of some AI or simulation aren't visible elements. It ends up being a lot like movie logic: the superficial appearance of "being right" is more important than actually getting it right. That's why you constantly get big lists of how movie logic "gets it wrong". They're already aware it's wrong, it's not a mistake, it's deliberate, because they know that it works cinematically, which leads to the thread-relevant bit where in every movie some viewer always says "but that's not how the science even works, why can't they get it right?"
That's also the reason that "not technically correct" simulation code continues to be used in games. Games work when "players does action X leading to enemy response Y" is true. But, this is not how the real-world even works. Responses in the real-world to your actions may be unpredictable and fickle. "Good" game-AI would have a ton of hidden variables and it wouldn't have that satisfying linear response to the player's actions. Arguing "Nintendo Hard" isn't the same as arguing for punishing realistic AI. "Nintendo Hard" is about memorizing the patterns, and if the AI can change the patterns those hard-fought "Nintendo Hard" skills are worthless. Imagine in a "Nintendo Hard" game if you killed 6 grunts using one attack pattern, then the 7th guard was smart enough to notice how you killed the other guys, so he changed his pattern and killed you instead. Do you expect the "Nintendo Hard" fans to be all over that? Additionally, realistic AI would be almost impossible to "tune" easily for difficulty levels. It's not a linear quantity where you just "add more AI" and the game gets incrementally harder in some predictable fashion. You'd have to train the AI independently for all desired difficulty levels.
A really smart AI would trick the player, hiding their actions, then surprising the player and beat the stuffing out of them, and you wouldn't know why it happened. This is the optimal "real AI" version of any game with any sort of Fog-of-War. It's what a properly written AI would do, but players wouldn't know the difference between that and cheating. There are quite a few stories of developers building "proper AI" for RTS, getting accused of the AI cheating, then they yanked the AI and put in a dumb one (using the standard production bonuses to set difficulty level), and the accusations stopped. What actually matters in game design, both for the Nintendo Hard crowd and the casuals is that you get predictable feedback based on your own actions. Realistic AI undermines this assumption. also, realistic AI only conceivably works in games which are exactly symmetrical. Any sort of asymmetry and it going to destroy the game.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on December 21, 2019, 02:08:30 am
Quote
There are quite a few stories of developers building "proper AI" for RTS, getting accused of the AI cheating, then they yanked the AI and put in a dumb one (using the standard production bonuses to set difficulty level), and the accusations stopped.I'd like to see specific examples of this because in my experience it's more common for developers to make fake claims about their game's AI.
Post by: Reelya on December 21, 2019, 02:25:33 am
This is from devs: they've basically found that if they try and program something really smart that the accusations of cheating fly around anyway, so realistic AI been put in the "why bother" bucket: costs too much, takes too much time, is unreliable and hard to tune, and people will just accuse you of being assholes even if it works as intended. It's a project-killer.
There's also a very fine line between being just being superhumanly good and cheating. For example, Aim-bots are clearly cheating if used by a human player, but what about playing an actual bot? Is that also cheating if they have perfect aim like an aim-bot?
Post by: ChairmanPoo on December 21, 2019, 02:56:07 am
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 03:02:31 am
In my experience, the cheating of the AI, is more that it ignores resource restrictions, or does not obey cooldowns correctly, and knows where everything is on the map, and thus plans moves with information it should not have.
I can test for this, and prove it, by placing the AI into a custom map where I have purposefully restricted the resources available to a hard limit, and seeing what it produces, how fast, and where it places them. This is especially true if there is an observer mode, and I can enlist the help of another person to just sit there and WATCH the AI, and time its action speed. This is typically how I verify cooldown compliance.
I have done this a few times, and shown that yes- the AI is a cheating mo-fo. I have even witnessed the AI simply CONJURE units out of thin air, just outside the player's visible circle, and attack with them. Seriously-- that's fucked up shit.
When I find that yes, the AI is indeed a cheating bastard, I get very hostile about it. To me that's not a skill challenge, that's seeing how well you can interject on its behaviors, and anticipate its behaviors to do that interjection.
Being able to trick the AI into thinking you are someplace you really arent with decoys is impossible when it cheats, for instance. It removes whole areas of potential play, because the AI is written for whiny bitches who 1) dont want to invest the time in a good AI, and 2) whine when the AI is good-- where appropriate to lay those condemnations.
Rather than just roll over and go "Oh right, sorry-- we will turn on baby mode for you." the devs should go "So, you did structured testing to show that our AI is cheating? Where-- we spent a great deal of time to make it not cheat. We are interested in it not cheating." That moves the ball back into the whiner's court, since now they have to back up their butt-hurt with a test result.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on December 21, 2019, 03:29:19 am
Post by: Reelya on December 21, 2019, 03:32:50 am
Also my point wasn't whether AI is cheating or not, is that not having the cheating AI doesn't actually prevent accusations of having cheating AI. Sure, there are "ways to detect whether the AI is really cheating" but the vast majority of people making any sort of internet accusations haven't actually done any checks.
Not to mention that scaling difficulty with a really good AI wouldnt be that difficult.... just ramp down their available resources
Th
Not to mention that scaling difficulty with a really good AI wouldnt be that difficult.... just ramp down their available resources
That's just not correct. Complex simulation code is very rife with non-linear problems. You're likely to get unexpected shit happening. It's not like people haven't tried this, it's that it's doomed to failure. Game developers need to ship product, and they need to ship it in a moderate time-frame, it needs to ship tuned and balanced as best as possible. Putting expermental, random, complex and unpredictable code such as solid AI, which is usually NNs of some sort is a fool's errand, if you're expected to pay employees. If you're a single indie dev with no employees and preferably no spouse/children to pay for, go for it then. Meanwhile, if you're someone making something and other people's livelihoods and families actually depend on the product succeeding, steer clear of "magic bullet" AI "solutions" to the problem of building a game.
In the real world, real-life experience is that if someone leading your dev team has some wild idea for some cool AI that's going to drive everything, it almost always fails and goes to shit. Pretty much every one of those examples of game AI that didn't live up to expectations was because someone had your idea about using "real" AI and went with it, and the shitty shit that doesn't live up to the "hype" is exactly what you get when you try that. The promise of "real AI" is that it's going to be this magic sauce that makes everything clever and fun and balanced, and you won't have to hand-craft or kludge anything. If such a thing ever worked, they'd all be doing it rather than kludges. Nobody wants to hand-balance a complex game and add a zillion kludges to make it work. It's very time-consuming.
They always end up either stripping that whole system out and replace it with some extremely kludgy code that is worse than what they would have used if they'd just hand-scripted everything from the start, or they pile kludges on top of the "magic AI" that was supposed to solve all the problems, and you get a system people will be complaining for for years to come.
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 04:21:05 am
The actual HOW it decides where to move, as long as it is not "Move mass of units to player base location" in nature-- and instead, "Triangulate base location from vectors of enemy unit travel as they enter my visual space"-- is moot. Use whatever algorithm you want. It need not be NN or a GAN, or anything fancy like that.
Just don't fucking cheat, and dont pretend that the game is even remotely about skill if you do.
Post by: Arx on December 21, 2019, 09:23:15 am
Just don't fucking cheat, and dont pretend that the game is even remotely about skill if you do.
The purpose of game AI is not to be good at the game (although it can do that). The purpose of game AI is not to push new limits in AI research (although it can do that).
The purpose of game AI is to be fun to play against.
That's the fundamental precept you should have in mind when building a game AI. If it requires it cheat, make it cheat. If it requires you lobotomise it, you lobotomise it. If it needs maphacks, you give it maphacks. There's no "purity"; there's only "fun" and "not fun".
A good friend of mine wrote a popular AI for an RTS. It cheats a ton, and can't beat many of the popular "good AIs". But it's a lot of fun to play against, and adapts itself to the skill level of its opponent. That is the only metric by which game AI must be measured. Anything else is nice, but ultimately secondary.
It's like if you buy a toaster that can load itself from a loaf, auto-butter, and send you a text when its done... but it barely actually toasts the bread. Or you buy a toaster that takes practically no space and works super fast, but also always chars your bread a bit. These are not good toasters.
Sure. But that is a different discussion.
The initial topic is about why the hell one would call that function/process an AI when it is clearly not ever intended to be one.
It's machine learning, which is sort of an intelligent behaviour. The other thing is that neural networks are, at least in origin, based on mimicking the human brain - and what else do you call an artificial brain? Also people like calling it AI. I don't know anyone in the field who actually calls it anything other than machine learning, though.
Post by: feelotraveller on December 21, 2019, 11:38:06 am
The purpose of game AI is to be fun to play against.
Yep, that's the line people like Soren Johnson have been running with for decades, and I wouldn't disagree at a macro level. But there are different kinds of fun - someone like wierd wants a challenge and presumably that involves getting feedback which changes as the 'AI' learns, whereas a bunch of spotty teenages just want something to repeatedly wipe their boots on that lets them get consistent 'success' by repeating the same thing over and over again. Guess who the market (generally) caters for?
Quote
It's machine learning, which is sort of an intelligent behaviour. The other thing is that neural networks are, at least in origin, based on mimicking the human brain - and what else do you call an artificial brain? Also people like calling it AI. I don't know anyone in the field who actually calls it anything other than machine learning, though.
Again I largely agree - although with a large dose of reserve, what chatbot (even) is actually credible today? - the ability to learn is generally thought to be a prerequisite for (or mark of) intelligence. My point was that just about no game AI "even aspires to such lofty heights" but rather generally involves a set of unchangeable predefined triggers without any capability for learning.
Now AI toothbrushes on the other hand... :P
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on December 21, 2019, 11:47:00 am
Post by: Arx on December 21, 2019, 02:08:34 pm
Reelya-style edit:
The purpose of game AI is to be fun to play against.
Yep, that's the line people like Soren Johnson have been running with for decades, and I wouldn't disagree at a macro level. But there are different kinds of fun - someone like wierd wants a challenge and presumably that involves getting feedback which changes as the 'AI' learns, whereas a bunch of spotty teenages just want something to repeatedly wipe their boots on that lets them get consistent 'success' by repeating the same thing over and over again. Guess who the market (generally) caters for?
I agree with you, but I don't think it negates my point - I have no problem with an AI cheating to bring itself up to be able to compete with a player, and I don't think it casts the skill component of the game into question at all.
As for compstomps vs. challenge, that's what difficulty settings should be for, provided you're in a context where those are relevant. I just don't think it inherently torpedoes the game's credibility if increasing the difficulty gives the AI, say, a resource handicap, as long as it's executed in a way that doesn't make playing against the AI blatantly unfun or unlike playing against a human.
Post by: Max™ on December 21, 2019, 02:35:43 pm
Post by: Egan_BW on December 21, 2019, 02:48:50 pm
I agree with you, but I don't think it negates my point - I have no problem with an AI cheating to bring itself up to be able to compete with a player, and I don't think it casts the skill component of the game into question at all.It annoys my inner roleplayer when AI players work differently for the sole reason of not being the player. Strategy games are more interesting to me as simulations than as challenges. And if the player and their opponant are the same except the opposition gets an arbitrary boost, it feels as if the simulation's integrity is compromised.
As for compstomps vs. challenge, that's what difficulty settings should be for, provided you're in a context where those are relevant. I just don't think it inherently torpedoes the game's credibility if increasing the difficulty gives the AI, say, a resource handicap, as long as it's executed in a way that doesn't make playing against the AI blatantly unfun or unlike playing against a human.
Then, I say this as someone who has never really gotten into strategy games.
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 02:58:02 pm
The AI for a strategy game, should permit the player to use--- Strategy.
Strategy is more than just "Oh, I will abuse this set of mechanics to zerg rush and shit." It is "Surprise fucker, i'm not where you thought I was" too.
Omniscient AI completely torpedoes this latter kind of play. AI that spontaneously generates units just outside the FoW likewise is bogus. Similar story for AI that does not obey resource rules or cooldowns, because cutting supply access is a valid strategy for defeating an otherwise superior enemy through attrition.
See where i am getting here? When your ai cheats like a mofo, you lose the right to call it at STRATEGY game.
Post by: Arx on December 21, 2019, 03:01:34 pm
It annoys my inner roleplayer when AI players work differently for the sole reason of not being the player. Strategy games are more interesting to me as simulations than as challenges. And if the player and their opponant are the same except the opposition gets an arbitrary boost, it feels as if the simulation's integrity is compromised.
Then, I say this as someone who has never really gotten into strategy games.
I'm a hardcore competitive RTS player (am I good? Questionable), and have friends who are the opposite - completely casual. In the former case, either the AI has to be good enough to compete with you (hella difficult for the average game studio to pull off without cheats), or single player is only good for practicing build orders (basically true of all current competitive RTS). In the latter case, the game is more about having some fun without having to go full tryhard, and the computer playing like a human isn't that important 'cause it's just about having fun.
The real issue is that the player and their opponent are fundamentally not the same. Sadly, the game is rigged from the start, and we can't have nice things.
You guys are missing my real point--
The AI for a strategy game, should permit the player to use--- Strategy.
Strategy is more than just "Oh, I will abuse this set of mechanics to zerg rush and shit." It is "Surprise fucker, i'm not where you thought I was" too.
Omniscient AI completely torpedoes this latter kind of play. AI that spontaneously generates units just outside the FoW likewise is bogus. Similar story for AI that does not obey resource rules or cooldowns, because cutting supply access is a valid strategy for defeating an otherwise superior enemy through attrition.
See where i am getting here? When your ai cheats like a mofo, you lose the right to call it at STRATEGY game.
"If the AI is blatantly unrealistic, if feels blatantly unrealistic to play against."
Yep, I never contested that. It's pretty obvious. That's why my comment was the AI must be fun, and cheating does not preclude fun. It can ruin it, but its mere presence isn't enough to do so.
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 03:09:28 pm
Whatever game that is, it is NOT chess, and that is NOT a valid strategy.
Post by: Arx on December 21, 2019, 03:21:13 pm
Post by: Max™ on December 21, 2019, 03:29:08 pm
Sorry guys, I'm not very good at python I guess.
Post by: Reelya on December 21, 2019, 05:21:14 pm
You're entitled to that opinion and I cannot dissuade you from it, but unfortunately the reality is that every shipped RTS AI will disappoint you, then. AlphaStar is the only AI I can think of that can actually play an RTS properly, because the problem is simply too complex for dev studios to solve within budget.
Pretty much this. All those broken promises from studios weren't just them hyping up non-existent tech. It was hubris from super smart programmers going "good AI, how hard can it be?" and thinking they're going to brew up some batch of "magic sauce" within budget that's going to totally play this game without needing kludges. Anyone saying "just put good AI in, how hard could it be to balance that, just vary the level of resources the AI has" is offering you Peter Molyneux level bullshit.
Post by: wierd on December 21, 2019, 05:42:21 pm
I would be happy with a simple algorithm if it simply had properly restricted inputs that better represent what is available to a player, and not an omniscient computer-- and obeys actual game rules. (Resource costs, build times, and cooldowns.)
The actual HOW it decides where to move, as long as it is not "Move mass of units to player base location" in nature-- and instead, "Triangulate base location from vectors of enemy unit travel as they enter my visual space"-- is moot. Use whatever algorithm you want. It need not be NN or a GAN, or anything fancy like that.
Just don't fucking cheat, and dont pretend that the game is even remotely about skill if you do.
EG, I am just fine with something that operates on branch tables, and is in no way a modern flavor AI. It just needs to follow the game's rules, and I will be OK with it.
The problem, is that for varying levels of "Buuuuuuuuuuuuut!" from developers, they RELY on the computer being omniscient to do ordinary things, like find paths. Make it obey FoW, and suddenly the computer can't even get out of its own base.
Rather than fix this, they just go "Oh, the player will never notice!"
Bullshit. I notice.
Like I said, the genre is STRATEGY.
When simple strategies, like base relocation, DO NOT WORK AS EXPECTED, and where decoy operations are likewise ineffective, 100% of the time, the laziness of the developers to properly limit their pathing routines to obey FoW results in entire classes of strategic combat being impossible, because "buuuuuuuuuut!" and it becomes painfully fucking obvious.
"Make it cheat!!" is poison fruit. Like I said, once you decide that the rules don't apply anymore for your computer player, you aren't playing the stated game anymore.
Post by: Trekkin on December 22, 2019, 03:55:15 pm
Rather than fix this, they just go "Oh, the player will never notice!"
Bullshit. I notice.
They know perfectly well you'll notice. They have just (correctly) determined that there are more profitable ends to which to devote their development resources. Once the AI can satisfy casual players by setting up units for them to knock down, it's good enough for one large fraction of their player base, and the other large fraction ultimately wants to play against humans anyway. Sure, they could chase some vaporware ideal of "good AI," but they could also spend that programmer time making the engine run more efficiently or across a wider range of hardware and make the game more widely accessible -- and what is more, even if they don't have time to make it perfect, every incremental improvement in efficiency is ultimately helpful. A wonderful AI that will be ready a day after the deadline is not. The former is therefore a safer bet.
Sure, they could completely restructure their development process to make that not true, and if you think they "should" do that, you know how to prove it. In the absence of that proof, though, the existing process does make games that sell infinitely better than vaporware.
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on December 28, 2019, 05:18:11 pm
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 28, 2019, 06:50:16 pm
Not sure such an enumeration of hypotheses as in that video is actually of any use to anyone who isn't already in the know, though.
Post by: Trekkin on December 28, 2019, 09:51:35 pm
I kinda like Sabine's outreach efforts, especially her 'talk to a physicist' service - which, to me, seems like one of the better ways to deal with wannabe Einsteins peddling their pet theories.
That depends what you mean by "better", though, especially in the current post-information age. Scientists' training in communication still assumes an attentive audience. It's great for meeting with collaborators, but not suitable for dealing with political trolls, cranks, and general lunatics, which together comprised the vast majority of the people who I interacted with during graduate outreach -- during which time, of course, I was not doing science.
I think that, as we transition to an audience more fundamentally opposed to the idea of objective reality and the gap between public knowledge and the cutting edge widens, scientific communication skills will become far less important than crowd control, and we can relatively easily brief people trained in that sort of pedagogy on an overview of our work.
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 29, 2019, 05:43:55 am
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This forces the crank to re-evaluate what they have created, what they want to ask, what they really know, what is the gap in the knowledge they're trying to bridge, and whether the whole endeavour is really worth it. All before they even actually talk to the physicist.
Admittedly, my working definition of 'better outreach' in this case is 'successful in discouraging people from becoming crackpots'. So this is seldom about really teaching the science to the public, as it is about pruning the false impressions of what the science is, so that they don't macerate and spread as readily.
Post by: Egan_BW on December 29, 2019, 07:10:45 am
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This assumes that people strive to spend their money effectively, which they do not.
Post by: Trekkin on December 29, 2019, 07:48:42 am
Have you looked into what the service comprises, though? It's, iirc, $50 per 20 minutes of full attention, one-on-one talk, or something along those lines.
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This forces the crank to re-evaluate what they have created, what they want to ask, what they really know, what is the gap in the knowledge they're trying to bridge, and whether the whole endeavour is really worth it. All before they even actually talk to the physicist.
Admittedly, my working definition of 'better outreach' in this case is 'successful in discouraging people from becoming crackpots'. So this is seldom about really teaching the science to the public, as it is about pruning the false impressions of what the science is, so that they don't macerate and spread as readily.
Yes, and the cost will help weed out some of the lazier trolls -- although, as the comments on her blog post announcing the service illustrate, some of them will just find the nearest free soapbox and whine about it.
My worry from an anti-crackpot standpoint is more one of triage, though. To be sure, some people will be spurred by the cost to rationally examine their theory and recognize it as aphysical, and maybe they need to be induced to do that in this way. But there are also people who arrive at unscientific ends by unscientific means, and I suspect their internal vetting process is to ask themselves whether they still think they are very smart and therefore everything they believe is true -- and then to also not bother actually talking to a physicist, more convinced they're right and more entrenched in their wrongness than ever. So now we have to ask whether those who are wrong for the right reasons and may be helped along will outnumber those who are wrong for the wrong reasons and will only be emboldened.
I think the latter are more common largely because modern American conspiracy theories and related follies are thick with them. At the root of Hammonism is the idea that Ken Ham thinks antediluvians fed Christians to dinosaurs before Noah built a floating wave-powered flush toilet and he's real smart so you should too. The Hovind Theory is little more than an excuse for Kent Hovind to pretend he has a real doctorate. Flat Earthers all cluster around their favored purveyor of well-gee-sure-looks-flat-to-me zetetic nonsense and rant about how everyone else is a CIA plant. Timecube was, by word count, mostly rants about how everyone but Gene Ray was educated stupid. Even the Dean Drive and the polywell fusor have little cults around them, and mewing runs mostly on the story that the Mews are persecuted orthodontic geniuses rather than dangerous crackpots. On the low end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorist Youtube is rife with these sorts of personal blogs about how persecuted they are by being asked to substantiate their nonsense, and the forum equivalent is about as rampant. I don't do social media, but what other people have shown me is along the same lines: as conspiracy theorists develop, they approach 100% conspiracy and 0% theory, because the point is to feel like they know something despite all evidence to the contrary.
This service is tantamount to an offer to put up or shut up. Some of them will try to do the former and realize they should really do the latter, sure, but we already select against crackpots willing and able to do either. The majority of loons who last long enough to spread their nonsense have already developed a defense mechanism against ever having to do either, so all this will do is motivate them to get out ahead of it.
If you want to prune false understandings of what science is, I think engaging with their purveyors is already taking the wrong tack. Detailed explanations of how bad science is bad are boring. Inviting people to come point and laugh at these stupid assholes who believe wrong things and are bad is sinking to their level, yes, but that's the level on which all of society operates now anyway, and it does have the advantage of being more engaging.
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 29, 2019, 09:12:08 am
If you want to prune false understandings of what science is, I think engaging with their purveyors is already taking the wrong tack. Detailed explanations of how bad science is bad are boring. Inviting people to come point and laugh at these stupid assholes who believe wrong things and are bad is sinking to their level, yes, but that's the level on which all of society operates now anyway, and it does have the advantage of being more engaging.I think yours is a too polarised a view. If there were only two kinds of people in the world - the sensible ones and the hardcore crackpots - then I'd be inclined to make a resigned sigh and agree that we might just as well give up and at least try to derive some fun from the situation.
But people don't become crackpots overnight. It's the repeated reinforcement of bad ideas and the skewed world view that hardens them against reason. Constant ridicule seems like a certain way to push them into the sweet embrace of cranky echo chambers.
So I think it's worth engaging in good faith those who are yet only at risk of sliding down the crank ramp. The format of the service ensures that most anyone who is already certain that the cabal of ivory tower scientists is out to get them won't even bother, while those who are still trying to understand how things work will make a valiant effort to sort their beliefs out before they spend the money. And when they do, they won't dismiss what was told outright, since it'd be admitting to wasting money.
I don't claim to know what is the best approach, really. However (for what it's worth), for some years now I've been hanging around in one of the sciency forums with strong moderation, and while I've seen a fair share of die-hard attention-seeking crackpots receiving banhammer treatment, there's just as many genuinely curious but confused people who get told off in brusque manner, which puts them in a defensive mindset and paints an unwelcoming picture of the scientific community. It's throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. I just don't see how it helps anyone.
Post by: Max™ on December 29, 2019, 01:36:52 pm
I've seen these dudes make tinker-toy models and photograph them to demonstrate their point supposedly.
After a while I had to start repeating to myself: comfortable beliefs are not dislodged by uncomfortable facts.
Post by: Trekkin on December 29, 2019, 01:51:33 pm
I don't claim to know what is the best approach, really. However (for what it's worth), for some years now I've been hanging around in one of the sciency forums with strong moderation, and while I've seen a fair share of die-hard attention-seeking crackpots receiving banhammer treatment, there's just as many genuinely curious but confused people who get told off in brusque manner, which puts them in a defensive mindset and paints an unwelcoming picture of the scientific community. It's throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. I just don't see how it helps anyone.
Oh, I'm not saying to mock otherwise harmless members of the general public just for believing unscientific things. As a strategy, going after the arch-wackos, the professionals, with as much memeable vitriol as we can muster may help people understand emotionally what they probably can't yet appreciate logically.
See, I think that more crackpots are salvageable than we can presently try to help, because we assume an order of events in the progression to crackpottery that is far from universal. I think we tacitly assume that people start believing untrue things and then willingly distort and dismantle their own bullshit filter in order to ignore the problems with their ideas, but the opposite process -- starting with a broken filter and then accruing appealing nonsense they failed to reject -- better explains both crank magnetism and how some scientists can also believe patently untrue things in something other than a literal sense without starting that slide into spouting unscientific nonsense and generally being useless. When I've asked my colleagues about it, they generally refer to some variant of non-overlapping magisteria.
So, if we work off the idea that crackpots are, at their core, people who can't recognize nonsense, then trying to bring them back through calm and patient explanation of the facts is tantamount to trying to reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into. I don't think that can work. Faulty logic can be identified and fixed, to be sure, and you're right that we're often more hostile than we should be to people who are honestly wrong, but I think that once someone chooses to believe things based on how they feel about them, they have too ready a way to just ignore all efforts to point out how dysfunctional that is. They are, in a fundamental sense, lost to science. We need another way to bring them back before we can do anything else, particularly since that kind of broken filter rapidly metastasizes into identifying as an expert based on little more than their own desire to be taken seriously without anyone having any reason to do so.
I think ridicule can be that path back. Some of the people on the slide to crackpottery might want to jump off if we shine a light on the giant pool of bullshit at the bottom, so to speak, as well as the very vocal people currently neck-deep in it. If we want to put the imprimatur of actual scientists on anything in order to damp down crackpottery, I think we can more effectively do that by pointing out the ridiculous in whatever way is most memorable and leave patient dissection of the merely wrong to those with the pedagogical expertise to do so effectively, particularly since most of that wrongness is on an elementary level.
Post by: wierd on December 29, 2019, 01:55:19 pm
They are in people trained to accept empirical results.
The issue, is that most people are given messages (either by friends, family, or the mainstream media, as may be) that they are entitled to their own facts, or worse, that personal opinions are more important than objectively real phenomena, outcomes, or events.
Take for instance, the current issue with Trump. We have some pretty damning evidence that he misused his office in a criminal matter, the prescribed remedy for which is removal from office via impeachment. Rather than go "Oh, our guy really did do something bad for our country that cannot be excused", the Trumpists instead grip harder to their (alarming and absurd) views that the media is "Out to get Trump", and that "He did nothing wrong", or worse, that "his behavior is how you get stuff done in international politics", etc...
Training people that "No, your senses, and as a consequence, what you perceive (and thus what you view with comfort) are fallible. Being able to identify when your senses have failed you, and knowing how to test for that occurrence, will let you know what is truly real. There are some well tried practices for that-- They are used by scientists all the time for this very reason, and you can use them too." is not very popular. This is because the basic message "No, what you experience can in fact be wrong." is not well tolerated, especially by the more emotionally minded. Emotions are illogical and irrational things; Being guarded in your decisions, especially based on faulty sensors, is a thing that requires strong rational thought to underpin. People have to be comfortable with self-doubt before they can easily accept an uncomfortable fact. With the emphasis these days on "Self Esteem! YAY!" in the media, which often gives some dangerous messages, which reinforce emotionally based decision making (and thus less rational thought, and more automatic behaviors, as long as they make people feel confident and self-assured), this is getting to be in vastly short supply in the general population. The cultural emphasis is not on "Being the best person you can be" (where "best person" is aligned individually to that individual's interests and persona, as they relate to a shared, and objective reality and its consequences), but instead on "Being happy" and "Self-confident."
I don't think I need to mention dunning-kreuger as more than just this one liner, but maybe I should: As self-confidence goes up, typically-- competence goes down. This is because there is less self-doubt driving the seeking of that shared objective reality and its consequences, and more of the "It feels right to me" based decision making.
At some point, society has to answer a very prickly question. At what point is it justified, and even essential, to stomp on a person's emotionally based view of the world, and bring them kicking and screaming into the harsher, objective shared reality?
We are at that kind of point now with Climate Change. When is the common survival of the planet and its remaining lifeforms more important than the "feels" of the majority of the human population?
I think that when we reach that point, the media will have no choice but to alter its message, and then people in general will be less prone to crackpot bullshit, because the educational message will have changed along with the status quo.
Post by: Il Palazzo on December 29, 2019, 02:57:57 pm
I think ridicule can be that path back.But have you seen this actually work, in practice? From all I've been able to experience so far, it just devolves into rabid name-calling and entrenchment.
I certainly agree, btw, that crackpottery can have something to do with inherently faulty epistemological toolbox rather than just its gradual erosion over time. But then again, it's probably most likely that it's a bit of both.
Post by: Max™ on December 29, 2019, 03:05:52 pm
I don't think it is likely to happen tomorrow, or the next day, and so forth. As someone who values honest doubt and would rather accept a usefully true statement with caveats... it would be easier to just ignore that I can't prove a vast number of the many assumptions I make about the world around me, and pretend the asterisks I append to every fact-like thing I seem to know aren't there.
It's easier to walk around on a flat surface of belief than it is to juggle torches on a tightrope while riding a unicycle made of doubt, and at the end of the day I'm not gonna get many people to join me up here, there are goats and pigs over at the petting zoo tent!
Post by: Trekkin on December 29, 2019, 05:09:56 pm
I think ridicule can be that path back.But have you seen this actually work, in practice? From all I've been able to experience so far, it just devolves into rabid name-calling and entrenchment.
I certainly agree, btw, that crackpottery can have something to do with inherently faulty epistemological toolbox rather than just its gradual erosion over time. But then again, it's probably most likely that it's a bit of both.
Well, since we're aiming to convince third-party observers anyway, I'd argue that seeing it appear to work would be evidence it's failed; we want people watching to go home and think, not convert to fanatic scientism on the spot, and you're right that the target is a lost cause anyway. There have, however, been people who subsequently became vocal anti-crackpots who cite more acerbic rational (mostly atheist) Youtubers as the reason for their coming around, Paulogia being one of them. If you can stand to do it, trawling through Logicked's comments sections turns up a few more, and he's closer to what I'm thinking of than most.
If you know of a more direct way to measure gradual disengagement from comforting nonsense without it being self-reported (and loudly at that) I'm all ears.
Post by: Max™ on December 29, 2019, 10:12:47 pm
Understanding that you're allowed to explore outside the "bounds" of typical conversation or discussion so you can better appreciate the common threads which tie together reality based views could help.
Case in point: you don't have to answer a broken question, if the asking involves assumptions which don't apply to you, say so.
I have no favorite baseball team, asking me which is my favorite is therefore broken, as is the assumption that any answer to that question involves me. I don't have a zodiac sign, belief system, IQ, favorite X-box game, or preference regarding country music. Asking me which one I have doesn't mean you get to slot me into a category when I don't answer, it means you need to ask better questions, perhaps research them more beforehand.
I can't say for sure that more people being comfortable with questioning things would reduce crackpottery, but teaching people how to more thoroughly question their own assumptions might by way of helping them ask better questions than "what if I'm smarter than Einstein" type bullshit.
Post by: Telgin on December 30, 2019, 11:16:05 am
Naturally, quite a lot depends on how said universe works differently from ours, but it would be a start. Things get really weird if you can do stuff like outrun gravity and electromagnetic fields (ignoring that magnetism probably doesn't exist without relativity), but it might be fun to imagine what that's like. That would be completely different from a universe where forces travel infinitely fast.
Maybe it's too much to try to imagine a realistic nonrelativistic universe that's recognizably similar to ours. I'm guessing almost all of chemistry and quantum physics would have to work so differently that it might as well be magic at that point.
Post by: Max™ on December 30, 2019, 11:18:28 am
Post by: Telgin on December 30, 2019, 11:25:12 am
Post by: Iduno on December 30, 2019, 11:29:31 am
This is arguably a bit off topic, but I've been kicking around an idea in my head for a little while now to try to write a sci-fi story that takes place in a nonrelativistic universe, and I've had a bit of trouble finding a summary of known phenomena that are caused by relativistic effects that I'd need to change or remove. Does anyone know of such a reference? Skimming the Wikipedia articles didn't really help a lot, but if it's the best there is I can go back and reread in more depth.
Naturally, quite a lot depends on how said universe works differently from ours, but it would be a start. Things get really weird if you can do stuff like outrun gravity and electromagnetic fields (ignoring that magnetism probably doesn't exist without relativity), but it might be fun to imagine what that's like. That would be completely different from a universe where forces travel infinitely fast.
Maybe it's too much to try to imagine a realistic nonrelativistic universe that's recognizably similar to ours. I'm guessing almost all of chemistry and quantum physics would have to work so differently that it might as well be magic at that point.
Probably the more you understand how those things works and impact everything else, the better your story without them will be. You also want to pretty narrowly define what exactly is different (in-story or as an introduction to the reader), so everyone knows what is the same/different and know what is and is not reasonable. For example, if you don't have covalent bonds in your story, you don't have molecules, which makes your protagonists somewhat less interesting.
Post by: Telgin on December 30, 2019, 11:39:46 am
Starting with atoms, for that matter, would covalent bonds not exist? I actually don't know. I strongly suspect the orbitals would be different at the very least, which impacts chemistry in profound ways, but for all I know relativity is fundamentally important to the idea of electrons even entering into orbitals instead of just colliding with nuclei and turning the universe into a soup of boring neutrons. And yet, would neutrons even exist? Again, for all I know, the strong force, quarks and so on are entirely different without relativity... I've heard that time dilation has important consequences on the decay rate of what I believe were charge carrying particles, which impacts the strength and range of those force fields, but this is all have remembered details from something I read a long time ago. Can't remember if it was the strong force or weak force, or something else entirely.
Hmm... that gives me thoughts to file away for future consideration - what would a universe without particle decay be like? Unrecognizable, I'm sure. Or a deterministic universe without uncertainty? Again, probably unrecognizable.
Post by: Madman198237 on December 30, 2019, 12:53:03 pm
First unite quantum mechanics to relativity and then move on to a unified theory of all physics, and we should be good to start considering how changing relativity might affect that! :P
Post by: Iduno on December 30, 2019, 02:45:41 pm
That's pretty much were I am right now: trying to figure out how much should work differently and how much can be hand waved or swept under the rug. I can deal with simple things like magnetism not existing, having no universal speed limit, mercury being a solid at room temperature and so on, but I know that pretty much everything should be different. Maybe it's possible to just say that atoms and chemistry happen to work very similarly to our universe, but it's pretty unsatisfying to say that without at least considering as many aspects as I can.
Starting with atoms, for that matter, would covalent bonds not exist? I actually don't know. I strongly suspect the orbitals would be different at the very least, which impacts chemistry in profound ways, but for all I know relativity is fundamentally important to the idea of electrons even entering into orbitals instead of just colliding with nuclei and turning the universe into a soup of boring neutrons. And yet, would neutrons even exist? Again, for all I know, the strong force, quarks and so on are entirely different without relativity... I've heard that time dilation has important consequences on the decay rate of what I believe were charge carrying particles, which impacts the strength and range of those force fields, but this is all have remembered details from something I read a long time ago. Can't remember if it was the strong force or weak force, or something else entirely.
Hmm... that gives me thoughts to file away for future consideration - what would a universe without particle decay be like? Unrecognizable, I'm sure. Or a deterministic universe without uncertainty? Again, probably unrecognizable.
You're going too complex for science fantasy, and not complex enough (or, arguably, too complex for you...or anyone with an incomplete understanding of relativity) for science fiction.
Post by: Telgin on December 30, 2019, 06:17:58 pm
This does make me curious if anyone with the needed knowledge has tried to design a recognizable universe with changes to the natural laws like this. It's probably too much work for what you get since very few would be able to appreciate it.
Post by: Trekkin on December 30, 2019, 09:42:34 pm
Yes, you're probably right about that. I'm probably best off just sticking to having no universal speed limit and calling it a day.
This does make me curious if anyone with the needed knowledge has tried to design a recognizable universe with changes to the natural laws like this. It's probably too much work for what you get since very few would be able to appreciate it.
It's also just really hard to write in a satisfying way. In a sense, it's a greatly exacerbated version of the more common problem with writing realistic space travel stories: automata are the most efficient and least exciting way to do the overwhelming majority of things in space, so if you want people to do exciting things for your audience to care about, you have to find some way to need them without overburdening the story with an explanation.
Here, I fear, you'd run a considerable risk of producing a physics textbook with a story squeezed in edgewise, because the premise has so many counterintuitive effects you'd spend ages explaining them. Plus which, as you say, most of your audience won't recognize you've changed anything anyway. EDIT: And of the rest, the majority will be deeply and fundamentally unhappy little pissants who will gleefully assume you don't understand physics, rather than deliberately departing from it, and do little but make snide "corrections" on that basis.
Post by: Eric Blank on January 03, 2020, 03:58:30 pm
https://youtu.be/A0__v5nMGaI
https://youtu.be/B8dl_CuwQhk
Very wiggly, much rhythmic pulsation. Such reproduction. Wow.
Post by: Kagus on January 03, 2020, 05:02:10 pm
And I just think that that's pretty fucking rad.
Post by: Sanctume on January 03, 2020, 05:22:03 pm
The donor is from a non-relation.
Son said majority of his DNA is from donor, except the lining of his guts.
He is doing well, thankfully, and will resume 2nd year of his college.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on January 03, 2020, 09:30:35 pm
Quote
Son said majority of his DNA is from donor, except the lining of his guts.Well it doesn't actually work like that, but I assume he means he has a complete donor chimera, which is a good thing.
Post by: Arx on January 04, 2020, 12:00:05 pm
Post by: wierd on January 09, 2020, 03:27:53 pm
The boomers might be able to live forever...
Post by: Telgin on January 09, 2020, 03:32:55 pm
I'm still hopeful though. I'd be surprised if it doesn't have any benefits for humans, but I'd be surprised if the effects are as pronounced or if there's a way to treat people short of gene edits in embryos.
Post by: Kagus on January 09, 2020, 03:53:22 pm
Post by: Jimmy on January 16, 2020, 05:33:06 am
"It has become almost a paradigm that the once fantastic graphene for electrocatalysis is not so fantastic anymore and that we need to add something to it to make it great again."
Also, they actually used crap in their demonstration of the truth of their position. Bravo, good sirs and/or madams.
Post by: Reelya on January 16, 2020, 07:03:56 am
Yes, you're probably right about that. I'm probably best off just sticking to having no universal speed limit and calling it a day.
This does make me curious if anyone with the needed knowledge has tried to design a recognizable universe with changes to the natural laws like this. It's probably too much work for what you get since very few would be able to appreciate it.
I recommend an anthology book: Barrington Bailey: The Knights of the Limits. It's a series of short stories of which many are about universes with very different assumptions about physics than ours. It'd be a good place to start for some ideas about how you'd approach writing these kinds of stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knights_of_the_Limits
One way of introducing the topic in a no-speed-limit universe would be to have for example two characters discussing how their space-drive works in a space ship, and one mentions a historical scientist "Steinein" who proved that the speed of light is infinite. You can take any equation that has "c" as a component and consider the implications as c approaches infinity as a limit. For example "E=MC2" implies that in a universe with an infinite speed of light you could extract infinite energy from a finite amount of mass, and the characters in the story could discuss this "known fact", which powers their space ship. And they could discuss the implications of what a finite speed of light would mean (time dilation etc, the twins paradox, black holes) and decide that such a universe would be preposterous so could never occur.
Post by: Il Palazzo on January 16, 2020, 07:31:28 am
You can take any equation that has "c" as a component and consider the implications as c approaches infinity as a limit. For example "E=MC2" implies that in a universe with an infinite speed of light you could extract infinite energy from a finite amount of mass, and the characters in the story could discuss this "known fact", which powers their space ship.It wouldn't make sense to do that, since you wouldn't have that equation in a universe where c is not finite. You probably wouldn't have people either, come to think of it.
It's not like the equations of physics exist by themselves, like some platonic ideals. They represent something about the workings of the world. The finite speed of light pops up in Maxwell's equations, so it says something about the workings of everything involving EM interactions, from propagation of signals to chemistry. That there is a universal speed limit is also telling us something about cause and effect relationships between events in space-time, and about the evolution of the entire universe.
These are fundamental rules that make the world what it is and getting rid of them is a sure way to unmake it completely.
Post by: Telgin on January 16, 2020, 09:26:39 am
And the knock on effects become profound and too much to consider. Like, if E=MC^2 isn't true, what is the new rule? Do you just not have any mass to energy conversion? That breaks literally everything in our universe, but it's interesting to think about things like nuclear reactions no longer producing energy.
The suggestions earlier to just allow FTL travel and communications with some basic rules laid down that I follow without explaining them is the best approach. As long as things follow naturally from the deviations I lay down, that's probably as good as I can make it.
Post by: Reelya on January 16, 2020, 10:25:17 am
You can take any equation that has "c" as a component and consider the implications as c approaches infinity as a limit. For example "E=MC2" implies that in a universe with an infinite speed of light you could extract infinite energy from a finite amount of mass, and the characters in the story could discuss this "known fact", which powers their space ship.It wouldn't make sense to do that, since you wouldn't have that equation in a universe where c is not finite. You probably wouldn't have people either, come to think of it.
It's not like the equations of physics exist by themselves, like some platonic ideals. They represent something about the workings of the world. The finite speed of light pops up in Maxwell's equations, so it says something about the workings of everything involving EM interactions, from propagation of signals to chemistry. That there is a universal speed limit is also telling us something about cause and effect relationships between events in space-time, and about the evolution of the entire universe.
These are fundamental rules that make the world what it is and getting rid of them is a sure way to unmake it completely.
I actually did think of that, but remember that Special Relativity was completely developed as a thought-experiment. The equations come out of the assumptions. Someone in a universe where it's wrong could still do the thought experiment and come up with the equations. So, you get E=MC2 if you assume a finite speed of light that's invariant. Someone in the story could laugh at whoever came up with that idea that's completely wrong in their universe, but correct in ours. For example, their version of Maxwell's equations could have proven that the speed of light is invariant in all frames of reference, and their version of Einstein could have worked out Special Relativity from that. But then the scientific debate would have been whether the speed of light is infinite (instantaneous) or finite, with the consequences that the equation E=MC2, which is true in both universes implies you can build perpetual motion machines or somesuch in their universe. That aspect of the story could revolve around them discussing that since the speed of light was first proven to be invariant then naturally it all made sense when it was found to be infinite, and how silly the universe would be if the "finite speed of light, yet somehow invariant to all observers" people had their way. I mean, it wouldn't be hard to write a non-relativity universe story where they say the same thing you are saying, and say that a universe where relativity is true is to silly for words and how could any living beings possibly live in a universe where time and space were so distorted.
Post by: Magistrum on January 16, 2020, 04:26:17 pm
Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect? (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184)
"It has become almost a paradigm that the once fantastic graphene for electrocatalysis is not so fantastic anymore and that we need to add something to it to make it great again."
Also, they actually used crap in their demonstration of the truth of their position. Bravo, good sirs and/or madams.
I thought it was a joke. It works.
Post by: Iduno on January 20, 2020, 01:51:05 pm
Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect? (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184)
"It has become almost a paradigm that the once fantastic graphene for electrocatalysis is not so fantastic anymore and that we need to add something to it to make it great again."
Also, they actually used crap in their demonstration of the truth of their position. Bravo, good sirs and/or madams.
I thought it was a joke. It works.
It is grade A trolling, and I love it.
Post by: Reelya on March 07, 2020, 08:09:24 am
"Paper that claimed the Sun caused global warming gets retracted"
Boiling this down, the paper claimed the sub wobbles around due to the gravitational effect of the major planets, and this would cause it to be either further or closer from Earth, and that supposedly accounts for all the global warming.
But then other physicists noted that the Earth also wobbles around due to the same gravitational sources, and they showed, with detailed simulations, how that completely neutralized the so-called effect. The paper's author then responded:
Quote
“Oh dear, You suggest that the Earth does follow in its orbit this solar inertial motion? And its orbit is not stable? You have to have a very vivid imagination assuming that the Earth moves like a drunken men...[sic]”
So, author publishes a "The Sun is wobbly" theory, and others point that the Earth's motion is also wobbly, and she smacks them down for their fanciful "Earth is wobbly" theory.
EDIT: BTW reading the comments now, this is apparently an actual quote from the Astrophysics professor who authored said paper:
Quote
Currently, the sun moves closer to the Earth during summers and autumns in the Northern hemisphere. This is why we feel higher temperatures in the summers and autumns and colder one in the winter and springs. In the Southern Hemisphere the situation vice versa, of course.
Post by: Il Palazzo on March 07, 2020, 08:17:50 am
Post by: McTraveller on March 07, 2020, 02:30:40 pm
What I mean is this: when you are rolling a six-sided die, the rolling and settling "samples" the probability distribution. But if the entire universe just consists of dice - what is varying? How would the dice "evaluate" each other? So when we say "the probability of finding a particle at this location with this momentum is X" - what "die" is being rolled to determine if we see it or not?
I've tried to come up with a thought experiment and can't really think of a good one. Closest I can think of is kind of a classical analog: you have a wheel that is spinning, and on it there is a dot. The probability of the dot being in a given position is equal at all points on the circumference (assuming you don't know the time at which the spinning started). The "die" rolled is "the time the sample was taken." If that sounds too deterministic, take instead a chaotic system like a double pendulum: you can again assign probabilities of finding the pendulum at a given position, but the "die" is "when" you take it.
So what is the "die" that is rolled when we are taking quantum measurements, from which the probability is sampled?
Post by: Trekkin on March 07, 2020, 03:27:41 pm
From time to time I ponder quantum mechanics. The one thing I can't wrap my head around is - what "evaluates" the probabilities of wavefunctions? Or perhaps phrased differently, in what space is the probability distributed?
The measurement problem is outstanding, and closely related to the other outstanding problem of whether those probabilities are fundamental or just descriptors of a deterministic system.
Post by: Ziusudra on March 07, 2020, 03:59:22 pm
The "die" rolled is "the time the sample was taken." If that sounds too deterministic, take instead a chaotic system like a double pendulum: you can again assign probabilities of finding the pendulum at a given position, but the "die" is "when" you take it.This reminds me of how in software a pRNG is usually "randomized" using at least part of the current time.
I don't think we're in a simulation, but it sure is easy to use the idea as explanations for so many real world questions.
Post by: Telgin on March 07, 2020, 10:12:17 pm
From time to time I ponder quantum mechanics. The one thing I can't wrap my head around is - what "evaluates" the probabilities of wavefunctions? Or perhaps phrased differently, in what space is the probability distributed?
The measurement problem is outstanding, and closely related to the other outstanding problem of whether those probabilities are fundamental or just descriptors of a deterministic system.
And scientists have pretty good reason to believe it's not a hidden deterministic system at this point, since based on my understanding having a deterministic system with hidden variables would imply FTL signaling for some reason.
Post by: Reelya on March 07, 2020, 10:20:42 pm
First, this doesn't prove there aren't local hidden variables that we haven't measured, they just can't explain the specific observations that Bell's Theorem looks at. Second, it doesn't exclude non-local hidden variables that could explain everything deterministically. What seems random to us may be interacting with trillions of other particles that caused it to act like that, and we can't take account of that.
Post by: Iduno on March 10, 2020, 03:45:35 pm
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on March 10, 2020, 03:50:01 pm
Once again the plastic-heavy portfolio pays off for the sober investor! (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2020/03/09/mysterious-worms-eat-plastic-and-poop-alcohol/#535fd2e379e0)that’s cool
Post by: wierd on August 07, 2020, 02:34:16 am
https://newatlas.com/physics/spacetime-wave-packets-laser-light-refraction/
I am tired, and not thinking clearly; Take this with a massive grain of salt--- But if the excitation packet moves irrespective of any matter in the path, that means it could be used very creatively. If such event can be created synthetically in a lab, then conditions that would produce them must happen in nature as well. Creating a dual detector, one that captures these raw space-time wave packets, and one that captures normal light wave packets, could enable a vastly more comprehensive means of measuring intervening gas densities, as well as measuring differences in local spacetime geometry (since the wave packets specified do not always take the shortest possible path).
A very interesting sensor could be made using this.
Post by: Eric Blank on August 07, 2020, 03:10:24 pm
Post by: wierd on September 26, 2020, 02:04:36 am
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-faint-principles-quantum-physics.html
Basically, they use wave-cancellation with wave prediction, to catch the "error" from the prediction, vs the weak signal source they are working with, and thus determine when the signal source has shifted to send data, even when the total number of photons is very very low.
This led to an idea in my head:
A number of years ago, another team demonstrated an "over unity" (ahem) LED. In reality, it was an LED held JUST under the bandgap energy, so that thermal excitations were able to effectively contribute to the photon emission of the LED. That thermal energy was consumed in the process, and was added to the energy of the resulting photons, allowing the LED to emit more energy as photons than was driven into it as electricity-- thus "over unity". I mention this work because--
Instead of using heat, you reduce the energy supplied to the LED so that it requires slightly more than what thermal noise introduces. (since we dont want noise.) Instead, an additional (very weak) voltage is supplied via a classical antenna and ground loop to replace that source of energy. This picks up weak signals, and converts it into a light stream with very low numbers of photons-- exactly what this work uses, (and demonstrates how to tease a useful signal from.)
I think this could be used (since LEDs are always a fixed energy frequency, and thus easily processed this way as an input source) to enable radio frequency, or even highly attenuated electrical signals to be enhanced with the same concept.
Post by: Reelya on September 26, 2020, 05:56:41 am
https://www.wired.com/story/are-radioactive-diamond-batteries-a-cure-for-nuclear-waste/
Post by: wierd on September 26, 2020, 06:21:08 am
The idea gets rehashed every so often it seems, but it has been looked into already. There's a reason people aren't making C-14 diamond battery wafers.
Post by: delphonso on October 05, 2020, 10:07:15 am
Post by: Starver on October 05, 2020, 10:47:20 am
Yes, that's a time-travel joke. And I will not apologise.
Post by: wierd on October 05, 2020, 10:54:35 am
Rather, it means that while you might create the time machine to go back in time to assasinate baby hitler, your attempt will always fail, your presence in the past was really your own timeline's history after all, etc..
Thus, there is never a condition where you succeed in killing hitler, and thus lose the impetus to create the time machine in the first place. That paradox is prevented, because you cannot succeed in your stated goal.
Post by: Starver on October 05, 2020, 11:27:37 am
(My post was a post-facto joke, ICYMI.)
It's always been the sanest[1] theory, to me, that for anything you go back and do you had already came back and done.
Unless the sum-total of mass and energy in the universe (including the negative bits) is zero, in which case there's nothing to stop whole-reality branching to pick up any changes due to interference. (But also nothing stopping any branching on every single quantum 'decision' ever made, so doesn't even need time-travel to end up with no Hitler, or possibly twin-Hitlers.)
[1] Which doesn't guarantee it's the most correct.
Post by: McTraveller on October 05, 2020, 11:38:37 am
I mean to go back to Earth in 1945, which is 75 years ago, you have to travel roughly 2 x 105 m/s (speed of sun around galactic center) x 7.5x101 years x 3.1 x 107 seconds/year or about 4.6 x 1014 meters.
Post by: delphonso on October 05, 2020, 05:57:57 pm
No, some guy just gave some math proofs that causality is not necessarily violated by time travel.
This is what I came here for. Thanks wierd.
Basing this more on fiction than anything (but at this point, what's the difference) I prefer the "always was" type of time travel - Kyle Reese goes back in time to protect John Connor('s mother) but becomes his dad in the process. Who was the original father? Doesn't matter, that has been changed and not it always was that Reese was his father.
Don't forget, if you want to time travel, you also need to space-travel.
I mean to go back to Earth in 1945, which is 75 years ago, you have to travel roughly 2 x 105 m/s (speed of sun around galactic center) x 7.5x101 years x 3.1 x 107 seconds/year or about 4.6 x 1014 meters.
I have yet to see any fiction deal with this adequately. I suppose if we have that sort of travel capability, we would more likely explore the stars rather than go back and get revenge on history's greatest monsters.
Post by: ZBridges on October 05, 2020, 06:09:59 pm
Don't forget, if you want to time travel, you also need to space-travel.
I mean to go back to Earth in 1945, which is 75 years ago, you have to travel roughly 2 x 105 m/s (speed of sun around galactic center) x 7.5x101 years x 3.1 x 107 seconds/year or about 4.6 x 1014 meters.
Can gravitational fields also allow for time travel, since time dilation can occur through two objects' different velocities relative to each other, and also through two objects' gravitational differences relative to each other?
Post by: wierd on October 05, 2020, 06:11:25 pm
Post by: ZBridges on October 05, 2020, 06:16:51 pm
Post by: wierd on October 05, 2020, 06:34:10 pm
Post by: Eric Blank on October 05, 2020, 06:36:47 pm
Maybe time travellers did assassinate Hitler, but the alternative turned out to be worse.
Post by: Starver on October 05, 2020, 07:56:07 pm
Basing this more on fiction than anything (but at this point, what's the difference) I prefer the "always was" type of time travel - Kyle Reese goes back in time to protect John Connor('s mother) but becomes his dad in the process. Who was the original father? Doesn't matter, that has been changed and not it always was that Reese was his father.T1 indeed heavily implies that meta-time is static, in its universe, that it was a self-serving timeloop with no evitability (though Reese is apparently not made aware of this; possibly him being fully aware would not support the closed curve the cosmos needs, so from among all candidate cosmii the 'solvable' one we see here is one where he is not told, even though clearly John found out ahead of (future) time). See also Twelve Monkeys. And, interestingly, Bill & Ted.
T2/T3 seems to suggest mutability of the future. Though if you assume 'dishonest' (or, rather, deliberately misinformed) future knowledge brought back to the present day, the 'avoided' future could be a fiction the true future individuals (human and otherwise) knew were part of the mix of information that had to be inserted into their past. This implies the temperal-theoriticians involved knew this enough to not even try to remake their history. Even Skynet, who sent back various 'failed' missions in order to support the situation in which Skynet does not have its own perfect machine-utopia. But then maybe Skynet is just the most logical (and willing to maintain the meta-time loop) of all parties, and is actually ultimate caretaker of ensuring the cosmos ticks over the way it clearly does. There are ways of the whole movie franchise to this point to be fully self-consistent, even when some (within it) believe otherwise.
From what I recall, Sarah Connor Chronicles threw that completely out (but I didn't see the whole series[1]) by making it a pliable-timeline universe in demonstrable ways. Which conceivably (NPI) might work just as well with John's movie-origin story (i.e. less self-bootstrapping than All You Zombies (https://gist.github.com/defunkt/759182/ad44c6135d168ae54503a281bb7e1a24c6c2ea0c), but clearly informatically near-indistinguishable lineage each time round) but, as with othe Film-to-TV adaptations (e.g. Stargate) can probably be considered a different cosmos entirely with different rules in some aspects of reality.
[1] It was awkward to watch, as I recall, both when originally hoving into view and in later repeats, I kept seeing just the same half-dozen episodes over and over, and never did get around to look for tapes or torrents or whatever of the whole thing.
Quote
I have yet to see any fiction deal with [space-synchronisation across temporal movement] adequately. I suppose if we have that sort of travel capability, we would more likely explore the stars rather than go back and get revenge on history's greatest monsters.
The usual answer is just being tied to the same spacial Frame Of Reference as you propel (whichever way) through the temporal one. H.G. Wells's eponymous device sat in the same physical spot while travelling[2], so tied to the given shifting techtonic plate, upon the spinning Earth, in its orbit around the Sun, in its path around the Milky Way, in its route within the Local Cluster, as that itself travels as required by the forces in the respective supercluster(s) and also however the expansion of the universe itseld interacts with any atemporal drifting. If the Machine were not sat in a workshop but in an orbital position, or some other 'free' trajectory (even whilst still going at 1s/s existence without any special movement ±t-wise), it probably would not be tied so closely to the continuous view (for as long as possible) of the changing fashions in the shop window opposite.
Or, for those not yet ready to accept any Wellsian space-travel in that setting (or at least a derivative one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Machine)), imagine you mounted your time-steed as it sat in a train goods van (or atop a flatbed, for that extra whistling wind) and then manipulating the controls to take you along in either direction of forced time, but are you 'tied' to the carriage? Go ahead three years, and you are where the (latest towing) train has moved your 'ground' to, back three years and you'd find where it had been. Before and after its true existence as a bogied and bodied platform do you find yourself within the initial fabrication location (or where it would later be built) or the scrapyard (or what comes to be once the scrap is also removed)? It might assist tue understanding of fundemental Natural Philosophy to try such a machine upon the decking of a Ship Of Theseus, assumingbone were provided with full working warranty but absent any explanation (or sufficiently annotated manual) from the device's designer/constructor.
If not entirely a 'thing that the Universe does for you', constructed time-devices may have specific spacial-lock (or synchronisation) elements in their mysterious internals (such that, where plot has allowed but now requires it not to be, the secondary level of spacial control - that adjusts where the "autohover" facility thinks it should 'stick' to - can be made inopetable such that the user has no power to control anything other than the time movement, however much the unit has to strain to maintain 'formation' with the evolving terrain (perhaps accounting for eroding bedrock or accumulating silt, so as to at least 'ride' the geology).
Or, any attempt at (propulsive) time-travel just sets 'here' as some frame completelg dissaciated with the substrate (perhaps the 'absolute inertia', instantaneously upon departure, is extrapolated forward/backward through space with no contact or gravitational forces applying in your transitting stats, thus flinging yoy off-planet and off to where you'd end up (or have come from) in interstellar/intergalactic space if you had instead just designed an "all external matter vanishes" pod and waited/been waiting for the requisite time of freefall.
And I'd definitely say that this issue has been addressed in fiction. Maybe in a Handwavium/technobabble way tuned to suit the fiction's own conceipt (to support its intended plot), but while many works stick with the implicit "it just works", others at least pretend to construct a viable operational theory.
For non-vehicular time-transportion, like wormholes[3], the mechanism is whatever it is that 'anchors' (and/or tows) the respective wormhole-ends. Either as part of its natural evolution or in deliberate manhandling/installation by the creators/exploiters of the phenomenon.
[2] Ignoring "outside world is visible as times are passed through, but the 'travelling' machine isn't visible as passing through(/existing in, perhaps as a frozen 'shade') those times where there should be witnesses" - also in going forward and backward, in the same location, are you also co-existing with your other self(/ves) as well as the location travell8ng along 'natural' time. But Herbert George was very much new to this (then) very much new game, so we can forgive the odd question like this. ;)
[3] Not counting the vehicle you might need to use to traverse the hole, if it has no time-propulsion of its own, and is just being used to safely slide down/up the time-chute.
Post by: Starver on October 05, 2020, 08:10:59 pm
(...)restore extinct species to the future, steal an egg or a DNA sample here and there, not mess with human history.You've not read/otherwise experiemced "A Sound Of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury, then?
By removing a single member of a historic species (or the egg of one, or 'interfering' enough to get a tissue sample) you could "squish the butterfly" as effectively as actually Killing Hitler, insofar as the historic future then rolls out again.
I mean, by breathing you could cause all kinds of Butterly Effect changes (notwithstanding pre-introducing a contemporary 'common cold' into an ecosystem that should never have seen it), so even the Time Safari precautions mentioned in that story seem woefully inefficient in any mutable timeline. You have to assume enough vanishing of returns upon the ripples eminating outwards and onwards on from your point of anachronistic involvement to dampen down your 'modifications', and I can't imagine the threshold between safe and unsafe being handily at the level implied within that story.
But if it's immutable, then it matters not how massive your potential changes will be, as they're actually already part of the seeding thst leads to your eventual exhibition to exact (intejtionally or otherwise) those 'changes'.
Post by: Jimmy on October 06, 2020, 03:43:03 am
Spoiler: Time Travel (click to show/hide)
Post by: Reelya on October 09, 2020, 12:40:25 pm
(...)restore extinct species to the future, steal an egg or a DNA sample here and there, not mess with human history.You've not read/otherwise experiemced "A Sound Of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury, then?
By removing a single member of a historic species (or the egg of one, or 'interfering' enough to get a tissue sample) you could "squish the butterfly" as effectively as actually Killing Hitler, insofar as the historic future then rolls out again.
I mean, by breathing you could cause all kinds of Butterly Effect changes (notwithstanding pre-introducing a contemporary 'common cold' into an ecosystem that should never have seen it), so even the Time Safari precautions mentioned in that story seem woefully inefficient in any mutable timeline. You have to assume enough vanishing of returns upon the ripples eminating outwards and onwards on from your point of anachronistic involvement to dampen down your 'modifications', and I can't imagine the threshold between safe and unsafe being handily at the level implied within that story.
But if it's immutable, then it matters not how massive your potential changes will be, as they're actually already part of the seeding thst leads to your eventual exhibition to exact (intejtionally or otherwise) those 'changes'.
Or there's the more amusing Let's Go to Golgotha! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Go_to_Golgotha!).
In this one, time tourists are dressed to play the part and told to act accordingly at the historical events that they visit / "participate" in. I think you can guess where that's headed. They go to the trial of Jesus, they're dressed up as citizens, and told to chant "Give us Barabbas" at the right moment. All the chanters are actually time tourists.
Post by: wierd on October 09, 2020, 08:30:16 pm
Rather, you could attempt to go back in time to prevent Barabus from being freed instead of Jesus; EG, you specifically go back in time to chant to have Jesus freed instead. The issue, is that what is 'fated' for you, is that you get arrested and spend the following day in jail, and thus cannot participate in the event at all.
Or, any number of other "things go spectacularly not according to plan", ultimately preventing you from saving Jesus (and thus, preventing the removal of the impetus the future you will have to create and then use the time machine.)
The butterfly effect is dealt with, because the future you come from, is already a product of the past you interacted with. Since no TRUE outside influence has occurred, the same result gets turned out; In fact, the deal killer would be your failing to use the time machine. (because then the input to history that you provide does not occur, and thereby causing a different kind of paradox.)
People hate this kind of explanation, because it denudes the concept of agency-- that people make choices, and that those choices are imbued with magical person-ness, not definable by a system of rules that is predictable, and consistent. "The future isn't written yet!" and all that. This has implications in everything from the legal system, to how people should interact with in a social setting, to religion, and everything between. The very concept of "blame" revolves around "You made a naughty choice!!" If you in fact, are not actually CHOOSING anything, but are instead just playing out the role prescribed for you by your environment, the very concept of "Blame" becomes wholly artificial, and capricious. People don't like that, and a lot of other things, about the notion of predestiny implied by a static universe that cannot be affected or changed by human agency.
As far as I can glean from QM though, the waveform does not really care about person-ness, or any other such tripe the philosophers want to foist on it. It's just the interactions of wave events over time, and that's it. Allowing wave event data from the past to bleed into the future (and vise versa) would just make the computation more complicated, not disrupt it intimately. I would go so far as to say that if they find a way to perform time travel, and it does indeed behave the way this mathematician postulates, then it is the smoking gun that choice is a farce, and so is free will.
Post by: Starver on October 09, 2020, 11:05:44 pm
The alternative is a bistable mode that in meta-existance is seen to have one future reality create exactly the past for another future reality and vice-versa. Possibly even polystable, with n>2 exact scenarios that spawn off the |next|n scenario. But in resolving a solution with finite states that perfectly loop, in a process that works outside of the time we can experience, I imagine (without rigorous proof) that some sort of equivalent of the Collatz conjecture sequence is followed down from whatever the starting parameters are, leading to the "1" endpoint. (Yes, totally unproven that the Collatz collapses for all values, but for the analogy assume that it does. Also, it might be considered 'artificial' that it ends at 1 and doesn't loop 1->4->2->1..., which would perfectly analagise a tristable time-loop.)
The most convincing argument I've seen against time-looping is that of entropy. Information that self-supports[1] must undergo a change of entropy as time progresses around if (including the offshoot time in the strange path that progresses 'forwards' to the past). So how come it can do that like a stairfull of Escher monks or a flow of an Escheresque self-powering watermill? Fairly convincing, when thought of it that way.
But then "entropy" as an argument is given as an objection to self-organising life itself, by people forgetting that the Sun itself dumps energy into the system. So perhaps, similarly, a completely closed (in both senses of the word) loop is impossible, but by being open to (standard time) input to boost the pattern's entropy like a Shepard Tone, 'each'[2] pass.
So no problem there, then...
[1] As a more realistic 'thing that loops' than any physical McGuffin that only exists to be the thing sent back in time to be the object that makes it possible to send it back in time. Though if matter is just patterns (vibrating strings?) on the substrate of Reality then even that is just information. Depends upon the exact nature of the universe, and this whole discussion is already replete with that question!
[2] To the non-looping bits of the universe, there's only one materialisation, co-existance then dematerialisation (on its way to being materialised) of whatever-is-looping, and attempting to have a 'self-perpetuating' GoPro looping eternally must involve at least the wiping/resetting of all the data (including any built in RTC) at some point, or else be self-perpetuating always entirely full and clock-overflowed. Doesn't stop a GoPro from 'normal' times being pushed in at th future end, retrieved from the past end and then coexist alongside its own past self, so long as you only end up sending the past self (not yet looped) into the loop to become the future self (has looped). Or you can send it back in, but that'd be a second[3] re-emerging GoPro. Which you might or might not want to send to the past, but eventually the most dizzy and longest-aged version is the (only) one you refrain from relooping, because you never got it back from having done it. It's allowable that it just fell to bits due to being worn out and didn't survive the trip (except as dust clinging to the casing of its younger version(s)? ...which eventually fell off itself before it actually became that dust?), so just shoving all the things you got out of the time-tunnel straight back in isn't a thing. And your attempts to never introduce the never-looped one in are doubtless ruined when someone who came to inspect your attempt at paradoxying fumbles their GoPro into the time-tunnel, with or without you knowing.
[3] By increasing self-seniority. Nothing to stop you pushing pre-looped GoPro into the future end before you shove the virgin GoPro in, the result (already experienced) probably that the twice-looped one arrived out of the past end before the creshly cherry-broken one. Depends on the nature of the loop, of course, which is entirely theoretical as far as we're concerned.
Post by: wierd on October 10, 2020, 01:44:43 am
No universe interacts with its OWN past, but interacts with the past of one of its quantum state partners.
Universe A has outcome 1, which interact with the past of universe B, resulting in outcome 2, which interact with universe C, which results in outcome 4, which then interacts with Universe A, which results in outcome 1.
Full causality is conserved, no universes are in limbo or are destroyed. Time travel occurs.
Post by: TD1 on October 10, 2020, 03:01:01 am
Post by: delphonso on October 10, 2020, 04:04:57 am
It'd be good if we could determine that time is immutable. What happened, happens. Time travellers could then do what they want. Of course, knowing the past is immutable, setting out to kill Hitler is stupid. Because you won't succeed. And who knows what happens to stop you?
Just got a sci-fi idea where time-travel tourism relies on the immutability of the past to give every person the opportunity to go back and kill hitler. It may not change the present, but the catharsis comes back with you.
Post by: wierd on October 10, 2020, 05:28:32 am
You ARE in fact, killing Hitler, and preventing Nazi Germany. Just not in your OWN timeline. You are sparing a potentially endless series of parallel instances of earth's timeline that atrocity.
Call it Heroes of Earth.
Post by: Starver on October 10, 2020, 07:30:02 am
It'd be good if we could determine that time is immutable. What happened, happens. Time travellers could then do what they want. Of course, knowing the past is immutable, setting out to kill Hitler is stupid. Because you won't succeed. And who knows what happens to stop you?But I will succeed, or my name's not Claus von Stauffenberg!
No universe interacts with its OWN past, but interacts with the past of one of its quantum state partners.Having spent a little too long playing one of those "build a bridge with linked beams" games, recently, I'm minded of the attempt to even out all the tensions and compressions of the links to be within the limit of all those links. Do we, in polystable linking between parallel strands, spontaneously (in multiverse-time) arrive at the perfect linkage of Many World strands to convey temporal stresses through both time-true and cross-linked paths of existence, or does it 'settle', perhaps even breaking the free-end links that create stresses[1], re-anchoring them until a fully interlinked subset mutually 'supports' the combined 'cable' of realities.
Quantum-level mini-time-links (single particles vanishing from one thread's future to arrive in another's past) might be used as safety-valves, in this process. Subtly killing just the right butterflies, as it were.
But I still rail against the possibility of a Time-Traveller creating a new Many-Worlds branch, by their 'arrival' (effectively taking their own universe as of their intended arrival point, sans arrival, and duplicating it entirely but with their travelled-selves now in its inception, as well as the all the 'fake past' copied from the original universe, for them to mingle with). If we have branching universes at all, it must happen anyway (possibly as frequent as every time a photon has to decide which slit it has passed through, etc, maybe not so frequent) and our traveller's journey, starting from one strand must arrive at a receptively-similar arrival point that corresponds to their (evil-twin-time-travellers'?) equivalent attempt across in this different reality.
Though if we have reality-branching, then why not branching within the back-linking time-tunnels, too? Assuming it's not an instantaneous transit, imagine sitting in your Time-Hopper vehicle (designed to withstand the rigors of the wormhole you use) using a double-slit experiment to determine whether you will interact one way or another with the past (Barabas/Jesus/Just Laser-Cannon Everyone And Take Over In The Confusion). Or, if it's that common, just let the branching happen without explicit invocation. Each dendritically-branched tendril of wormhole 'feels' for the arrival point that is receptive to (indeed, requires) its purpose and latches on.
Obviously this is where time-travel loops start, as however many travellers set off back (with a history of prior arrivals from 'their' future) more separately arriving individuals from will arrive. Some in realities that suffer multiple incursions from the 'same' travellers (with cooperating and/or competing aims), some maybe to strands where the intervention nixes the in-universe equivalents from making the same journey (Grandfather Paradox, or just solving the issue for which the trip was ever considered a solution). So, on balance, as many travellers arrived as ever will later have departed (minus any that were sabotaged in their journey by their good/evil time-twins and found their time-tunnel travel snuffed out, during transit), but spread across all realities.
And, to take this to a logical conclusion... Everybody wants to see what the Big Bang looked like, right? Well, sufficiently non-zero numbers across every reality thread for quite a lot of them to set their coordinates to <0,0,0,0> (or maybe <undef,undef,undef,-1>). Perhaps an entire cosmos-worth of people? All arriving at basically the same rather boring singular point of space-time simultaneously with everyone else who ever decides to try it? Remember, as you travel there, pull just the right pose as you do so and maybe, just maybe, you can influence one small bit of the ripples in the Cosmic Background Radiation..!
[1] Initially (in meta-time) perhaps the link is from a strand-future to the same-strand-past, and maybe with a time/space 'wobble' of the ends to try to seek out a singly-consistent solution. If that isn't found, it then tries to cross-link to nearby parallel threads (with a similar problem in its own attempts at a parallel consistency. If that fails, further cross-links are sought out and 'teased' in the attempt to establish the ultimate zero-temporal-tension setup. Which might be easier with not just a single (per thread) attempt to tunnel through time, but multiple ones that can cross-link into other alternate realities for cross-polinated influences from other realities. (Actually, not too dissimilar from fictional tales of Bad Time Travellers Create Evil Dystopia/Good Time Travellers From Evil Distopia Also Go Back To Combat Evil TTs and 'Restore' Utopia/Their Efforts Create A New Compromise 'Topia' That Contain No Reason To Do Either/But, In A Sequel-Teaser, Naive Time Travellers From This Reality Look Like They're Going Back To Interact Unwisely...)
Post by: wierd on October 10, 2020, 08:25:37 am
This would be true for time travelers, and their reference frames, from their respective parent universes. The same mathematics that enables black holes and wormholes would apply. (The inversion of spacelike and timelike features after crossing the event horizon would still occur.)
If you are going for full scifi, just make some shit up. Say that there is a conserved hyperspace between all possible universes, and this is where black holes and wormholes open to. (this would enable all universes to have relative coordinate systems, without a true fixed coordinate system, but enable a medium by which transits can occur. The hyperspace has a switched personality between spacelike and timelike features, since it exists on the opposite side of an event horizon. Moving through what appears like space is moving through the appropriate feature of time in the intended destination, with relative "distance" from your point of arrival inside the hyperspace governing your measure of distance, and where distance traveled from origin determines the degree of time travel. (there is no fixed reference other than this origin, which is unique for each traveler)-- Since the potential "direction" you travel in is infinitely diverse, in all axes of freedom, and you MUST move from your origin to accomplish the time travel, the potential to cross your own universe's timeline is not permitted to you-- Your perception of moving forwards in time in the hyperspace provides the movement through space, and the direction of movement specifies which universe you will emerge in, once you create the necessary singularity in the hyperspace, to re-enter "A" normal space coordinate system again.)
Thus, the time traveler creates the wormhole, which has an event horizon, and a functional singularity analog. Crossing it, inverts the personalities of space and time, (but appears seamless to the traveler), as they make the crossing. These gateways are one directional; You go in, but nothing comes back out. This inverted personality "space" is the hyperspace. All potential universes share this same space. Passage of time within the hyperspace is functionally identical to movement through space in normal space conventionality. Since time is relative to your frame of reference (both in and outside the hyperspace and normal space), the orientation of your entry, the point of your origin, your momentum, and various other factors are conserved, and specify the parameters of your reference frame, and thus specify how you experience time, and or, movement. This vector of ingress determines "time's arrow", and deviation from the true vector puts you in the potential exit points of parallel universes. (since perfect reversal of vector to afford time travel backward into time is not possible, you will always emerge in a parallel universe's past.)
This would give you all kinds of fun shit straight away in your fantasy setting-- 1) FTL-- Since time is effectively traded for space-ddistance, the more time you spend in hyperspace, the greater the "distance" of your exit point is. So, if you enter hyperspace, then somehow retain your ideal vector, but slow the fuck waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down, and just barely creep forward, but spend a shitload of time there, before re-engaging the drive again, you will be transported an epic assload of distance, stay on your course vector, and return to your parent universe, with "Very little time elapsed" (because you hardly moved at all in hyperspace). EG, "FTL." 2) Effective short jump into the far future--- You do NOTHING to alter your vector, and enter at a very high "speed". You engage the drive as soon as possible. Your movement along the vector determines your degree time travel (still moving forwards, so still toward the future), and the amount of time you spend there determines your exit distance. You could thus pre-compute the vector of entry, inherit a vector in hyperspace, and have a reliable vector of re-entry, from which to compute both necessary time and space movements to have an effective time machine.
This would "more or less" agree with penrose diagrams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aId5rHdcdMl).
(Possibly better explained? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83yGeDri0ds))
Post by: Starver on October 10, 2020, 10:34:38 am
There is no universal reference frame. Only relative reference frames.If this is in response to my "setting the coordinates for <a view of the Big Bang>", I was just using that has shorthand for... Well, a view/participation of the Big Bang.
(A Big Bang... You could be aportioned to become the start of a differing BB from which you arose. Probably should be, for the same reason as the GoPro example, eventually all matter that arrived in a 'loop' from a different origin misses the trip back to (different) startup events and now lives out its existence (up to proton decay times, or whatever its in-situ fate ultimately is) happily sat not in a circular-eternal loop. -. But that does still require some 'virgin' matter from somewhere to make its first loop back, so it doesn't exactly answer more questions than it poses.)
Indeed, an 'unsustainable' attempt to time-tunnel back (one that cannot easily fit within the mesh of causalities it is aiming at finding its 'home' with - a critical juncture in Causality like the death/survival of the latest Hitler figure to concern our particular 'version' of tunnelers) might be dealt with by the meta-cosmos by just being assigned to form (part of?) the moment of Creation. Much as it is practically theorised that black-hole mass (Hawking Radiation apart) is swallowed up into a Big Bang event on the 'other side' of the singularity. As well as all the people who put in the 'absolute coordinates' (sic, also why I added 'undef' for x/y/z or theta/phi/r or whatever elements) for unwitting participation, all the 'awkward' attempts to travel find their least disruptive destination not nearly in their own strand of reality, nearly in their intended location[1] or nearly at the right time (whoops, you're eaten - as you always had been eaten - by a T-Rex, and nobody got to kill anybody's grandpa or support young Adolph's interest in painting...) but for utterly incompatible attempts to change the unchangable you get put through the blender of the origin of all time. But I'm not sure how that would be 'simpler' than just being shoved into the much more recent Late Heavy Bombardment era and suppressed into consistency by the tolls of time and immediately being pounded to fine dust by something that could easily laugh at the Dinosaur Killer one.
I nearly suggested this (safely at, or much closer to, the BB) for the "single, not-Many Worlded, self-consistent, time-loop-supporting" model, but then you hit the same questions of entropy re-ramping as I mentioned others have argued about.
((And I read the rest, just making a point about the bit I quoted. If you're inventing a fictional system, as you mention, you can do anything you want. From blasé Whovian treatment to something more akin to The Final Question - basically Big Bounce, perhaps with elements of the Lexx universe(s). But I'm seriously, but with large amounts of armchair-expertise, pondering about reality. And almost certainly missing the true mark, but it's a thought experiment!))
[1] If preservation of causality sends you 'a little way away', but far enough to be part of a completely separate time-cone (day you go back exactly one year, but are now ~4ly away in orbit around Alpha Centauri, in a way not incompatible with the system the universe has set up... And you can't go back a further year and back to Earth, but you can go forward a year and to Earth, perhaps now having been given a 'pass' on information you return with arriving two years ahead of the usual schedule... Depends on your physics you rely on, obviously.
Post by: Egan_BW on October 10, 2020, 10:53:57 am
This event was called the big bang.
Post by: McTraveller on October 10, 2020, 12:08:34 pm
There is another dimension for propagation of events in addition the the usual ones. Call it "hypertime" (in the vein of hyperspace). The rationale is that when you are time traveling "backwards" in spacetime, your own local clock is still moving forwards. So rationalize time travel by saying that you always travel forward in hypertime.
Imagine then that events in spacetime are always propagating forward in hypertime. In fact, all of spacetime history is propagating through hypertime. So if you travel in hypertime to go "back in time", when you go back you are actually traveling forward in hypertime but slow enough that the propagation of the past spacetime catches up with you. Then you modify that past. But the changes you make don't propagate through hypertime faster than the speed of light - so they do not modify the "initial" future. Instead, there is a new "future" that is propagating out from that new change, making a new future, but offset in hypertime from the original frame. So there are now two universes, both propagating forward in hypertime, but they can't influence each other.
So this means when you travel back to the future, you can travel back to either the "modified" propagation, or to the "original" propagation.
Post by: Starver on October 10, 2020, 01:33:49 pm
Multiple worlds are stacked against each other like a set of very similar playing cards. Identical (initially) but skewed by time. A "time travel" event just takes you 'sideways' to the world "500 years ago" (or "500 years in the future", but I'm not sure how they dealt with when (or where on the stack) the first world existed that invented this transit method) but that is their world, and any changes you make to them (by giving the Romans modern automotive techology, e.g.) will never be/never was a change to your own. Romans can come 'here', check any historic records of their period for 'their' immediate future (though they might be better off checking in a slice opened up to their access that's still more modern than theirs but not much more advanced) and be prepared for things that would happen. So long as it's not something that someone else's travels and travaills has caused to not happen the same.
It's just a more ordered "change a separate timeline" setup, effectively.
(I'm thinking it's a late '70s book. Or earlier, but that's when I read it. Not really the place for a YASID post, so not here asking for that. Just adding it as a solid concept to add to the list.)
Post by: McTraveller on October 12, 2020, 04:46:48 pm
What does spacetime curve through? All the examples talk about how spacetime is curved like the surface of a planet or whatever. But all those examples are surfaces embedded in some other higher-dimensional space.
So is spacetime in some other higher-dimensional construct through which it curves?
Or is it essentially the case that the extra dimension is indeed "artificial" and spacetime really does just curve "through itself"?
Or are these equivalent statements, that if spacetime is curved then there is in fact a way to treat it as in some non-curved frame?
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 04:58:57 pm
For an example of how geometry doesn't work like it does in a Euclidean space, if you drew a triangle (using light beams, the only definition we have for "a straight line" in real life) with a neutron star at one vertex, the triangle's angles would add up to considerably less than 180° and the trigonometry would, therefore, be different.
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on October 12, 2020, 05:01:54 pm
So, it's just all math. Extremely important math that blows up stars.
Post by: Starver on October 12, 2020, 05:18:57 pm
for example, the largest possible triangle you can draw on the Earth's surface has three 90° angles,Well, technically the asolute largest would have three angles of lim->180°, just short of just being an actual Great Circle... ;)
(Or, if you're going by boring old area covered, not perimeter, internal angles of lim->300°, i.e. all but a tiny-tiny "not in the triangle" bit of the Earth's surface. Going further would wrap over (at least some of) the surface more than once. Which would be cheating, but interesting.)
Post by: McTraveller on October 12, 2020, 05:50:09 pm
Maybe this should've been in random thoughts instead...
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 05:52:36 pm
I don't really know why I said "largest", which doesn't even have a consistent meaning in this context, no.for example, the largest possible triangle you can draw on the Earth's surface has three 90° angles,Well, technically the asolute largest would have three angles of lim->180°, just short of just being an actual Great Circle... ;)
(Or, if you're going by boring old area covered, not perimeter, internal angles of lim->300°, i.e. all but a tiny-tiny "not in the triangle" bit of the Earth's surface. Going further would wrap over (at least some of) the surface more than once. Which would be cheating, but interesting.)
Much as there isn't really any such thing as an "object" when you really break down the nature of matter to weird probability fields, I don't think there's really any such thing as spacetime in what we think of as existence either. It's just a mathematical representation of what we perceive. Or rather, it's so indistinct that you can't find any discreet part of spacial existence.Well, "spacetime" has a specific definition under general relativity. It's kind of hard to describe in classical terms, but basically spacetime is a particular coordinate space.
So, it's just all math. Extremely important math that blows up stars.
Yeah I know it's just a math model - but since you can represent a curved n-dimensional space with a non-curved n+1 dimensional space with an extra constraint, what is that extra 5th dimension and constraint for space-time? Even if it is "purely math".There isn't one. We can confidently prove the lack of any extra dimensions big enough to matter in that sense.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 08:45:53 pm
Also, I feel like some of the previous posts might be confusing space curvature with space-time curvature. One can have flat space with Euclidean geometry that still has gravity (space-time curvature) in it.
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 09:01:04 pm
Also, I feel like some of the previous posts might be confusing space curvature with space-time curvature. One can have flat space with Euclidean geometry that still has gravity (space-time curvature) in it.Actually can't, as gravity curves space per se, not just space-time. In fact, you can't curve one and not the other!
Nope, physics backs me up on this one. The linear relationship imposed by c means you can't curve one and not the other.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 09:07:02 pm
Yes you can. Cosmological models with no spatial curvature describe just that.Also, I feel like some of the previous posts might be confusing space curvature with space-time curvature. One can have flat space with Euclidean geometry that still has gravity (space-time curvature) in it.Actually can't, as gravity curves space per se, not just space-time. In fact, you can't curve one and not the other!
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 09:08:09 pm
Pretty sure those models are only globally flat but still have local curvature.Yes you can. Cosmological models with no spatial curvature describe just that.Also, I feel like some of the previous posts might be confusing space curvature with space-time curvature. One can have flat space with Euclidean geometry that still has gravity (space-time curvature) in it.Actually can't, as gravity curves space per se, not just space-time. In fact, you can't curve one and not the other!
ETA: Asked my astrophysicist friend and he says the same.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 09:19:43 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 09:29:37 pm
The models assume uniform distribution of matter and energy, so there aren't any local deviations. Obviously, there is a small-scale granularity in reality (at least today, less so in the early universe), but the models ignore that.With uniform continuous distribution of matter and energy, there is no spacetime curvature (assuming globally flat spacetime). Once gravity is operational, there is local spatial curvature — you can ignore it, but then you're willfully violating both general and special relativity. Obviously it is possible to produce anything you want once you ignore general and special relativity, but that means the model doesn't apply in those domains.
Also I think my physicist friend is personally mad at you now. He's going on a whole thing about models.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 09:34:43 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 09:41:55 pm
Does a de Sitter universe have no space-time curvature then? Or has localised spatial curvatures? Or is violating GR?
An "approaching-de-Sitter-ness universe" like some models of our own universe's development predicts, of course, have negligible local spatial curvature.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 10:04:55 pm
A de Sitter universe per se does in fact have no spacetime curvature, since it contains no ordinary mass-energy. (This is actually the whole point.)I think that's wrong. Doesn't de Sitter space-time have constant positive curvature?
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 10:10:23 pm
A de Sitter universe per se does in fact have no spacetime curvature, since it contains no ordinary mass-energy. (This is actually the whole point.)I think that's wrong. Doesn't de Sitter space-time have constant positive curvature?
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 10:15:55 pm
You're talking spatial curvature here.No, its omega is one, so it's flat. Its omega-lambda is also one. It does have a positive cosmological constant.A de Sitter universe per se does in fact have no spacetime curvature, since it contains no ordinary mass-energy. (This is actually the whole point.)I think that's wrong. Doesn't de Sitter space-time have constant positive curvature?
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 10:23:05 pm
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 12, 2020, 10:36:39 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 12, 2020, 11:11:38 pm
I mean, it's easy to find references discussing de Sitter space-time as being characterised by curvature. And yet, here you are, saying it isn't. I think. As you say, we might be talking past one another.Having a positive cosmological constant does give a de Sitter space positive scalar curvature, which makes sense because that's basically the inverse of gravity. Basically this means that it does have global spacetime curvature and I shouldn't have said "has no spacetime curvature" before. I wasn't really considering this part but it was clearly, overall, wrong. It does appear to still be locally flat though.
However, more importantly, it also does have spatial curvature, in the sense that it is not Euclidean. This has to be the case because its curvature is reference-frame-invariant: as you move between reference frames, the space and time coordinates mix, so there definitely has to be some frame in which that curvature exists in space. I'm really confident in this and my interlocutor agrees. Apparently, it has been said that de Sitter spaces model a "flat universe", but this is a different kind of flatness, the topological kind, where all kinds of surfaces of constant positive curvature can be "flat" as long as they can be continuously deformed into the plane.
BTW, if you're thinking, "hold on, isn't 'topologically flat' just a mathematical way of saying 'not flat in any way that counts'", yes, that's what I said too. Like oh, okay, it doesn't fold in on itself like a sphere, that's not helping anybody, it could literally be hyperbolic and still meet that criterion.
Post by: Il Palazzo on October 13, 2020, 01:07:22 am
Post by: Madman198237 on October 16, 2020, 03:43:15 pm
I don't think is this much closer to being useful than the typical ones that superconduct at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
Post by: Egan_BW on October 16, 2020, 04:39:29 pm
Post by: Greiger on October 20, 2020, 04:48:06 am
Post by: Starver on October 20, 2020, 04:57:18 am
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 20, 2020, 09:40:10 pm
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on October 20, 2020, 09:49:50 pm
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 21, 2020, 04:48:12 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 04:59:43 pm
Water is an excellent refrigerant if you're working within its liquid range. You can also push that a bit with the right solutes; seawater is decent (if you are using materials with which it's compatible).
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 05:22:47 pm
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 06:13:18 pm
Water has a very high specific heat, which makes it less desirable than some other refrigerants.Yes, but, you know, it works, and it's a lot easier. It's freely available from the sky.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 06:18:34 pm
(You want a refrigerant that rapidly expands and contracts, based on just a teensy bit of thermal energy being provided to it, so that you can soak in and subsequently squeeze out, thermal energy using a compressor. The high specific heat of water means it takes much more total thermal energy being applied to it for it to raise in temperature-- and conversely, more energy must be pulled out of it to make it lower in temperature. Something like difluoroethane boils on contact with human skin, but can be liquid at relatively low pressures. It would make a significantly better refrigerant for use in a cold-weather heatpump.)
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 21, 2020, 06:28:44 pm
I'm thinking about this a bit more quantitatively now, particularly how powerful the compressor should be. Am I right in thinking the temperature reduction factor is roughly equivalent to the pressure increase factor of the compressor? Ideal gas law says so, given same volume (which can be managed by having the high pressure part of the circuit have the same volume as the low pressure part of the circuit). But maybe we're dealing with water, and water as a fluid is either liquid, which may invalidate the use of the ideal gas law, or water vapor, which I've heard doesn't follow the ideal gas law very well because of all the intermolecular interactions.
ninja edit: Hmm, I think maybe I've seen that mentioned somewhere else before, as a solvent. However I can't seem to find it on Amazon or Sigma Aldrich.
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 06:29:10 pm
It will be significantly less efficient as a heat pump, especially in a cold locale, than some other refrigerant.I feel like you're forgetting that bloop_bleep is a 15-year-old building this in (what I imagine to be) a basement.
(You want a refrigerant that rapidly expands and contracts, based on just a teensy bit of thermal energy being provided to it, so that you can soak in and subsequently squeeze out, thermal energy using a compressor. The high specific heat of water means it takes much more total thermal energy being applied to it for it to raise in temperature-- and conversely, more energy must be pulled out of it to make it lower in temperature. Something like difluoroethane boils on contact with human skin, but can be liquid at relatively low pressures. It would make a significantly better refrigerant for use in a cold-weather heatpump.)
ETA:
Water sounds like a good idea, if you think it can work. That's one less thing on the design budget.Typically, a heat pump cycle wants to incorporate a phase change if possible, so the latent heat of the phase change has to be factored in anyway.
I'm thinking about this a bit more quantitatively now, particularly how powerful the compressor should be. Am I right in thinking the temperature reduction factor is roughly equivalent to the pressure increase factor of the compressor? Ideal gas law says so, given same volume (which can be managed by having the high pressure part of the circuit have the same volume as the low pressure part of the circuit). But maybe we're dealing with water, and water as a fluid is either liquid, which may invalidate the use of the ideal gas law, or water vapor, which I've heard doesn't follow the ideal gas law very well because of all the intermolecular interactions.
Quote
ninja edit: Hmm, I think maybe I've seen that mentioned somewhere else before, as a solvent. However I can't seem to find it on Amazon or Sigma Aldrich.Yeah, difluoroethane is "extremely toxic" and is also a drug of abuse. I recommend against it.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 06:35:05 pm
It's major fault is that despite what the MSDS says, it totally *IS* flammable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_duster
Note that the most common substances in them are:
Difluoroethane
Trifluoroethane
Tetrafluoroethane (also known as R134A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane) ;) )
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 06:36:22 pm
Not TOO toxic, it's the stuff inside compressed air duster.It will make your heart incredibly unhappy, which counts in my book. :P
Does the difluoroethane used in the cans also soak into your skin and kill you, or is that the other one? I'm honestly not sure which isomer is which.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 06:44:38 pm
However, that does not use a compressor, so much as it relies on capillary action, and something more like what's at work inside a sterling engine's working fluid type setup.
RE: Compressed air duster
I have gotten the stuff on my hands many times, and all it does it make them get risk of frostbite. They add a bittering agent to it to discourage use as an inhalant. If it was that toxic, inhalant abuse would be more than "Stupid kids asphixiating", and more "Stupid kids killing themselves in seconds."
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 21, 2020, 06:47:55 pm
They add a bittering agent to it to discourage use as an inhalant.
Well, that might be useful if the thought were to strike me of huffing the bottle wholesale, but as you can imagine I'm a bit more worried about an accidental exposure. :)
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 06:53:00 pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy
It takes energy to cause a liquid to become a vapor-- this is the enthalpy. If you compress this vapor, it will force the heat to leave so that it can condense again. Ideally, you want a substance that is liquid at room temperature and pressure, but which evolves into a gas rapidly as the temperature rises. This allows you to exploit the phase change.
To use WATER as the refrigerant-- instead of COMPRESSING the water, you should consider using a vacuum pump instead. Pressure is greatly reduced, causing the water to seek to become a vapor at the ambient temperature. This will cause it to "become very cold", as the thermal energy needed to become vapor is rapidly released due to the sudden drop in pressure. On the "hot" side, you compress the vapor, forcing condensation. This will make it expel the heat it rapidly pulled from solution on the low pressure side.
See also, "Vacuum freezing"
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 06:56:19 pm
Also, could you explain why a phase change is desired? Is it because of the huge thermal energy absorption/radiation that's required for a phase change, compared to temperature changes below or above the boiling point?Yeah, pretty much.
Quote
But how is that different from doing an equal thermal energy movement without a phase change?It's not, except insofar as doing it with a phase change is a lot easier.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 07:12:07 pm
You would want to prevent the refrigerant from freezing in the line, but you DO want it to boil in there freely. The gas pulled from the vacuum line would be getting pushed into the compressor chamber, to force recondensation.
It would then be effective down to the freezing temperature of the refrigerant. (which, if you add the antifreeze to, could be very cold indeed.)
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 21, 2020, 07:18:00 pm
You want a phase change, because it means you can use the heat of enthalpy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy
It takes energy to cause a liquid to become a vapor-- this is the enthalpy.
Interesting, I usually only think of enthalpy in the context of chemical reactions, but I guess it can be applied to other state changes too.
Quote
If you compress this vapor, it will force the heat to leave so that it can condense again. Ideally, you want a substance that is liquid at room temperature and pressure, but which evolves into a gas rapidly as the temperature rises. This allows you to exploit the phase change.
But doesn't the compression increase the heat too? Or do you mean that it makes it easier for the heat to leave in the condenser or radiator?
ninja edit:
A vacuum pump variation, using water with an antifreeze agent (like isopropyl alcohol), would allow you to still use phase changes.
You would want to prevent the refrigerant from freezing in the line, but you DO want it to boil in there freely. The gas pulled from the vacuum line would be getting pushed into the compressor chamber, to force recondensation.
It would then be effective down to the freezing temperature of the refrigerant. (which, if you add the antifreeze to, could be very cold indeed.)
Ah, so you mean instead of making the pressure cycle atmospheric pressure-high pressure, make the pressure cycle low pressure-atmospheric pressure, which pushes the cycle lower down the state diagram to where the gaseous state of water is more accessible. Interesting idea.
Thanks a lot for all your help so far, guys!
Post by: Maximum Spin on October 21, 2020, 07:21:53 pm
Post by: Starver on October 21, 2020, 07:28:05 pm
Also, the solvent I was thinking of earlier probably was dichloromethane,This conversation had me thinking of 1,1,1-trichloroethane (which I think was Tippex's thinning agent). Does anyone use Tippex[1] any more? Except for various political parties at voting time...
[1] Other brands are... or were... available.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2020, 07:35:22 pm
Surprised TCE did not get mentioned. (did you know they used to use it to decaffeinate coffee (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-05-19-8502010068-story.html) way back when? Scary.)
Dont worry, they use supercritical CO2 these days. Much safer.
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 21, 2020, 07:38:22 pm
Compression is (in principle) adiabatic, so it doesn't increase the heat content, just the temperature; the higher-temperature refrigerant now loses heat to its surroundings because those surroundings are at a lower temperature and, when decompressed adiabatically again, drops to a lower temperature than it started at because it lost heat.
Yeah, I guess temperature is what I meant.
Surprised TCE did not get mentioned. (did you know they used to use it to decaffeinate coffee (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-05-19-8502010068-story.html) way back when? Scary.)
Anesthesia refrigerator. Cool your beer and cool your mind... at the same time!
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 27, 2020, 02:11:06 am
Post by: wierd on October 27, 2020, 04:39:02 am
Personally though, if you are gonna go through the trouble of basically making a mold for the part, I would just go the next logical step, and pour the mold with resin and make a resin version of your print instead.
Post by: bloop_bleep on October 27, 2020, 12:44:24 pm
Then the question becomes what to use as materials for the mold and the piece... You mentioned epoxy for the piece itself, which I think is good. For the mold you said silicone, but isn't that expensive? Does it make sense to make the mold from epoxy, wait for it to harden, then make the piece itself inside the mold? Would it form as two separate pieces?
There's also the question of porosity. Is epoxy too porous for high pressure liquid inside the compressor?
Post by: wierd on October 27, 2020, 01:02:37 pm
https://www.amazon.com/Enduro-Soft-Polyurethane-Casting-Durable/dp/B07YCV6491/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=2+part+silicone&qid=1603821431&sr=8-6
Then get yourself some casting resin.
Smooth-On is a namebrand, so is kinda pricey. There are others out there.
https://www.amazon.com/Smooth-Cast-305-Urethane-Resin-Trial/dp/B00ZGOSTTY/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=smooth+on+resin&qid=1603821664&sr=8-6
I doubt you are going to be doing a huge item, so this should be fine. See also this useful youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrLXTzS9lo&feature=youtu.be
and this one as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P9KmCjOWFQ
Post by: Starver on March 12, 2021, 04:55:11 pm
Latest news about the 'earliest' scientific computer. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56377567)
(...i.e. the earliest known and 'surviving' one. That's not still awaiting some Lara Jones/'Indiana' Croft type person to discover it and try to keep it from Bad People.)
Post by: Kagus on March 13, 2021, 03:55:33 am
I thought I'd necro-bump this thread, rather than the Engineering one, etc. There may be yet another thread that could do with similar love, but that can wait until next time.
Latest news about the 'earliest' scientific computer. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56377567)
(...i.e. the earliest known and 'surviving' one. That's not still awaiting some Lara Jones/'Indiana' Croft type person to discover it and try to keep it from Bad People.)
Oh snap, they think they might have worked out the Antikythera mechanism? That's badass, that thing's been sitting around for ages.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on March 13, 2021, 08:15:28 am
Post by: Maximum Spin on March 13, 2021, 05:01:09 pm
I think I've been reading about people having figured it out several times over the last 15 years. IMO nobody has "figured it out" but apparently many teams have their own theory and want to push a paperIt's more that they've been consistently figuring out parts of it over the last 15 years.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on March 31, 2021, 07:37:06 pm
Quote
Astronomers have announced the first detection of X-rays from Uranus.I know its a bit of a fringe idea, but I wonder... could it be there's a black hole in Uranus?
Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, is an ice giant planet in the outer Solar System.
Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and its rings appear to mainly produce X-rays by scattering solar X-rays, but some may also come from auroras.
Chandra observations from 2002 and 2017 were used to make this discovery.
Post by: Eric Blank on April 01, 2021, 02:23:31 pm
Post by: martinuzz on April 01, 2021, 02:36:04 pm
https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2021/uranus/Nah, the measurements have been distorted by methane nebulae from DeinarschQuoteAstronomers have announced the first detection of X-rays from Uranus.I know its a bit of a fringe idea, but I wonder... could it be there's a black hole in Uranus?
Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, is an ice giant planet in the outer Solar System.
Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and its rings appear to mainly produce X-rays by scattering solar X-rays, but some may also come from auroras.
Chandra observations from 2002 and 2017 were used to make this discovery.
Post by: feelotraveller on April 01, 2021, 07:13:43 pm
Post by: bloop_bleep on April 01, 2021, 07:21:54 pm
Post by: martinuzz on May 06, 2021, 07:59:49 pm
Quantum mechanics in action at a larger scale than thought possible.
Possible implications: Analog mechanical quantum computing
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6542/625
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6542/570
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/minitrommels-in-het-lab-slaan-onmogelijk-ritme-en-dat-verandert-het-beeld-over-de-grenzen-van-onze-wereld~b266b7e1/
Post by: Jimmy on May 18, 2021, 02:58:00 am
A.K.A. Cowen's Second Law in action.
Post by: Starver on May 18, 2021, 06:25:40 am
The effect of football player transfer movements on abnormal fluctuations in oil price futures (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988321002310)
A.K.A. Cowen's Second Law in action.
Spoiler: Firstly, I can't read that because... (click to show/hide)
If it isn't like the "Israeli fighter pilots have a skewed ratio of daughters to sons" thing that's just a blip found after ploughing through data looking for a group that's a blip (or maybe it's a real thing for real reasons after all (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3619847/)?), could it be that people who spend serious money on football (soccer, yes?) spend serious money in the oil business/markets and being flush with the cash in one also translates to the other? (Also, transfer seasons (pre- and mid-) are locked to the competitive season, which are locked to the year's seasons and therefore possible cycles of variatble use of fuel oils, so I could imagine this exagerates the lock-step in some way.)
Maybe that's all addressed, but as my "I can't read it" aside grew larger than intended, so my on-topic (if grievously uninformed) waffle also did. ;)
But you're probably right in that it's very much like Rule 34.
Post by: Jimmy on May 19, 2021, 05:15:49 pm
Here's the full article, hopefully it works for you (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342093274_When_Pep_comes_calling_the_oil_market_answers_The_effect_of_football_player_transfer_movements_on_abnormal_fluctuations_in_oil_price_futures)Spoiler: Firstly, I can't read that because... (click to show/hide)
It's also authored by a bunch of Kiwis and Aussies, so I'm pretty sure a lot of beer was involved in the writing.
Post by: Starver on May 19, 2021, 05:44:03 pm
Here's the full article, hopefully it works for you (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342093274_When_Pep_comes_calling_the_oil_market_answers_The_effect_of_football_player_transfer_movements_on_abnormal_fluctuations_in_oil_price_futures)Only read the abstract so far, which had a "your privacy is important to us, say Yes for cookies" overlay that worked as it should (and revisted the upper link to check, and it still goes wrong, but I'm not digging into page-sources on this device!).
Interesting abstract, though. If the hypothesis is true then it may well be that Deep Learning auto-trading systems (and/or insightful human traders) might have established this proposed meta-connection between Sports News pages and upcoming Financial News.
Quote
It's also authored by a bunch of Kiwis and Aussies, so I'm pretty sure a lot of beer was involved in the writing.Or that. I'll dive into the actual PDF when I'm on a better connection.
Post by: Jimmy on May 20, 2021, 02:47:43 am
A.K.A. We can give you oxygen via your anus.
Spoiler: Because a picture is worth a thousand words (click to show/hide)
Post by: wierd on May 20, 2021, 03:38:18 am
A class of chemicals that has been known about for decades, Perfluorocarbons, can be shot up your butt when you are suffocating from acute lung dysfunction, and it will help you keep enough oxygen in your body to survive.
Or:
Oxygen rich enema lets you breathe through your ass.
Post by: bloop_bleep on May 20, 2021, 11:54:14 am
Post by: MetalSlimeHunt on May 20, 2021, 12:02:00 pm
Post by: Starver on May 20, 2021, 03:12:35 pm
(While we're in the ar... ea. Though not sure it should be done simultaneously.)
Post by: Bumber on May 21, 2021, 02:36:42 am
Post by: Arx on May 22, 2021, 04:40:49 am
Post by: wierd on May 22, 2021, 05:45:55 am
Lighter than air machines work, because the total volume of the machine has less mass than the equivalent volume of air.
For most foams (other than an aerogel), the substrate is still heavier than the same volume of air, all on its own. This is why replacing the air in the foam with a lighter than air gas, has no real lifting effect.
Additionally--
Hydrogen is infamously hard to contain, and diffuses through solid materials, by wiggling through the gaps between molecules (since it is so much smaller than other molecules). As such, an aerogel made with it, would only lift for a very short period of time; the hydrogen would diffuse out of the aerogel, and then it would become heavier than air again.
Post by: Arx on May 22, 2021, 06:46:52 am
Pedantic aside: I wouldn't expect an aerogel to be practical, I brought up metal foam specifically because it's less diffusible-through. The whole point of the exercise is to reduce the extent to which you're strapping your gondola to a fuel-air bomb waiting for the air :P
Post by: Starver on May 22, 2021, 02:14:53 pm
(And if you're manufacturing in an inert environment to prevent oxidation - not sure if that's what you intend - and then it gets damaged enough to let oxygen in (and the trapped hydrogen out), it might be even worse for the structure...)
The old chestnut, however, is that a vacuum won't burn. Build a giant self-supporting (and damage-resistent) metal sphere, strong enough to entirely evacuate. How to do that (and how utterly impossively huge it would have to be) I leave as an excercise for the reader. ;)
Post by: delphonso on August 28, 2021, 04:55:07 am
Fusion ignition almost achieved (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/lawrence-livermore-lab-makes-significant-achievement-in-fusion.html) through the laser induced method. This is a big advance toward reliable fusion for research and potential energy purposes. I think this youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M5U2_9eEgM)a friend found explains it well - although some of the "hurdles" are a bit silly.
Golden Rice (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/philippines-approves-golden-rice/) finally starts getting used. Golden Rice is a GMO fortified with vitamin A. It was opposed by Green Peace and a bunch of other organizations despite being an amazing example of a company doing the right thing. The holder of all the patents has declared Golden Rice free for any and all humanitarian purposes, meaning you could probably whip up a charity and start distributing seeds in a weekend if you know a good notary.
Two great science news articles that made me feel very optimistic.
Post by: Telgin on August 28, 2021, 02:55:19 pm
Not to mention the difficulty in actually tapping the resulting heat for generating power. I'm curious if anyone has even solved that problem for magnetic confinement reactors.
Post by: Starver on August 28, 2021, 03:14:45 pm
(And that joke itself is a number of decades old... in the '70s it was already an old chestnut, and the castanea has itself never been rejuvinated since.)
That said, I saw about that the other day, and it is a definite step towards the ultimate goal.
(Not quite Mr Fusion level of utility, of course. And once you get to actual practical over-unity with the experimental apparatus, you still have to convert that expertise into creating the first facility to properly pump energy back into the grid and get on with tweaking or even revamping the process in your initial custom-built research facility and any now more potentially lucrative copies that arise. But gives you the ability to think about it.)
Post by: delphonso on August 28, 2021, 05:11:26 pm
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 06, 2021, 10:09:05 am
Post by: Iduno on September 06, 2021, 03:39:45 pm
I’m trying to make an RNA strand and a DNA strand in an app I got, and O learned bout various nucleosides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside) in the process, apparently we’ve made synthetic ones as well
I do *not* remember enough Organic Chemistry for that.
Post by: Starver on September 06, 2021, 04:51:16 pm
A minute's thought will spring up a half dozen or so Jurassic Park-esque "Life will find a way" possibilities of why rhe answer to one could overtirn the surety of the other... ;)
Yes, that's usually couched more in terms of nucleotides than nucleosides, but I think they're trivially synthesised between (of equivalent sub-brands).
Apart from being vaguely possible (and apparently put through at least partially practical experimentation) I'm not sure if they've yet gone full-blown movie-plot and/or made-of-phlebotinum in a significant way. Which might mean you (NG) and your remodelling of life's building bricks might be doing groundbreaking work... Good luck, and try not to unleash some weird chimeric monster-slash-microbe-slash-monstrous-microbe-slash-microbial-monster creation upon us all!
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 07, 2021, 01:56:29 am
Post by: Starver on September 09, 2021, 06:51:46 pm
The soɹǝɔouᴉɥɹ experiment (given the Transportation award) sounded like fun to do!
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 09, 2021, 07:15:16 pm
Quote
PEACE PRIZE [USA]:Iwonder how they tested this…
Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier, for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face
Post by: delphonso on September 14, 2021, 02:52:15 am
Having an additional method to reach fusion reliably gives the entire industry another path to figure out solutions for. No clue if this will just be a curiosity, but it certainly helps with the march toward fusion power - no matter what.
Well, some progress (https://phys.org/news/2021-09-superconducting-magnet-magnetic-field-strength.html) was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.
New superconductive high-temperature magnets make the size of these projects much more reasonable. The team had a clever strategy - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Basically just introduced the better magnets into an already successful model. The new magnet (in a stack of 16 of them) reached 20 tesla - which is apparently record breaking.
Post by: Starver on September 14, 2021, 04:35:26 am
Baby steps, picking our way, these ways and more. (But still a way to go, and the paths ahead probably having a few mis-steps and difficult terrain to forge through.)
Post by: delphonso on September 14, 2021, 04:51:04 am
Undoubtedly hurdles will present themselves. I'm.not sure if I'm just following the story, but it seems like they've been knocking down a few hurdles lately, and it's good to read some positive science news that isn't just...telling people not to drink bleach.
Post by: Bumber on September 15, 2021, 04:55:15 am
Well, some progress (https://phys.org/news/2021-09-superconducting-magnet-magnetic-field-strength.html) was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.
Quote
The sun in a bottle
The sun? The sun in a bottle?
Post by: Starver on September 15, 2021, 06:00:52 am
Post by: delphonso on September 15, 2021, 08:30:43 am
Post by: Naturegirl1999 on September 15, 2021, 02:43:05 pm
to think this has been going on for this long, and I was here when the running joke started, this puts a smile on my faceWell, some progress (https://phys.org/news/2021-09-superconducting-magnet-magnetic-field-strength.html) was made already on the other, more-realistic, method of obtaining commercial fusion.QuoteThe sun in a bottle
The sun? The sun in a bottle?
Post by: delphonso on September 15, 2021, 05:00:30 pm
I really /dropped/ the ball.
Post by: delphonso on October 20, 2021, 09:51:08 pm
Paid access to the actual reseach here :( (https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(21)00433-5#relatedArticles)
We should all be aware that recycling has basically been a hoax up to this point - most recycled material by the customer never gets reprocessed. The general reason for this is that recycling material is harder and more expensive (more fundamental reasons include greed and desire to bring about the end times) than just making products from raw resources. So, this study, if proven replicable, will do a lot in battery production to reduce waste. The cathode material of spent high-performance lithium ion batteries actually performs better when recycled, giving the batteries a longer lifespan (at the same storage and discharge rates) when compared to new batteries.
This is good, especially because batteries are basically the only practical barrier to a fully solar and wind grid (even if it needs to be supplemented by other forms of energy.)
The study found that the physical structure of the material was why the batteries performed better - which could mean it is generalizable technology to other battery materials, say aluminum batteries (which would be wonderful).
More good news: Malaria vaccine! (https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/outside-eu-product-information/mosquirix-product-information_en.pdf)
Quote from: Science-Based Medicine
"...Mosquirix, is the first vaccine against a parasitic organism and targets the member of the Plasmodium group that is most associated with severe and life-threatening illness. It works by limiting the ability of P. falciparum to gain access to the liver, where it typically would mature and multiply before moving on to invade it’s victim’s red blood cells. The vaccine results in immunity against the circumsporozoite protein that is found on the surface of the malaria parasite when in the form that initially enters the body via the bite of an infected mosquito.
Malaria is one of the deadliest diseases for humans out there - especially deadly for children under 5. Developing a vaccine for it has been particularly rough - but this vaccine, by preventing access to the liver, greatly reduces the amount of malaria-causing plasmodia - giving the vaccine about 40% effectiveness. That's a huge jump from zero. Insecticide-treated netting is still better, at around 75-80% effective - but that's not available everywhere, and the two in conjunction could drastically reduce risk.
Hooray for saving babies!
Post by: Telgin on October 21, 2021, 09:01:03 am
In other health related news, scientists made genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys have been tested in a proof of concept transplant: link (https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiKGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9oZWFsdGgtNTg5OTM2OTbSASxodHRwczovL3d3dy5iYmMuY29tL25ld3MvaGVhbHRoLTU4OTkzNjk2LmFtcA?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen).
Post by: McTraveller on October 21, 2021, 02:58:55 pm
I'm surprised that a malaria vaccine is this difficult to make, but it's good to see progress made on that front. 40% sounds pretty bad but as you say it's much better than before.Hey only one step to go before we have a man-bear-pig!
In other health related news, scientists made genetically engineered pigs whose kidneys have been tested in a proof of concept transplant: link (https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiKGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy9oZWFsdGgtNTg5OTM2OTbSASxodHRwczovL3d3dy5iYmMuY29tL25ld3MvaGVhbHRoLTU4OTkzNjk2LmFtcA?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen).
Then we can work on Dogman?
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2021, 03:04:47 pm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036542/
this proof of concept surgery does nothing to fix that big assed elephant in the room.
Post by: Telgin on October 21, 2021, 03:22:28 pm
Actually, I'm curious now if we do that if it will even guarantee that the new organ is compatible with the target. I would guess that there's at least some chance of the adaptive immune system rejecting it if there were any neoantigens for one reason or another, but I can't begin to guess how likely that would be. I suppose it would mostly guarantee that immunosuppresive drugs allowed the transplant to survive at least.
Post by: wierd on October 21, 2021, 03:47:44 pm
Basically, you take your pig kidney-- then you brutally murder it, and literally wash out all the cells, and leave just a kidney shaped network of fibronectin and pals.
You then introduce cloned human fibroblasts, which then integrate onto the scaffold, recognize the tissue type by the markers present in the scaffold matrix, and set up extracellular signalling for cell migration and integration.
After that, you hook up the "what is left of the circulatory network" of the organ to a low pressure supply of collected whole human blood, and introduce IPS stem cells appropriate for the organ type.
those IPS cells integrate with the fibroblast network on the scaffold, and replace the missing tissues on the scaffold.
When you are done, you have a properly structured organ, that is fit for transplant, that has been completely washed of the xenobiological tissues, and thus suitable for rejection-free transplant, and free of zoonotic pathogens.
aka--
Tissue Engineering
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587658/
Post by: delphonso on November 02, 2021, 08:37:07 pm
Flat brain organoids have much longer lifespan (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00923-4) than their 3D counterparts.
Organoids are made from stem cells, actually creating the tissues you intend to test your drug on. They provide a few benefits over other testing methods, for one, they're actual human tissue, and they're very controlled (generating the specific tissues you want). Brain organoids have been a bit complicated, as you might expect with such a complicated organ. A frustrating hurdle has been that the core of the 3D organoid would start to die for lack of nutrients, limiting the time you can actually study the effects of your medicine. However, this study generated a flat brain tissue organoid and were able to keep it alive for 240 days. Doing so allowed them to test drugs which broke up protein build-up, which is a sign and possible cause of ALS/FTD - degradations of neural tissue.
Good news for neurochemistry and medications!
Spider's diversity is more...diverse than previously thought (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-061520-083414#_i15):
Knowable's write up on the behavior side with pulls from other articles (https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2021/are-spiders-intelligent)
A few hypotheses about how spiders evolved have been put to the test and the results are less than satisfactory. Previously it was assumed that spiders mostly evolved in line with insect diversification - the hunter changing to suit the prey that changes to avoid the hunter. The research itself is interesting - taking a look at genetic differences as well as their behavioral counterparts (web building, for example) and poking holes in the assumed connections. I found the Knowable article much more interesting - as it explains a few jumping spider hunting tactics which are really quite complex, such as avoiding an orb-weaver's webs (because orb-weavers will shake them to throw off anything not stuck in the web) by climbing up a tree, silking down like Mission Impossible and swinging into the center of the web to assassinate the orb-weaver.
Spiders are cool!
Juno's microwave analysis of Jupiter shows more details about the Great Red Spot (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/juno-reveals-deep-3d-structure-of-jupiters-massive-storms/):
The giant storm is at least 300km deep, and could go up to 500km deep - which is pretty insane. Crazier still is that this still means the storm is mostly flat (it's about 12,000km wide). The microwaves were used to look deeper into the cloud layers of Jupiter. There's a large water-could around 60km deep, but under it is an unexpected lack of ammonia gas, which suggests something is moving the gas around. Possibly this points to 8 circulation cells that could be pushing and pulling the ammonia around. Interesting!
Post by: Bumber on November 12, 2021, 07:03:26 pm
brb, gonna flatten my brain so i can live longer
Post by: delphonso on November 12, 2021, 09:16:36 pm
Post by: McTraveller on December 07, 2021, 05:02:53 pm
Yes this one is microscopic but... wow...
Post by: Telgin on December 07, 2021, 06:30:55 pm
Also, worth a reminder that until someone measures one of these bubbles moving faster than c, we shouldn't assume that this will lead to FTL technology even if it's possible to make a vehicle that makes use of it.
Post by: wierd on December 07, 2021, 07:10:27 pm
You dont need ftl there. Just useful deviation/manipulation of quantum field parameters. (Think, use it as a lens, or, use it to make electrons tunnel preferentially in one direction, etc)
Post by: Starver on December 07, 2021, 07:24:59 pm
Imo, a better use would be inside a computing device, or inside a miniature linear accelerator.You maybe don't, but I'm actually looking forward to my computer system being controlled by three primary main processor core elements (cross-linked with a redundant melacortz ramistat through fourteen kiloquad interface modules) based upon just such an FTL nanoprocessor (ideally with 25 bilateral kelilactirals, twenty of those being slaved into a primary heisenfram terminal)...
You dont need ftl there.[...]
Post by: delphonso on December 07, 2021, 07:26:13 pm
Post by: Starver on December 17, 2021, 06:51:38 pm
Post by: martinuzz on January 10, 2022, 06:13:28 pm
So far so good. For 3 days now, the heart is working well and not showing any signs of rejection by the body.
Fingers crossed. If this works, it could mean shortage of transplantable hearts becomes a thing of the past.
Post by: delphonso on January 11, 2022, 07:33:11 am
Post by: McTraveller on January 15, 2022, 02:03:46 pm
Awe-inspiring. Kind of terrifying too.
Post by: Starver on January 15, 2022, 06:11:33 pm
Anyone else fascinated and impressed how we caught the volcanic explosion basically in real-time with satellites?Caught? Or caused. Where exactly were Musk's latest batch of satellites at the time?
(BTW, controversy with the pig-heart transplantee. He was convicted of viciously stabbing someone, thirty years ago. The family of the victim (who was paralysed, and died after long-term complications in 2007) think he wasn't 'worthy' of the possibly life-saving procedure. On the other hand, of course there's always the old "undergo extremely high-risk medical procedures as a test subject to offset your criminal conviction" meme right?)
Post by: wierd on January 16, 2022, 05:02:08 am
But that's just me.
I am known for my hot takes.
Post by: martinuzz on January 16, 2022, 06:14:34 am
Anyone else fascinated and impressed how we caught the volcanic explosion basically in real-time with satellites?
Awe-inspiring. Kind of terrifying too.
20km high mushroom cloud. Awe-inspiring satellite picture indeed.
Miraculously no one on the main island was injured. They don't know yet how the smaller islands fared, it's too dangerous to send planes, ships, or helicopters to take a look and their communications systems are all down.
Post by: martinuzz on January 31, 2022, 04:55:11 am
Post by: DwarfUli on February 01, 2022, 01:42:30 pm
Since recent scientific studies have shown that not just women are at risk of developing uterus cancer from HPV infection, but men can also develop penis cancer and anal cancer from it, the dutch govenment will now start offering HPV vaccination not just for girls over 10 years old, but also to boys (girls have been getting the vaccination since well over a decade now).
The dutch have always been a very forward thinking peoples. Good luck with this in "amurica", people shy away from science and certainly vaccinations over here..
Post by: martinuzz on February 02, 2022, 11:44:44 am
The researchers chose crows for being the most intelligent bird species available, with an intelligence level comparable to chimpansees.
Next they will try and train jackdaws as well, because they fly in larger packs and are more abundant.
In France a similar project has been done before. The difference is that the French experiment worked with handraised tame crows, the Swedish project trained wild birds.
Post by: Cthulhu on February 03, 2022, 08:56:52 am
Psychology/sociology replicate one effect challenge (impossible)
Post by: martinuzz on February 03, 2022, 08:58:40 am
Post by: Cthulhu on February 03, 2022, 09:51:44 am
Post by: Bralbaard on February 03, 2022, 11:33:37 am
Pretty cool: The city cleaning services in Stockholm have managed to train crows to clean cigarette butts from the streets, in exchange for food from automatic dispensers.
The researchers chose crows for being the most intelligent bird species available, with an intelligence level comparable to chimpansees.
Next they will try and train jackdaws as well, because they fly in larger packs and are more abundant.
In France a similar project has been done before. The difference is that the French experiment worked with handraised tame crows, the Swedish project trained wild birds.
I just want to share that I misread the first sentence and was left to wonder how the hell they managed to train cows to do that until I got further in the paragraph.
Post by: delphonso on February 03, 2022, 06:10:15 pm
It could still exist, but the experiment doesn't say much. In retrospect it's kind of apparent on the graph, clickbaity articlws always use a more dramatic graph but the average predicted score hovers around 60-70% for the entire sample, like theres no actual bias in predicted score in either direction
A few months ago I read an analysis of the Dunning Kreuger effect that pointed out some flaws in it. For instance, people skilled in a field have less range to make mistakes in their predictions than those unskilled.
That is, if you consistantly score a 90 in math tests, you can only.overestimate your skill by ten points. If you consistantly score 70s, you can overestimate by much more, which doesn't require an understanding of your own ability in the greater field, in either case.
Post by: Starver on February 03, 2022, 06:43:39 pm
Not sure what that means for Mssrs. Dunning or Kreuger, but I was probably fairly smug for a while.
(* - trying to be linguistically neutral, there. given that it's "maths" over here and I wouldn't be honest writing it the yankee way...)
Post by: martinuzz on February 07, 2022, 12:58:54 pm
Good news for patients and cyborg technology.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/wetenschappers-ontwikkelen-implantaat-waarmee-dwarslaesiepatienten-weer-kunnen-lopen~b14112a8/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01663-5
Sadly the nature article is paywalled except for the summary.
The test subject use an app on their smartphone to select their type of movement. A bit like controlling your own motions with a gamepad.
Post by: Starver on February 07, 2022, 01:38:22 pm
The test subject use an app on their smartphone to select their type of movement. A bit like controlling your own motions with a gamepad.Reminds me of the basic premise of Exo-Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exo-Man) (except of course, being effectively Endo-Man).
Post by: martinuzz on February 09, 2022, 06:49:47 am
This is more than double their previous record of 22 Megajoules (in 1997).
They did not break the previous record for 'most productive second', but that doesn't matter, because the goal is not to produce peak power, the goal is to produce higher yield over longer periods.
Post by: Starver on February 09, 2022, 08:22:21 am
But, that aside, "for the latest tests, new walls were constructed out of the metals beryllium and tungsten. These are 10 times less absorbent." - I hate that highlighted phrasing. Is just me, or is it being used more and more by people?
(They probably mean it only has a tenth of the absorbency, but there's potential ambiguity creeping in there.)
Post by: wierd on February 09, 2022, 08:43:32 am
1 * .01 = .01
1 / 100 = .01
The first is "one hundred times less"
The second is "One one-hundredth"
Post by: Starver on February 09, 2022, 10:41:00 am
Take the phrase "<Some particle> is detected as travelling 95% the speed of light. <Some other particle> was ten times slower."
At what speed was the second measured to be, w.r.t. c? 50%? 45%? 9.5%? 4.5%? It all depends upon what exactly you are multiplying(/dividing) by ten - and also from where you are applying this 'slowerness'.
For (say) a business with fixed costs and variable income on any given a day, given one day with a marginally below average net-profit and "ten times less" net-profit on another, this could mean net loss. Or just a slightly more significant dip in profits. Or a particularly bad dip, but still at least in the black.
Like I said, taken straight (as quoted) it's probably a tenth of the absorbency, but I always get the feeling that any such quote is referencing a more nuanced version of "X times less/fewer/smaller" (from a value that we don't even know[1]) that doesn't produce the same instinctive double-inversion (by the standard that "one tenth as big" == "ten times more small", or equivalent). Easily used in a deliberate narrative attempt to do "lies, damn lies and statistics", but then there's also errors introduced by misunderstandings cropping up at some point between the raw data being stated and the case then presented to us using such wording. All I'm saying is that it really shouldn't be encouraged.
But don't mind me. Mindful that I might be over-reacting, I pledge that even if I could gather all the people who say this kind of thing in one place, at my complete and utter mercy, I'd probably only decimate them... i.e. there'd be a tenth fewer of them by the time I was finished.
[1] Also a problem. A death rate that is 50% more than (or of) a one-in-a-million chance isn't as interesting as the same adjustment to a one-in-two base fatality rate.
Post by: McTraveller on February 09, 2022, 11:01:23 am
The first is "one hundred times less"
I'm on Starver's side here. This is just ill-formed! Sadly however the war is unwindable and colloquial usage wins.
I will go to my grave asserting that "small" "slow" "less" "cold" and their kin are not measurable quantities so you can't "times" them. But I'll only admit it in pedant-friendly environs.
Post by: Starver on February 09, 2022, 11:14:13 am
Post by: wierd on February 09, 2022, 11:18:11 am
Really saying "(Foo) is 100 times less than (Bar)", is just saying this:
Bar * (1/100) = Foo
It is the cognate of "Bar is 100 times larger than Foo"
Foo * 100 = Bar
I agree that it can be dicey if you say something like "X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than X)" because it relies on the implied "(than X)". It COULD be interpreted as "X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than the speed of light.)"
They are very different things indeed!
But, saying something is "50% colder" is just the cognate inversion of "Hotter".
You can measure thermal energy, and thus can indeed measure "coldness". Coldness is just a negative value for a thermal figure, rather than a positive one.
(EG, one can derive a "Increase in coldness" from inversion of "Increase in temperature", using a negative number for the "increase" )
Is it conceptually convoluted for no real reason, other than lack of scientific literacy, or lack of numeracy? Absolutely.
Does doing away with it actually help matters? Not really. The fundamental problem is lack of scientific or mathematical literacy. Changing the language wont fix that.
For a functional basis by which to define "Coldness", one could start with differing starting conditions for the measurement. Instead of taking absolute zero (where there is no thermal energy at all), one could start at maximally allowed entropy before the concept becomes meaningless, (derived from the mass term of the energy added by the entropic energy, against the smallest allowed massed particle, before that energy causes the particle's energy-mass to exceed the schwartzchild metric, and become a black hole) then work DOWN, rather than working UP. (After hitting that energy metric, adding more energy only increases mass, it does not increase temperature.)
Post by: Starver on February 09, 2022, 11:50:11 am
[...]if you say something like "X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than X)" because it relies on the implied "(than X)". It COULD be interpreted as "X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than the speed of light.)"
Not sure "(than X)" is sufficient.
"X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than X is, compared to C)" Y=92.5% - did you mean this?
"X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (instead of X's comparison to C)", Y=97.5%
"X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50% slower (than C itself)", Y=50% - your second example
"X is 95% the speed of light, and Y is 50%(age-points*) slower (than those X already lacked)", Y=45%
* - because percentage points and percentages also tend not to be differentiated neatly enough in everyday usage.
I'm not saying talking percentages (with the asterixed point as an exception) is quite as bad, but it still suffers all the same possible assumptions/presumptions of implicitly unstated aspects.
Post by: McTraveller on February 09, 2022, 11:58:43 am
Let's say you try additive inverse: 1 meter is -1 shorty. This doesn't work with multiplication; 2 shorties is not half the size as 1 meter (2 x -1 = -2), it's twice as big!
So let's say you define a "shorty" as 1/x instead of -x; if you have 1 meter of length and 1 shorty of "shortness". If you add two meters you get 2 meters. But if you add 2 shorties, you get... 2 shorties; but 2 shorties is 1/2 a meter, which doesn't match what you got by sticking those two meters next to each other.
This is why we don't measure things in coldness or shortness or slowness; instead we measure them in heat/energy, length, and speed.
Post by: Starver on February 09, 2022, 05:49:06 pm
A homo sapien child's tooth has been found in layers of cave deposit dated to 54,000 years ago, above which is plenty of Homo Neanderthalensis evidence, etc, suggesting that there was about 14,000 years or so of coexistence (without implying it was peaceful, but certainly a slow burn if it was still mostly conflict) before the point at around 40,000 years ago when it seems HN did not survive beyond.
The best bet is that it was waves of mobile occupation, many generations of each lineage may have adopted territories suited to themselves, probably interacting on the fringes and possibly moving out of some areas to 'let' the other faction in. Could have been many reasons for the ebb and flows, and it doesn't preclude a 'final conflict' over the final couple of millenia (to copy some prior theories, where it was just a First Contact thing gone wrong/horribly-right), but seems not to have been just what happened when 'we' finally came out of Africa because we'd already done it well before...
I'm sure there's some additional paleontological details to fill in the obvious questions or gaps in the story that I have in mind, but the news seems fairly sure it means what I'm saying it means. ;)
Post by: Egan_BW on February 09, 2022, 07:08:13 pm
Post by: martinuzz on February 09, 2022, 07:09:08 pm
Sorry Eric <grin grin>
Post by: martinuzz on February 12, 2022, 05:13:49 am
In as little as 3 minutes, it can tell you which species of animal a DNA sample comes from.
Previous methods took up to three months.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/revolutie-in-de-biologie-dna-analyseren-in-drie-minuten~ba727252/
Post by: Eric Blank on February 12, 2022, 05:35:05 pm
Post by: Starver on February 12, 2022, 07:02:44 pm
Post by: Starver on February 23, 2022, 07:02:00 pm
Not that I think my own mix-tape is at all ready to watch yet.
(Though I tend to get rather bizarre dreams - last night's was a doozy that involved fried chicken and (separately) a lengthy visual pun based on recursively disassembling computer screens - so I guess I'll have to wait and see what I end up with. I'll have to try to let you all know, right?)
Post by: Starver on March 09, 2022, 03:55:35 pm
A 57 year old heart patient in the US is the first person ever to have been given a heart tranplantation with a genetically modified pig heart.
So far so good. For 3 days now, the heart is working well and not showing any signs of rejection by the body.
Fingers crossed. If this works, it could mean shortage of transplantable hearts becomes a thing of the past.
It has been announced that the patient has now died. But not bad for a first[1] go. Louis Washkansky's life was extended (by Christiaan Barnard) for around two weeks back in '67.
[1] Almost. The first pig heart (this one not genetically-engineered, but 'normal' pig) was in '97, in India, but failed almost immediately. And Boyd Rush was given a chimpanzee heart in 1964 and survived for an hour-and-a-bit.
Post by: ChairmanPoo on March 09, 2022, 04:32:01 pm
A 57 year old heart patient in the US is the first person ever to have been given a heart tranplantation with a genetically modified pig heart.
So far so good. For 3 days now, the heart is working well and not showing any signs of rejection by the body.
Fingers crossed. If this works, it could mean shortage of transplantable hearts becomes a thing of the past.
It has been announced that the patient has now died. But not bad for a first[1] go. Louis Washkansky's life was extended (by Christiaan Barnard) for around two weeks back in '67.
I was going to say that. For a first attempt its pretty good.
And also: the man was not a candidate for a regular heart transplant (as in, he had been excluded from the transplant list). This suggests that he had significant comorbid conditions. Worth noting that in high risk heart transplants the 1-year mortality rate is around 30%. This guy probably would have a priori longer odds (as that high risk group is composed of people who hadn't been excluded).
I feel sad for the man but all in all its a very promising first attempt. I hope they scale up to larger trials soon.
Post by: martinuzz on March 09, 2022, 05:36:47 pm
Very hopeful first results.
Perhaps we can enlist captured Russian invaders. I've heard they have no hearts
Post by: Eric Blank on March 09, 2022, 06:19:29 pm
Post by: delphonso on March 09, 2022, 07:23:22 pm
Post by: dragdeler on March 10, 2022, 10:39:03 am
Post by: feelotraveller on March 11, 2022, 08:00:07 pm
"Since its earliest days, science has been associated with war. The inventors Archimedes and Leonardo turned their talents to the problems of fighting, and since the rise of modern science many individual scientists have steered their investigations towards military purposes. But the orientation of science to war was relatively sporadic until the rise of professionalised science under the auspices of the state beginning in the late 1800s. The process of incorporation of science into the war system was greatly accelerated by the two world wars this century, and especially since World War Two science has become an essential part of military races."
A large percentage of contemporary science remains funded, directly or indirectly, by the military-industrial complex expressly for the purpose of war. Although I think it fair enough to say that scientists aren't generally at the steering wheel.
(Anyways it's just an aside so youse all don't read the spoiler...)
Spoiler: Wait, you've been warned (click to show/hide)
Post by: dragdeler on March 15, 2022, 06:39:03 pm
You have been warned in deed. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5igz4_UvWU4) hehe :)
When everything is so fucked that the only way interract sanely is with layers of paranoia as to appear completly psychotic.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Post by: martinuzz on March 17, 2022, 01:31:16 pm
It's as if Fat Boy Slim and Einstürzende Neubauten had a baby
Post by: Scoops Novel on April 07, 2022, 08:54:26 pm
The measurement is the first conclusive experimental result that is at odds with one of the most important and successful theories of modern physics."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60993523
The standard model is changing for the first time in 50 years.
"The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play."
Post by: Il Palazzo on April 08, 2022, 04:27:31 am
The standard model is changing for the first time in 50 years.Lord, do I hate making breaking news out of the scientific process. It's a 0.09% discrepancy in a single, just published study. Give the boffins some time to look it over before proclaiming a revolution.
Post by: delphonso on April 08, 2022, 06:09:25 pm
Yeah, the standard model has been changing consistently - new discoveries and accommodations for such. It's got it's own holes already - something like this would just be another one. We need a new explanatory model before we can abandon the current one.
Post by: martinuzz on April 30, 2022, 08:02:45 am
https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
Post by: Eric Blank on May 01, 2022, 11:08:30 pm
Not peer reviewed by any means, and I certainly want more tests with more thicknesses, compositions and temperatures and various other information, I'd be keen to know if the rate of crack propagation matches the speed of sound/vibration traveling through the material, or what exact material properties determine it, but it is recorded and published in an easily consumable format.
Post by: Starver on May 02, 2022, 03:42:37 am
It may be going faster than the signal pervades through the surrounding air, but the same effect could be seen by jolting a push-rod (without breaking it), which shoves mechanical effort 'instantaneously' from one end to the other at (if it's long and rigid enough to measure) faster speeds than an audio signal can propogate in the surrounding it.
I think this 'superluminal'-analogue is what causes the distinctive 'twang' of a metal pole (or rail) being struck at one end, the in-material transmission of sound creating a strangely rapid (to our ears) transmission of a coherent wave to all points on the length, to then become a line-source of very-nearly-in-phase air-transmitted sound that disobeys most of our mental expectations from echoes and other indirect sound that we normally would be able to pinpoint to an origin through quite obvious (to our auditory processing neurons, if not consciously) principle of first-detrction and allowance for secondary arrivals. (Instead of hearing the emination from the nearest bit of rod before the air-only sound comes from the further away bit of rod that was actually struck first.)
That said, I'm sure I'll like the video, but it is a measurement failure. I can move faster than light, if you get me a (very long!) coil of fibre-optic to shine the light down whilst I simply step from the first exposed end to the second, with a not too dissimilar claim that I can thus exceed c. ;)
Post by: McTraveller on May 02, 2022, 06:49:53 am
We have supersonic aircraft, which "crack" the air and generate shocks ("shock waves") and expansion waves. A crack in a solid material, not being a result of pressure gradient in the direction of propagation, may be more like an intrusion into the material and so may in fact be able to propagate faster than the speed of sound in the material; the crack may be the equivalent of the shock in air and so can in fact travel "faster than sound".
I want more info!
Post by: Starver on May 02, 2022, 07:50:50 am
Obviously if you strike the first atoms enought to excite them onwards at 'unnatural' velocities into the next atoms, it'll be like the penetrator, but as soon as the effect translates to cracking (especially lateral displacement, breaking any high-tension bonds and allowing high-compression bonds to get their desired breathing space) the 'information' speed limit is essentially sonic-limited. Or, rather, sound in the material is just the same thing but (usually) beneath the failure/assymetric stress relaxation level.
But I'm more familiarvwith metals, and laminated glass poses kther issues (does the lamination-bonder effectively act as a 2D molecule, chanelling failure-level stresses faster, in its own higher-than-glass 'local' speed of sound, and the propogation decays inversely rather than inverse-squaredly, as a price to be paid for having up until then withstood far more stress than the unlaminated equivalent glass). And if it's more that 'soake up' overdamage finally gets released by the final criticality of failure, the question still remains how the coordinationis achieved to fail (apparently sequentially) at a rate of inter-zone 'messaging' that exceeds the usual force-transfer. (Possibility: the molecular forces trip' the next atom along, not just the adjacent one, because of the extraordinary crystal-breaking effect. But I can't see it being coherent enough to trigger an 'unzip', at best an audio version of Cherenkov Radiation just... doing I don't know ehat.)
((Not claiming Materials Science expertise on this one. Not if it gets beyond your basic metallic ductility, anyway. Just my first thoughts on the subject.))
Post by: Eric Blank on May 12, 2022, 04:29:54 pm
https://www.eso.org/public/blog/spot-the-difference-sagittarius-a-m87/
https://mobile.twitter.com/NASA/status/1524744614623821824?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Post by: Loud Whispers on May 19, 2022, 01:43:05 pm
Sagittarius a, the black hole at the center of the milkyway, has been imaged using the same technique as was used to image M87Damn our galaxy has a dark heart. Must be a goth or something
https://www.eso.org/public/blog/spot-the-difference-sagittarius-a-m87/
https://mobile.twitter.com/NASA/status/1524744614623821824?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Post by: Duuvian on December 27, 2023, 05:00:32 am
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/16/climate/solution-hot-rocks-renewable-energy-battery/index.html
Is the captured carbon suitable for the purpose of a thermal battery (which in the article uses graphite)? Inside a battery may be a fine storage solution. I'm not sure what the plans for storing a metric butt-ton of carbon are, but it seems like dumping it into industrial batteries could generate money through cost-savings over time for those businesses rather than storage costs for whoever is paying for rent and/or maintenence of the carbon storage even if that part were to be pretty cheap and easy.
Post by: Loud Whispers on December 27, 2023, 07:50:51 pm
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-is-spending-millions-to-trap-carbon-where-will-it-go/Turn it into vodka? (https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/oct/20/vodka-made-with-co2-captured-from-air-sustainable-spirit)
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/16/climate/solution-hot-rocks-renewable-energy-battery/index.html
Is the captured carbon suitable for the purpose of a thermal battery (which in the article uses graphite)? Inside a battery may be a fine storage solution. I'm not sure what the plans for storing a metric butt-ton of carbon are, but it seems like dumping it into industrial batteries could generate money through cost-savings over time for those businesses rather than storage costs for whoever is paying for rent and/or maintenence of the carbon storage even if that part were to be pretty cheap and easy.
Tbh best thing we could do is preserve our bogs
Post by: Duuvian on December 30, 2023, 06:48:46 am
Tbh best thing we could do is preserve our bogs
Yes
The coal of the future
What's going on with the bogs?
Post by: Loud Whispers on January 01, 2024, 11:17:04 pm
Yes
The coal of the future
What's going on with the bogs?
Surprisingly good at capturing carbon
Quote from: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/28/ultimate-bogs-how-saving-peatlands-could-help-save-the-planet
Known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests.
Also a lot more reliable than arborial carbon credit schemes (https://greenly.earth/en-gb/blog/ecology-news/us-wildfires-destroy-carbon-offsets), which kinda miss the point that a planted tree will die and release the carbon back. So quantity of trees is less important than the integrity and size of an ecosystem
Post by: dragdeler on January 03, 2024, 09:47:46 pm
Post by: anewaname on January 03, 2024, 10:37:05 pm
Post by: Great Order on January 03, 2024, 10:41:05 pm
I have been thinking recently they should actually be turning stuff into charcoal and filling old mines or something like that. But you're just going to be tempted to burn the coal sooner or later. We got it from the moors why not pump it back into the moors, heh.Bonus, if society collapses we'll have that store of energy dense material to kick start the industrial revolution again!
Post by: Loud Whispers on January 11, 2024, 11:07:37 am
I have been thinking recently they should actually be turning stuff into charcoal and filling old mines or something like that. But you're just going to be tempted to burn the coal sooner or later. We got it from the moors why not pump it back into the moors, heh.It'd have to be some place deep and lifeless. Cos it's been an old truth that smashed up charcoals and ash mixed into soil are super good for enriching the soil with carbon, encouraging the kind of bacteria and plant growth that kinda defeats the point of being a "carbon sink" that encourages the release of carbon already stored in the soil (https://phys.org/news/2008-05-limitations-charcoal-effective-carbon.html). Might be a decent alternative to agrochems tho (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666154323000054). Like imagine vineyards or orange plantations (https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-orange-peel-produced-something-nobody-imagined)making their own organic fertilisers
Post by: wierd on January 12, 2024, 05:46:31 am
When done under hermetic conditions, the environment inside the kiln rapidly depletes all available oxygen, and the carbon cannot turn into CO2, and instead "Just melts" and mixes with the glass. This should produce a geologically stable form of carbon that is mechanically sequestered, and the energy to perform the process can come from low-tech, inexpensive solar sources.
Doing this with human garbage (specifically, plastic wastes, but the chemistry shouldn't care too much about other organic impurities in the waste stream) could in theory resolve a number of ecological and economic problems all at once, but good luck getting the funding to start a pilot waste disposal operation.
the NIMBY folks will swear to heaven and back that the resulting black glass causes cancer and disruptions to their orgone responses, or some other nonsense.
To work correctly, the glass must melt below 400C, which means a high-soda glass, but there are numerous ways to accomplish that.
Post by: Loud Whispers on January 12, 2024, 09:07:00 am
I had considered "solar sintered glass entrapment" in sealed saggar crucibles several times.One of the funniest things I've seen from NIMBY was the woman who managed to block a charging port for EVs outside her house then when she got an electric car couldn't get the council to put a charging port outside her house or even in her neighbourhood, citing the stop order she had filed for
When done under hermetic conditions, the environment inside the kiln rapidly depletes all available oxygen, and the carbon cannot turn into CO2, and instead "Just melts" and mixes with the glass. This should produce a geologically stable form of carbon that is mechanically sequestered, and the energy to perform the process can come from low-tech, inexpensive solar sources.
Doing this with human garbage (specifically, plastic wastes, but the chemistry shouldn't care too much about other organic impurities in the waste stream) could in theory resolve a number of ecological and economic problems all at once, but good luck getting the funding to start a pilot waste disposal operation.
the NIMBY folks will swear to heaven and back that the resulting black glass causes cancer and disruptions to their orgone responses, or some other nonsense.
To work correctly, the glass must melt below 400C, which means a high-soda glass, but there are numerous ways to accomplish that.
Post by: StrawBarrel on March 26, 2024, 02:14:39 am
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/africa/toba-supervolcano-early-human-migration-africa-scn/index.html
Quote from: Katie Hunt
“People start to increase the percentage of fish in the diet when Toba comes in. They’re capturing and processing almost four times as much fish (as before the eruption),” he said.John Kappelman's study does sound like it presents an interesting theory regarding human migration.
“We think the reason for that is because if Toba is in fact, creating more aridity, that means it’s going to be a shorter wet season, which means longer dry season.”
The team theorized that the drier climate, counterintuitively, explains the increased reliance on fish: As the river shrank, fish were trapped in water holes or shallower streams that hunters could more easily target.
Blue vs. green corridor
The fish-rich water holes may have potentially created what the team described as a “blue corridor,” along which early humans moved north out of Africa once they were depleted of fish. This theory contradicts most other models that suggest that humanity’s main migration out of Africa took place along “green corridors” during humid periods.
“This study … demonstrates the great plasticity of Homo sapiens populations and their ability to adapt easily to any type of environment, whether hyper-humid or hyper-arid, including during catastrophic events such as the hyper-explosion of the Toba volcano,” said Ludovic Slimak, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse, in an email. Slimak was not involved in the research.