Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh, the research would certainly be useful for predicting the behavioral trends of students, for sure.

The behavioral sciences department would eat it up like candy.  (Simply because the model does not produce sentience in a machine, does not mean the model is without purpose.)

Aww crud, really? I guess I'd better stop throwing protein folds at our AIs and expecting them to spontaneously write me a sonnet about the meaning of life, then. /s

Seriously, though, there's no proposed model here. All we have is a suggestion that we load data into an AI in order to learn about it. My point was that AI doesn't operate with the transparency necessary for that to be a productive line of inquiry.

EDIT: PCA could, maybe?

Cool. This means that the force keeping a bacterium on a human is stronger than the force keeping a human to Earth. I used about 45 kg since thst was about my weight, using the average for all humans makes much more sense.

Bacteria also aren't that far off from the length/mass scale where inertia stops being a significant determinant of the mechanical behavior of a system under physiological conditions, so gravity doesn't really matter once something that small is in fluid and acted on by Brownian motion. Think about how you can launch yourself off the wall of a swimming pool, for example, and just drift for a while through the water in whatever direction you pushed. Now imagine trying to do the same thing in a ball pit. Now imagine how hard it would be if all the balls were baseballs and actively jumping around, and you'll have some idea of why mass and inertia and gravity don't have much to do with your skin flora. Intermolecular interactions do, though.

Oh, really? Well, that clears up a lot, since I was confused how it worked exactly because radioactive decay is exponential, not linear.

Well, it doesn't help that "atomic clock" is something of a misnomer. We talk about most clocks according to the oscillation they use to actually measure time; a pendulum clock, for example, physically swings a pendulum back and forth to measure out some consistent period of time. A quartz watch uses the piezoelectric effect to physically oscillate quartz. So, when we talk about atomic clocks, it's totally reasonable to assume the atoms are somehow oscillating in a way that we read out directly, and decay makes sense in that context.

What an atomic clock actually does, though, is use those transitions to tune another oscillator in a feedback loop, usually (in modern cesium and rubidium clocks) by using that oscillator to drive a maser at the frequency at which they are most readily excited and measuring either the absorption of energy or the excitation through a variety of methods. If you take the pendulum out of a pendulum clock, it stops; if you take the cesium out of a cesium clock, it drifts.

So an atomic clock is really an atomic drift corrected clock, if you will, in which case the use of hyperfine transitions makes a lot more sense.

Bah. Just use POSIX time. To Hell with 12-hour clocks, 24-hour clocks, DST, leap seconds, time zones, minutes, hours, days, etc. Just one number that is what time it is, increments by 1 every second, and will keep doing so at that rate forever.  Simple, easy, unambiguous, and totally unrelated to arbitrary astronomical phenomena and all the complexity they add; if for some reason you care where the Sun is, you can just do the modular arithmetic to figure it out.

We're also assuming people are acting rationally. If there were a government program to help people purchase eco-friendly vehicles, you know the day after launch there would be a hundred thousand Youtube videos with some wheezing Boomer in aviators and camo pants screaming about how he bought one of those commie cuckmobiles just to #triggerthelibs by filling it with gasoline and endangered species, then shooting it until it catches fire. Just like they did with the ex-NRA stuff. It seems destroying their own things is just...how conservatives express malaise now.

I just had a thought - instead of subsidies or tax rebates, why doesn't the government provide zero-interest loans for green tech? This would be both better for tax revenue and would get more people into "green tech" faster.  The government should do things that aren't commercially viable: because the benefits of "green tech" are diffuse, no private company will offer cheap (enough) loans for it because they can't get enough direct benefit.  But the "government" gets "all" of the diffuse benefit, so should be willing to do this.

What green technologies in particular are you thinking of, though? All cynicism about the government aside, solar panels and electric cars and LED lightbulbs and things have a significant impact on the environment to manufacture, so spurring a lot of people to install them spontaneously might actually end up at a net loss if you factor in the waste from replacing whatever less green equivalent still had life in it.

That's why I don't like seeing 100% goals.  Everyone knows it isn't going to be accomplished, so why not have real, specific policy planks instead?  So everyone knows what to expect, and can work with the upcoming problems, instead of being held responsable[sic] for failure to meet an unattainable goal.

Because to every company in America, "working with upcoming problems" means "weaseling out of our obligations to everyone but our shareholders." If you propose a carbon tax, that means paying lobbyists to shoehorn in an exception for their specific industry or getting the state to give them a tax break to offset it or any of the other games companies play with money -- or just flat-out ignoring it and daring someone to sue about it. If you propose a <100% reduction in nonrenewable power generation, that means establishing that their particular  concern should be in the nonrenewable fraction for whatever reason, or that the percentage should be dragged down to meet their needs. Historically, what is "achievable" has been twisted by conservatives to mean what doesn't need them to change anything, so the less wiggle room one starts with, the better.

Then, too, specific policy planks aren't compatible with American policy. Debating about things we don't understand is almost a sport, here, as is demanding to be taken seriously for no good reason. If you give people a target number like 95%, you will get a hundred million armchair experts on Facebook parroting the same factoids about why it should be 90% or 99% or 0% or my ideological opponents should die in a fire%; if you give them actual policy proposals, they will find or invent some consequence they disagree with or mine a quote they think sounds dumb and bikeshed about it just for the sake of sounding impressive until the news cycle turns over.

Don't think of the 100% proposal as a law; America doesn't do those anymore. Think of it as a slogan to rally the mob behind our next dictator, something short and memeable to chant in the civil war to come. It serves well enough as that.