Domain: wikipedia.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to wikipedia.org.
Comments · 444,599
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The physiology of cat hearing
I used to work for a world-class audio expert. One time he and I were talking and he mentioned that cats hear very differently than humans do.
Cats can hear up into the ultrasonic. They can also hear sounds in the range audible to us. But he said that while their range is much wider, this has the tradeoff that it's more difficult for cats to tell the difference between some sounds that sound different to us.
The base set of sounds that we identify to distinguish words are called formants. He told me that cats have trouble distinguishing formants, but on the other hand they can track a mouse in 3D space by the mouse's heartbeat. (Consider how small a mouse heart is and then imagine the audio spectrum of its heartbeat.)
A cat can't respond differently to its name if it can't tell the difference between its name and some other word. I wonder if the researchers allowed for the physiology of cat hearing at all in their tests.
Now, this next part isn't anything the audio expert said, it's me trying to fill in the blanks with what I know.
The sound of the letter 's' (called a sibilant) is basically white noise and thus covers a lot of the spectrum. Thus I'm pretty sure cats can at least distinguish between sibilants and non-sibilants. My wife and I have two cats right now, and one of them is named "Saga" while the other is named "Harbard". I'm pretty sure that those names will sound different even to a cat.
But if we had third cat named "Samba", I'm not sure they would be physiologically able to distinguish that name from "Saga".
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The physiology of cat hearing
I used to work for a world-class audio expert. One time he and I were talking and he mentioned that cats hear very differently than humans do.
Cats can hear up into the ultrasonic. They can also hear sounds in the range audible to us. But he said that while their range is much wider, this has the tradeoff that it's more difficult for cats to tell the difference between some sounds that sound different to us.
The base set of sounds that we identify to distinguish words are called formants. He told me that cats have trouble distinguishing formants, but on the other hand they can track a mouse in 3D space by the mouse's heartbeat. (Consider how small a mouse heart is and then imagine the audio spectrum of its heartbeat.)
A cat can't respond differently to its name if it can't tell the difference between its name and some other word. I wonder if the researchers allowed for the physiology of cat hearing at all in their tests.
Now, this next part isn't anything the audio expert said, it's me trying to fill in the blanks with what I know.
The sound of the letter 's' (called a sibilant) is basically white noise and thus covers a lot of the spectrum. Thus I'm pretty sure cats can at least distinguish between sibilants and non-sibilants. My wife and I have two cats right now, and one of them is named "Saga" while the other is named "Harbard". I'm pretty sure that those names will sound different even to a cat.
But if we had third cat named "Samba", I'm not sure they would be physiologically able to distinguish that name from "Saga".
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The physiology of cat hearing
I used to work for a world-class audio expert. One time he and I were talking and he mentioned that cats hear very differently than humans do.
Cats can hear up into the ultrasonic. They can also hear sounds in the range audible to us. But he said that while their range is much wider, this has the tradeoff that it's more difficult for cats to tell the difference between some sounds that sound different to us.
The base set of sounds that we identify to distinguish words are called formants. He told me that cats have trouble distinguishing formants, but on the other hand they can track a mouse in 3D space by the mouse's heartbeat. (Consider how small a mouse heart is and then imagine the audio spectrum of its heartbeat.)
A cat can't respond differently to its name if it can't tell the difference between its name and some other word. I wonder if the researchers allowed for the physiology of cat hearing at all in their tests.
Now, this next part isn't anything the audio expert said, it's me trying to fill in the blanks with what I know.
The sound of the letter 's' (called a sibilant) is basically white noise and thus covers a lot of the spectrum. Thus I'm pretty sure cats can at least distinguish between sibilants and non-sibilants. My wife and I have two cats right now, and one of them is named "Saga" while the other is named "Harbard". I'm pretty sure that those names will sound different even to a cat.
But if we had third cat named "Samba", I'm not sure they would be physiologically able to distinguish that name from "Saga".
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Re:Considering that those nations are busy destroy
Amazon, the company in the US, the book shop, the retailer, is not the only company called amazon.
http://www.pttmcc.com/new/cafe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The coffee they offer is actually quite good.
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Re:Rising prices
No, it has always been an economic union. Europe has experienced the longest running peace in centuries because of it. They've had wars on the Continent almost every 40 years prior to that.
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Re:Solo Programming ...Nonesense!
A small/ solo shop can even be TOO successful...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird
...not a happy story, but it shows that impactful* solo development is quite possible.*sorry 'bout the marketerspeak...
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Not naive, just recent graduates
Some years back there used to be a (US?) print magazine titled "Game Developer Magazine". It existed from 1994 to 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I read it at the time because of a general interest in programming and computer games. I didn't ever really expect to get a job doing it. And reading that magazine didn't really change that expectation...
There was basically about three kinds of articles they generally had:
--One was about new game hardware, software or related tech coming soon.
--One was called "Post Mortem" where after a game was released, they would have a manager talk about all the major problems they had along the way.
--The last was general management articles about running computer game production.
From reading this magazine occasionally for a couple years I gathered two things:
1. Many people who got hired to code were recent college grads in LA or Austin TX, who really just took the job to put something on their resumes. The lower coding jobs were low salary and long hours with little benefits, and they left as soon as they found anything better.
2. There were constant problems with employee turnover. Many articles were about how to set up content management systems so that it was as easy as possible to get new people up to speed and working productively.
I often wondered who the target audience for this magazine really was. From reading it, working at a game company really didn't sound like much of a dream job. -
ignorant
[...] We must be the master "race" (a term that does not exist in science btw). [...]
You are such a pillock. The term "race" used by scientists, viz. the Wikipedia article on its use in biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... -
Re:Physics still says no
Where does it say they are using standard air for it?
Hint: Archimedes' principle.
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Re: Translation
> I know no cases where a republic changed back to monarchy again.
Rome, though it transitioned through some other populist stuff first
England? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Netherlands, 1672, and again in 1813.
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Re:You can Trust the Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation: keeping the world safe for entitled white christian males since 1973.
Wikipedia: Heritage also became involved in the culture wars of the 1990s with the publication of "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators" by William Bennett. The Index documented how crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use and fourteen other social indicators had become measurably worse since the 1960s."
Was Mr. Bennett wrong? Were those social indicators worse in the 1990s than in the 1960s? If so - then why do the facts hurt you so?
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Re:You need to learn about Switerland
Angel'o'sphere... you're slipping (or have you been sipping?) The lowest part of Switzerland is Lake Maggiore which is 195 m *above* current sea-level.
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You can Trust the Heritage FoundationThe Heritage Foundation: keeping the world safe for entitled white christian males since 1973.
Wikipedia: Heritage also became involved in the culture wars of the 1990s with the publication of "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators" by William Bennett. The Index documented how crime, illegitimacy, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use and fourteen other social indicators had become measurably worse since the 1960s."
China Social Credit 2019. Some local governments have taken things further. Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, designed a map on WeChat that warns people when they’re within 500 meters near a “deadbeat,” the word used by authorities to describe those who fail to repay their debts. One county also made a ringtone that warns people when they’re calling a “deadbeat."
As Google continues to help China build a censored search engine (and lies about it), the person you want to help with your AI ethics initiative is from the organization that fanned the flames of the 90's Culture War. President "Grab Them by the Pussy" Trump is 100% on board.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Re:It's legitimate.
because we're talking about America, an aggressive authoritarian nation with an awful humans right record (currently "re-educating" a million+ native Americans).
FTFY
C'mon Gravis Zero, you got to admit at least the Chinese Muslims are not being removed from their land and genocided like the native Americans. -
Ol Olsoc calling out the kettles
Note to the shills - Seriously, your flooding the group with Anti-Chinese propaganda any time Huawai is mentioned is kinda a dead giveaway. No discussion, nothing except 'Chyna BAD!
Now for the shillls with mod points to mod up this post.
FTFY
Ol Olsoc your selective outrage about one million in China seems odd considering 'Murrica was one of the stand out pioneers of racial genocide.
You overlooking atrocities against native Americans is kinda a dead giveaway isn't it? -
Oblig wiki
Read this Wikipedia article about coral reef bleaching.
PLEASE tell me they can't recover. -
Re: Translation
> I know no cases where a republic changed back to monarchy again.
Rome, though it transitioned through some other populist stuff first
England? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Re: Starship?
In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge.
Or it could be very tiny like the StarChip proposal. But either way it is not landing on any planets.
I'm not sure I'd consider those star ships any more than I do the Voyager probes, which may eventually pass into another star system. Even though they'll be targeted towards Alpha Centauri, unless you redefine the word 'ship', they're still probes.
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Re: Starship?
In order to make it there to begin with it would have to be huge.
Or it could be very tiny like the StarChip proposal. But either way it is not landing on any planets.
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The 30 year old 'expert' with +40 years experience
Also very good at marketing himself although he build his 'unique' expertise on the work of others.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This is nothing more than a pawn in a mud fight between Google and Apple over the 'best' engineers.
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Renting a PC
Hell, even Steve Jobs never announced the death of the PC. It may be the "Post PC" era, but he never said they were going to die.
After Windows 8 came out in fourth quarter 2012, entry-level 10.1" x86-64 laptops disappeared in favor of (higher profit margin) convertibles and detachables as well as locked-down Windows RT devices. When netbooks came back, largely as a response to Chromebook late in Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign, the smallest one could buy was 11.6".
He likened the PC to trucks - versatile machines that can do everything, but have limitations of their own, while smartphones and tablets represent other vehicles on the road - able to do their tasks generally with far more efficiency. But as you can see, we have trucks on the road still, because of their utility.
But can someone who doesn't own a truck but occasionally needs to use one rent a truck? Can someone who occasionally needs a PC rent a PC?
Is there a substantial wheel tax penalty for owning a truck compared to a car? Is something analogous contemplated for owning a PC?
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Re:Ban royalty
And Alexander Hamilton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hamilton viewed the system as superior to direct popular election. First, he recognized, the "sense of the people should operate in the choice", and would through the election of the electors to the Electoral College. Second, the electors would be:
...men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.Such men would be "most likely to have the information and discernment" to make a good choice and to avoid the election of anyone "not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications."
Corruption of an electoral process could most likely arise from the desire of "foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils." To minimize risk of foreign machinations and inducements, the electoral college members would have only a "transient existence" and no elector could be a "senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States"; electors would make their choice in a "detached situation", whereas a preexisting body of federal office-holders "might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes".
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Lawsuits are not the problem.
Paying damages for the immediate accidents won't be a big problem. However, the prospect of losing thousands of future orders could be a significant blow to both Boeing and the US economy.
Japan Airlines Flight 123 - a boeing 747 that crashed killing 520 people - remains the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history.
The official cause was botched maintenance by a team of technicians sent to Japan by Boeing.
JAL paid a total of $7.6 million to the victims' relatives in the form of "condolence money".
JAL president, Yasumoto Takagi, resigned.
A JAL maintenance manager and an engineer who had inspected and cleared the aircraft as flightworthy, both committed suicide.
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Re:Translation
There's a strong case for every government eventually doing so.
tldl:
According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the cycle, it rotates through the three basic forms of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny.
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Just adds another chapter to Censorhip in the UK
Go and amend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's got a long tradition.
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Re:Testament of Solomon
King Solomon worshiped Satan. Read the book yourself if you don't believe me.
Meh, I'll bite since this is some creatively "out there" trolling. You seem to be unaware that the book you're referring to, which is fictitiously/falsely attributed to Solomon by its actual author, was written a millennium or more after Solomon's death in a language that didn't even exist at the time of his reign. If you actually read it, you should have noticed the readily apparent Greek influence (e.g. mythological, thematic, and linguistic) that should have been a dead giveaway that it came much later and wasn't something he authored.
But hey, if you think that book is historically accurate, I've got a few other historical accounts that might interest you and are of similar levels of historicity. They really provide some insight into the period conditions of their respective times and places.
On the plus side, today I learned a new word from that first link: pseudepigraphical.
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Re:Testament of Solomon
King Solomon worshiped Satan. Read the book yourself if you don't believe me.
Meh, I'll bite since this is some creatively "out there" trolling. You seem to be unaware that the book you're referring to, which is fictitiously/falsely attributed to Solomon by its actual author, was written a millennium or more after Solomon's death in a language that didn't even exist at the time of his reign. If you actually read it, you should have noticed the readily apparent Greek influence (e.g. mythological, thematic, and linguistic) that should have been a dead giveaway that it came much later and wasn't something he authored.
But hey, if you think that book is historically accurate, I've got a few other historical accounts that might interest you and are of similar levels of historicity. They really provide some insight into the period conditions of their respective times and places.
On the plus side, today I learned a new word from that first link: pseudepigraphical.
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Re:Testament of Solomon
King Solomon worshiped Satan. Read the book yourself if you don't believe me.
Meh, I'll bite since this is some creatively "out there" trolling. You seem to be unaware that the book you're referring to, which is fictitiously/falsely attributed to Solomon by its actual author, was written a millennium or more after Solomon's death in a language that didn't even exist at the time of his reign. If you actually read it, you should have noticed the readily apparent Greek influence (e.g. mythological, thematic, and linguistic) that should have been a dead giveaway that it came much later and wasn't something he authored.
But hey, if you think that book is historically accurate, I've got a few other historical accounts that might interest you and are of similar levels of historicity. They really provide some insight into the period conditions of their respective times and places.
On the plus side, today I learned a new word from that first link: pseudepigraphical.
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Re: Ban royalty
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Re:Ban royalty
It's an outdated concept, a relic from when we we're uncivilized.
I agree they're outdated, but they are also a nice reminder of tradition, And
usually they have the candor to stay out of political matters.If the latter changes, then I would firmly suggest a democratic revolution and abolishment of the monarchy in form of that done with the first French republic.
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Re:Ban everything we don't like.
>In the Western world, phosphate usage has declined owing to ecological problems with the damage to lakes and rivers through eutrophication
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...Safe for us, directly. Not so much for any animals that live in the water. And anything that threatens the health of our ecosystem, threatens our survival as a species.
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Re:Prove that youtube videos cause violence?
While not a "religion" per se, atheism is just as much a faith as any religion.
Logically, you cannot prove a negative (other than disproving every other possible case), meaning you can't prove that there is no god. So the only logically supportable belief is agnosticism - you are uncertain if a god does or does not exist. To take that extra step to atheism - being convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.
Your TV analogy doesn't work because it's trivial to observe that the TV is off. A better analogy is the TV in my house that is unobservable to you and the people debating its state. Religious people might say it's tuned to CNN or NBC. An atheist would say the TV is off, and get into arguments with anyone claiming the TV is on. An agnostic would (logically correctly) say "we can't know the state of the TV" and would pretty much ignore anyone claiming it's on or off, because to them there's no point arguing over something that can't be determined with certainty. (Which incidentally is why engineers are more likely to be religious than scientists. Engineers are used to making important design decisions in the face of uncertainty as a normal course of their work. Scientists rather dislike publishing results unless they're certain.)
The atheist "lack of a belief" argument basically boils down to obfuscating the atheist and agnostic cases to combine them. Yes "we don't know what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be off" is a logically correct statement. But it's rather meaningless since you can just as easily say "we don't know how what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be on" and also be correct.
I attribute this misconception among atheists to the rise of computer science. Computers use boolean logic, where the only possible states are true or false. So failure to confirm the true state logically confirms the false state. But boolean logic is actually a subset of real-world logic, which has three possible states - true, false, and cannot be determined. In the real world, failing to confirm the true state does not prove the false state. -
How to know an article sucks right away
> For this to work, the Linux desktop has to be using the Wayland display server (some Linux-based OSes use X11)
MOST Linux-based OSes *still* use XOrg, and Wayland is still considered beta quality software that lacks support for remote access. FAIL.
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Re:Capitalism again
when investing in bribes and government subversion creates better returns than investing in production, a capitalist will invest in bribery and not in production.
Please be more specific. It's only bribery and corruption when it it is paid to a foreign official. It is protected speech when paid to a domestic politician.
Congress voted itself a monopoly in the taking of graft.
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Re:Reminds me of Tacoma
Sounds like the past.
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Re:Clunky system?
That said, I do not recall two blades on either side of the nose cones.
Some fighters and other military aircraft don't use AoA vanes. Instead, they use a pitot tube type sensor to sense the direction of the direction of the air flow. This type of sensor will just be a few more ports in the air data boom and a few more pressure transducers.
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Re:Clunky system?
That said, I do not recall two blades on either side of the nose cones.
Some fighters and other military aircraft don't use AoA vanes. Instead, they use a pitot tube type sensor to sense the direction of the direction of the air flow. This type of sensor will just be a few more ports in the air data boom and a few more pressure transducers.
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Re: These are children of people who know better
nothing wrong with heavy metal.
Agreed 100%.
Just in case you (or others) didn't get the reference/joke above... negative teen behavior was often attributed to heavy metal music's alleged "bad" influence. Most notably in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shootings, where artists like Marilyn Manson, KMFDM, Ramstein, and Nine Inch Nails were discussed by news networks and even on the US Senate floor as factors in the shooting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bullshit knee-jerk reactions, of course.
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Re:Prove that youtube videos cause violence?
Christianity never had a reformation.
The Reformers would like to have a word with you.
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Re:China and America actually are different
...Working in tech field, then you probably have NDAs/claims that you are taking their intellectual property. Failing that, remember when Apple, Adobe, Google, etc. agreed not to hire each other's employees?
Yes, but that was challenged and ruled illegal by the U.S. government. That makes a difference: in the US, the government challenges the anticompetitive "gentleman's agreement". In China, the government enforces it.
https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...
https://www.mintz.com/insights...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Still... where are my back wages? Where were the big fines on these companies who were involved in a criminal conspiracy that affected millions of workers.
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Re:Outlawing kinds of speech now?
Interesting thing that, "fire in a theatre" quote. According to Wikipedia it is a paraphrasing of the opinion of a Justice in the U.S. Supreme Court and was originally, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The interesting part, to me at least, is that we essentially have the same problem. Someone is knowingly giving false information which could result in someone else taking action based on it. In this case the internet is the theatre, the false information was from people talking to Brenton Tarrant and the action was killing 50 people.
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Re:Queue the ACs
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Re:Light pollution
Time to move all serious astronomy to the far side of the moon.
True story. Also "home, home on LaGrange, where it's dark and the telescopes play"
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And physics laws...
...will soon cut off satellite broadband access to the whole world for a very long time. Just wait for the first collision among Amazon, SpaceX & co. satellites.
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Re:Seconds instead of minutes?
His favorite movie is Logistics.
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China and America actually are different
...Working in tech field, then you probably have NDAs/claims that you are taking their intellectual property. Failing that, remember when Apple, Adobe, Google, etc. agreed not to hire each other's employees?
Yes, but that was challenged and ruled illegal by the U.S. government. That makes a difference: in the US, the government challenges the anticompetitive "gentleman's agreement". In China, the government enforces it.
https://www.cnet.com/news/appl...
https://www.mintz.com/insights...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -
Re:Starship?
Just use a billion times as much fuel
Not just fuel, also fuel tanks, extra staging, and assorted mass. But yeah, in my book that counts as a "problem".
Plus, our biggest telescope array is still only measured in miles
A telescope array is only useful to increase its resolving power, because that only depends on maximum distance. It doesn't help much with sensitivity, because that's related to total area, which only modestly increases with extra telescopes. The biggest single dish in the Deep Space Network is only 70 meter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You could of course use a bigger dish on the probe, but that would require more mass, and/or a really flimsy structure. And every ton of mass would require another billion tons of fuel, per your estimate.
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A tool for repression
Thank you, anonymous coward Chinese troll, for your delightful fake facts.
AP News: "China bars millions from travel for ‘social credit’ offenses". ref
Business Insider: "China has already started punishing people [with low social credit] by restricting their travel. Nine million people with low scores have been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights, Channel News Asia reported in March, citing official statistics." Ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4
Wikipedia: "Travel ban. By the end of 2018, 5.5 million high-speed rail trips and 17.5 million flights had been denied to prospective travellers who were on a blacklist." ref
And the "social credit" system is also used, yes, to enforce politics. Wired: "If solving problems was the real goal, the CCP would not need social credit to do it," she says. "China’s social credit system is a state-driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s power." (Ref: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained
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Re:ELI5 please
In addition to "ghoul's" comment, there is a simple lag factor. It takes days or weeks of warm sunshine to melt the foot to metre of winter snow when spring comes. The sun has to provide energy to raise the temperature to 0degC, then it has to provide more energy to overcome the latent heat of fusion of the ice into water (that energy goes to breaking down the crystal structure of the ice). That takes time. For multi-kilometre-thick ice sheets, that time can be in the millennia. Which is long enough to show up in the climate records.
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Re:AI models based on their adverts?
while it's likely that the number of accidents will go down. It's also true, all else being equal, that the number of car journey will increase. Is there anyone outside of the auto lobby that thinks, yep, what we need is more car journeys. That'll help with the obesity crisis, pollution and global warming. Really?
This is why we need to promote rail. Here in the USA, Trump is attacking national rail, probably on behalf of the oil and car companies. It's happened before that auto companies destroyed profitable public transportation lines to increase demand for their product (with the aid of oil and tire companies, who wanted the same for their products.)
The future of ride hailing is the use of a single app to manage an entire journey. A trip could involve an autonomous car showing up to take you to a train station, where you'd transfer (on one pass) to a train that would take you to an airport, where you'd transfer again, etc. If we are vigilant, that journey will make sense.