Oh yes, and that whole thing your school teachers taught about electrons orbiting a cluster of protons and neutrons is a lie; it's just a convenient way of visualizing what's happening.
Nice condescending swipe. Now, would you care to explain why you said you need "a gap no greater than two protons thick" to block the escape of helium atoms, each consisting of a nucleus with its attendant populated orbitals, several orders of magnitude larger than the bare nucleus that you seemed to be describing?
For that matter, how exactly would you define "a gap no greater than two protons thick" in an object made from molecular matter -- that is, matter bound together by those clouds of electrons that you alluded to? You know, the things that "don't really take up physical space" (except that they really do) and "have no mass" (except 9.10938291 × 10e-31 kilograms), and don't really "orbit" (but certainly do interact to form what's "conveniently" conceptualized as a van der Waals surface)?
The argument seems to be that, because we don't see "evidence of technological activity" when we look out at the universe, intelligence leading to technological culture must be rare or absent. If an entity or a culture doesn't cause huge, recognizable perturbations in its environment, it must not represent "intelligence".
Think of an electrical engineer from the 1880s studying the data cables that run through a modern city. He might cut into a cable, expecting to find a wire carrying electrical impulses. Instead, he sees a bundle of glass fibers, glowing brightly if he nicks or breaks them. No tools at his disposal would let him even detect the gigahertz-scale fluctuations in that light.
For that matter, consider a 1960s "exobiologist" trying to decode an intercepted 2014 video stream. If you told him it was image data, he might look for periodicities that would let him determine rows, columns, and pixels. In an MPEG-compressed stream, he wouldn't get far. Heaven help him if it's DRMed.
My point: the things we look for as evidence of technological civilization may just be evidence of insufficiently advanced technological civilization. The "filters" we fear -- nuclear annihilation, bioterror, grey goo -- may indeed claim a lot of civilizations, or they may be laughably uncommon. It seems to me most likely that, instead of trying and failing to build space-opera-scope interstellar empires, most civilizations simply grow into something that we aren't yet sophisticated enough to notice.
So it really all comes down to the seal: if they can get the seal to leave a gap no greater than two protons thick (He comes in stable isotopes of 1 or 2 neutrons), then no helium can escape. Good luck getting a seal that good though.
Well, you just need to squeeze your neutronium together really hard along the joints.
Seriously, "a gap no greater than two protons thick"? Have you completely forgotten about electrons? You know, those things that hold all Earthly matter together (and apart)?
You'll notice that whenever companies engage in discussions about this sort of thing, they seem to be talking about households of one person. I have no idea how 10MBPS would suffice in a house of, say, four people.
Why, they're all gathered around the radio in the evening, while Father smokes his pipe and Mother does her knitting.
"The environmentally-friendly fuel propane" doesn't refer to the method of production. Propane is easier to burn cleanly than gasoline or kerosene, and it's not as significant a greenhouse gas as methane. It still produces CO2 when burned, of course, but it's carbon-neutral (assuming you aren't using a fossil feedstock, which would seem kind of pointless).
Gasoline produced through fermentation would be carbon-neutral as well, but it would still burn dirtier.
I have a different theory. His comic appeal to people who merely believe themselves to be above average.
...but it can't appeal to people who really are above average, because it doesn't appeal to you! Right?
So, can you recommend any webcomics that appeal to people who bolster their own sense of superiority by accusing others of feeling superior, and then mocking them for it? Maybe something with "Projection" in the title...
I feel embarrassed every time I see an English-language site render this as "Bardarbunga", when that "d" should be "th". Yes, the letter "eth" looks like a lowercase d with a crossbar and erectile dysfunction, but it's pronounced like "th".
They should render the a-with-diacritic as "au", too. (Maybe even take the "g" to a "k".) But while there's a long and stupid tradition of dropping diacritics without rewriting the vowel, there's no damn excuse for getting it this badly wrong when you've got to replace a letter that simply doesn't exist in your target alphabet.
I did, and I chose that word carefully. If we have a fleet that accumulates experience over time, I expect its performance to improve by a compounding percentage over time. That fits the precise definition of "exponential growth".
You may disagree with my optimistic outlook, but I stand by my choice of words. If anything, perhaps I should have said "exponentially more situations over time", but I think that actually dilutes the point a bit. All the same, I accept that reasonable people may disagree with my wording.
Nope. "High tension" means high voltage, which is done so they can get away with low current, which means low magnetic (b-field) coupling. And the rate-of-change is also low, because it's a 60hz sine wave, not an aggressive fast-rise-time pulse. Finally, it's a line (approximately), not a coil -- the magnetic flux is proportional to the number of turns, and for a transmission line the number of turns is 1.
Now, the electric field effects from high-tension lines are another matter entirely.
As TFA illustrates, Google's autonomous cars aren't yet ready to drive on every road in the country. But the same could be said of many, many people who are driving those very roads at this very moment.
We don't need a system that always outperforms the very best human drivers. Even if it only outperforms 95% of human drivers, it will still make the roads safer for everyone -- even that 5%, because they'll be at less risk from the 95%.
And remember, there are an awful lot of people in that lower 95% -- heck, in the lower 50%, or the lower 10% -- who are absolutely convinced that they're in the elite 5%.
I think it's the same as a lot of other AI applications. Because autonomous cars can be so much better than human drivers in so many ways -- more and better senses, faster "reflexes", less susceptibility to distraction/impairment/fatigue, inter-vehicle communication, learning from the experience of an entire fleet (including the vehicles that "died" in serious accidents) -- they may never need to be ANYWHERE CLOSE to "human-level AI".
As a very simplistic analogy, consider anti-lock brakes. It takes humans a huge amount of experience, along with lightning reflexes, to deal with rapidly-changing road conditions. Machines don't have anywhere near the human capacity to attend to weather conditions (and weather forecasts), interpret subtle changes in the appearance of the road surface, remember which local roads are prone to ice or standing water, and so forth. But because machines can observe the actual behavior of each wheel of a car and modulate the brakes independently in response, much more quickly than any human's reflexes, they can reliably outperform even experienced and attentive human drivers. And that's with 1970's mechanical technology.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car".
I really don't mean to be a jerk about this, but didn't you actually just utter pretty much those exact words?! -- from earlier in your post:
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
So, given that you said that and that you were "sure" of that statement, does that mean you also don't wear a seat belt because you're afraid of dying in a car fire? Just wonderin'.:)
My point was this:
There are a few situations where you're worse off wearing a seat belt than not wearing one. There are people who have died because they were wearing a seat belt.
Those situations are immensely rarer than the situations in which a seat belt will save your life, and since "accidents" are inherently unpredictable, you can't tell in advance when you should or shouldn't wear a seat belt.
Given these facts, it's really really stupid not to wear a seat belt, even though there are some situations in which it might harm you.
Similarly, self-driving cars will eventually reach a point where they'll sometimes kill you, but far, far more often save your life. At that point, avoiding them because you're afraid of the rarest scenario will be an equally stupid decision. It's one that people will make, though, because people are demonstrably terrible at this kind of risk evaluation.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
I'm equally sure that there will be exponentially more situations where standard automation will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than average (or even well above-average) human drivers.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car". It's not wrong, but it is foolish, and it's a poor decision.
In related news, since staring at the sun through a large telescope can damage your retina, DON'T DARE LOOK AT YOUR PHONE SCREEN! It emits DEADLY PHOTONS of electromagnetic RADIATION!!11!
Something to keep in mind should you ever decide to timidly stick your head out of your cave.
"How long" isn't the question, but "how fast". You should be accelerating it to a few kilometers/sec, then reversing its velocity when it's a few millimeters from your scalp. You should probably do this in a vacuum, to avoid confounding influences from shockwaves.
You're on the right track, but I think you'd still be short on power by several orders of magnitude. Even if you strap it directly to your head, your subwoofer's still only good for causing headaches and annoying bystanders.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, and that whole thing your school teachers taught about electrons orbiting a cluster of protons and neutrons is a lie; it's just a convenient way of visualizing what's happening.
Nice condescending swipe. Now, would you care to explain why you said you need "a gap no greater than two protons thick" to block the escape of helium atoms, each consisting of a nucleus with its attendant populated orbitals, several orders of magnitude larger than the bare nucleus that you seemed to be describing?
For that matter, how exactly would you define "a gap no greater than two protons thick" in an object made from molecular matter -- that is, matter bound together by those clouds of electrons that you alluded to? You know, the things that "don't really take up physical space" (except that they really do) and "have no mass" (except 9.10938291 × 10e-31 kilograms), and don't really "orbit" (but certainly do interact to form what's "conveniently" conceptualized as a van der Waals surface)?
Nonsense.
The argument seems to be that, because we don't see "evidence of technological activity" when we look out at the universe, intelligence leading to technological culture must be rare or absent. If an entity or a culture doesn't cause huge, recognizable perturbations in its environment, it must not represent "intelligence".
Think of an electrical engineer from the 1880s studying the data cables that run through a modern city. He might cut into a cable, expecting to find a wire carrying electrical impulses. Instead, he sees a bundle of glass fibers, glowing brightly if he nicks or breaks them. No tools at his disposal would let him even detect the gigahertz-scale fluctuations in that light.
For that matter, consider a 1960s "exobiologist" trying to decode an intercepted 2014 video stream. If you told him it was image data, he might look for periodicities that would let him determine rows, columns, and pixels. In an MPEG-compressed stream, he wouldn't get far. Heaven help him if it's DRMed.
My point: the things we look for as evidence of technological civilization may just be evidence of insufficiently advanced technological civilization. The "filters" we fear -- nuclear annihilation, bioterror, grey goo -- may indeed claim a lot of civilizations, or they may be laughably uncommon. It seems to me most likely that, instead of trying and failing to build space-opera-scope interstellar empires, most civilizations simply grow into something that we aren't yet sophisticated enough to notice.
You seem to have a really... optimistic view of the size, cost, and power budget for RAM.
So it really all comes down to the seal: if they can get the seal to leave a gap no greater than two protons thick (He comes in stable isotopes of 1 or 2 neutrons), then no helium can escape. Good luck getting a seal that good though.
Well, you just need to squeeze your neutronium together really hard along the joints.
Seriously, "a gap no greater than two protons thick"? Have you completely forgotten about electrons? You know, those things that hold all Earthly matter together (and apart)?
What's the news on HAMR? Is it still being pursued?
Don't stop. It's not HAMR time.
You'll notice that whenever companies engage in discussions about this sort of thing, they seem to be talking about households of one person. I have no idea how 10MBPS would suffice in a house of, say, four people.
Why, they're all gathered around the radio in the evening, while Father smokes his pipe and Mother does her knitting.
Er, TV, not radio.
It's a fine international tradition, but one that I thought had fallen out of favor some centuries ago.
IT'S MADE FROM PEOPLE!
"The environmentally-friendly fuel propane" doesn't refer to the method of production. Propane is easier to burn cleanly than gasoline or kerosene, and it's not as significant a greenhouse gas as methane. It still produces CO2 when burned, of course, but it's carbon-neutral (assuming you aren't using a fossil feedstock, which would seem kind of pointless).
Gasoline produced through fermentation would be carbon-neutral as well, but it would still burn dirtier.
The Universe was such a nice place before all this suburban sprawl took over. Stupid commuters.
I have a different theory. His comic appeal to people who merely believe themselves to be above average.
...but it can't appeal to people who really are above average, because it doesn't appeal to you! Right?
So, can you recommend any webcomics that appeal to people who bolster their own sense of superiority by accusing others of feeling superior, and then mocking them for it? Maybe something with "Projection" in the title...
Well, cool. It always takes some of the sting out of being wrong when I learn interesting things from the correction. Thanks!
I feel embarrassed every time I see an English-language site render this as "Bardarbunga", when that "d" should be "th". Yes, the letter "eth" looks like a lowercase d with a crossbar and erectile dysfunction, but it's pronounced like "th".
They should render the a-with-diacritic as "au", too. (Maybe even take the "g" to a "k".) But while there's a long and stupid tradition of dropping diacritics without rewriting the vowel, there's no damn excuse for getting it this badly wrong when you've got to replace a letter that simply doesn't exist in your target alphabet.
I did, and I chose that word carefully. If we have a fleet that accumulates experience over time, I expect its performance to improve by a compounding percentage over time. That fits the precise definition of "exponential growth".
You may disagree with my optimistic outlook, but I stand by my choice of words. If anything, perhaps I should have said "exponentially more situations over time", but I think that actually dilutes the point a bit. All the same, I accept that reasonable people may disagree with my wording.
Nope. "High tension" means high voltage, which is done so they can get away with low current, which means low magnetic (b-field) coupling. And the rate-of-change is also low, because it's a 60hz sine wave, not an aggressive fast-rise-time pulse. Finally, it's a line (approximately), not a coil -- the magnetic flux is proportional to the number of turns, and for a transmission line the number of turns is 1.
Now, the electric field effects from high-tension lines are another matter entirely.
Exactly.
As TFA illustrates, Google's autonomous cars aren't yet ready to drive on every road in the country. But the same could be said of many, many people who are driving those very roads at this very moment.
We don't need a system that always outperforms the very best human drivers. Even if it only outperforms 95% of human drivers, it will still make the roads safer for everyone -- even that 5%, because they'll be at less risk from the 95%.
And remember, there are an awful lot of people in that lower 95% -- heck, in the lower 50%, or the lower 10% -- who are absolutely convinced that they're in the elite 5%.
I think it's the same as a lot of other AI applications. Because autonomous cars can be so much better than human drivers in so many ways -- more and better senses, faster "reflexes", less susceptibility to distraction/impairment/fatigue, inter-vehicle communication, learning from the experience of an entire fleet (including the vehicles that "died" in serious accidents) -- they may never need to be ANYWHERE CLOSE to "human-level AI".
As a very simplistic analogy, consider anti-lock brakes. It takes humans a huge amount of experience, along with lightning reflexes, to deal with rapidly-changing road conditions. Machines don't have anywhere near the human capacity to attend to weather conditions (and weather forecasts), interpret subtle changes in the appearance of the road surface, remember which local roads are prone to ice or standing water, and so forth. But because machines can observe the actual behavior of each wheel of a car and modulate the brakes independently in response, much more quickly than any human's reflexes, they can reliably outperform even experienced and attentive human drivers. And that's with 1970's mechanical technology.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car".
I really don't mean to be a jerk about this, but didn't you actually just utter pretty much those exact words?! -- from earlier in your post:
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
So, given that you said that and that you were "sure" of that statement, does that mean you also don't wear a seat belt because you're afraid of dying in a car fire? Just wonderin'. :)
My point was this:
There are a few situations where you're worse off wearing a seat belt than not wearing one. There are people who have died because they were wearing a seat belt.
Those situations are immensely rarer than the situations in which a seat belt will save your life, and since "accidents" are inherently unpredictable, you can't tell in advance when you should or shouldn't wear a seat belt.
Given these facts, it's really really stupid not to wear a seat belt, even though there are some situations in which it might harm you.
Similarly, self-driving cars will eventually reach a point where they'll sometimes kill you, but far, far more often save your life. At that point, avoiding them because you're afraid of the rarest scenario will be an equally stupid decision. It's one that people will make, though, because people are demonstrably terrible at this kind of risk evaluation.
It will be decades before these vehicles can handle real life situations. You will need AI that can improvise as well as a human. Good luck with that.
I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.
I'm equally sure that there will be exponentially more situations where standard automation will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than average (or even well above-average) human drivers.
I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car". It's not wrong, but it is foolish, and it's a poor decision.
In related news, since staring at the sun through a large telescope can damage your retina, DON'T DARE LOOK AT YOUR PHONE SCREEN! It emits DEADLY PHOTONS of electromagnetic RADIATION!!11!
Something to keep in mind should you ever decide to timidly stick your head out of your cave.
The peak rate of flow for blood appears to be well under 1 m/s, even in the largest vessels. No, you won't get a noticeable effect.
"How long" isn't the question, but "how fast". You should be accelerating it to a few kilometers/sec, then reversing its velocity when it's a few millimeters from your scalp. You should probably do this in a vacuum, to avoid confounding influences from shockwaves.
No, not spinning, reciprocating -- moving in and out.
You know, like the ones in that Insane Clown Posse song that everyone keeps quoting.
It's a shame Dr.Bob is no longer with us. Your troll is a mere 1/1000th the power of his.
Wow. That's an impressive body of work.
You're on the right track, but I think you'd still be short on power by several orders of magnitude. Even if you strap it directly to your head, your subwoofer's still only good for causing headaches and annoying bystanders.