Actually, when it comes to the ISS, the "ruskies" might decide to dump the US first (at least the Russians claim that, "The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot."). Apparently Russia has already "banned" the US from using their RD-180 engines which power the Atlas V rockets used to launch our military satellites as a consequence of this Ukraine tiff...
Perhaps you are unaware of how much regression has occurred the US space program. You talk about the science of space travel from a knowledge point of view, but that is currently a moot problem from the US point of view, we don't have launchers at the moment. If you are in a hurry, you might have better luck if you direct your scientific requests to Roscosmos... Maybe the "ruskies" can dump the US from the ISS and build the centrifuge you seek...
Get your own city-wide WIFI system installed and running with decent coverage.
Some people travel from city-to-city and don't like to carry 2 phones (or rent phones for a different network when they get there)...
FWIW, that was part of the dream that was WiMax and VoLTE... Maybe we'll get there with VoLTE eventually, but WiMax part of the dream is certainly dead...
With many companies, the lifetime of the equities are shorter than an investor's lifetime (e.g., nearly all US-based airlines, GM, Chrysler, automobile companies, banks, energy trading companies like Enron, Calpine, PG&E, WorldCom). With some internet companies, significantly shorter...
Stock ownership with its historical PE levels, is often less about ownership of the company, than a bet on the future performance of the company.
The stock market is really about providing a safe place to gamble. Think of it like gambling in Vegas vs gambling in a smoke filled room in the basement of a restaurant wondering if you win the pot, if you are going to get out the room alive. Stocks are merely the chips in this game. They have some intrinsic value which follows the fortune of the company they are attached to, but there is an artificial shortage of chips and people that want to play the game are bidding up the value of those chips...
Why not make more chips? The internet bubble showed what happens when you create more chips (e.g, companies that issue stock) simply to fill that demand...
Contrary to popular belief, you can sell ownership securities in a company and *not* register them, or even list them in a regulated stock exchange (e.g., if the number of owners is small enough). The only purported rationale to do so is so that if securities are sold to the public at large, the public can have a fair chance to see what they are probably worth so that small-fry can play the game. High-frequency trading pretty much obliterates this idea, so you might begin to wonder what the rationale is for a regulated stock exchange to service a secondary securities market (other than a false sense of security).
If a company wanted to, it could sell partial ownership securities directly to a investment partnership and ordinary joes could invest in that partnership (if they trusted that partnership), but then the investment wouldn't be as liquid. Asset liquidity is really the only reason the stock markets continue to exist, not ownership...
FWIW, Ecology isn't just "fuzzy" animals and although space is not likely to be completely sterile (e.g., space faring bacteria diaspora?), you can still have ecological impact w/o native organizing. However, it could affect *our* future
Say capturing an asteroid and mining it isn't going to kill and fuzzy animals, but there is likely going to be unexpected collateral pollution issues (e.g, space debris in orbit of the moon, etc). Nascent industrial operations often ignore any such collateral pollution issue (it's usually expensive to bootstrap operations, and since initial operations are small, people don't care as much and corners are cut).
Once industrial operations gain inertia, they tend to resist reform measures until forced to by political pressure. Examples of this kind of crap are near my own backyard. During early silicon valley years, industrial solvents like TCE spilled into the soil by AMD and TRW resulted in a sub-surface toxic contaminated plume which became superfund site near a neighborhood elementary school (San Miguel).
Okay, humans aren't likely to be living near asteroids captured for mining near the moon, but given that we've had direct experience with orbital pollution before (e.g., Project West Ford), we should at least think about pausing before releasing unrestrained industrial forces in an area...
Why is sending humans to Mars supposed to be such a great thing? It's incredibly expensive, incredibly dangerous, and doesn't accomplish much of anything useful. Once you've sent them, the next trip will be almost as expensive as the first one.
Well, since you asked...
"Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Of course if the challenge of sending humans to Mars is something we are unwilling to accept, or willing to postpone, or intend to lose...
Industrializing space may sound like a meaningful thing, but industrializing areas of our own earth hasn't been the most ecological of pursuits. Nothing like the chants of "drill-baby-drill" being replaced by "launch-and-mine-baby-launch-and-mine"... It seems like it was also meaningful thing Yellowstone was the first national park, although I'm sure there's someone out that could make an argument that exploiting sustainable geo-thermal energy in old-faithful will help build up our oil independence...
Further, getting anything less than As closes doors for that child in the future - permanently.
That's a complete myth.
No, it's actually somewhat true, but that doesn't mean any of those doors are necessary desirable destinations, or that getting less than A's in a class is a barrier to any actual measures of success (e.g., happiness, status, high-paying job, etc), or the opportunity cost of working towards that A results in a overall better life.
Of course, although there are very few consequence for lower GPAs in early schools, there are actual consequences for a pattern of mediocre grades as you advance in schooling (putting students in "tracks" is nearly inevitable regardless of your schooling options) which does pin you into certain corners of future outcomes.
At least in the USA, it's possible (and perhaps even not uncommon) to break out of the consequences of "tracks", however, in many countries in the world, it's nearly impossible to do so, so it is not exactly a "myth".
We'd like to think there should always be a second chance at a door, but often in life there are usually not. However, most of the time, there are often many alternatives, some of which may be even better than the original choice, but this isn't the same as a second chance at a door, and you need to learn to identify these situations and catch that door before it closes, if it's something you really want. If you need to teach your kid anything, that's probably the thing to teach them.
Similarly, the opportunity cost of working for something as abstract as all A's, might be too high a cost to pay relative to other uses of someone's time (say spending the time learning/practicing some valuable "hobby" that would be valuable in the future, or on interpersonal relationships). As someone who used to spend time working with college admissions officers, I'd say this is the unspoken reality of the college application game that parents often fail to understand: A's can only get you so far...
...so by creating AIs with the necessary pressure on them to perform some activity, are we not simply bringing more misery into the universe?
No, we are either creating our personal slaves, or our new masters (or both, but over time)... In either case, the misery we are bringing forth is probably our own...
Once mechanical machine marvels were our slaves, then in the industrial revolution, in some ways, they became masters of those workers on the assembly line and made many lives miserable along the way...
Electronic computers also started out as our slaves, but sometimes we are the slaves to our electronic creations and/or in the process of making some computer workers lives more miserable along the way...
There's no reason to believe AI will be much different. Although it will likely enables many achievements, it will also no doubt make some lives more miserable along the way to a potential post-blue-collar (workers replaced by machines run by computers), post-white-collar (workers replaced by computers run by AI), economy...
OR, perhaps we use the same method but look at the data a different way (e.g., like a turbo code uses the same basic error correction code technology, but permutes the input data)... I suspect the brain does something similar to this, but I have no evidence...
Th232 + neutron -> Th233 (which isn't as stable stable)
Then two stages of beta- decay
Th233 -> Pa233 + electron + anti-neutrino Pa233 -> U233 + electron + anti-neutrino
The problem is with U232 production is because all of these intermediate products are also fissile in the reactor (e.g., can interact w/ stray fast neutrons and undergo extra neutron decay before undergoing beta- decay resulting in U232 instead of U233).
However, the issue isn't that U232 is so unstable it decays with products that emit large amounts of gamma radiation (which in the decay chain, Tl208 is a big gamma emitter so it's really dangerous), it's mostly that you can't use chemistry to separate U232 from U233 (since only the mass is different, not the valence electrons). You either have to use advanced techniques (e.g, laser isotope separation), or modify your reactor parameters so that U232 production is reduced.
The ironic thing is that purported proliferation resistance of U233 is because reactors can be deliberately tweaked to increase the concentration of U232 to denature the U233. However, as I understand it, there is no particular technical reason to do this other than proliferation resistance (except to make it more dangerous to potential nuclear power plant workers as if that was a goal). If a rogue country wanted to operate a Th reactor to create large amounts of U233 w/o a limited amount U232 contamination, apparently it's not that hard to do (basically replacing the fuel more frequent schedule than normal, since most of the U232 yield comes at the end of the fuel cycle where there are more high energy neutrons bouncing around)...
That, plus a failure to ever produce a non-fizzle U233 bomb, means that this really isn't a good fission bomb source material.
If your goal is to simply produce a bomb, (not necessarily a large one with optimal yield), apparently India detonated an experimental U233 bomb as part of their Pokhran-II tests back in 1998... I don't think that bomb was a fizzle...
Caltech the post-doc world (which is portrayed in TBBT) and Caltech the under-grad world (which is portrayed in RG) are actually quite different worlds that exist mostly under the same roofs (except for the UG houses which are apparently a world upon themselves).
I haven't noticed them making many references to Caltech in TBBT, but when they do it's not totally out of line with what I remember about interacting with post-docs at Tech (nobody calls it the Institute), but of course it usually isn't quite right. I'm guessing that is probably due to one of the script writers Eric Kaplan who did not go to Caltech, but Harvard as a grad turkey, not a post-doc...
I mean, really, can they make it so delicious that you WANT to eat it? I seriously doubt it.
I used to eat this type of candy when I was a kid. The wrapper was not so delicious, but it was mildly sweet and added a slight "gummy" candy experience when you got saliva over it, so most kids actually WANTED to eat it (not that it was the most sanitary thing to do).
FWIW, it was not unlike the edible rice paper that many folks use to keep macaroons from sticking to a baking sheet or that cake decorators use in conjunction with printers for edible paper...
Of course rice paper isn't remotely water proof, but now days industrial food chemistry technology is much more advanced and capable of simulating many tasty treats, so at least the taste aspect is certainly within the realm of possibility...
Although states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, this is not the specific issue in this case.
A person living in NJ can buy a Tesla (purchased on the internet and shipped from out of state), because that is interstate commerce issue and NJ regulations are trumped by federal interstate commerce regulations.
A non-independent automotive dealer in NJ cannot sell a Tesla to a person living in NJ, because that is not addressed by current federal regulations and now against NJ state regulations.
However, the FTC has some jurisdiction in this area if they can prove that it is anticompetitive. Unfortunately the current supreme court rulings on this topic (e.g., wine, contact lenses) really only cover internet sales (e.g., what Tesla is doing now), not forcing states to license brick/mortar business to sell products in their jurisdiction.
For instance, the 18 states that require some form of state-owned liquor stores or wholesalers, aren't required to let say Jack Daniels open up a company store in a mall to sell their product in their jurisdiction. That would likely take another supreme court ruling and I don't see that coming any time soon given the magnitude of such a ruling.
Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI? Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?
The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...
Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...
Yet, you don't get to choose a Apple laptop with an AMD instead of and Intel processor, a Samsung handheld computer with an A7 processor instead of a Exanos or Qualcomm. In life, things come in sub-optimal bundles and you pick your poison.
The problem is that we often only have a few choices even in a commodity market because of economies of scale. The economics of spending billions of dollars to develop high performances CPUs have dwindled the field to a majority player and a consolation player. Likewise, in the US, there aren't an excess political resources to fund billion dollar campaigns where only 1 person wins, so there is only about 1.1 political parties. When you scale things back you get more diversity, (e.g., local politics or SoC chips), but at the top of the food chain, it's not much freedom and not much service...
Imagine trillions of years from now on a planet far-far away, some technician named Vort assembling computer subroutines from a small number of libraries (known as the Legacy code) that dropped from a space probe billions of years before he was born.
Vort's creating "organic" software to get one of his jobs done, one that's just like Vort's ancestors created using these well-known components that always seemed to do the job. It's really expensive to assemble components this way because the Legacy codes are very inefficient, and you need to string together lots of calls to get all the requirements you need for the job, but it's known to be a sustainable process and even if nobody understands it, Legacy code doesn't have any "secret ingredients".
Back a few decades ago, Vort recalls there where two movements that tried to change the way code was assembled to get a job done:
One was to actually modify software to have it do what you wanted it to do, but the purveyors of this black magic were evil companies that wanted to keep these modifications to themselves and you could never be sure what type of modification they made or what side effects they had.
The other group was called the Open movement which wrote all new code free of the original Legacy libraries, but offered them to everyone so that they could see for themselves. Sadly although there were many experts among the Open group, normal users of open code did not have the expertise to validate the new code so it was just as mysterious as the Legacy code. Contrary to popular belief, the new open code has been used at most less than 10 years (meaning tested less than 25 years), the Legacy code has been tested for 1000's of years...
Nope, Vort, will continue to use the original Legacy code. None of that modified code for Vort, also, none of that open code created from scratch. Vort would continue to use Legacy code...
FTFY, you may be an OPEN code advocate, but you are a LEGACY food advocate, not an OPEN food advocate.
I'm an engineer but I don't have a PE license so what kind of "professional responsibility" am I supposed to have? The answer is none.
In a few localities, it is actually illegal** to call yourself an engineer or offer engineering services if you don't actually have a PE license (akin to practicing medicine or law w/o a license even if you graduated from medical or law school).
However, the odds are you probably don't live in one of the few remaining localities that have these restrictions on the use of "engineer" in a job title, but you should be aware that in most localities, simply by practicing engineering often puts you under the jurisdiction of the local board and local/state boards usually have some rules for people that are "exempt" from licensing, but able to practice the profession. Therefore, even if you are not required to be licensed, you might have some professional responsibilities, you may simply be ignorant of what they are (and ignorance of the law is generally not a valid excuse in a court of law).
**About 20 years ago, I was working for a company that was bought by another company headquartered in another state where it was illegal to have the word "engineer" in a job title w/o that person being a licensed P.E. A year after the merger, the company was cited by the state board as employing non-engineers w/ engineering titles and as part of the penalty/settlement was forced to change the job titles of nearly everyone in my department (e.g, from applications engineer to technician level 3, or from engineering team manager to technical team manager). I remember one of the newly minted technician level 3s disagreed with this decision and stupidly quit in protest.
About a year later, the state changed the rules slightly where we were allowed to be called application engineers again (because apparently a large electronics industry employer based in the state convinced the state board it was generally known that mere applications-engineers weren't allowed to sign-off on actual designs). Of course, for a job title that was say a lead engineer, or principal engineer or a partner engineer, I think many of those still require being P.E. Licensed.
Today, the two pesky loose ends that are likely to change everything are dark matter and dark energy. What we need is a theory that explains these phenomena and an experiment to test the theory.
If it turns out we need astrophysical levels of dark energy to initiate such an experiment, maybe you'll forgive me if I take a few steps back...
Wow, he invented the rental car way back in 1875 !
FWIW: Sandor Herz (aka John Hertz) wasn't born until 1879, but he was friends with Edward Teller (Mr H-bomb) and funded lots of research (mostly defense related). BTW, Sandor didn't invent the rental car idea that bears his name, but he did found the yellow-cab company...
Here is one of Sandor's most popular quotes...
I’d like to hire a ship and send back to their own countries the men who are complaining about American conditions and American institutions. Every one of these fellows has a better opportunity here to lead a happy and prosperous life than he had in his own country, wherever it may have been. The best thing that ever happened to me was that my father went broke in the mountains north of Buda-Pest and decided to make a new start in this country. I came here as a foreigner, and this country not only tolerated but encouraged me. It will do the same for every other immigrant who is willing to work to succeed.
Although your theory is neat and clean, the reality is probably different.
When things get too neat and clean, there are diminishing returns. Sciences stagnate under reduced funding, industries consolidate which cause trade secrets proliferate reducing the velocity of discoveries. When the situation is less ordered in the world (say after a war), the pace of discovery during rebuilding is greatly advanced.
Sometimes a tear down of some old stuff to make room for the latest shiny stuff. Thinking of a non-eventful plateau period waiting for some new Einstein to be born is a very sanitized way to think about it. Sometimes it takes a rebirth after a major world war.
Ironically (or perhaps fortunately), this reality isn't likely to be an efficient way to stimulate a renaissance in discoveries (as the net cost of wars generally put the whole thing in the red due to the effects captured in the parable/fallacy of the broken window).
Maybe it means we are often simply a complacent species that perhaps needs to be kicked in butt occasionally... Or, maybe it just means that comparing the rate at two isolated points in history isn't the best measure of the pace progress.
Then again, excluding folks that like to draw graphs that linear extrapolate to the right in a hockey stick and have never heard of a double logistic function, there might be some other ways for statistical experts to interpret this data...
Offering incentives to get people to work in areas out of their comfort zone or to get people to teach others so they can enter an area out of their comfort zone should not be discouraged.
That would be like offering free housing to police in a slum area to bring attention to problems in the inner city.
Actually, in the current US economy, it would be more like offering incentives to women to get into the fracking industry... (don't read that f-word wrong)
FWIW, the idea of group/collective guilt (bullshit or not) is not simply a mantra of a victim lobby or a group of rabid Tumblr feminazis, it is likely simply just a higher degree of expression of a generic sociological/psychological human behavior.
Interestingly people with the lowest degrees of expression of these types of human behavior tends to suggest those people might be borderline psychopaths that don't feel any empathy at all or perhaps exhibiting behavior associated with repression and/or projection (e.g., blame the victims).
I wonder if they are effectively taking advantage of the the current concentration of dissolved CO2 to operate efficiently (e.g, if we hadn't burned up all those hydrocarbons and acidified the ocean), or are there enough natural CO2 to extract to make this a worthwhile endeavor?
Yep, sure is. Ever filled out a job application that asked if you were a fascist or a communist?
Although I'm not old enough to have had an application that asked if I was ever a member of a communist party, a colleague of mine is old enough and once when I was over at his house, he showed me the carbon-copy of such an application he filled out...
Oh yeah, that was an application for a US government civil service job (not military, or top-secret), although he told me that was a common question on many Job applications of the day (he said the grocery packer job he applied for had the same question, although he didn't have any actual proof of that in hand).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if we can dump the Ruskies...
Actually, when it comes to the ISS, the "ruskies" might decide to dump the US first (at least the Russians claim that, "The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The U.S. one cannot."). Apparently Russia has already "banned" the US from using their RD-180 engines which power the Atlas V rockets used to launch our military satellites as a consequence of this Ukraine tiff...
Perhaps you are unaware of how much regression has occurred the US space program. You talk about the science of space travel from a knowledge point of view, but that is currently a moot problem from the US point of view, we don't have launchers at the moment. If you are in a hurry, you might have better luck if you direct your scientific requests to Roscosmos... Maybe the "ruskies" can dump the US from the ISS and build the centrifuge you seek...
While you're at it, you can probably look into this study of circadian rhythms on MIR cosmonauts
Get your own city-wide WIFI system installed and running with decent coverage.
Some people travel from city-to-city and don't like to carry 2 phones (or rent phones for a different network when they get there)...
FWIW, that was part of the dream that was WiMax and VoLTE... Maybe we'll get there with VoLTE eventually, but WiMax part of the dream is certainly dead...
Two things...
With many companies, the lifetime of the equities are shorter than an investor's lifetime (e.g., nearly all US-based airlines, GM, Chrysler, automobile companies, banks, energy trading companies like Enron, Calpine, PG&E, WorldCom). With some internet companies, significantly shorter...
Stock ownership with its historical PE levels, is often less about ownership of the company, than a bet on the future performance of the company.
The stock market is really about providing a safe place to gamble. Think of it like gambling in Vegas vs gambling in a smoke filled room in the basement of a restaurant wondering if you win the pot, if you are going to get out the room alive. Stocks are merely the chips in this game. They have some intrinsic value which follows the fortune of the company they are attached to, but there is an artificial shortage of chips and people that want to play the game are bidding up the value of those chips...
Why not make more chips? The internet bubble showed what happens when you create more chips (e.g, companies that issue stock) simply to fill that demand...
Contrary to popular belief, you can sell ownership securities in a company and *not* register them, or even list them in a regulated stock exchange (e.g., if the number of owners is small enough). The only purported rationale to do so is so that if securities are sold to the public at large, the public can have a fair chance to see what they are probably worth so that small-fry can play the game. High-frequency trading pretty much obliterates this idea, so you might begin to wonder what the rationale is for a regulated stock exchange to service a secondary securities market (other than a false sense of security).
If a company wanted to, it could sell partial ownership securities directly to a investment partnership and ordinary joes could invest in that partnership (if they trusted that partnership), but then the investment wouldn't be as liquid. Asset liquidity is really the only reason the stock markets continue to exist, not ownership...
FWIW, Ecology isn't just "fuzzy" animals and although space is not likely to be completely sterile (e.g., space faring bacteria diaspora?), you can still have ecological impact w/o native organizing. However, it could affect *our* future
Say capturing an asteroid and mining it isn't going to kill and fuzzy animals, but there is likely going to be unexpected collateral pollution issues (e.g, space debris in orbit of the moon, etc). Nascent industrial operations often ignore any such collateral pollution issue (it's usually expensive to bootstrap operations, and since initial operations are small, people don't care as much and corners are cut).
Once industrial operations gain inertia, they tend to resist reform measures until forced to by political pressure. Examples of this kind of crap are near my own backyard. During early silicon valley years, industrial solvents like TCE spilled into the soil by AMD and TRW resulted in a sub-surface toxic contaminated plume which became superfund site near a neighborhood elementary school (San Miguel).
Okay, humans aren't likely to be living near asteroids captured for mining near the moon, but given that we've had direct experience with orbital pollution before (e.g., Project West Ford), we should at least think about pausing before releasing unrestrained industrial forces in an area...
Why is sending humans to Mars supposed to be such a great thing? It's incredibly expensive, incredibly dangerous, and doesn't accomplish much of anything useful. Once you've sent them, the next trip will be almost as expensive as the first one.
Well, since you asked...
"Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Of course if the challenge of sending humans to Mars is something we are unwilling to accept, or willing to postpone, or intend to lose...
Industrializing space may sound like a meaningful thing, but industrializing areas of our own earth hasn't been the most ecological of pursuits. Nothing like the chants of "drill-baby-drill" being replaced by "launch-and-mine-baby-launch-and-mine"... It seems like it was also meaningful thing Yellowstone was the first national park, although I'm sure there's someone out that could make an argument that exploiting sustainable geo-thermal energy in old-faithful will help build up our oil independence...
Are you sure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Further, getting anything less than As closes doors for that child in the future - permanently.
That's a complete myth.
No, it's actually somewhat true, but that doesn't mean any of those doors are necessary desirable destinations, or that getting less than A's in a class is a barrier to any actual measures of success (e.g., happiness, status, high-paying job, etc), or the opportunity cost of working towards that A results in a overall better life.
Of course, although there are very few consequence for lower GPAs in early schools, there are actual consequences for a pattern of mediocre grades as you advance in schooling (putting students in "tracks" is nearly inevitable regardless of your schooling options) which does pin you into certain corners of future outcomes.
At least in the USA, it's possible (and perhaps even not uncommon) to break out of the consequences of "tracks", however, in many countries in the world, it's nearly impossible to do so, so it is not exactly a "myth".
We'd like to think there should always be a second chance at a door, but often in life there are usually not. However, most of the time, there are often many alternatives, some of which may be even better than the original choice, but this isn't the same as a second chance at a door, and you need to learn to identify these situations and catch that door before it closes, if it's something you really want. If you need to teach your kid anything, that's probably the thing to teach them.
Similarly, the opportunity cost of working for something as abstract as all A's, might be too high a cost to pay relative to other uses of someone's time (say spending the time learning/practicing some valuable "hobby" that would be valuable in the future, or on interpersonal relationships). As someone who used to spend time working with college admissions officers, I'd say this is the unspoken reality of the college application game that parents often fail to understand: A's can only get you so far...
...so by creating AIs with the necessary pressure on them to perform some activity, are we not simply bringing more misery into the universe?
No, we are either creating our personal slaves, or our new masters (or both, but over time)...
In either case, the misery we are bringing forth is probably our own...
Once mechanical machine marvels were our slaves, then in the industrial revolution, in some ways, they became masters of those workers on the assembly line and made many lives miserable along the way...
Electronic computers also started out as our slaves, but sometimes we are the slaves to our electronic creations and/or in the process of making some computer workers lives more miserable along the way...
There's no reason to believe AI will be much different. Although it will likely enables many achievements, it will also no doubt make some lives more miserable along the way to a potential post-blue-collar (workers replaced by machines run by computers), post-white-collar (workers replaced by computers run by AI), economy...
OR, perhaps we use the same method but look at the data a different way (e.g., like a turbo code uses the same basic error correction code technology, but permutes the input data)... I suspect the brain does something similar to this, but I have no evidence...
Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.
Not exactly ;^)
Th232 + neutron -> Th233 (which isn't as stable stable)
Then two stages of beta- decay
Th233 -> Pa233 + electron + anti-neutrino
Pa233 -> U233 + electron + anti-neutrino
The problem is with U232 production is because all of these intermediate products are also fissile in the reactor (e.g., can interact w/ stray fast neutrons and undergo extra neutron decay before undergoing beta- decay resulting in U232 instead of U233).
However, the issue isn't that U232 is so unstable it decays with products that emit large amounts of gamma radiation (which in the decay chain, Tl208 is a big gamma emitter so it's really dangerous), it's mostly that you can't use chemistry to separate U232 from U233 (since only the mass is different, not the valence electrons). You either have to use advanced techniques (e.g, laser isotope separation), or modify your reactor parameters so that U232 production is reduced.
The ironic thing is that purported proliferation resistance of U233 is because reactors can be deliberately tweaked to increase the concentration of U232 to denature the U233. However, as I understand it, there is no particular technical reason to do this other than proliferation resistance (except to make it more dangerous to potential nuclear power plant workers as if that was a goal). If a rogue country wanted to operate a Th reactor to create large amounts of U233 w/o a limited amount U232 contamination, apparently it's not that hard to do (basically replacing the fuel more frequent schedule than normal, since most of the U232 yield comes at the end of the fuel cycle where there are more high energy neutrons bouncing around)...
That, plus a failure to ever produce a non-fizzle U233 bomb, means that this really isn't a good fission bomb source material.
If your goal is to simply produce a bomb, (not necessarily a large one with optimal yield), apparently India detonated an experimental U233 bomb as part of their Pokhran-II tests back in 1998... I don't think that bomb was a fizzle...
Caltech the post-doc world (which is portrayed in TBBT) and Caltech the under-grad world (which is portrayed in RG) are actually quite different worlds that exist mostly under the same roofs (except for the UG houses which are apparently a world upon themselves).
I haven't noticed them making many references to Caltech in TBBT, but when they do it's not totally out of line with what I remember about interacting with post-docs at Tech (nobody calls it the Institute), but of course it usually isn't quite right. I'm guessing that is probably due to one of the script writers Eric Kaplan who did not go to Caltech, but Harvard as a grad turkey, not a post-doc...
I mean, really, can they make it so delicious that you WANT to eat it? I seriously doubt it.
I used to eat this type of candy when I was a kid. The wrapper was not so delicious, but it was mildly sweet and added a slight "gummy" candy experience when you got saliva over it, so most kids actually WANTED to eat it (not that it was the most sanitary thing to do).
FWIW, it was not unlike the edible rice paper that many folks use to keep macaroons from sticking to a baking sheet or that cake decorators use in conjunction with printers for edible paper...
Of course rice paper isn't remotely water proof, but now days industrial food chemistry technology is much more advanced and capable of simulating many tasty treats, so at least the taste aspect is certainly within the realm of possibility...
Although states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce, this is not the specific issue in this case.
A person living in NJ can buy a Tesla (purchased on the internet and shipped from out of state), because that is interstate commerce issue and NJ regulations are trumped by federal interstate commerce regulations.
A non-independent automotive dealer in NJ cannot sell a Tesla to a person living in NJ, because that is not addressed by current federal regulations and now against NJ state regulations.
However, the FTC has some jurisdiction in this area if they can prove that it is anticompetitive. Unfortunately the current supreme court rulings on this topic (e.g., wine, contact lenses) really only cover internet sales (e.g., what Tesla is doing now), not forcing states to license brick/mortar business to sell products in their jurisdiction.
For instance, the 18 states that require some form of state-owned liquor stores or wholesalers, aren't required to let say Jack Daniels open up a company store in a mall to sell their product in their jurisdiction. That would likely take another supreme court ruling and I don't see that coming any time soon given the magnitude of such a ruling.
Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI?
Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?
The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...
Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...
Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?
Yet, you don't get to choose a Apple laptop with an AMD instead of and Intel processor, a Samsung handheld computer with an A7 processor instead of a Exanos or Qualcomm. In life, things come in sub-optimal bundles and you pick your poison.
The problem is that we often only have a few choices even in a commodity market because of economies of scale. The economics of spending billions of dollars to develop high performances CPUs have dwindled the field to a majority player and a consolation player. Likewise, in the US, there aren't an excess political resources to fund billion dollar campaigns where only 1 person wins, so there is only about 1.1 political parties. When you scale things back you get more diversity, (e.g., local politics or SoC chips), but at the top of the food chain, it's not much freedom and not much service...
Imagine trillions of years from now on a planet far-far away, some technician named Vort assembling computer subroutines from a small number of libraries (known as the Legacy code) that dropped from a space probe billions of years before he was born.
Vort's creating "organic" software to get one of his jobs done, one that's just like Vort's ancestors created using these well-known components that always seemed to do the job. It's really expensive to assemble components this way because the Legacy codes are very inefficient, and you need to string together lots of calls to get all the requirements you need for the job, but it's known to be a sustainable process and even if nobody understands it, Legacy code doesn't have any "secret ingredients".
Back a few decades ago, Vort recalls there where two movements that tried to change the way code was assembled to get a job done:
One was to actually modify software to have it do what you wanted it to do, but the purveyors of this black magic were evil companies that wanted to keep these modifications to themselves and you could never be sure what type of modification they made or what side effects they had.
The other group was called the Open movement which wrote all new code free of the original Legacy libraries, but offered them to everyone so that they could see for themselves. Sadly although there were many experts among the Open group, normal users of open code did not have the expertise to validate the new code so it was just as mysterious as the Legacy code. Contrary to popular belief, the new open code has been used at most less than 10 years (meaning tested less than 25 years), the Legacy code has been tested for 1000's of years...
Nope, Vort, will continue to use the original Legacy code. None of that modified code for Vort, also, none of that open code created from scratch. Vort would continue to use Legacy code...
FTFY, you may be an OPEN code advocate, but you are a LEGACY food advocate, not an OPEN food advocate.
I'm an engineer but I don't have a PE license so what kind of "professional responsibility" am I supposed to have? The answer is none.
In a few localities, it is actually illegal** to call yourself an engineer or offer engineering services if you don't actually have a PE license (akin to practicing medicine or law w/o a license even if you graduated from medical or law school).
However, the odds are you probably don't live in one of the few remaining localities that have these restrictions on the use of "engineer" in a job title, but you should be aware that in most localities, simply by practicing engineering often puts you under the jurisdiction of the local board and local/state boards usually have some rules for people that are "exempt" from licensing, but able to practice the profession. Therefore, even if you are not required to be licensed, you might have some professional responsibilities, you may simply be ignorant of what they are (and ignorance of the law is generally not a valid excuse in a court of law).
**About 20 years ago, I was working for a company that was bought by another company headquartered in another state where it was illegal to have the word "engineer" in a job title w/o that person being a licensed P.E. A year after the merger, the company was cited by the state board as employing non-engineers w/ engineering titles and as part of the penalty/settlement was forced to change the job titles of nearly everyone in my department (e.g, from applications engineer to technician level 3, or from engineering team manager to technical team manager). I remember one of the newly minted technician level 3s disagreed with this decision and stupidly quit in protest.
About a year later, the state changed the rules slightly where we were allowed to be called application engineers again (because apparently a large electronics industry employer based in the state convinced the state board it was generally known that mere applications-engineers weren't allowed to sign-off on actual designs). Of course, for a job title that was say a lead engineer, or principal engineer or a partner engineer, I think many of those still require being P.E. Licensed.
Today, the two pesky loose ends that are likely to change everything are dark matter and dark energy. What we need is a theory that explains these phenomena and an experiment to test the theory.
If it turns out we need astrophysical levels of dark energy to initiate such an experiment, maybe you'll forgive me if I take a few steps back...
Wow, he invented the rental car way back in 1875 !
FWIW: Sandor Herz (aka John Hertz) wasn't born until 1879, but he was friends with Edward Teller (Mr H-bomb) and funded lots of research (mostly defense related). BTW, Sandor didn't invent the rental car idea that bears his name, but he did found the yellow-cab company...
Here is one of Sandor's most popular quotes...
I’d like to hire a ship and send back to their own countries the men who are complaining about American conditions and American institutions. Every one of these fellows has a better opportunity here to lead a happy and prosperous life than he had in his own country, wherever it may have been. The best thing that ever happened to me was that my father went broke in the mountains north of Buda-Pest and decided to make a new start in this country. I came here as a foreigner, and this country not only tolerated but encouraged me. It will do the same for every other immigrant who is willing to work to succeed.
Although your theory is neat and clean, the reality is probably different.
When things get too neat and clean, there are diminishing returns. Sciences stagnate under reduced funding, industries consolidate which cause trade secrets proliferate reducing the velocity of discoveries. When the situation is less ordered in the world (say after a war), the pace of discovery during rebuilding is greatly advanced.
Sometimes a tear down of some old stuff to make room for the latest shiny stuff. Thinking of a non-eventful plateau period waiting for some new Einstein to be born is a very sanitized way to think about it. Sometimes it takes a rebirth after a major world war.
Ironically (or perhaps fortunately), this reality isn't likely to be an efficient way to stimulate a renaissance in discoveries (as the net cost of wars generally put the whole thing in the red due to the effects captured in the parable/fallacy of the broken window).
Maybe it means we are often simply a complacent species that perhaps needs to be kicked in butt occasionally...
Or, maybe it just means that comparing the rate at two isolated points in history isn't the best measure of the pace progress.
Then again, excluding folks that like to draw graphs that linear extrapolate to the right in a hockey stick and have never heard of a double logistic function, there might be some other ways for statistical experts to interpret this data...
Offering incentives to get people to work in areas out of their comfort zone or to get people to teach others so they can enter an area out of their comfort zone should not be discouraged.
That would be like offering free housing to police in a slum area to bring attention to problems in the inner city.
Actually, in the current US economy, it would be more like offering incentives to women to get into the fracking industry... (don't read that f-word wrong)
FWIW, the idea of group/collective guilt (bullshit or not) is not simply a mantra of a victim lobby or a group of rabid Tumblr feminazis, it is likely simply just a higher degree of expression of a generic sociological/psychological human behavior.
Interestingly people with the lowest degrees of expression of these types of human behavior tends to suggest those people might be borderline psychopaths that don't feel any empathy at all or perhaps exhibiting behavior associated with repression and/or projection (e.g., blame the victims).
As with most things in life, a happy medium...
I wonder if they are effectively taking advantage of the the current concentration of dissolved CO2 to operate efficiently (e.g, if we hadn't burned up all those hydrocarbons and acidified the ocean), or are there enough natural CO2 to extract to make this a worthwhile endeavor?
Yep, sure is. Ever filled out a job application that asked if you were a fascist or a communist?
Although I'm not old enough to have had an application that asked if I was ever a member of a communist party, a colleague of mine is old enough and once when I was over at his house, he showed me the carbon-copy of such an application he filled out...
Oh yeah, that was an application for a US government civil service job (not military, or top-secret), although he told me that was a common question on many Job applications of the day (he said the grocery packer job he applied for had the same question, although he didn't have any actual proof of that in hand).