People that keep parrots (as I do) tend to be very impressed with their intelligence, although it is different from ours. They tend to have a fine understanding of people's emotional states, are very attentive to fine details, and typically can communicate well. I have no doubt that they understand some words and phrases and are not "parroting" much.
Still, parrots have been living in flocks a long time, and probably don't need human words to communicate within them. If human language catches on, it will be because they are using it to communicate with humans, and such communication in the wild is likely to be pretty simple (go away, or give me some food, things like that), and there may be an element of "parroting" in that.
BTW, I am not very impressed with the Turing test as a measure of intelligence. (For example, take a person with mid-level Alzheimer's into a social setting. They may understand nothing of the conversation, but as long as they say the right things at the right time, which they frequently can do, everyone thinks that they are doing just fine.)
I keep parrots and have been predicting this for some time. The ability to talk is incredibly advantageous in a world increasingly dominated by people, and so there would be a strong selection effect in its favor. Since they can do it, and since there are birds passing between the wild and the human worlds, I would look for this to spread, especially (as the story says) for birds in city flocks.
Don't forget the 200,000 troops that Churchill sent to Normandy and then had to evacuate after Dunkirk. There were two separate big British evacuations, and the second wasn't even opposed by the Germans.
"No staff college war game would have allowed so indulgent an outcome." ("Winston's War," Max Hastings.)
I think it is fair to say, though, that the Luftwaffe let up because they, too, were taking punishing losses. It wasn't that they randomly switched targets, it was that they blinked first.
The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.)
Battle of Britain - 1940. V1/V2 - 1944/45. Most weapons are ineffective if they come along 4 years too late.
In 1940, the Germans had a weapon that was accurate enough to hit even tanks, much less airfields, the Stuka dive bomber. The trouble is, dive bombers are very vulnerable to fighter opposition unless you have air supremacy, which was what the Germans were trying to achieve in Britain. The Stukas suffered heavily from the RAF and were rapidly withdrawn from the Battle of Britain, which indeed hampered the German ability to take out those airfields.
After the V2 campaign started Germans installed a post-launch radio navigation system which improved the V2 accuracy to a few 100 meters or better. Thanks to the ULTRA / Enigma decrypts, the Brits knew that they were testing this against English targets, were worried about the improved accuracy, and instituted a deception campaign to convince the Germans that they were not actually hitting what they were aiming at. It worked, and they never really made good operational use of the more accurate aiming capabilities.
Don't they teach navigation in flight school anymore?
The Navy, at least, was working on an automatic "sextant" (i.e., an autonomous optical navigator), precisely so that they wouldn't have to teach celestial navigation any more. I don't know if they have actually made that change.
The GPS jammers I have heard of replicate and resend the coded pseudo-random noise signal. That means that if you correlate your code on the jamming signal, you will get a strong peak at some bogus delay, so you could lock onto the false signal, giving yourself a very bad position fix (because the delay of the repeated signal would be wrong). But, that signal will always come after the true GPS signal, so there are ways to sort this out. Like most code-division multiplexed signals, the correlation is very low except for the true delay offset of the signal, so once you do lock onto the true signal, the jamming signal appears as just more noise.
Suppose this is true as stated. When not in a state of war, if you are not certain about your position, you avoid if possible violating the other side's airspace - especially in a trigger-happy zone such as the Korean DMZ. So, I think that they probably did the right thing.
Now, suppose there had been a state of war. In that case, they wouldn't have been concerned about which side of the DMZ they were on, and having GPS jammed doesn't mean you can perform your missions (one of the first of which would presumably be to take out the GPS jammer radiating away down on the surface).
I was around at the time, and followed both stories. If you don't think the Japanese government and TEPCO have not been secretive about this accident, you have seriously not been paying attention.
Never mind that Fukushima, as a BWR-type reactor, was designed in 1955 and that a new reactor would have practically nothing in common but the presence of uranium and steam. Never mind that a pebble bed reactor could, as far as I understand it, be left completely un-managed for months at a time or suffer a complete core breach and still be incapable of reaching the level of contamination caused by Fukushima.
I agree. Given that, why in the hell was TEPCO continuing to run 55 year old gear ? Why were the old fuel rods not containerized ? The nuclear industry has known the problems here for decades; what is the sign that the responsible people are being fired and the new managers are taking appropriate measures ?
In my opinion, after a initial period of secrecy, the Soviet Union did a lot better job with openness and communication on Chernobyl than the Japanese Government / TEPCO is doing with Fukushima.
That should say something to the Japanese Government, but I fear it will not.
Who elected these people ? What claim do they have to represent the people of the United States ? I sure don't remember anyone touting their kowtowing to foreign special interests at election time.
Mine the Giant Molecular Clouds where stars are made. If you wanted to make lots of Dyson sphere habitats, O'Neil Cylinders, or Jupiter Brains, that is where you would do it. The resulting stars would lack whatever elements you really needed.
The real question is, why would they want all of the lithium ? Maybe for fusion power (as Castle Bravo showed, lithium-7 captures a neutron and splits into an alpha particle, a tritium nucleus, and the captured neutron, and tritium / Helium fuse well). Either such mining is rare, or the need for lithium is rare, as this star is pretty unusual.
The Beagle 2 was the Robert Falcon Scott of planetary missions. Gallant, but weak on the implementation.
If I were running the NASA Mars program, we would have launched 2 more MERs every launch window or every other launch window and we would have 10 or so running around by now. Mars is a big planet, and there are lots of places to do useful science.
I was part of Viking, and it is not correct to say that "Viking tests of Martian soil didn't seem to give any signs of life." The protocols and expected results were published before the mission, and all 6 (3 tests each on 2 spacecraft) passed at the one bit level (i.e., some of the details were not what was expected, but at the "we do X and Y happens" level, they all passed). What didn't "pass" was the mass spectrometer, which didn't reveal any organics.
Funny thing was, the mass spec was listed as one of the tests of life before the mission.
Now, they think that perchlorates may have removed all of the organics when the samples were heated for the mass spec. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Parrots (and even chimps) only mimic. They do not actively teach.
You obviously don't have much experience here.
People that keep parrots (as I do) tend to be very impressed with their intelligence, although it is different from ours. They tend to have a fine understanding of people's emotional states, are very attentive to fine details, and typically can communicate well. I have no doubt that they understand some words and phrases and are not "parroting" much.
Still, parrots have been living in flocks a long time, and probably don't need human words to communicate within them. If human language catches on, it will be because they are using it to communicate with humans, and such communication in the wild is likely to be pretty simple (go away, or give me some food, things like that), and there may be an element of "parroting" in that.
BTW, I am not very impressed with the Turing test as a measure of intelligence. (For example, take a person with mid-level Alzheimer's into a social setting. They may understand nothing of the conversation, but as long as they say the right things at the right time, which they frequently can do, everyone thinks that they are doing just fine.)
I keep parrots and have been predicting this for some time. The ability to talk is incredibly advantageous in a world increasingly dominated by people, and so there would be a strong selection effect in its favor. Since they can do it, and since there are birds passing between the wild and the human worlds, I would look for this to spread, especially (as the story says) for birds in city flocks.
Don't forget the 200,000 troops that Churchill sent to Normandy and then had to evacuate after Dunkirk. There were two separate big British evacuations, and the second wasn't even opposed by the Germans.
"No staff college war game would have allowed so indulgent an outcome." ("Winston's War," Max Hastings.)
I think it is fair to say, though, that the Luftwaffe let up because they, too, were taking punishing losses. It wasn't that they randomly switched targets, it was that they blinked first.
The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.)
Battle of Britain - 1940. V1/V2 - 1944/45. Most weapons are ineffective if they come along 4 years too late.
In 1940, the Germans had a weapon that was accurate enough to hit even tanks, much less airfields, the Stuka dive bomber. The trouble is, dive bombers are very vulnerable to fighter opposition unless you have air supremacy, which was what the Germans were trying to achieve in Britain. The Stukas suffered heavily from the RAF and were rapidly withdrawn from the Battle of Britain, which indeed hampered the German ability to take out those airfields.
After the V2 campaign started Germans installed a post-launch radio navigation system which improved the V2 accuracy to a few 100 meters or better. Thanks to the ULTRA / Enigma decrypts, the Brits knew that they were testing this against English targets, were worried about the improved accuracy, and instituted a deception campaign to convince the Germans that they were not actually hitting what they were aiming at. It worked, and they never really made good operational use of the more accurate aiming capabilities.
Don't they teach navigation in flight school anymore?
The Navy, at least, was working on an automatic "sextant" (i.e., an autonomous optical navigator), precisely so that they wouldn't have to teach celestial navigation any more. I don't know if they have actually made that change.
You don't have to do triangulation and you don't have to rely on, or even use, the signal power to find out where a radio signal is coming from.
The GPS jammers I have heard of replicate and resend the coded pseudo-random noise signal. That means that if you correlate your code on the jamming signal, you will get a strong peak at some bogus delay, so you could lock onto the false signal, giving yourself a very bad position fix (because the delay of the repeated signal would be wrong). But, that signal will always come after the true GPS signal, so there are ways to sort this out. Like most code-division multiplexed signals, the correlation is very low except for the true delay offset of the signal, so once you do lock onto the true signal, the jamming signal appears as just more noise.
Suppose this is true as stated. When not in a state of war, if you are not certain about your position, you avoid if possible violating the other side's airspace - especially in a trigger-happy zone such as the Korean DMZ. So, I think that they probably did the right thing.
Now, suppose there had been a state of war. In that case, they wouldn't have been concerned about which side of the DMZ they were on, and having GPS jammed doesn't mean you can perform your missions (one of the first of which would presumably be to take out the GPS jammer radiating away down on the surface).
If it is cultural imperialism to believe that truth is better than lies, than so be it.
I was around at the time, and followed both stories. If you don't think the Japanese government and TEPCO have not
been secretive about this accident, you have seriously not been paying attention.
Never mind that Fukushima, as a BWR-type reactor, was designed in 1955 and that a new reactor would have practically nothing in common but the presence of uranium and steam. Never mind that a pebble bed reactor could, as far as I understand it, be left completely un-managed for months at a time or suffer a complete core breach and still be incapable of reaching the level of contamination caused by Fukushima.
I agree. Given that, why in the hell was TEPCO continuing to run 55 year old gear ? Why were the old fuel rods not containerized ? The nuclear industry has known the problems here for decades; what is the sign that the responsible people are being fired and the new managers are taking appropriate measures ?
In my opinion, after a initial period of secrecy, the Soviet Union did a lot better job with openness and communication on Chernobyl than the Japanese Government / TEPCO is doing with Fukushima.
That should say something to the Japanese Government, but I fear it will not.
You are correct, this is what diplomats do.
Now, how much do I have to pay to get them to do things for me ?
After reading this, does anyone doubt that the indictment on Julian Assange was motivated by US interests ?
Who elected these people ? What claim do they have to represent the people of the United States ? I sure don't remember anyone touting their kowtowing to foreign special interests at election time.
They rarely enforce the intended uses of the existing TLDs.
I guess you haven't tried to get a .bank or .aero domain name.
Anyone who is surprised by this has simply not been paying attention.
And what about the Constitutional Coup that Harper conducted with the Governor General ?
In my mind, that is sufficient reason right there for Canada to become a Republic.
None of this is any surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, they are not above being sleazy in the same way that the ocean is not above the sky.
That's a fission rocket. There are at least two detailed designs for fusion spacecraft, Discovery II and Project Daedalus / Icarus.
Neither, however, would look anything like a star, unusual or otherwise, even if the exhaust happened to be pointing in your direction.
Mine the Giant Molecular Clouds where stars are made. If you wanted to make lots of Dyson sphere habitats, O'Neil Cylinders, or Jupiter Brains, that is where you would do it. The resulting stars would lack whatever elements you really needed.
The real question is, why would they want all of the lithium ? Maybe for fusion power (as Castle Bravo showed, lithium-7 captures a neutron and splits into an alpha particle, a tritium nucleus, and the captured neutron, and tritium / Helium fuse well). Either such mining is rare, or the need for lithium is rare, as this star is pretty unusual.
The Beagle 2 was the Robert Falcon Scott of planetary missions. Gallant, but weak on the implementation.
If I were running the NASA Mars program, we would have launched 2 more MERs every launch window or every other launch window and we would have 10 or so running around by now. Mars is a big planet, and there are lots of places to do useful science.
I would say we need a human chemist up there, but that is another argument.
And, the usual typo
Funny thing was, the mass spec was not listed as one of the tests of life before the mission.
I was part of Viking, and it is not correct to say that "Viking tests of Martian soil didn't seem to give any signs of life." The protocols and expected results were published before the mission, and all 6 (3 tests each on 2 spacecraft) passed at the one bit level (i.e., some of the details were not what was expected, but at the "we do X and Y happens" level, they all passed). What didn't "pass" was the mass spectrometer, which didn't reveal any organics.
Funny thing was, the mass spec was listed as one of the tests of life before the mission.
Now, they think that perchlorates may have removed all of the organics when the samples were heated for the mass spec. Oh well.