So you're arguing that NASA shouldn't test a potential new propulsion technique based on some shady logic founded on a description in a pop science magazine? Very rigorous of you.
Which NASA is working towards gathering. What's the problem?
Somebody convinced NASA that it was worth spending some money checking this out, so they build a small scale version and tested it. Results were positive, with some compromises in the experiment. The next step is to do a more rigorous experiment. If that's positive you invest a little more. Eventually, if everything goes well, you launch a test satellite. There's your extraordinary evidence.
Many crazy ideas are not worth testing. This one isn't nearly as crazy as the media likes to make it sound. The leading theoretical explanations don't involve any violations of conservation of momentum.
All (known) forces are between two charge carriers: electric charge for electromagnetism, mass for gravity, colour for the strong force, etc. You can use electromagnetic interactions to accelerate mass out the back of your rocket and because of that force symmetry the result is that your rocket accelerates in the opposite direction. You can drop a rock and it will accelerate towards the Earth, but the Earth also accelerates towards the rock. The symmetry means that momentum is conserved. Essentially, in order to change your momentum, you need something to push (or pull) on, thereby changing it's momentum, conserving total momentum.
For a reactionless drive you want to be able to change your momentum without pushing or pulling on anything. That idea has all sorts of problems. One of the proposed mechanisms for the EM drive is that it isn't actually reactionless at all: the asymmetric design of the drive canister causes the microwaves to push asymmetrically on the sea of virtual particles that are always popping up and annihilating. So the drive actually would have an exhaust, it would just be virtual particles that were encountered along the way instead of fuel you brought along.
I was surprised. He's usually pretty good. But this article is crap. Maybe someone hacked his blog.
The results, as he described them OR as actually reported in the paper, are weak support for the EM/Cannae drive. You can't conclude that it actually works from those results because there were some compromises in the experiment, like not running everything in a vacuum. But you also can't conclude it doesn't work.
The NASA experiment demonstrated that one man's idea of what was required for thrust generation was wrong. The null device differed from the real device only in not having some ridges machined into the case.
That doesn't mean the device really is producing thrust useful as a space drive, but it also doesn't mean it isn't. The experimenters reported "anomalous thrust," which is exactly what they saw. More experiments, in a vacuum to start, are required.
From the perspective of someone falling in, the outside universe experiences an infinite amount of time. So if it's going to end, it's going to end before the infalling observer has even the very short period of time required to cross the event horizon.
If the universe doesn't end, it will have infinite time to cool off and the black to hole to evaporate from Hawking radiation. To conserve energy that means the infalling observer must observe a greater and greater amount of Hawking radiation the closer he gets to the event horizon, and the horizon will always recede from him as the hole shrinks. When he eventually reaches the centre he'll discover that there's no black hole left.
Physicists originally called black holes "frozen stars" because the flow of time stops at the event horizon. Nothing can fall past an event horizon in outside time because that would take an infinitely long time to happen. It also can't happen from the perspective of an observer falling in, provided the outside universe has a finite lifetime. So you can never get a singularity.
I'm not really sure why that idea doesn't get more attention from today's physicists.
Not the original poster, but I agree. I think it's great to have strong female main characters, on an equal footing with strong male main characters. But this ain't it. They're taking a character who is male, both in mythology and in their own storyline, and changing him into a woman. Why? Because they can't write female leads so they'll just take a male one and give him boobs? Because a female main character can't be successful without all the momentum gathered by that character being male for a thousand years?
Learned is such a strong word. I teach evidence based medicine, including test evaluation to med students and residents. I also have to try and explain it to practicing physicians.
Nest thermostats don't seem the least bit inexpensive to me. Knowing how to actually build one, they seem to cost right about what the hardware and back end infrastructure would run, plus some boutique-level profit. You could make one for a quarter of the cost without the cloud stuff.
I find R's syntax really annoying for actually doing anything. So I do all the data acquisition, manipulation, etc. in Python and use the RPy2 bridge to just run the actual analysis in R. Best of both worlds.
Human experimentation without review board approval and informed consent violates a number of national and international laws. It doesn't matter whether anyone gets hurt.
I pretty much automatically fall asleep when I sit down now. Usually open my eyes for the takeoff, then fall asleep again well before cruising altitude.
It's actually a challenge staying awake part of the flight while flying west to prevent jet lag.
I've gone out scanning for APs. Recording SSIDs and data packets are COMPLETELY different things. You don't "inadvertently" do the second while doing the first. In fact, actually connecting to the APs just slows your entire operation down.
And there are laws specifically against recording unencrypted signals emanating from someone's house (the wiretap laws in question). What's your point? The taking pictures through your window analogy is pretty much exactly what happened.
Google didn't just scan SSIDs like a regular war driver would, they connected to the APs and recorded traffic. That's not just "oopsie, it was an accident."
Americans don't seem to like independents. They usually don't vote for them, and there seem to be laws to try to discourage them. Perhaps the ones in power want to stay that way so they pass whatever laws they think they can get away with to keep challengers at bay.
Actually, research suggests that once you have enough basic funds to get yourself on the radar, more doesn't make much difference at all. The biggest factor in swaying elections is the candidate's personal attractiveness. Mostly visual.
I'm going to cherry pick a bit on your absentee list. Domestic spying? Your republic will boldly march on. Wait, you don't like the idea of being spied upon in America, land of the free? Is it really that different to propose laws (from an extreme religious motivation) that control women's fertility and ban stem cell research? Or the biggest one of all, put a discriminatory, rights-removing amendment in the constitution of the United States itself?
Sure, nobody actually runs a Turing test. It's too hard. If a real Turing test were ever passed there wouldn't be any dispute. They're ALL restricted versions where the judges go easy on the computers.
The 13 year old gambit isn't the problem though (it's the judges). In fact, it suggests all sorts of strategies for the judges to trip up the computer. I just had a quick conversation with Eugene where I told him a story about a pretty girl asking a guy to go to the movies, and the two of them sitting right at the back. He changed the subject. Obviously not a 13 year old boy.
I agree with you, a proper Turing test is the best, possibly the only way we currently have to assess an AI. But if you have a computer that you think is at the level of a five year old, for example, find some child psychologists and let them talk to it and some real five year olds. Or thirteen year olds. Or adults. Age doesn't matter.
So are assuming that this program is uncooperative because it's supposed to model a 13 year old? I've talked to it. It doesn't seem to be uncooperative. It's only convincing if you ask it simple factual questions though. Anybody who doesn't think intelligence is about memorizing trivia, the very thing the 13 year old gambit is supposed to help explain away, would see through it very quickly.
Over 50% is your test. Turing didn't suggest any such thing. IIRC, in his paper he suggested only that judges not being able to tell the difference between a computer and a person was the criteria for passing. Your criteria requires that the computer beat the person more often than chance.
The slow typer is only a problem because of the artificially limited (for practical purposes) duration of the Turing test. It's not the same situation as a 13 year old. The language problem is similar, if the subject's understanding of the language is so bad you can't ask reasonable questions.
Age is different. In fact, I'd argue that mixing in children and non-native but still reasonably fluent English speakers is a valuable addition to the test. It distracts the judges from things that don't matter like grammar and factual knowledge, leaving them with more of the important things.
Realistically, the actual Turing test is so hard that nobody ever runs it. The chatbots do reasonably well at restricted Turing tests where the judges are focusing on knowledge and sentence parsing, and do horribly at cognitive tasks like understanding a story and forming defensible opinions based on it. The former are things 13 year olds aren't so good at. The latter is something they can do quite well.
The answer to that philosophical musing is "it doesn't matter."
You can't prove to me you're "conscious." If you're honest, you can't prove to *yourself* you're "conscious." The truth is, if a "non-conscious machine" can mimic the details of a "conscious" human in an unrestricted way, your distinction between them is nothing but magic.
The Turing test, as envisioned by Turing, is an excellent test of intelligence. The "Turing test", as implemented with scripted questions, pre-chosen topics and limited length exchanges isn't.
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So you're arguing that NASA shouldn't test a potential new propulsion technique based on some shady logic founded on a description in a pop science magazine? Very rigorous of you.
Which NASA is working towards gathering. What's the problem?
Somebody convinced NASA that it was worth spending some money checking this out, so they build a small scale version and tested it. Results were positive, with some compromises in the experiment. The next step is to do a more rigorous experiment. If that's positive you invest a little more. Eventually, if everything goes well, you launch a test satellite. There's your extraordinary evidence.
Many crazy ideas are not worth testing. This one isn't nearly as crazy as the media likes to make it sound. The leading theoretical explanations don't involve any violations of conservation of momentum.
All (known) forces are between two charge carriers: electric charge for electromagnetism, mass for gravity, colour for the strong force, etc. You can use electromagnetic interactions to accelerate mass out the back of your rocket and because of that force symmetry the result is that your rocket accelerates in the opposite direction. You can drop a rock and it will accelerate towards the Earth, but the Earth also accelerates towards the rock. The symmetry means that momentum is conserved. Essentially, in order to change your momentum, you need something to push (or pull) on, thereby changing it's momentum, conserving total momentum.
For a reactionless drive you want to be able to change your momentum without pushing or pulling on anything. That idea has all sorts of problems. One of the proposed mechanisms for the EM drive is that it isn't actually reactionless at all: the asymmetric design of the drive canister causes the microwaves to push asymmetrically on the sea of virtual particles that are always popping up and annihilating. So the drive actually would have an exhaust, it would just be virtual particles that were encountered along the way instead of fuel you brought along.
I was surprised. He's usually pretty good. But this article is crap. Maybe someone hacked his blog.
The results, as he described them OR as actually reported in the paper, are weak support for the EM/Cannae drive. You can't conclude that it actually works from those results because there were some compromises in the experiment, like not running everything in a vacuum. But you also can't conclude it doesn't work.
This is a far better article.
The NASA experiment demonstrated that one man's idea of what was required for thrust generation was wrong. The null device differed from the real device only in not having some ridges machined into the case.
That doesn't mean the device really is producing thrust useful as a space drive, but it also doesn't mean it isn't. The experimenters reported "anomalous thrust," which is exactly what they saw. More experiments, in a vacuum to start, are required.
From the perspective of someone falling in, the outside universe experiences an infinite amount of time. So if it's going to end, it's going to end before the infalling observer has even the very short period of time required to cross the event horizon.
If the universe doesn't end, it will have infinite time to cool off and the black to hole to evaporate from Hawking radiation. To conserve energy that means the infalling observer must observe a greater and greater amount of Hawking radiation the closer he gets to the event horizon, and the horizon will always recede from him as the hole shrinks. When he eventually reaches the centre he'll discover that there's no black hole left.
Physicists originally called black holes "frozen stars" because the flow of time stops at the event horizon. Nothing can fall past an event horizon in outside time because that would take an infinitely long time to happen. It also can't happen from the perspective of an observer falling in, provided the outside universe has a finite lifetime. So you can never get a singularity.
I'm not really sure why that idea doesn't get more attention from today's physicists.
Not the original poster, but I agree. I think it's great to have strong female main characters, on an equal footing with strong male main characters. But this ain't it. They're taking a character who is male, both in mythology and in their own storyline, and changing him into a woman. Why? Because they can't write female leads so they'll just take a male one and give him boobs? Because a female main character can't be successful without all the momentum gathered by that character being male for a thousand years?
Ridiculous seems like a reasonable summary.
Hey, the condescending article manages to not know what positive predictive values are!
Learned is such a strong word. I teach evidence based medicine, including test evaluation to med students and residents. I also have to try and explain it to practicing physicians.
Nest thermostats don't seem the least bit inexpensive to me. Knowing how to actually build one, they seem to cost right about what the hardware and back end infrastructure would run, plus some boutique-level profit. You could make one for a quarter of the cost without the cloud stuff.
I find R's syntax really annoying for actually doing anything. So I do all the data acquisition, manipulation, etc. in Python and use the RPy2 bridge to just run the actual analysis in R. Best of both worlds.
Human experimentation without review board approval and informed consent violates a number of national and international laws. It doesn't matter whether anyone gets hurt.
Learn to sleep on planes. It changes your life.
I pretty much automatically fall asleep when I sit down now. Usually open my eyes for the takeoff, then fall asleep again well before cruising altitude.
It's actually a challenge staying awake part of the flight while flying west to prevent jet lag.
I've gone out scanning for APs. Recording SSIDs and data packets are COMPLETELY different things. You don't "inadvertently" do the second while doing the first. In fact, actually connecting to the APs just slows your entire operation down.
And there are laws specifically against recording unencrypted signals emanating from someone's house (the wiretap laws in question). What's your point? The taking pictures through your window analogy is pretty much exactly what happened.
Google didn't just scan SSIDs like a regular war driver would, they connected to the APs and recorded traffic. That's not just "oopsie, it was an accident."
Americans don't seem to like independents. They usually don't vote for them, and there seem to be laws to try to discourage them. Perhaps the ones in power want to stay that way so they pass whatever laws they think they can get away with to keep challengers at bay.
Actually, research suggests that once you have enough basic funds to get yourself on the radar, more doesn't make much difference at all. The biggest factor in swaying elections is the candidate's personal attractiveness. Mostly visual.
I'm going to cherry pick a bit on your absentee list. Domestic spying? Your republic will boldly march on. Wait, you don't like the idea of being spied upon in America, land of the free? Is it really that different to propose laws (from an extreme religious motivation) that control women's fertility and ban stem cell research? Or the biggest one of all, put a discriminatory, rights-removing amendment in the constitution of the United States itself?
Sure, nobody actually runs a Turing test. It's too hard. If a real Turing test were ever passed there wouldn't be any dispute. They're ALL restricted versions where the judges go easy on the computers.
The 13 year old gambit isn't the problem though (it's the judges). In fact, it suggests all sorts of strategies for the judges to trip up the computer. I just had a quick conversation with Eugene where I told him a story about a pretty girl asking a guy to go to the movies, and the two of them sitting right at the back. He changed the subject. Obviously not a 13 year old boy.
I agree with you, a proper Turing test is the best, possibly the only way we currently have to assess an AI. But if you have a computer that you think is at the level of a five year old, for example, find some child psychologists and let them talk to it and some real five year olds. Or thirteen year olds. Or adults. Age doesn't matter.
So are assuming that this program is uncooperative because it's supposed to model a 13 year old? I've talked to it. It doesn't seem to be uncooperative. It's only convincing if you ask it simple factual questions though. Anybody who doesn't think intelligence is about memorizing trivia, the very thing the 13 year old gambit is supposed to help explain away, would see through it very quickly.
Over 50% is your test. Turing didn't suggest any such thing. IIRC, in his paper he suggested only that judges not being able to tell the difference between a computer and a person was the criteria for passing. Your criteria requires that the computer beat the person more often than chance.
The slow typer is only a problem because of the artificially limited (for practical purposes) duration of the Turing test. It's not the same situation as a 13 year old. The language problem is similar, if the subject's understanding of the language is so bad you can't ask reasonable questions.
Age is different. In fact, I'd argue that mixing in children and non-native but still reasonably fluent English speakers is a valuable addition to the test. It distracts the judges from things that don't matter like grammar and factual knowledge, leaving them with more of the important things.
Realistically, the actual Turing test is so hard that nobody ever runs it. The chatbots do reasonably well at restricted Turing tests where the judges are focusing on knowledge and sentence parsing, and do horribly at cognitive tasks like understanding a story and forming defensible opinions based on it. The former are things 13 year olds aren't so good at. The latter is something they can do quite well.
The answer to that philosophical musing is "it doesn't matter."
You can't prove to me you're "conscious." If you're honest, you can't prove to *yourself* you're "conscious." The truth is, if a "non-conscious machine" can mimic the details of a "conscious" human in an unrestricted way, your distinction between them is nothing but magic.
The Turing test, as envisioned by Turing, is an excellent test of intelligence. The "Turing test", as implemented with scripted questions, pre-chosen topics and limited length exchanges isn't.