Posts by DJO

Re: "Except for the higher pressure, hydrogen is no different than gasoline. "

Seeing as most hydrogen is made by catalytic breakdown of methane that seems a superfluous step.

The Sabatier reaction is not all that efficient and runs hot to produce wet methane with all the cooling and drying costs that incurs.

Adding carbon to hydrogen kind of defeats the whole point of using hydrogen in the first place - reducing CO₂ emissions.

Re: Fireworks

If cars needed to be fuelled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and possibly some hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, I think they too would have "issues".

Re: for balance

No. Who said it was?

But almost every expert in every field that Brexit would affect said it was a bad idea. And they were right.

Re: for balance

No.

They didn't.

Perhaps if they were given accurate information instead of the lies and misinformation peddled by the Brexit side the result might have been different.

However I'll guarantee that at least 99.99% of economists voted Remain.

Re: for balance

There's a thing called false equivalence.

The BBC had this in the run up to the Brexit vote, 99.99% of economists approached stated that Brexit was an economically stupid idea but due to pressure from the government they had to do interviews with one pro and one against which presented an unintentionally misleading impression.

To be truly unbiased they should have had 9999 economists against and 1 for on the debate but that would not have made for good or even watchable TV. By just having one of each it presented a false equivalence and you are doing exactly the same thing.

Re: for balance

OK you are right

"this almost never happens, perhaps once in a million times when you get an idiot who does not understand the issues.

Happy now?

Re: for balance

There are idiots on every side of every argument but they are statistically irrelevant.

One person in millions is not a trend.

Re: for balance

Bullshit.

will talk you into an abortion

This never happens except in the fevered dreams of the anti-choice brigade. It's more right wing projection - they want to control people so they assume everybody else is doing the same.

Nobody who is pro-choice would say they are "pro-abortion". Ideally hardly anybody would ever have an abortion except when there is a danger to the woman because ideally there would be adequate sex education and provision of contraceptives and good confidential accurate advice on contraception. (And ideally all men would understand the meaning of the word "no")

So if you want to reduce abortions the best way is to provide care well in advance of the problem occurring and give women the tools and knowledge to avoid accidental pregnancies.

Re: Heat engines

So arguably man-made CO2 isn't that significant, especially compared to natural CO2 fluxes

Just because nature changes the CO₂ levels does not mean only nature changes the CO₂ levels.

Yes there are natural variations but they are slow, what's happening now is happening nearly 1000 times faster than normal natural causes can account for and is far too fast for natural systems to adapt to.

Man made climate change is beyond reasonable doubt, which it seems only leaves unreasonable doubt.

Re: Heat engines

Solar irradiance : 173,000 TW

59% of that is re-radiated from the night side as infra red radiation. Good thing too, things would be rather toasty if it wasn't.

Re: Is it neccesary?

Ah but the iconic Mr Holmes would deduce that tracking clusters of failing electronic devices would provide a unmistakeable trail.

Re: a panel of 15 to 17 experts

This being the real world we can reasonably assume the experts are already employed and paid or are tenured academics so the $100k will only need to cover additional expenses such as transport and occasional hotel costs and perhaps one or two part-time employees to coordinate the experts and collate any data collected.

Darwin was not all that rich and the name of the ship "HMS Beagle" should give a clue that it was not a private mission.

Darwin then was a 22 year old student who happened to have the required qualifications for the mission and could cover his own minor expenses over the trip.

We're so used to seeing pictures of Darwin as an old man with his splendid beard we forget he did his formative work as a clean shaven youth.

Re: I hope they are consulting with NASA

There's a region in the atmosphere where the pressure and temperature are approximately the same as on the surface of the Earth. Up there the sulphuric acid is a minor problem, plenty of critters on earth thrive in absurdly acidic conditions.

Microbiomes in extremely acidic environments: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369527417302230

At some point somebody will send a balloon to lurk high in the atmosphere and do the science from there. Covering the probe with Teflon would be more than adequate to protect it from the sulphuric acid.

Slowing a probe down enough to prevent the balloon from being torn to shreds is rather tricky but not impossible.

It's not a new Tory tactic, it's been just about their only tactic for years: Make a big announcement, get lots of favourable coverage from their poodles at the Daily Mail, Telegraph etc. Throw a few million at a tame "consultant" who is probably a family member of someone who's owed a favour, then with the "report" saying it can't be done they'll just quietly forget the whole thing. Anyone remember the £2B "Great Northern Forest" £13m to a consultant and then nothing.

You'll also notice that big finance plans are more often than not the money they want the private sector to pony up when the private sector has no intention or incentive to do so. Like the Forest mentioned above, they only mentioned a few days after the announcement that they wanted the private sector to pay the £2B, fat chance.

Re: Tesla shares

Tesla are no longer alone in the luxury end of the EV market, for example the Jaguar I-Pace base model is a bit dearer than the basic Tesla, but the top of the range Jags are a lot cheaper than the top of the range Teslas.

Can't see Tesla maintaining the proportion of the market they've enjoyed over the last few years.

As for the robot, if connected to a computer through a power and control umbilical then no real problem, but a self powered autonomous humanoid robot that will run for more than 30 minutes on a charge, no chance for at least 10 years.

Re: Definition

This is always the problem when discussing AI and it's properties and implications, at some point you have to hand it all over to philosophers to try to sort something out. Empirically a waste of time because philosophers never agree on anything.

"Understanding" is indeed a complex concept but I'd say one aspect is the ability to take some knowledge and apply it differently but consistent with the principles behind that bit of knowledge.

An example could be deriving the formula of the volume of a sphere from the formula for the area of a circle, without understanding what circles and spheres are, such a derivation would be impossible.

..."artificial intelligence" is effectively an oxymoron...

Wouldn't argue with that, it's too late now but I'd much prefer the term "Machine Intelligence" precisely to avoid the conflation with human intelligence which is not a viable or sensible goal for research.

Intelligences moulded for the task rather than emulating the general purpose intelligence humans have would seem a more probable path.

Re: Definition

You don't need to "understand what kinetic energy is" to be able to apply and manipulate it.

That is wrong in almost every aspect and detail.

Yes you can answer a physics exam question using rote acquired learning but if you wanted to apply the same to a real world situation if you don't understand it then there is no chance.

I think you are getting fixated on "understanding" being a comprehension of the underlying methodology of how an intelligence be it real or artificial works. That does not matter in the slightest, it's all "black boxes".

For an intelligent system to work with and manipulate a subject it must understand that subject otherwise it's no more intelligent than ELIZA.

An important point here, at the moment "AI" does not exist, there are plenty of machine learning systems but they do not exhibit intelligence and there are certainly no emergent properties that would suggest true intelligence. Part of that is the current computer architectures are unsuitable for AI and never will be, a new paradigm is needed and there is a lot of work being done in that direction.

..not a useful concept as regards making distinctions between "real" and artificial intelligence...

I never said it was, I draw no distinction between meatsack intelligence and silicon intelligence, both of them have the same requirement to understand something before they can fully utilize it in anything more sophisticated than the most basic way.

Re: Definition

Understanding the underlying process is not important, understanding what is being discussed is critical otherwise it's just rote learning.

For example it's easy to say e = ½mv² but if you don't understand what kinetic energy is or how to apply the knowledge then it's meaningless.

There have been a number of really good lectures about various aspects of AI available online from the Royal Institution Friday Discourses, they do a lot more than Christmas Lectures for kids you know.

Re: Definition

I never said it was the only criterion, just one of several that have to be considered together before a system can be considered "intelligent" but it is an important one for without understanding there cannot be intelligence.

...able to understand how you picked out your sister's face in a jostling crowd...

Maybe, maybe not but that is a complete strawman argument, the issue is understanding what a "sister" is. I think you've taken a different interpretation of "understanding" in this context.

Re: Definition

...Sentience means having the capacity to experience feelings and emotions...

Another important factor is understanding, an "AI" can spew out reams of conversations but it does not have any underlying understanding of the subject, it's just following (admittedly complex) rules.

Here's a talk by Vint Cerf at the Royal Institution which may be useful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J63mKverb8w&list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyu3P8J1AKG6HO-rofZVWP7&index=6

Re: Establish a system to preserve certification test records

...quirk of law that a signature on a fax carries legal weight...

A fax always sends a receipt to acknowledge the recipient has received the fax. Email can be configured to send a receipt but seldom is and even then is easy to spoof.

It's the receipt of delivery that's important for legal documents.

how secure the world would be it we just supported text emails

As long as URLs are plain text, not particularly secure at all.

You can tell users not to click on a link and definitely never copy a link to a browser. You can tell them again, it won't make a blind bit of difference, often it just needs one careless user.

Re: So this will replace

And still does not address the problems caused for telescopes not operating in visible light. Radio telescopes are rendered almost useless when these things are in their field of view. When a receiver designed to pick up signals in the picowatt range suddenly gets a signal 14 or 15 orders of magnitude more powerful, the results are not pretty.

Perhaps the constellation companies should pay for a space based radio telescope that won't be affected by their satellites. As an alternative to switching off the satellite transmitters when over a radio telescope, it would probably work out to be the cheapest mitigation strategy.