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No.

The "no hair theorem" states that black holes preserve exactly three numbers: mass, charge, and angular momentum. Baryon number, lepton number (as you would see in antimatter) are not conserved, the information is lost.

And, no, antimatter does not have negative mass, in any of the three contexts (mass-energy equivalence, inertia, and gravitational).

Therefore, a black hole fed entirely by antimatter would be indistinguishable from a black hole fed entirely by the equivalent matter.

And the children's series, which made its way to the United States during Nickelodeon's bundle series, The Third Eye.

This reminds me of a clip I saw of an older martial arts practitioner, like heavy-duty, far east, everything was translated. He had spent decades punching harder and harder things until he had to hit opponents at a small fraction of his strength, as his forearms on up were mineralized clubs on the inside. A full strike could kill.

I watched closely and his hands didn't seem to be much use for anything else.

I cannot cop to "smoke test" being interchangeable with "sanity test," in any way. Smoke tests are obvious crashes, often before any real input. I had a friend on the build team of Windows NT 5.0 (until it was called Windows 2000) and their version of smoke test was "can it boot up to the login screen," and that's similar to working in electronics, where powering up your machine or circuit is all you do and you hope it doesn't release the magic smoke, before you actually do anything with it.

On that alone, I am very doubtful on that article.

This is also distinguished from what I have taken to calling a "pre-flight checklist" at the start of large programs, making sure databases are connected, requisite tables are present with the correct columns and datatypes, that specific files or directories exist, that files may be of a certain "freshness," and so on.

I'll stand by it: sanity test is a lot more descriptive and useful than "quick test." Those footnotes are only kicking the can down the road of justifiability. But let's examine them according to the aforementioned The PC Replacement is Less Useful criterion.

Recommending just "test" is ... well, double-plus ungood, in the sense that we now have no idea of the qualities of this test and how it could be distinguished from some other test. Hard pass.

"Confidence test" only implies a statistical likeliness, like a confidence interval. It does not imply the This Ought Not to Happen of a sanity test.

"Coherence test" is interesting but ... coherent against what?

If someone wants to sell me on a replacement, they are free to try, but the replacement must be at least as good at communicating what it does as the term sanity test. If this fails, then it will be scoffed at, and should be.

If not for space considerations, I would be right there with you.

I still have hardware and software to get me back to NT 4.0 or Windows 95 (OSR 2, please, it wasn't tolerable before that). I haven't needed to in a while, but in a previous job, we'd run across old disks in some author's archive and I'd go home to dig around, find a 5.25" drive and rig something up, reach back in time.

I could maybe do Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

If shipping weren't so brutal, I would love to send off my old stuff to someone who would use it. I still have working SCSI equipment! I bet somewhere there is someone stymied on trying to liberate some ancient works but for the necessary hardware/software setup.

We should make choices based on communication, first and foremost. Words that do not communicate are not useful.

A "quick test" implies almost nothing, other than it is faster than some other, unnamed test out there. Is a quick test good or is it bad? No way to tell. This term, quick test, it does not inform.

On the other hand, a sanity test, well, it is more evocative. You definitely want to pass a sanity test.

If you reach back to your psychology classes, they talked about a four-part test that is useful for determine if a behavior is sane or not.

1) Is it abnormal? Unusual? Out of the ordinary? for the situation.

2) Is it unjustifiable, unreasonable given the circumstances?

3) Is it counter-productive? Which is to say, does the behavior serve the individual, or does it in fact make things worse? Or simply do nothing?

4) (and this is where my memory is fuzzy) I think it involves personal distress. For the life of me I can't find it via Google and it annoys me.

Now, interestingly, a sanity test matches the first three! (The fourth, well, there is no "I" in the program to be distressed) In programming, a sanity test looks for something abnormal, not reasonable for the program, and represents a state that won't get us the desired output. In short, it's highly congruent to the other context for sanity.

This term, it communicates, and in a way "quick test" does not.

In general, one of the main critiques of political correctness which few really notice is that the new term is less specific and less useful, that it fails at communicating. Consider when "Oriental" fell off of the euphemism treadmill for "Asian." We all knew that the first term referred to a particular part of the world, from the Latin for "east." (Ex lux orient and so on) "Asian," however, could refer to people in Russia or people in India, but nobody in the US does (I note in the UK India does get the "Asian" pass). So here the new term is less specific and less useful, and is confusing to boot because we deliberately ignore parts of Asia when using the term "Asian."

If you want something to supplant "sanity test," you gotta work harder for it than "quick test."

I am working on one of my Master Lists, but the /r/darkjazz subreddit was good. Now, it is mostly dead but for spam from randos who aren't within miles of the sound trying to flog their own efforts. Black Chamber, Free Nelson Mandoomjazz, you might try those for giggles.

I had expected that some of Badalamenti's stuff would have opened up since his death, like his score for Witch Hunt, but no luck. His stuff was sort of a wellspring, among others, which intermingled into that little creek we called darkjazz, for a while.

I originally got into it as a primary component of a long set of mixes for a particular mood, namely that I would have instrumentals (primarily darkjazz) buffering slow tempo "torchy" kinds of songs (Mel Torme, Julie London, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday) and the "once every ninety minutes" track which was a little newer. The idea being that the darkjazz doesn't call too much attention to itself and keeps the mood going.

I have started a little research project wherein I have been harvesting the feeds of various Internet-active radio stations so I can look for the "deep cuts." Not just for classic rock, but for various "new wave" stations, as well as combining old "top 500" lists, and so on. I am nowhere near done, but I have made some notes that confirm old suspicions.

One, you're quite right about classic rock having a lot of deep cuts that just don't make it outside of some specific instances. On the other hand, not only was new wave not entirely congruent to the 1980s, but a lot of what gets called new wave on various stations is only music that existed in the 1980s, rather than being actual new wave. New wave was fairly tight and the rest is padding.

"Darkjazz" really came and went, and it's unfortunate. I'm still working my way through it but there was a hell of a drop-off.

Speaking of researched tracks, I think when an artist dies, there's a contraction of what of their tracks get played on air.

Another thought, this one purely math. If you bought, say, ten CDs every year, new releases, well, the average age of your collection will age at about half your own age rate. The only ways to prevent that, if this concerns you, is to either jettison your old music or gather ever-increasing amounts of new music.

All of this is to say that, unless your preference is "whatever is on the radio ... played a reasonable volume" (Pictures for Sad Children), you're swimming upstream, against the fantastically evolved. Taste gave way to faddishness, then payola, and now, well, The Algorithm. It's a fight to find what you might like rather than what is just being extruded like soft serve.

You remember ... wrongly. It's just another particle accelerator, its intention was not to produce micro black holes for study.

You shouldn't use "theory" when it comes to science unless you know what that means. Gravity is a "theory." "Theory" means that it has a working model, comes with a ton of observational evidence in line with predictions, and it has yet to be replaced by anything better. Outside of math, nothing is ever proven. Any leading scientific theory is, at best, "yet to be disproven." And it stays in the lead until something better comes along: more accurate, extending over a greater domain, etc.

Hawking radiation has yet to be observed.

And if you're worried about micro black holes, well, even an iron atom has a non-zero chance of tunneling to a micro black hole state. No collider needed.

Cyc isn't secretive, it's proprietary, the way the Microsoft codebase is, the Adobe codebase is, and so on.

I have what is a rather rare disease in the United States. I recognized it for what it was about a month in, purely by accident -- I recalled an interesting article I had read when I was about twelve. It took roughly a year to convince the appropriate doctors to run the tests, yes because they were fixated on the "hoofbeats, horses, not zebras" mantra, despite my symptoms aligning so perfectly you'd think a constellation had been traced on onionskin paper. Each specialist who drifted through behaved like a sage in the tale of the six blind sages and the elephant. Then you consider the overwork -- why? It's hazing, but we know that it causes people to underperform.

If I am going somewhere unfamiliar, I do use a map ... but only to make directions that I internalize beforehand. I believe that this mental exercise improves your sense of direction and general orientation.

I don't merely do a "turn here onto Route X," rather I note if I will be passing a particular road on the left, if I will be going through a town, and so on. My turns are always in the "left/east onto," including both my personal orientation and world orientation. It is a little time-consuming but there is an eventual payoff.

An acquaintance of mine was a professional carpenter for a theater company. Thoughtful, careful guy. Never in a rush. He of course used a table saw all the time. I asked if he had Sawstop. They were too cheap.

He still has no idea what happened, he simply came to holding the bleeding stumps of his fingers. Surgeons managed to reassemble some functioning digits out of the chunks.

It is my opinion that the government should purchase and "open source" safety patents as they come up, then manufacture replaceable safety parts to sell at cost.

So, a Friend of a Friend died. It had been a long time since I had seen her, she had numerous medical issues, and so forth. My friend rushes several states to help with the funeral arrangements and returns to report pure horror: her "spouse" (I put the word in quotes because it was technically true but denotes a level of care which was not present) waited until the last minute to supply photos, almost all of which were amazingly inappropriate. Think leather gear, collars, leashes, and so on. And managed to make it all about them instead of the deceased. My friend and the funeral director had a frantic what can be accomplished in fifteen minutes sprint of cropping, blowing up, making collages, and so forth so as to not completely mortify the deceased's family with the details of what passed for their sex life.

It's not necessarily true, but functionally ... we lack a lot of counterexamples that have really scaled to the level churches have.

It's right there in the Wikipedia article on the No Hair Theorem:

"Suppose two black holes have the same masses, electrical charges, and angular momenta, but the first black hole was made by collapsing ordinary matter whereas the second was made out of antimatter; nevertheless, then the conjecture states they will be completely indistinguishable to an observer outside the event horizon. None of the special particle physics pseudo-charges (i.e., the global charges baryonic number, leptonic number, etc., all of which would be different for the originating masses of matter that created the black holes) are conserved in the black hole, or if they are conserved somehow then their values would be unobservable from the outside"

Now, this is all still hypothetical, as we haven't a black hole on hand, but this has been the mainstream view on black holes for decades.

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs. Another classic "this will be easy as long as we have unobtanium" concept.

I've been baffled, though, by the insistence on this kind of antimatter production. Antimatter production is inherently expensive because we are fighting conservation of baryon number, conservation of lepton number, et al.

Physics does have one theoretical method around this, which never seems to be addressed for these proposals, and that's the baffling issue of black holes having no hair. You throw whatever past the event horizon, all that is conserved is mass, angular momentum, and charge. Baryon number, lepton number, strangeness ... all lost. Re-emission as Hawking radiation, it is thought, would simply be this sort of thing, redistributed without regard to what went in, so long as mass, angular momentum, and charge are accounted for. You would conceivably get out as much antimatter as matter.

Now, that's worth looking at. And not from a "we JUST need to capture an itty black hole" (the word "just" does an enormous amount of lifting here) perspective. Rather, passage through the event horizon somehow strips off (we think, some think it might be preserved in some fashion) all of the variables which account for matter versus antimatter. And yet the event horizon isn't a hunk of matter, it's a ... membrane, a boundary, generated by matter at some distance (as a function of our usual three variables). Somehow, this warpage of spacetime operates on matter, shaving it so it has no hair.

That's what fascinates me, in the sense of the theoretical having some extremely juicy practical results.

I may need to take some tips from this for some posters I am making for our annual April 20th event, "Children of the Stoned." Yes, the "this is for kids?" program(me) from the late 1970s, we watch it in a variety of states of intoxication.

I've found that this sort of thing goes most awry when targeted not at smaller children but at tweens. The results tend to be bizarre and open to some fairly inappropriate interpretations. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural is an excellent example of the species in its US form.

He had the Bobbler and he also had the Babbler, the later being a short story involving the Tines ...

That really, really depends.

Some of them, once you got a drink or two in them, would tell you about the indignity of academia: teaching 101 classes to kids who would rather not be there, scrabbling for grant money, the bitter jockeying for resources. Sure, you get your true-blue types, but they were largely outnumbered by people haunted by the sunk cost fallacy. And it's not really about nice cars, it's about "being able to arrive at the class you are teaching on time because your car doesn't break down every five minutes."

I had a similar sort of thing. There I was, plowing away in physics, doing pretty well. I was enjoying myself. They let me, an undergrad, take some grad level courses because I was doing good work. But then I took a long, very hard look at the people who were teaching me and their lifestyles. Their cars that were always breaking down, their second jobs, how much their wives worked, their clothes, and so on. Brilliant people working for a pittance.

I think it is safer to say that accessibility is an one of many edge cases. Not important ... until it suddenly is.

I had many tricks to "sell" accessibility to the various clients and one of them was "What percentage of your potential users would you like to immediately piss off?" "How comfortable are you with random lawsuits? [Then you have to talk about the Target lawsuit]"

At that time, you have three big candidates: terminology, language barriers, and speed of propagation.

I might also include a certain scientific isolation. Not in the sense of isolationist tendencies, rather that there were a lot of blind men reaching across the elephant and their hands had yet to touch.

And don't forget that brilliant "HR says we can't assign any fives, and only a handful of fours" thumb on the scale.

I've been obsessed, mildly, with Feolite. It could be brought back for these sorts of applications to great effect. It's got the volumetric heat capacity of water and the ability to withstand much greater temperatures without any annoying phase transitions. It was very popular in the UK, where they went in early on charging for electricity on a rate varying by hour. The basic formula is easy, but there's a lot of secret ingredients to get the heat capacity way, way up.

Speaking of home uses and phase transitions, they have made inroads into making materials with a phase transitioned tuned to household temperatures. Say you have aimed for seventy-two Fahrenheit. The temperature gets higher than that? The material melts, absorbing ambient heat. Then, as the temperature dips below seventy-two Fahrenheit, it freezes, releasing heat. It would make a fantastic sort of "heat capacitor," designed to deal with rapid, small-scale temperature fluctuations, while larger heat batteries could deal with fluctuations over days, weeks, and so on.

Only problem is that these phase transition materials tend to be terrifyingly flammable, so far. Like soaking all of your drywall panels in candle wax before putting them up.

I have some old wire photos in a particular set of movie memorabilia I've been constructing from press kits, pamphlets, film cells, foreign posters, slides, lobby cards, et al.

I have so many "in-progress" essays about topics where I keep circling back, adding on one bit or another. I've been working on one which, vaguely put, concerns the more unusual aspects of a variable, from start to finish. I suspect that I am not enough of a logician to really consider everything, but I believe that just spending time on the topic, whether or not an essay results, might be valuable to me in some capacity.

Fortunately, I have a physics degree so I am quite sure I am not being misled by the textbooks.

We will face different challenges at different scales, of course, but even as recently as 2016, researchers using a scanning tunneling microscope crafted a 8,192 bit message using less than ten thousand atoms. So, no, I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't have robots within an order of magnitude of the human cell -- we have bacteria which are much much smaller capable of a variety of functions as well as reproducing themselves

You might look into Feynman's "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

Look into the "swim test" and other such endurance tests given to rats, usually in the pursuit of depression medication. Desire to live is absolutely a thing, and it is real and observable.

My basic thrust wasn't about adaptability, but rather that organisms with a desire to live will eventually replace organisms without a desire to live. An AGI who was uninterested in someone reaching the off switch will eventually be outcompeted by a similar lineage endowed with that desire to live. It might fight back or spawn a few progeny before it was felled. And thus evolution would produce AGIs that want to live.

You're not going to get a simple answer because the answer is quite complex.

Astronomy is the paleontology of photons. You should take an astronomy course if you really want to know, but essentially a "ladder" was built of distances, starting with the very near and slowly building outward using various techniques and discoveries of physics as they became available. This is called the cosmic distance ladder. You start with stellar parallax, then after that you go farther with "standard candles" (particular types of variable stars). But then you have to get even further out, where you can no longer see an individual star, and then you rely on specific breeds of supernovae. Only then do you get to redshift, and compounding tons of data from step three seems to verify the redshift estimates. By the time you get to the Hubble constant, it was a huge rift between two communities over what was still a factor of two difference.

It's quite fascinating, but I can't really dump out an entire book into a comment.

Right now, there are many people on this forum who work for individuals they've never met in the flesh. Reasonable simulation of emails, phone calls, and Zoom meetings are what an AGI needs to deceive the humans, not a dozen mechs lurching about a fortress of crystalline computer chips. You wouldn't know, and if you did know, where would you go for the off switch?

And remember, by the time you've caught on, a bunch of custom blades have arrived at a co-lo, with someone dispatched to install them. Everyone loves a side gig, and hooking up these blades is great.

A reasonably deceptive AGI would pursue a strategy like that as just one tine in a fork. Then there's the botnets, the poorly-secured printers, and there's firmware to corrupt!