14 karma · joined January 20, 2018
The numbers are taken as abstractions and untethered from the complex subsystems that generate the results. This decoupling eliminates any understanding of the underlying principles at work.
Human tissues are organized into organs that eventually fail. When you put the tables and figures away, and look at the actual centenarians themselves, there’s no expectation that those people’s organs will continue on an endless plateau of static operation without further incident, in an endless streak of winning coin flips.
The reality is that life at that age isn’t abstract coin flips, there’s definite decline lurking in the background. Externalities like microbial illness could be modeled as coin flips (does the individual catch the flu this year?), but internal deterioration is still a systemic function with a graded slope that varies from person to person.
That declining slope could be altered with transplants, but eventually the brain gets involved, and we lack the metaphysical and philosophical tools to argue about when a zombie robot brain transplant might mean animate brain death or the living exchange and passing of one distinct individual for wholly another living mind.
IMAGINE a world in which you are manipulated
by intelligent advertisements from dusk until
dawn.
It may sound outlandish, but this dystopia is
increasingly what stockmarket investors are
banking on.
Day-to-day spending also is not swayed by advertisements. There are real reasons behind the choices I make, and those ideas, opinions and motivations don't source their information from advertisers. I'm not charmed by entreaties that pander to my niche demographic.
Advertising has one rare utility, in shedding light on things that are new. The cliche being that everything is "new and improved" if you believe what ads are trying to sell you.
The people that try new things are the targets, and learning who will try something new, and who will spread positive word-of-mouth endorsements, is the holy grail of advertising, but realistically most people do research and find real evidence, before parting with their money.
Ads can notify a person of presence, but in practice, people really do operate carefully before accepting invitations to buy, or R.S.V.P. with their wallets.
Meanwhile if a city needs 3/4 of it’s workforce through the door by 9AM, congestion at each hub still occurs, and rush hours aren’t actually alleviated, only spread around. Hub stations will be the same horrible kind of place train stations, bus stations and airports are, unless a new conceptualization of origin sourcing and destination arrival is brought to the table.
The only new aspect that a hyperloop adds to the equation, to change the game is that, theoretiacally, longer distances can be negotiated, permitting any given urban center to import from greater distances than before, and urban residents can interchange between hubs without 500MPH aviation.
Of course, for those promises to hold true, tubes must be cut, and track laid within them. Every mile of interconnection adds compelling power to the principle of the concept. Individual point-to-point connections are meaningless, if there are not many points connected, and the distances aren’t longer than was previously realistic.
The automatic analysis of the source data’s thermal video capture seems to look for hot nostril flares, from breathing through the nose only, as a reliable measure of relaxed respiratory rate? The respiratory rate is either assessed as a measurable number, ranked as a percentile, high or low, or indeterminate/chaotic which is then presumed as correlated with elevated mental activity?
Note that this spectrogram is not chemical analysis of respiratory exhaust from exhaled gases. It’s not mass spectrometry, searching for CO2 and water vapor content as an indicator of metabolic respiration, which is what the title almost sounds like it could be about, without careful reading.
The study then goes on to state that other sensors (air flow meters, pressure sensitive chest straps) could be used to extract respiratory rate over time, and construct the same data interchangably. I’m not so sure that’s true, but clearly the goal here is passive reads, probably for retrospective lie detector types of analysis. Seems like a presuptive effort at precrime.