noselfrighteous

I have a side question. If gravity (i.e. warping of space time) propagates at the speed of light. Then does that mean that the Alcubierre warp drive is fundamentally incapable of supra-light speeds?

Awesome! Thanks for that.

Beautiful ideas! Do you have a way to control the final stereo-isomer that comes out of the synthesis? I'm thinking of the "256 stereo-isomer" molecule that you mentioned. Or is it a case of brute force and select afterwards?

You say statistically but you don't have any references to support that statement. My anecdotal experience says otherwise.

Why even comment with such a lackluster critique?

No, that rings hollow to me. Humans are sophisticated enough to genuinely have other needs aside from primal mating urges. Self-actualization is a huge one and more than sufficient to be the primary motivator for someone seeking to leave a family/marriage situation.

Ish. How much do you know about the Russian cultural psyche?

I'm not disagreeing that the paranoia around American<->Russian relations isn't massively overblown, but I think you underestimate the aspirations of the Russian ruling class, and the degree to which the working class would bend to those aspirations if called upon (forced to).

Yeah I pictured being a foreign national during that, I can imagine it being a little irksome.

Edit: foreign national working at SpaceX. If there were not foreign national's involved in today's success, then feel free to ignore me.

Go for 20, I'd be interested to see if you can do it.

I really love this story (no sarcasm intended at all). It's such a physicist's story. The recollections of Einstein amount to "he was a nice guy", but the bulk of the story is details about whatever problem she was working on at the time.

Thank you!

I feel like I've fallen into a hole. There's jargon everywhere, I'm not sure if I'm in the middle of some sort of satirical art experiment.

Can anyone explain what is going on?

Can you link to an explanation/derivation of the geometric formulation?

Would be interesting to see how the lack of gravity affects growth.

Ahh yep, got it.

So I read the wiki on the One-time pad and there's something I'm a little stuck on. There's a statement (paraphrasing) that the OTP is immune to cryptanalysis (brute force) because any given key translates to all possible plain-text, and the viable words all have a-priori the same likelihood.

The thing I'm stuck on though, isn't it still possible to do semantic analysis on the various permutations. Basically reading permutations for cogent statements? So do some sort of a-posteriori analysis

Infeasible for a human to do, but assuming one could construct a significantly advanced parser (non-trivial of course), wouldn't it be possible to brute force still? What am I missing?

I think your tl;dr is unjust. I read the author as criticizing the imposition of a simple story onto the nuanced experiences of people. I think he criticizes it for the lack of artistic subtlety (pictures are not allowed to speak to the reader by themselves) and also for the effect that ignoring social structure has on the way the art is consumed.

He decries the "read, get emotional cookies, and forget" effect of the simple "uplifting" narratives of every day people. The consumer of the art must think no further than one person's experience.

Practically speaking, even armed you're a subject. The government is free to impose its will on you any time it likes unless you're in the business of shooting police offices who pull you over.

I was thinking about this the other day, what's the loss factor in compressed air storage?

Lasers make a lot of sense in space, much more so than in the atmosphere.

It's not clear at all that Mouse->Human is simply a scaling problem.

It would appear that there is some emergent phenomenon (consciousness) somewhere on the scale between mouse and human. This phenomenon may be triggered by a surplus of "computational resource" with respect to "body to be controlled", which I personally think is unlikely. It may be triggered by a matching of computational resource to controllable complexity, i.e. the hands and fingers -> tool use, who knows?

There is so much we don't know about cognition. For example, are Whales/Dolphins self aware/conscious? They have the requisite brain mass, if it's simply a scaling problem.

My point is that offering up IQ as an explanatory variable which alleviates any obligation to help another group is cowardice. Even accepting that IQ difference is an irrevocable consequence of genetics (which I don't), the next step is not "so it's their fault and we should not help them because they don't help themselves".

Which is the point of the DS analogy. It was an appeal to what I consider fundamental humanity. Perhaps it was a waste of time as an argument. Perhaps I should have just stuck to pointing out how fundamentally flawed the idea is; of formulating social policy on a metric as flexible as IQ.

It might make a lot of sense actually. It could serve to speed up instinctive responses to stimuli which have been encountered before, i.e. whipping your finger away from a hot surface.

Perhaps, if one asserts IQ is some quantity defined and birth, and not amenable to influence through education, diet, living conditions etc.

Then one might be justified in implying that black people are worse off because they are fundamentally, genetically limited.

But that assertion re: IQ is not at all well founded. And this is setting aside how well IQ even captures "intelligence". Let me just point out that your statement "Intelligence is correlated with long term planning and academic performance and is anti-correlated with lack of intelligence" means absolutely nothing, as in the statement itself is non-sensical. Of course "intelligence" is anti-correlated with "anti-intelligence". You go back and forth between "intelligence" and IQ as if they're interchangeable meanings.

Even if I allow you that assertion re: IQ, and join with you in believing that blacks are fundamentally, genetically limited, then that would put them in the same camp as people with down syndrome.

From there, the implication of your view is that perhaps we should just place all the people with down syndrome in ghettos and leave them there. After all, they can never compete in the modern world. Do you think that's acceptable social policy? That that's an acceptable way to treat your fellow human beings, no matter how disadvantaged they are?

Why are you not looking at these circumstances and weeping for the way in which this genetically disadvantaged branch of humanity has been treated?

There is so much wrong with the taking of this view. Instead of looking at the experience of growing up black, the horribly unlevel playing field, the reverberating echos of slavery and broken families. A resonance maintained by the complete disregard of the dominant system.

You point to a metric associated with intelligence only to a standard deviation at best, and say it's the reason? I think your reasoning is a lazy kind of cowardice. You want there to be a simple explanation because you want to believe it's not possible to elevate african americans and therefore you don't have to face the enormous effort that will be required to do so.

Finally, the Jews, Italians, Irish and Chinese were never slaves in america. They lived through terrible poverty as immigrants, but they were never slaves.