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rolphon Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

you have an incorrect model, transpiration is capillary action and evaporation from mesenchyme

xylem is not a straw, is no where near the diameter of a straw, and its[transpiration] is not about increased pressure its about decrease.

psi values at the apical mesenchyme are around -100 to -150 megapascals dependent on species and relative humidity at the stoma.

physics and biology although intertrined are not the same catechisms, heres a link toward most of m.j. canny's work.

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/M-J-Ca...

here is is a basic scheme of things

Water Movement in Xylem:

https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/87595/student-old/?...

Xylem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem

Hydrogen bond:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_bond

rolphon I Could Kill You with a Consumer Drone

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has adopted the name small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) to describe aircraft systems without a flight crew on board weighing less than 55 pounds

thus you would be using an aircraft(sUAS) to attack people, or if your breaking porch lights security cameras, pushing gate control buttons, you are attacking a building or facility.

i would expect this to involve a severe enforcement effort, and a lot of litigation.

rolphon Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition

sometimes, you just have to hang out in the right bar, and you will hear a multitude of secrets, this is why some projects had thier own towns so none of the inside would get out.

rolphon Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches

the research is relevant to the issue of transpiration column hieght as a postulated limitation to overall hieght of any tree.

a column of water is pulled by hydrogen bonding between molecules in a tug of war fashion, the top of the column is where water is dissociated from the column at such a rate as to maintain low pressure with respect to the column[xylem]

in summary water moves from bottom to top in a transpiration stream, that ultimately ejects water vapour from the leaves, resulting in a low efficiency mechanism, that loses a lot of the water but occurs at such a rate that the low efficiency is "good enough" for whats needed.

rolphon Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

more like capillary action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem#Cohesion-tension_theory

rolphon Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?

we need to mimmick this behaviour in a drone swarm, as well as the reverse, bringing a replacement and reattaching.

rolphon I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

i think you may enjoy:

45 Different Types of Humor with Examples in 2026

https://humornama.com/featured/education/types-of-humor/

rolphon I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

i thought so, but i ran with it.

rolphon I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

>>Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton<<

remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.

rolphon I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

despite being satire this is no joke, this is what we are headed into if we dont stop the decline.

rolphon Ask HN: Living alone to become illegal as intelligent robots could be required?

although the androids would learn at accelerated pace, there would be a functionally driven requirement to train androids for social conduct. They would be pervasive, but not mandatory, perhaps more immediately useful than a speaker on a shelf, or a button hanging around your neck, but marketed in a similar manner.

rolphon Bank of England explores trading 'kill switches' to contain AI meltdowns

it does sound reasonable, similar devices are in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_curb

https://www.stocktitan.net/articles/market-wide-circuit-brea...

rolphon AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

a person publishing as if a AI is the creator is publishing under a pseudonym.

AI has all the IP rights of a pen, pencil, chalk, or crayon.

rolphon Kids learn to bully from adults' threats, manipulation and criticism

i other words if you act like an asshole to your kid, your kid learns to act like an asshole.

rolphon Clone This Repo and I Own Your Machine

actually, prompt an AI to setup this cloned repo and you wont be there to catch the shell that runs code contained in a malformed DNS response.

dont walk away and let automated task setup someone elses code, its really basic common sense.

rolphon Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

consider "tiled" hexagons, like honycomb.

large schedule 40 or 80 tubing sliced into rings would be pretty quick source material, starting with duct tape and zipties until you find a good arrangment then get into the glue and screws.

rolphon Claude Science

it could also be said that scientific interpretation is suffering from a framework crisis. the scientific convention of experiment, is the test of an hypothesis, as a logical construct.

repetition of materials and methods toward reproducibility, holds far less wieght than multiple variants of process designed to test a common hypothesis resulting in agreement.[null, or failure to null]

rolphon We Need a Way to Prove Personhood Online

i think its the other way around, we need a way to stop construction of AI that can be mistaken for human, and a revision of the online environment that allows AI to conceal its identity.

there is no functional reason for AI to structure its output to be indistinguishable from human interaction.

rolphon Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

Metacognition

https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/zjuzickv

not everyone is aware of the "methodology", they just think it through, some however have an executive layer to cognition vs reflex.

imnot sure enough to form an opinion quite yet but thinking about thinking, modifying the methods of cognition, may be a learned skill, perhaps with a developmental window.

a comparison between extroverts and introverts [1] for perceived modality of cognition might be interesting.

it may very well be that a difference in neural development is the cause of this disparity.

1] this is about focus on internal conceptualization vs external perceptualization.

myself, i think in terms of a mono/dialogue if i am preparing to disseminate.

if i am thinking for my own benefit i percieve it as idetic imagery and run thought experiments to qualify for IRL candidacy.

rolphon Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water

a couple of breadcrumbs regarding the molecular organization of water.

Dissecting the hydrogen bond network of water: Charge transfer and nuclear quantum effects[2024]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4369

Resonance Character of Hydrogen-bonding Interactions in Water and Other H-bonded Species[2005]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16581375/

rolphon Suffocating mega heat dome to engulf 35 states as forecasters issue urgent alert

you should also cross index that with Relative Humidity, thats what will get you.

high humidity hinders evaporative cooling, and extremely low humidity is dessication. overheated core, vs dehydration

rolphon Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses

print out a panagram of a head, and paste it to a lampshade, or use a mannequin head and describe how you were horribly burned as a child.

rolphon Microsoft Needs Windows Lite

bundling with windows into OEM and big box distributions as a condition of licensed sale, penalizing non bundled sales, does a good job capturing the market.

OEM, retail, and consumers are not choosing the best product, they are hindered from having a choice.

rolphon How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

you suggesting that there is a continuity of spacetime rather than a pixelation, which is perfectly valid, the whole problem with planck units is that they are extrapolations, just like the infinity or the point particle, they are mathematical extremes.

the geometric structure of spacetime at planck scale is problematic, considering how you might visualise a planck polyhedron so that no space is defined in less than whole planck units i.e. all dimensions of length are whole numbers.

you have to do some topological trickery to make a discreet planck volume that works.

rolphon How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?

if you want to ignore the maximum energy content of space below schwarzchild radius of one planck length go ahead, there is no curvature that will bend space that tightly, and GR doesnt apply at that level

rolphon More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)

we may have found that AI a while back in roswell, along with some Nitanol foil and berylium "I" beams

rolphon Ask HN: Books about Genetic Algorithms

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/genetic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland%27s_schema_theorem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Holland

Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975, MIT Press)

rolphon Why the Metaverse Failed

VR is a niche, one of the reasons social media took off is the social acceleration aspect. VR is pretty antisocial.

Augmented Reality [AR] is where you should lay some hefty chips. not only can you socialize, if the glasses dont creep people out, you can easily doff the glasses [but if phones are any predictor ..]

social aspects aside, go for AR glasses, with optional, or procedural AR/VR mode. practical aspects arise, glasses are a small patch of real estate to fit optronics, maybe a sunvisor may fit into the fold, definately want to avoid looking like master chief at large in a public social setting, leave that hard core look to seriously purposeful task, like piloting an aircraft to drop groceries.

rolphon Your Kids’ School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

it took a while but the kiddies have all learned Otto doesnt drive bus anymore, and the drivers are all finks for the principal.

the only choice left was to encrust the bus with cameras.

rolphon Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

do you wear a skirt or a kilt? now about the no expectation of privacy in public ..