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tritium

395 karma · joined May 14, 2014

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tritium··on “The effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency” (2002)
Man, that example knocks it out of the park. I had my own retort to the basic concept behind the article, but that one tears it to shreds.

Anyway, the tendency of the article pushes negative reinforcement, not just anecdotally, but also as a continuous prevailing message, instead of alternating with degrees of praise even if only on occassion. There are at least three things wrong with that on a behavioral level: a. resentment as an inversion of stockholm syndrome b. learned helplessness, and c. simple fatigue.

In other words, people will hate your idea of leadership, conclude that you can never be pleased, and realize that they'll be worked to death on a treadmill of demands, if they don't jump ship sooner or later.

tritium··on Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Is a Marker of Anxiety, Depression [pdf]
I can't find the dictionaries they used. It's hard to develop any intuition about the utility of research like this, without the actual dictionaries they applied analysis to.

Are the word lists public information? Why or why not?

Are there links to the word lists?

tritium··on The marbled crayfish is a mutant species that clones itself
Seems like an ideal protein source for space travel. Even if the genomic monoculture represents a serious starvation hazard.
tritium··on Intel made smart glasses that look normal

  Q. Hey, this won't just try to show me 
     more Twitter bullshit, will it?

  A. No, no, no! Heh heh! It will show you
     Yelp bullshit. Much better, yes?

  Q. Ah... so the advertising will finally 
     be the kind we all yearn for?

  A. Yessssss!
Wow. Thanks guys.
tritium··on // If this happens, I am going to quit and become a barista
Yeah, but wildcard replacements via regex? Come on.

There's so much bike shedding that regex tolerates that we make games out of it.

https://xkcd.com/1313/

tritium··on Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice
Wow, this stops and reverses cancer in progress (in mice).

It's not just a preventative measure to eliminate the potential of possible cancers from emerging. The cancers the mice already have goes away.

tritium··on Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to a smell (2013)
I think this also blows apart some nascent theories regarding toxoplasmosis.
tritium··on Can We Copy the Brain?
Would you commit suicide to find out?

Would you believe it, if you witnessed a minutes-long, violent, extremely painful suicide, and the dead individual’s clone said they remember everything, and that despite all the screaming and begging, it was an unremarkable experience?

tritium··on Can We Copy the Brain?
Identical twins handily prove that copying a brain still produces different people.

It’s true for siamese twins, and it’d be just as true for cloned genetic stem cells 3D printed from a snapshot of the exact cellular structure of your brain from a moment in time, transplanted into your body.

If I copy your brain, you won’t be inside it, even if it’s effectively you, as far as anyone else can tell.

So, I can comfort myself with a replica of each dead parent. But the parents that raised me, those people are dead. They won’t be there to see me sharing christmas with their atomic-precision duplicates.

Virtual simulations aren’t people, aren’t human beings, no matter fidelity of the simulation. Maybe you can hold a conversation with a hologram, but then what?

Would one expect to experience what it feels like to become and persist as a haptic-enabled hologram? Pretty sure that’s a bogus concept, turtles on down.

tritium··on So you want a flamethrower
There's still the reasonable argument that this represents a collector's item, conferring appreciable value more reliable than many cryptocurrencies.
tritium··on Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases
You’d have to cache an available copy, wait for updated data, and then compare the two, to produce a diff. I’d imagine (or hope) there’s a process behind the scenes that slows down and selectively fragments the availability of new data, so that such diffs are too coarse to be revealing. Annual updates, staggered by decoupled groupings, being an ideal strategy.

In general though, just knowing that an event has ever occurred thanks to the map, circadian rhythms often take care of the rest, since it’s a map of (mostly recreational) human activity.

tritium··on With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit
Protip: It’s not the individual’s mobile device usage patterns that are the problem. It’s the usage patterns of everyone else that turns out to be distressing.
tritium··on Free Linux cloud shell for Gmail users
Does this have something specific to do with Gmail? Or is it just that it’s another thing (a separate, independent feature of your Google account) that you get for free, as part of being a Gmail user?
tritium··on Fish skin helped bears burned in the Thomas Fire get back on their feet
Maybe accupuncture, in this case, operates in the same area as horse whispering, exercising trust by engaging awareness and attenuating hostility. Operant conditioning has lots of animal applications.

They can’t subject them to tranquilizers for weeks, and the pain leaves the injured animals restless, so they have to be dealt with, while fully lucid and agitated by their injuries. Familiarizing wild animals with being handled, even while in pain, and for the purpose of carrying out possibly painful procedures, has a unique set of problems to solve.

tritium··on New population of one of world's rarest fish found off Tasmania
Breeding elephants, however, is quite the tall order.

Irrespective of the challenges their sheer size presents, they’re also relatively smart, and happen to live in conflicted territories. Convincing elephants that they should feel safe, and command enough familiar territory to breed openly is an additional complexity.

Is there enough room for 100,000 or a million more elephants? I’d like to think so, but what do I know?

tritium··on USAF Is Jamming GPS in Western U.S. For Largest Ever Red Flag Air War Exercise
Jamming is denial of service. If the transmission medium is flooded with a high noise floor, digital signal processors will fail to decode any valid values from the band the carrier signal transmits on. Authentic signatures have no utility if excessive noise outshines the entirety of the signal.

No one can check any signatures, if the signed message cannot reach an audience.

Perhaps an aperture could prevent omni-directional cross-talk and interference, forcing a receiver to only listen from a specific, selected line-of-sight source, but to simulate warfare, what if the enemy really does manage to completely destroy a resource?

A genuine disruption keeps everyone honest in the spirit of the exercise. It’s really down. Not just “what if”? No peeking. No cheating.

tritium··on How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves (2009)
Well, if you cut the bagel according to this particular linked torodial method, to produce two links, you’d then be able to perform the traditional bagel slice on one of the linked halves, and that would produce a chain with three links...

But deriving from a single original torus, a chain with an arbitrary or infinite number of links, whereby each individual link is bound to no more than two other links? I’ll have to think about that one...

tritium··on How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves (2009)
The manner of delivery is reminiscent of Steve “Protopod” Sutton’s [0] famous iced tea video. [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/protopod

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSkT77010fE

tritium··on DNA seen through the eyes of a coder (2017)

  What happens if you copy paste 
  the 'legs selector' part of a 
  mouse HOX gene into the fruitfly 
  Homeobox:

    'In fact, when the mouse Hox-B6 
     gene is inserted in Drosophila, 
     it can substitute for Antennapedia 
     and produce legs in place of 
     antennae'	
Mother of God, is that ever strange.
tritium··on A Spiraling Bees’ Nest
So that rule can implicit as well: avoid collision with the existing comb floor by ramping either up on top of it, or down underneath. The spiral staircase structure starts to appear as soon as you encircle the axis and choose a vertical direction to continue with. With each orbit, the structure becomes more obvious.

I don’t think there was any intention of trying to describe a comprehensive rule set in this thread.

tritium··on Posse of SF police with battering ram sent to arrest architect for iPhone theft
So, it’s safe to say that from birth to death, it’s possible to take a phone, from point of sale, all the way through the rest of it’s usage history, watch it float around, and then tie it presumptively to an individual, whenever the phone’s various identifiers appear on the network, and that might turn out to be pretty accurate most of the time?

I mean we’ve known about the identifiable aspects of cellular phones for a long time, but I’m not sure I’ve heard of a store claiming a number of unsold phones as stolen goods, handed off a list of targets to police, who then utilize technical resources, attempt to passively triangulate on anything in their jurisdiction, and then hunt them down.

In this case, it was point of theft to doorstep, and the accuracy was sacrificed for a rush job to “catch a bad guy” or “save lives” as is so often said, but consider the operations of a slower, more patient, even cautious operation.

tritium··on Device creates particles with negative mass, and a novel way to generate lasers
See also: Excitonium

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15885404

Sounds like polaritons and excitons are part of the same area of study, that a number of groups are looking at right now.

tritium··on The city I write this in protected its name, so I am not allowed to use it
Nonetheless, it adds an even greater depth to the absurdity of the premise of intellectual property your article discusses.

A photo with its own special attribution and reuse rights, depicting a full-scale replica (possibly with its own special rights for time of day), of an original that, by way of simple expiration under the letter of the law (and not so much in the spirit of the work itself) has effectively released its photographic and replicative rights to the world, which do not cascade on down to other replicas or depictions.

So I can produce an inspiring and original work, permit the world to replicate it in full and depict in images, but those that do so can make me beg to reference their work. Riiiiiight.

tritium··on Why is only half of Mars magnetized?
To gather something that seems like a reasonable answer, you’d have to consider that while Earth’s magnetic field deflects charged particles from the solar wind, the atmosphere is also an important deflector and buffer for the absorption of other forms ionizing radiation, so even if the magnetic field deflects charged particles, like free protons, free electrons and alpha particles, there’s still the occasional burst of X-rays, neutrinos and the constant UV radiation and probably even some neutrons, which mostly gets caught by the air and distributed into the environment as heat.

So, the comparatively thin Martian atmosphere is probably a bigger deal than the magnetic field, generally speaking.

Anyway, to approximate how big a deal this all is, you’d have to consider the inverse square law, to account for how much weaker the intensity of the radiation is, given that Mars is farther from the sun than Earth is. If Earth is roughly one astronomical unit from the sun, Mars is about 1.52 units away. The inverse square law says that as the distance doubles, the signal strength is four times weaker, triple distance weakens strength by nine times. So, 1.52^2 is ~2.3104 times weaker intensity, which is partly a correlation to the disk of the sun being visibly smaller, farther away.

If the general, overall radiation is at least twice as weak, or more than 50% weaker on Mars, the strength of the Martian magnetic field being 98% weaker than on Earth, probably means it’d still need to be 49 times stronger than it is to effectively deflect an amount proportional to the solar wind which is deflected by Earth. This means that on the surface of Mars, 50 times the amount of solar wind still rains down into the thin atmosphere, and much of it is still probably scattered by the air as heat, instead of forming into a Martian Van Allen belt.

During solar storms, however, when solar radiation is emitted at higher levels, it could be a bigger deal. I think much of the particles falling onto Mars would simply ionize in the air overhead before reaching the surface (as static electrical effects, like lightning or aurora plasma), but flare-ups of sun weather could easily be a real problem, since they still are problems even here on Earth.

The fact that you can see a sky on Mars during the day means that the air overhead is doing some work scattering the inbound sunlight, even if the sky isn’t blue. The atmosphere is about 10 kilometers thick, and air pressure is weak enough to boil water at room temperature (less than 1% of standard good-weather air pressure on earth). So, the barely-there atmosphere ensures that skin cancer and penetrating rays aren’t a super big deal, because moreso than providing natural barriers itself, the Martian environment ensures people will pretty much always be in thick suits and behind thick windows and walls as a pervasive fact of life.

tritium··on An Amazon Order Might Lock You Out of Trusted Traveler Programs
Oh god, I wonder if that’s what’s going on with a hard-to-find audio CD that I tried to order a while back...
tritium··on JS things I didn’t know existed
I knew about half of these, and the other half was still pretty awesome. I’m not entirely enthused by the pipeline operator, but oh well.
tritium··on Space mining is going to seriously disrupt Earth's economy
Totally true, but it’s really, really important to stay alert and watch disruptive economic shifts like a hawk.

The first thing keep in mind when radical improvements arrive is that spectacular new things have been dropped at our feet before, and killed a massive shitload of people. Not everybody wins when things get generally better. Some people lose, and when the individual tales of losers are closely examined, sometimes they have lost through incredibly bitter narratives no less.

Some cavemen were probably left crippled only to die a miserable caveman death by trying to mount horses, some people were gored by non-collapsible steering columns in early car accidents, some people were smeared across mountain tops by early planes without hazard avoidance instrumentation.

Things get better, but indivuals still pay for it.

tritium··on Why code that never goes wrong can still be wrong
In this instance, the phrase "code that never goes wrong" does not imply recognition of human factors affecting an operational system.
tritium··on Were the Cuban sonic attack victims actually poisoned?
If this story keeps showing up in the news, but without any real information, I’d suspect that this constant simmering vagueness belies undisclosed information locked behind operational secrecy that prevents the public from understanding the media pressure and the suspicion.

This is to say, fingers are being pointed, but we only receive incomplete information. It’s sort of like seeing two neighbors bicker about trash collection and garbage cans, but they leave out glaring details about known trash can abductions by space aliens, that they’ve been summoning with multi-colored LED flash lights.

tritium··on Hawaii missile alert: How one employee ‘pushed the wrong button’

  From a drop-down menu on a computer program, 
  he saw two options: “Test missile alert” 
  and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to 
  choose the former; as much of the world now 
  knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a 
  real-life missile alert.
Oh man, it just blows my mind to hear things like this still operating throughout the world, after dealing for so long with high availability systems built to be super redundant, and insulated with compliance software and handing off highly documented procedures to dedicated teams operating change-control plans during graveyard shifts to minimize downtime.
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