Science!

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beatbandito
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Re: Science!

Postby beatbandito » Tue May 01, 2018 6:40 pm

Yoji wrote:The world's oldest spider died at the ripe old age of 43. She is survived by a shitload of grandchildren.

Okay I get that the point is that it was good to see a spider living in its natural habitat for so long, but going out by wasp attack is like finding out a woman who lived to be 200 years old was stabbed to death. Like, at some point it becomes more about seeing how long it can last than preserving RNG.
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nosimpleway
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Re: Science!

Postby nosimpleway » Wed May 02, 2018 10:51 am

Wasps: zero percent mercy

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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Sat May 12, 2018 2:17 pm

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François
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Re: Science!

Postby François » Sun May 13, 2018 12:23 am

I know the perils of describing oneself as wise, but if I am wise and no one else around me is, then my life is explained.

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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jun 02, 2018 8:00 pm

So as we've seen, the "environmental lead from leaded gasoline caused higher crime rates from the 30's to the 80's" theory is becoming more and more widely accepted as fact.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out there were more knock-on effects during that period, including possibly a massive drop in fertility:

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Yoji
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Re: Science!

Postby Yoji » Mon Jun 04, 2018 5:54 pm

Ever wonder what it's like to stand in the twilight of the dwarf planet Pluto? I sure have, and it turns out there's a utility for that.
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Re: Science!

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Jun 04, 2018 6:41 pm

Well, it's high noon somewhere in the solar system.

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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 22, 2018 1:57 pm

Fine-tuned high-energy x-rays can be used to completely recover images from Daguerrotypes previously believed to be completely irrecoverable.

This is one of those "happy accidents"; the original goal was simply to try and help scientifically evaluate conventional methods used to try and restore Daguerrotypes.
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 04, 2018 10:37 pm

Companies racing towards fully autonomous vehicles may be about to hit a technological wall, with no easy way of breaking through

Most crucially, in terms of fatalities-per-mile-driven, Tesla was farthest along (it's not directly stated in the article, but IIRC, Google technically has more miles, but is even now still heavily relying on data collected from cars run purely on fully or partially closed roads or routes under optimal conditions), and even their run has been cut short less than halfway to the distance it would take an autonomous car to simply to EQUAL a human driver, never mind surpass one. Other companies have hit similar failures with far fewer miles driven.

So unless someone can crack this problem with current machine learning technology, autonomous cars released as they are today would possibly kill at least double the number of people regular cars currently do.

The universal response from companies involved has been a desperate race for more and more data (i.e. miles driven), in the hope that there's a critical mass which will provide a deep enough database to train truly autonomous cars with.

TL;DR: If all you have is a hammer...


EDIT: Incidentally, I found out just the other day that Uber's current business model is literally "Heavily subsidize all rides and pray we get autonomous cars worked out before we completely burn through all our venture capital money."
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mharr
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Re: Science!

Postby mharr » Thu Jul 05, 2018 9:48 am

Hurray, rushing tech to market ten years before it's ready because money. It's going to be leaded petrol all over again.

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Grath
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Re: Science!

Postby Grath » Thu Jul 05, 2018 11:58 am

Mongrel wrote:Most crucially, in terms of fatalities-per-mile-driven, Tesla was farthest along (it's not directly stated in the article, but IIRC, Google technically has more miles, but is even now still heavily relying on data collected from cars run purely on fully or partially closed roads or routes under optimal conditions), and even their run has been cut short less than halfway to the distance it would take an autonomous car to simply to EQUAL a human driver, never mind surpass one. Other companies have hit similar failures with far fewer miles driven.

I'm pretty sure Waymo (Google) has fully-autonomous, no-safety-driver-needed cars on the road as we speak, albeit in Phoenix, AZ suburbs with easy-to-handle grids of wide roads. Legally permitted to even give robotic taxi rides to people. (... And they haven't killed anyone because we actually got the tech working in closed roads before putting them on the road. We're also doing closed roads in Michigan now so that they'll be able to handle shitty weather.)

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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 05, 2018 2:21 pm

Grath wrote:
Mongrel wrote:Most crucially, in terms of fatalities-per-mile-driven, Tesla was farthest along (it's not directly stated in the article, but IIRC, Google technically has more miles, but is even now still heavily relying on data collected from cars run purely on fully or partially closed roads or routes under optimal conditions), and even their run has been cut short less than halfway to the distance it would take an autonomous car to simply to EQUAL a human driver, never mind surpass one. Other companies have hit similar failures with far fewer miles driven.

I'm pretty sure Waymo (Google) has fully-autonomous, no-safety-driver-needed cars on the road as we speak, albeit in Phoenix, AZ suburbs with easy-to-handle grids of wide roads. Legally permitted to even give robotic taxi rides to people. (... And they haven't killed anyone because we actually got the tech working in closed roads before putting them on the road. We're also doing closed roads in Michigan now so that they'll be able to handle shitty weather.)

I think that if anyone can do it, it would probably be Waymo, simply due to sheer weight of data and expertise that Google can bring to bear on analytical problems like this.

But while Waymo has avoided trouble so far by only letting cars out of controlled areas in very small, incremental stages (which is best practices, don't get me wrong), they still have yet to go get out much on untested roads. Back in February, they stated they had logged five million miles on uncontrolled public roads. Which sounds like a lot, but as the article above stated, the Rand study number quoted to equal human drivers is 275 million fatality-free miles.

Only increased exposure will tell if Waymo's systems will be better than or similar to anyone else's in practise. Even Waymo's CEO seems to be poo-poohing expectations for dealing with the unexpected when he talks about what the cars can and can't deal with.

Again, this is all good policy for Waymo, they're going about development in the safest, most responsible way, while companies like Tesla and Uber are out there stretching the tech past its current limits because they've bet their survival on it. But that doesn't mean Waymo is any further ahead in terms of solving the fundamental problems holding back fully autonomous cars.
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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 22, 2018 2:43 am

On the extinction of most Y-Chromosome lineages, at the beginning of the bronze age

It seems most Eurasian male lineages have been wiped out, leaving a small number of "winners" - a particularly violent, possessive strain of human males whose genetics have come to dominate the most recent couple thousand years of human history. There were some news articles about this a few weeks back, but this provides more detail as well as specifically identifying the Yamnaya - which you might better know as Aryans - as the culprits.

So, if you want to get technical, it's actually white folks who are the genetically "evil" race.

Sort of a funny coincidence - I was just reading about the lost pre-bronze-age human societies, of which the major remnants are the Basques, Albanians, and the Uralian peoples (Finns/Lapps/Sami/Hungarians, though the Hungarians arrived MUCH later than northern groups, etc.)

Just sort of staggering to think of how much genetic diversity and potential we've lost.
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Thad
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Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 22, 2018 1:03 pm

Mongrel wrote:So, if you want to get technical, it's actually white folks who are the genetically "evil" race.


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Re: Science!

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Jul 22, 2018 1:43 pm

So why do we bother, again?

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atog
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Re: Science!

Postby atog » Sun Jul 22, 2018 5:09 pm

Pre-Indo-European Europe offered wood for sheep, and the Aryans obliged.
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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 25, 2018 12:48 pm

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Lottel
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Re: Science!

Postby Lottel » Wed Jul 25, 2018 7:19 pm

Elon Musk is already planning on building a water capable car in order to taxi people around for it.
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Mongrel
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Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Tue Aug 07, 2018 2:38 am

One of the all-time greatest scientific abstracts:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.10553.pdf

This paper explores the physics of the what-if question “what if the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries?”. While the assumption may be absurd, the consequences can be explored rigorously using elementary physics. The result is not entirely dissimilar to a small ocean-world exoplanet.


The end result is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.
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Yoji
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Re: Science!

Postby Yoji » Tue Aug 07, 2018 11:52 am

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