I'm not sure I understand how "red sky in morning, sailors take warning" can be both inaccurate and useful. Surely a heuristic for when to prepare for bad weather is useful only insofar as it is accurate?
These are very cool results. But please, the big cat in the demo image is a leopard, not a tiger. It's clear that even the SAE feature space knows this, because the images generated are never striped (as tigers always are), and are instead either spotted (as most leopards are) or all black (which is not uncommon in leopards, Wikipedia claims 11% and I expect them to be over-represented in image databases; while even so-called "black" tigers still only have very broad, partially merged black stripes with some light color between).
Minor quibble: Hamilton the musical is based on the biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. So while Lin-Manuel Miranda did arguably know a lot about Alexander Hamilton once he had read the book, I would say that his unique contribution was not (musical theater composition) + (Alexander Hamilton facts), but specifically the idea that a biography of a historical figure most well-known for being killed in a duel with a former vice president was, in fact, material that could be adapted into a musical. (And furthermore that it should be a rap musical...
Ergot is toxic and eating contaminated bread has been a historical problem, but the results of ergot poisoning, contrary to pop science/history accounts, don't seem to be much like the results of LSD, although there is a neurological component. It is plausible that the evolutionary "purpose" of the alkaloids is to poison animals that eat it, but whether the benefit to the fungus comes from decreased predation, improved dispersal, or something else is unclear.
Certainly there exist fungi which produce psychoactive compounds in order to alter the behavior of ...
Also: Did Albert Hoffman hit the most powerful variant on the first try? No, he was systematically investigating similar compounds for pharmacological properties (not psychedelic properties, just regular drug discovery). LSD is just the one that had significant novel effects at low doses, and so it is the one which became famous.
The extreme potency of LSD is indeed a critical part of the story; synthesizing it is difficult in part because it's very hard to produce it in any large quantity without incidentally ingesting active doses through the air. According to Wikipedia, the threshold dose to feel effects is about 25µg. Not milligrams, like the active dose of most medicines, _micro_grams. I am sure chemists over the years have gotten accidental doses of 25µg of many tens of thousands of chemicals without ever noticing it. Albert Hoffman's original accidental dose was consistent...
LSD as such does not occur in nature, so it has no evolved biological role. It is a semi-synthetic chemical, meaning that it is synthesized in a lab by chemical reactions, but that the usual starting material is biological (typically ergotamine, which is, as you allude, found in ergot).
Regarding the effect of longitude, rather than fiddling with the offset, I think you want two terms, sin(lon) and cos(lon). Together they model a sinusoid with any offset.
Ok, now I understand the type of maneuver you are talking about. That definitely does make sense. I wonder if our hypothetical probe has knowledge early enough about the orbital trajectories of the stars close to the black hole, such that it can adjust its approach to pull off something like that without too much fuel cost. Of course it's a long trip and there is plenty of time to plan, but it seems that any forward-pointing telescope would tend to be at significant risk while traveling at 0.8c into a galaxy, let alone 0.99c before the primary burn. Howev...
In the typical case, there are (at least) two meaningful bodies other than the spacecraft doing the maneuver; in real-world use cases so far, typically the sun and a planet. An (unpowered) slingshot maneuver doesn't change the speed of the spacecraft from the frame of the planet, which is the object that the spacecraft approaches more closely, but it does change the speed in the center-of-mass frame, and it works by transferring orbital energy between the planet-sun system and the spacecraft. But the key is that in order to change your speed as much as p...
I suspect another issue is that it's too dangerous to fly at 0.99c as you are entering a galaxy. There's too much gas and dust.
If I understand correctly, the Penrose process as such (i.e., actually extracting energy from the black hole's rotation) only works if your exhaust is expelled fast enough, relative to you, that is is put on a negative energy orbit, which necessarily falls into the black hole. I'm not sure how you could perform a retrograde burn in which your exhaust somehow enters the black hole but you don't, since in a retrograde burn your exhaust is getting extra orbital velocity.
I am still really curious whether it helps to execute the retrograde Oberth maneuver with...
Ahh, that makes more sense.
I don't understand how a slingshot maneuver off of a central black hole would work. My understanding was that a slingshot never slows you down in the frame of the object you are slingshotting around, it only changes your direction. Since the central black hole is presumably stationary with respect to the rest of the galaxy, this wouldn't help you in slowing down. Slingshotting around an intermediate mass black hole (if such things exist) out in the galactic disc seems like it would be more useful.
Or maybe there is something about general relativity that changes things?
It seems implausible that everyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s would have genetic variants that no one else has. Their parents and children would have grown up in different decades, whether in Britain or elsewhere, and they would also have those variants.
I hate to make a comment just to be pedantic with a definition, but it honestly confused me the first time you used the word "dichotomy" in this post to refer to a division into three, rather than two, categories, and then disturbed me every subsequent time. It's possible that this is informed by my training in biological taxonomy, where we also use the contrasting word "polytomy", meaning a division into more than two parts. In this case, you could use the less common "trichotomy", meaning division in exactly three, including the same nuance as "dichotom...
I have also found this with Bohnanza; although the rules say that the most points win, my group has always made it a faux pas to actually count points before the end of the game. Everyone plays to maximize their own score, rather than to beat the opponents, and it is definitely the case that people who accept "bad" trades tend to do better than people who walk away from the negotiating table. (At the same time, people who can instead negotiate the "bad" trade into something better do the best of all.)
I would say that Agricola (by the same author) and its ...
I believe there are also single-celled eukaryotes which have more than two mating types.
I think the key is that you have to have a system where a third mating type makes sense. Having fallen into the basin of attraction of anisogamy, and then later sexual differentiation of reproductive anatomy, it's much harder to develop a new sex that could reproduce with existing males and females (but not itself).
The way the fungal system that leads to the claim of over 20,000 mating types for Schizophyllum commune is similar to how our pheremones (purportedly?) work;...
I came here to say this; there are many species of Eukaryotes that seem to reproduce exclusively asexually. I know Malmesbury said not to mention Fungi, but I'm a mycologist so it's what I do. The lesson there seems to be the asexuality evolves fairly easily from sexuality, and is adaptive when you have a good genome which is well adapted to a relatively stable environment. But it's also kind of a dead end; you don't usually see large groups of related species which are all asexual (with the possible exception of Glomeromycota, although their genomes...
Although the crux of your claim that diffusion is the rate-limiting step of many biological processes may be sound, the question you actually ask, "Why hasn't evolution stumbled across a better method of doing things than passive diffusion?", is misguided. Evolution has stumbled across such methods. Your post itself contains several examples of evolved systems which move energy and information faster than diffusion. These include the respiratory system, which moves air into and out of the lungs much faster than diffusion would allow; the circul...
I don't see any information on the Wikipedia page about the height of the aircraft carrier; the figure you give in your footnote, 252 ft, is listed as the beam. That's width, not height.
The transcript shows two prompts in a row for you in the middle, the first of which includes a lot of (incorrect?) information about the influence of Nash's newsvendor impossibility theorem on other researchers. I suspect that text is actually what ChatGPT said in response to a prompt like "What other researchers were influenced by Nash's newsvendor impossibility theorem?", but that your question and the "ChatGPT:" line are missing from the transcript. As presented I got the initial impression that you were egging ChatGPT on by helping it fabricate a story, but I think maybe that was no the case?
I do have a sibling 4 years younger, and have always generally liked babies and children, but this was an additional effect.
I definitely experienced some version of this at the birth of my child. I was convinced, even while I knew it was likely not true in the outside view, that my baby was actually the cutest baby. My child is not genetically related to me, so I don't think this was a matter of calibrating my standards for cuteness on other babies in my family or on similarity to myself. Also, I definitely have a persistent increased tendency to cry during movies, especially in scenes that involve the separation of parents and children.
I don't personally expect a (total) nuclear war to happen before AGI. But, conditional on total nuclear war before AGI: although nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction, it could still cause a big setback in civilization's technological infrastructure, which would significantly delay AGI.
Most Americans who would consider running for office are already a member of a political party. Unlike in many (most? all?) other countries, where joining a political party is a separate act of engagement and commitment to the party, in the US it is a standard part of voter registration. Depending on the state, it may or may not determine which primary elections one is eligible to vote in, but I believe it always at least determines which primaries one is eligible to run in (i.e., a candidate in the Republican primary must be a registered Republican)...
This is exactly right! It's a poor analogy for the Cold War both because the total payoff for defection was higher than the total payoff for cooperation, and because the reward was fungible. The cooperative solution is for one side to "nuke", in order to maximize the total donation to both organizations, and then to use additional donations to even out the imbalance if necessary. That's exactly what happened, and I'm glad the "nuking" framing didn't prevent EAs from seeing what was really happening and going for the optimal solution.
Specifically for Mandarin, or other languages as well?
It strikes me that evolution by natural selection has most of the characteristics you attribute to a control system, not a selection system: feedback is far from perfect, each step of evaluation is heavily constrained by previous outputs and there is no going back, most of the search space is unreachable, it operates on the territory and there is no map, there is no final output distinct from the computation itself, and as you mentioned, it is strictly "on-line". It's true that it is massively parallel, and in this sense different elements...
I think I parsed this quote differently than you.
The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years.
Your question from the following paragraph:
[W]hat factors caused the rapid accumulation of knowledge in specifically only a few countries and for only those two hundred years?
suggests that you interpreted the quote to mean "The new kind of scientific activity was restricted to the few countries of Western Europe where it emerged, and a period of abou...
It has been a year since this code was posted and the user has deleted their account, but for the benefit of anyone else reading for the first time, I would like to point out that the case for breed == 3 (two girls) is unhandled; because the default answer := 0 this means that in the case of two girls, the mathematician is modeled as saying "at least one is a boy". Incorrect code gives the incorrect result.
Maybe I am missing some previous rationalist discourse about the red sky saying. I remember reading it in books as a child, and do not know (except that it is listed here as a useful heuristic) whether it is actually true, or what the bundled incorrect causal story is. I have always interpreted it as "a red sunrise is correlated with a higher chance of storms at sea." That claim does not entail any particular causal mechanism, and it still seems to me that it must be either accurate and therefore useful, or inaccurate and therefore not useful, but it's hard to imagine how it could be inaccurate and useful.