exchemist

Look, I’m sorry to seem harsh, but all you have done is propose a motor, a battery, pedals and some kind of unspecified regenerative braking, controlled, in some undefined way, by a computer. Do you really think saying just that is enough to constitute a design?

No shit! How?

At present you show 2 sources of mechanical power ( motor and pedals) and 2 sources of electricity( regen brakes - which by the way implies another generator and/or motor which is not mentioned - and a battery) connected, not to the wheels, but to a computer. That makes no sense unless you want to fry its circuits. So far you are not describing a design or even a concept. Where is the motor? Is it in the hub of a wheel to drive it directly, or somewhere else? If the latter how is it connected to the powered wheel? Is the generator that provides the regen braking the same motor, or a different machine? And so on.

You’ve left out the wheels.

My thoughts are that you seem to be an AI robot, adding no value to the forum with your bland and obvious contributions.

Gosh I remember him from “Tomorrow’s World” in the 1960s. With Raymond Baxter.

I find deGrasse Tyson a bit glib and the level of Cox’s explanations seems to be for 11yr olds - a sad reflection of the assumption in the British media that nobody in the population knows any science, even though we all learn a fair bit in school and many people take it further. (British media seems run by arts graduates , quite unlike say France where the prestigious grands ecoles were founded by Napoleon to study science and engineering.)Cox is also a bit annoying, somehow, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Kaku seems to be a bit nuts, but I don’t really know much about him. Sagan was far better than any of them I think. I quite like Sabine Hossenfelder on physics.

I think Wiki is in general a good quick or introductory source for a lot of things. However you do need to apply your critical faculties, especially when what you reading seems poorly worded, unclear or contradictory, and you need to cross-reference before relying on it. Also , on any topic that is known to be contentious, you need to be aware of potential for bias. The references are a valuable source of ideas for further reading.

Then reality may not be local. That does not make it less real.

I don’t see how any reproducible phenomenon of nature can fail to be due to something physically and objectively real in nature. You can’t make a model without something for it to be a model of, surely?

Yes, scientific theories are models, the map and not the territory, and sometimes we have multiple maps that show different aspects of the territory, or which are sometimes not easy to interpret. But that does not mean there is no territory, or that we can make up our own ideas about it.

There is not that much pseudoscience to be found in research papers published by reputable journals, so I don’t think its existence is much of a threat to research or careers in science. Pseudoscience is much more of a curse in social interactions and of course, notoriously, in politics. Politicians not infrequently seek advantage from representing policy positions as based on science, when they are nothing of the kind. The whole business of “Intelligent [sic] Design” is a recent case in point. As are many of the various “scientific” arguments put forward to oppose the science behind climate change, or the various anti-vax stories that go round. One of the more depressing features of modern politics in the Anglophone world is how the Right has seen fit to dispute science in so many areas and to rely on Pseudoscience to attack its findings. It’s part of a long-standing tradition of suspicion of intellectuals. As my grandfather (a professor at Glasgow University) used to put it, these people seem to belong to the: “I’m thick and proud of it!” School of thought.

Yes.

Why? This subject has been done adequately, hasn’t it?

Thanks. Always interesting to get an insight into another industry. Phosphine as a fumigant strikes me as bloody dangerous, though.

That’s interesting. What chemical process is that?

I did not know about carborane acid. Rather interesting. Thanks for drawing to my attention.

That strikes me as an unjustified assumption. People can vote for war if they feel suitably motivated, for instance by persuasive leaders. If different parts of a country are sufficiently alienated from one another and those separate parts have a system to vote independently, they might even vote to go to war against the others. And then again, no country has a theoretical ideal democracy in the first place.

But surely this is due to relativistic effects (loss of energy as gravitational radiation) which only become significant at close range, isn’t it? Yet you are proposing spiral paths for objects far from the black hole, aren’t you? Or have I misunderstood?

Doesn’t spiral motion require a progressive loss of kinetic energy? What causes this loss and where does the energy go?

Thanks, that’s a very useful summary of the possibilities. It was actually a recent exchange with @Orion1 that triggered my enquiry. Perhaps option 4 fits that particular case best. There does not seem to be any spamming or malicious intent, but some of the responses seem to be highly verbose (in the kind of way that would be marked down by a good teacher for "padding") and curiously devoid of any insight.

I use PlantNet on country walks, which is a free app that works on iPhones and can identify species from leaves, flowers, fuit or bark, or so it claims. With leaves and flowers it seems to work most of the time. I have not tried fruits or bark so far. Certainly adds interest to the walk.

Ah, I didn't know publishing on-line was something set to school students as an assignment. In that case, I suppose the use of a LLM might account for the strangely verbose and grandiose language. Seems rather a waste of everyone's time, and not a great way to teach, but there we are.

Hafele-Keating or Dunning-Kruger?

That's what prompts my question. I wonder if someone like @Sensei or another IT-literate member might know more about how they gather "information" (by which I suppose I mean chunks of plausible-seeming text to regurgitate).