TheVat

It is encouraging when someone grasps the essential lie that nuclear weapons make the world safer. Until we can forge some kind of international and binding treaty that reduces then eliminates nukes, no one is safe. Those of us who live near an AFB with a nuclear bomber wing, or GCHQ or a missile field don't so easily enjoy the luxury of imagining we are safe. Even a fairly limited Herman Khan scenario of nuclear war would make current spectres of climate catastrophe, polar melting, PFAS toxicity, plasticmageddon, lethal pandemics, etc look like a few ants at a picnic by comparison. The kids of Generation Z give me some hope because so many of them seem to grasp these realities and their sharing of awareness easily crosses the porous international borders of the web.

I would guess public opinion is strong enough in the US, so the present problem is Russia and China and their being 2/5 of the UN Security Council. If they ever (next blue moon, perhaps) decided to join US, UK, and France on a full disarmament of nukes, then we would probably be well on our way to a solution. An international ban, backed by the Big Five, could maybe be implemented. But only if there was rigorous international monitoring of all fissile materials. The toughest countries to disarm might prove to be ones like Pakistan, Israel, India, and of course you know who. Certain financial supports, especially for Israel, might have to be withdrawn to encourage compliance.

You need either need huge war power or huge economic power to enforce a no-nukes restriction. Ideally both. Another path, if there was a time when a more global coalition could really come together on no nukes, would be for nations to consider the budgeting joys of not maintaining a nuke arsenal. Such arsenals are hideously expensive. Samuel Beckett couldn't have come up with a scenario more absurd than hundreds of billions spent to maintain something you can never use. Conventional modern warfare is absurd enough. Nukes are absurdity cubed. Sell leaders on all the low carbon energy to be had from all that plutonium. More dystopian: A terrible global economic collapse that reduced all nations to poverty could do the job - no one could afford to keep the nuke thing going. Unfortunately such a collapse would likely also mean government incapacity to disassemble the warheads and safely process and secure all that plutonium, so you could have the terrorist nightmare of militant splinter groups raiding ICBM silos and the like.

Respectfully, I have to say that it will be efficacious to implement consensus mechanisms that build through multiple iterations of the feedback system as it cycles through each incremental through-line of various pedagogical tiers as they self-actualize and tesselate through a full plenum of profit algorithms and covariant fact valuations. And thanks for a good laugh!

Matt Davies is a master.

Goodness me, could this be industrial disease?

Well, he IS the Reaper, after all. 😀

Also 1E1*2E2*3E3. Also the sum of the mystery numbers on the American (cult popular) series "Lost." Also the product of the Supreme Court size and the most common jury size (9 and 12). Also, in Hinduism 108 is the sacred number of creation. Also sacred in Buddhism. In Islam it's the number associated with Allah. You get the idea. (there was also the frequent noticing of $1.08 in coins in my pocket, a digital clock happening to read 1:08, etc) Type "significance of 108" in a search engine and you will be drenched in mystical connections and mathematic elegance. It's an absolute turbocharger for association chaining.

Plus one - fascinating. The human mind is particularly adept at pattern recognition, useful for animal tracking or hunting for edible plants or seeing a potential enemy hiding in a bush, less useful when working overtime in a world full of symbol systems - letters, numbers, logos, etc. Many logical fallacies and statistical fallacies (and pareidolia) arise from such over-application of pattern recognition. (I often am reminded of one called The Texas Sharpshooter, which also seems common among crackpots) I have wondered if astrology buffs also have a tendency to association chaining - it's sort of a conspiracy theory involving celestial objects and Greek/Roman god names mystically applied to them, with spurious connections constantly being drawn and reinforced by very selective observations of persons. I wonder how rates of belief in astrology correlates with rates of Q-anon beliefs. On a personal note, I once let this cognitive tendency go a little overboard on the number 108. (I let it happen on purpose, curious what would happen) That number was everywhere. Once I even saw it lurking, big brass letters on the side of a house, behind an EVERGREEN tree.

This would be worth linking here. Who collected, how it was tested, what researchers it was shared with, where it is stored, etc. When an archaeologist finds axolotl remains in a stew pot in Aztec ruins, there's a chain of custody that may end up in a specimen drawer at a university or natural history museum. One can formally request to see them, examine them, in some cases subject them to NDT. (some institutions you have to ask only once, but some you have to axolotl...)

Hehe. It does seem possible that a craft would leave something, even if it doesn't empty its latrine tank or toss out candy wrappers.* Change to residual radiation levels, thermal stress to soil and plants, bits of an ablation shield if it entered atmosphere from orbit, tracks of some kind, traces of unusual chemical compounds if an airlock opened, unusual indentations in the ground, traces of biocide chems, if something was disinfected....I expect this list could go on at some length. (*Milky Way wrappers, perhaps)

BMTI. And I would object to overmuch parental input (blasphemy in some circles, I know) because I don't see most parents as expert on pedagogy or what branches of human knowledge are needed for well-rounded education, or what curricula are optimal for specific trajectories in life. I would like pedagogical experts doing this. Just as I'd send a family member to a cancer clinic that was organized and run by oncologists and healthcare admin pros, not a random group of relatives of cancer patients. America already has too many ignoramuses dictating how to run things they understand very little.

Well, with AI, it would likely have been immersed in human language from its very beginning stages, so maybe not analogous to a lion. But maybe it's not completely OT, in terms of the broader question of how an AI would experience the world differently from us. And much depends on whether or not an AI is embodied, either virtually or as an android. And if it has a childhood-like phase of growth. And other considerations.

Just asking this again (re the Minot case). This seems to me the missing leg on the evidence chair. Once in a while you see some poorly documented case where it's reported there was some physical artifact or trace and invariably it's reported to have gone missing or been swiped by shadowy characters. In wildlife biology, if you want to estimate how many cougars are in a certain area, you don't rely on sightings (cougars tend to hide from humans). You lay down a grid, and get a team to each walk through their square and hopefully find cougar scat, and make an estimate based on the amounts of scat. * * yes, you really have to know your shit

That study also underscores the way the placebo effect gets at subconscious processes in the brain, so that even someone told it's a sugar pill and we presume will no longer consciously believe in the treatment effectiveness, still shows a benefit. That is how powerful suggestion can be, bypassing our rational mind.

IIRC Wittgenstein's famous lion quote was in German and may have suffered in the translation. He wasn't saying that we couldn't follow some of what the lion might say. Rather he was saying that, being a lion, some of the referents in a sentence might be subtly different for certain words so that we wouldn't understand the nuances as well. The lion might say, I would like to have your family for dinner sometime, e.g. We would understand the words, while still misunderstanding the underlying meaning. Because the lion and we experience the world somewhat differently - and have a different concept of having someone for dinner. ETA: What Ludwig meant IMO is that, if a lion could talk as we talk and mean what we mean, then he would have ceased to be a lion and have become a person. And yes, a bit OT.

Yes, I don't see philosophers like John Searle or David Chalmers getting invited to the party celebrating conscious machines. In popular thinking, some form of Turing Test is enough. The thinkers who argue about qualia (the subjective "felt" aspect of mind) will probably still argue whether it's simulated or genuine for a long time. David Chalmers' "philosophic zombie" is an amusing approach to the question. Personally, I think the best evidence of real consciousness will be the AI having difficult growth periods in its life - like a child.

Could be. The Minot 68 sightings are deeply puzzling, but also frustrate further investigation: we have multiple eyewitness reports, drawings, radar photos, but as Swanson noted you can't investigate what is no longer there. There's nothing to feed debate because everyone can agree it's anomalous and defies mundane explanation but there's not much prospect of further resolution. Did anyone investigate the location where it was seen on the ground for physical traces? In so many of these cases I've read about where there is a possible ground contact, there just doesn't seem to be the staffing or funds to have a team of forensic scientists on hand. At the very least you would want to study the soil and flora for unusual thermal stress or deformations. Like, ASAP.

@Dave Whatever the update did (would have been 2am-5am here), alas did SFA to stop spam. Absolute blitz, had to scroll past about a hundred to get to an actual post just now. This was quite a variety, not just cheap airfare kamikazes. Maybe, as was suggested in another thread, have a keyword filter that drops newbie posts into a queue for mod inspection? Also filters posts crammed with emojis and atypical characters, maybe? Seem to be another telltale of spam.

Out here in the western US, storm drains go to creeks or rivers, untreated. All sewerage is separate from this, obv. , and consists of enclosed pipes. The municipal ordinance here is regarding dumping used motor oil down storm drains. Soap is apparently not a concern. Probably written back when a lot of people changed their own oil at home. Hardly anyone does that these days, so there's less concern about scofflaws illegally dumping.

Sky blocked also (thanks for trying!), but I did read a bit on it. Early November, it sure sounds like the Leonids to me. Both Leonids and Perseids are known for unusual bursts of activity known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which will produce at least 1,000 meteors an hour - especially the Leonids. The pilot reports sound like they saw a good-sized one, maybe breaking up so you'd get several bright objects moving on a similar trajectory as was reported.

...is what my US screen is showing. Got a link to text on this?

I remember this one, geared for a popular audience: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Biggest-Unsolved-Problems-Science/dp/0471268089 But it doesn't have math problems like the traveling salesman. For really tough questions, there are the Millennium Prize problems. Could be a book on those?

Many thanks. Will these updates help suppress spammers? The airfare spammers seem to be back in force, the past couple hours.

What's cute and fluffy and full of glycerides? The ester bunny.