Danijel Gorupec

That is too easy. Here is a more difficult task... find 5 times when scientists were wrong but then either religion or some political ideology finally provided the correct answer.

When we build really complex systems, we build it in redundant way. This way the system is always in some fault, but it never stops completely. The Enterprise star-ship would be more like a large city traffic system (or the internet) than like the space shuttle - it will be in constant state of repair but will be able to continue its missions.

Ed, I don't think they claimed that dog evolution occurred in 50 years and then stopped. They claim that they managed to do more or less the same but in much much shorter time. But I also believe that they claims are somewhat exaggerated - dogs are much more than just human-tolerant. But maybe when they use the term "replicated dog domestication" they are maybe referring to one other observed effect that I find fascinating. It is that while they selected animals only based on the human-tolerance trait, as a side-effect the same foxes began to physically look more like dogs (floppy ears, curly tail, shorter legs, barking... They even said that they look more 'cute' - this made me wonder if they are more cute only because we learned what 'cute' should look like, or is there some deeper meaning to it.)

Why didn't you use the same trick when connecting a1 and c1 connections?

I imagined something like this, keeping a brain in an enriched fluid. I imagined you start with an embryo brain and somehow mange to grow it without body. However I am completely powerless to deduce if consciousness will ever ignite in this brain. Those circumstances are just too strange for me. I suppose that you already know that during REM sleep we experience sensory deprivation. Arguably, one can accept that human consciousness is active during REM sleep phase. Do you think so? However in this case we are talking about sensory deprivation of a brain that already achieved consciousness and I am not sure if this situation can provide any insight regarding your OP.

Human brain is probably hardwired for sensory input so I wonder what would happen... Of course, motivation is a must. Humans are hardwired to strive for some sensory input combinations (breathing, eating, sex...), but can also be motivated by curiosity and can feel satisfaction of insight... I am afraid that a very young human brain is only motivated by sensory inputs and maybe its mind cannot even 'start' without it. But if it 'starts' then there might be something for it to do, as I speculated in my former post, and there might be ways to experience curiosity and insight.

An interesting question, DrmDoc. My bet would be: yes, consciousness can be achieved without sensory input. But note, my opinions on that mater should not be given much weight. You did not specify if this is a human brain or some general (artificial) brain. A human brain might likely go insane, but I think that for some artificial brain this does not have to be the case. I think that a brain can (will) experience things even if it does not have external inputs. Some experience might come from internal brain functions. For example, it might be interested to measure how much its own memory is big, for how long can it hold the data, what is the average memory access time (some form of time measurement might come from inside)... Yes, I think it can do many experiments within itself. There will be something measurable - so I think, even if experience is necessary to achieve consciousness, there will be some. It would be easier for me to say something smart if I would know what a consciousness is. However, I always considered that consciousness is somehow connected to having an abstract model of oneself. And I believe t is possible to have an abstract model of oneself without sensory inputs.

Two things come to my mind: - magnetization saturation of iron (iron saturates at less than 2T, and we know nothing better at the same price magnitude level) - specific resistance of copper (funny, copper has such a small resistance but still we could much benefit from reducing it further) But many other things can help: insulation strength improvement, cooling improvements, hysteresis and eddy current reduction, commutator design (if it exists), tighter manufacturing tolerances... (And when we know no better, we just increase the motor size.)

(Yes Strange, the presented answer and graph were useful to me. Even if I was not able to digest it completely. Thank you.)

And my question is... let say that this object that is falling into singularity observers the rest of the universe. What does it see? Does it see the whole universe speeds up? I find it puzzling.

But did you suppose an immovable soft target? I have a gut feeling that a small fish my be pushed away by a very slow projectile thus the penetration depth might be reduced - so I guess that projectile speed might be important too.

Moon, Zapatos.... but I am sure you guys must see the spiral here. If all you can do is to have a bigger gun than your neighbor, where does that leads us? I mean, all man could have assault riffles and hand grenades at home but this does not mean that there would be no burglars - it only means that burglars will come with bazookas, IMO.

If a burglar believes that you have a gun in your home, he will bring his own piece too. A burglar also dislike the cost of gun ownership, but what can he do - he must protect himself too.

Just don't get me wrong... I am not saying that it is your gun that is 'provoking' you to kill me. I am saying that it is my gun that is 'provoking' you to take out your gun and kill me. I am not saying that if you own a gun it makes you more kill-intended. It is my gun that makes you quicker to defend yourself (you cannot think that as fast as fast I can kill you, so you are forced to kill me faster than you can reasonably think). That said, I am not absolutely against firearms. And I really have no idea how to regulate it.

Here is what I think is wrong with such logic... If you take out your car keys, I will assume you are going to drive; If you buy some fertilizer, I will assume you need it for your lawn; If you start a chainsaw, I will assume you are going to cut a tree... but If you take out your gun, I am not going to assume you are going to scratch your nose. Guns are made for a specific purpose and they make other people nervous. They just make a society a bit more nervous.

I learned it many years ago - I remember I downloaded a typing tutor software (there were many - this particular one was called "ten thumbs typing tutor" and I liked it, but I am not sure if it exists any more). Learning touch type proved much fun. - The software had options to learn only basic keyboard (letters and numbers) or whole keyboard (special characters like #, $, %, &...). I choose the first one and I made mistake because I learned later that as a programmer I need special characters very often. Even today, typing special characters interrupts my typing fluidity. - Concentrate to decrease mistakes, not to increase speed. You will see this advice everywhere... I underestimated it and even today I have to use backspace way too often. - Do not look at the keyboard, but look at the screen. Also the most common advice. Fortunately I followed this one. - Expect that your typing speed will decrease at first. This might be a problem because you might want to finish an important work quickly and decide to temporally revert to your old way of typing. This will set you back for days, imo.

A destructive invasion would be dull. There would be no fight-back; no time to make heroes. The invasion could last from several minutes to several hours, it all depends if they will choose to hit us on a single spot (for simplicity) or simultaneously on multiple spots. Hauling a 1000 ton projectile at 0.7c should be no problem for a civilization that is traveling between stars. Peaceful contact is much more interesting. I am not sure what do you mean by 'arrive' - physical presence or just radio/light contact? In both case I would be completely fascinated - I would try to get all information available. That is what I would do.... It is government and leaders that concern me - I am afraid that they have this unhealthy urge to always be in charge which might lead them to do crazy things. If aliens arrive physically, then it is important that we accept that we are underdogs here... I actually wonder if majority of population can accept this. Probably not (the only hope is that aliens would expect this and would have effective methods to decrease our fears). Established religious leaders, I suspect, would probably keep their cool. But there will be abundance of new 'prophets' that will seduce some portion of population. In a way you might say that even a peaceful contact with a technically advanced civilization is going to be destructive. I believe that many Australian Aborigines would claim that western civilization was destructive for their culture. This just happens and is not all bad.

Sure, excitation is needed to generate power - more excitation will generate more power (up to saturation) if the rotation speed is kept the same... But the important thing is that more excitation will also require more mechanical power to keep the generator spin at the same speed. Without the increased mechanical input, the generator would just slow down failing to produce any additional power. That is, speaking informally, higher excitation makes generator harder to turn. For sure, all the energy comes from mechanical work. You use the excitation as you use a lever (with a lever you can adjust forces, but the lever does not generate any power/energy). I completely agree with Strange on what he says about such people (I can also add that they often ask you to make the device for free and then later you can share the "guaranteed" income). Edit: edited inaccurate and confusing wording

I have a bandwidth-unlimited periodic signal. All I know about this signal is its finite peak amplitude. I pass this signal through a known and simple low-pass filter (gain = 1 within the pass band; say 2nd-order Butterworth or Bessel type filter). I am interested to estimate the maximum change rate of the resulting signal (that is, absolute maximum / minimum of the derivation of the resulting signal) for the worst case. 1. Does the ‘worst case’ (that is the case where the resulting signal changes most rapidly) happens if (and only if?) the original signal has peak-to-peak discontinuities? For example, when the original signal is a square-wave signal. 2. What is a good estimation for the maximum change rate of the resulting signal? At the moment I naively estimate the maximum change rate by finding the maximal A * Gn * wn; for an index ‘n’. Where: - A is the amplitude of the original input signal; - Gn is the filter gain at frequency wn; - wn is the frequency (rad/s) of the n-th component of the signal (think Fourier series). In practice, for wn I use a frequency near the cut-off frequency of the filter, and Gn as 1. However I cannot even say if this estimation method is any good.... I have no much taste for overly complex estimators, but can you still propose something better?

Gosh, MonDie... I am reading your post for 15 minutes and I am still not sure if I understand it right. Do you say that grammatically both following fragments are ok? "cure for rabies" - something that would destroy rabies (*) "cure for rabid dogs" - something that would heal dogs. (for me, this is quite opposite meaning than in the first example). (If the second one is ok, then the misquote from OP might be intentional and possibly smart. I know many Christians who think that something about religious society is wrong and should be fixed. Some of them believe that the answer is at the source -> the bible.) (* rabies example chosen accidentally - no connection to Christianity.)

Even more striking... at 22% of the light speed the g-force would be some seventy million g... gee. (Now I wonder how much my result is off if proper, relativistic, computation is used instead. Can anyone make and educated guess, please?)

Imperial percentages! How did you compute this 22%? (Compute the percentage more carefully and I guarantee you the 'aha moment' you will not forget.)

Hi baltoche... can you please double-check the formula you mentioned: units do not match.

Hmm... The insurance company probably would not think so. They will question zoo's responsibility on the court. And I think this is the right thing to do.

I guess that if you use air conditioning a lot, you can benefit even more from more efficient lighting (on the other hand, if you heat your rooms by electric energy a lot, then benefits are somewhat diminished). (I have few light bulbs under stairs etc. where I would not mind if they remain inefficient for a while. I use them twice a week for two minutes.) How much you like LED light quality is for you to decide. I must admit that I find bright incandescent lighting (like halogen) very good (still better than LED -> also good).