EdEarl

Religious cultures change slowly. We live in future shock. If humanity survives long enough, religions will accept the current hot button science issues, just as they accepted Earth is not flat. To me, caring for humanity is critical, including climate and poverty. Unfortunately, opposition is strong and I have no magic.

There is always an arms (spy tech)race. The smallest insects are fairy wasps, which are about the size of large amoeba. Think in terms of many of these tiny drones being released by various parties, some for spying, some hunter-killers to remove opponents drones. Imagine a bug war almost invisible right in your office and kitchen.

AI as it is now, before artificial consciousness, is designed by humans for humans; thus, it should benefit someone. No doubt unintended consequences will harm people. In addition, perverse programmers will develop AI malware. After AI consciousness, we cannot know how it will affect us. it may ignore us. RE: "Human[\b]: What do you like to talk about? Machine[\b]: Nothing."

I've got a couple of workers building an atrium over the west side deck. I believe it will heat 4k gallons water and keep the house warm in winter. Evaporative cooling will help in warm weather, but probably need geothermal. Been watching YouTube people playing with 3d pens. The results I saw were disappointing; although, some of the work was intricate and artistic. My interest is less artistic and more model oriented, which leaves them lacking. I need strait edges, triangles, curves, and more than one extrusion size and shape. A thermoacoustic cooler can be driven by concentrated solar, with tracking, heat. With heat pipes to move the heat, cost of indoor refrigeration would be low. Moreover, a solar thermoacoustic chiller could sink heat from a heat pump or refrigerated air conditioner to improve their efficiency. I don't understand why I can't buy one.

Is there a God or are there gods; I do not know. IMO if there is/are, then they created the Universe with some 100 Billion galaxies, similar to the Milky Way, which has around 200 Billion stars and perhaps 20 Billion more or less Earth like planets with liquid water possible on their surface. That would make 2000 Billion Billion Earth like planets in the Universe. With so many chances for life, it seems likely there are or have been other civilizations of aliens who also have a concept of god or gods. It seems unlikely any of these alien civilizations would have developed Islam, Christianity or any other Earth religion. Thus, if God/gods exist, all our concepts of them must be less than accurate and complete, because the chances of an Earth religion replicated throughout the Universe seems improbable. On the other hand, if we find Jesus, Mohammuid, Zeus, etc., being worshipped on other worlds, we might have evidence for a God. Thus, I think we are ignorant about god/gods and all religions are the creation of men.

If you can terrace your property and spread 4 inches of charcoal, tilled under,it will retain water better than it does now, and you might not need the cistern and pumps.

I think this possibility is virtually impossible. The Greeks came up with the idea that everything is made of atoms; although, the elements were fire, earth, air, and water; they got it partly right. That's often the case in science. Thus, I think your question is stated wrong. I expect we could learn much from a civilization that could travel among the stars, but they would say something like, "Your science is incomplete, and we have some things to share with you."

That's a good idea, and might be what Unity wants; of course, message length and bandwidth are not the same. There are sites that measure your actual bandwidth, for example: http://speedtest.texas.rr.com/ http://www.speedtest.net/

I am a unsure what you are asking. Four integers and a date/time are not precise types. How many characters in each integer, 1 or 1,000,000. To what precision are you specifying time, 1 hour or 0.000,000,1 second. Bandwidth can be specified a few ways, for example baud, bits per second, or Hertz respectively for a twisted pair telephone line, fiber optic cable, or radio. Moreover, any amount of data (4 integers and a date/time) can be sent either fast (high bandwidth) or slow (low bandwidth), depending on the equipment being used. For example, a message over a telephone line might be sent at 9600 baud (about 1200 characters per second); whereas, over a fiber optic cable might be 1 Tbits/s per second (about 125 billion characters per second). ODBC messages have required overhead characters, in addition to your data, which affect overall message length, but don't affect the speed messages are sent. Although, more characters to send increase the time it takes to transmit a message at a given bandwidth. Perhaps you can refine your question, if my broadside hasn't answered it.

Earliest fire from StringJunky's reference is that the cooking fires were about a million years old. Thus, these fires were probably used by homo erectus, not homo sapiens. On the other hand, earliest evidence of farming is about 12,000 years ago, clearly homo sapiens. Was there a period of pre-farming, wherein people knew that seeds started plants, and wherein people carried seeds to locations and sew them for later use, yet continue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Is it possible homo-erectus knew about seeds and practiced pre-farming.

I believe the human brain/mind has been genetically about as it is now for much more than 20,000y, at least 100,000y. However, nutrition is a factor in brain development. Thus, the start of farming may have contributed significantly to better fed people; thus, smarter people. I believe farming started about 12,000y ago; thus, the average intelligence of people may have increased then.

I believe the primary evidence going back into prehistory is mainly fossil skulls, which means brain volume can be determined; thus, weight. However, no brains exist from that era; thus, one cannot know how our brains were interconnected further back into history than the oldest mummified or chemically preserved brain--perhaps a brain as old as a few thousand years for a mummy and a few hundred for preserved. The evidence for when in prehistory brain development occurred can only be deduced by artifacts people left behind, which are mainly stone and bone artifacts, for example the quality of stone tools and bone beads. Thus, the answer to your inquiry is that we do not know precisely. DNA has provided some evidence, but AFAIK no one has identified a DNA sequence that lays out the history of brain development. Some Neanderthal DNA has been found that may be 170,000 years old. IDK how much information can be teased from old DNA.

Yes! No hassle parenting.

Humanity has enough wombs already. I doubt there would be a market for them. If they improve them enough for transplants, there might be a market for women who needed replacements and transgenders first time.

Oh, OK.

Receivers demodulate signals; thus, this statement seems untrue sometimes. I must misunderstand your point.

I'm aware of Fourier analysis, ringing, dampening, etc. I'm trying to understand the fundamental issue being discussed. Perhaps it is people would like to communicate more than the available bandwidth permits; thus, engineers compress signals thereby reducing quality.

I consider perfect equipment would turn the sine wave generator on starting at zero amplitude and it would turn out a perfect sine wave for 138M cycles and turn it off when it gets to zero amplitude. The square wave you are talking about would only cause harmonics on the carrier if the carrier is turned on at some amplitude other than zero, whereupon it would jump instantly to some amplitude, causing harmonics as you say.

John, consider the case of a person modulating amplitude while sending Morse code at 550MHz. At 10 words per minute dits and dahs are about 0.25 sec long, which would emit about 138M cycles of sine wave. The only harmonics generated from keying would occur at the start and end of the 138M cycles. While the key was held on, the carrier would be a sine wave as pure as possible with modern electronics. You are right that FM modulation occurs upon key down and key up, but it does not appreciably contribute to the entire signal, and does not make reading the signal difficult. With ideal equipment, there would be no harmonics, but we don't have ideal equipment.

I've not thought about modulation before quite so critically. I think that separating AM and FM signals from the carrier may depend on the AM and FM signals being different frequencies. Audio bandwidth is 30K Hz (more or less). Video bandwidth is about 1M Hz. Carrier frequency is 54M Hz and higher. Harmonics from video in the audio range would be 5th, which are mostly low amplitude. As I've been reading, I realize the broadcast standard has changed over the years, from BW+mono to HD+stereo. The documents don't always tell which standard they refer to, which can be confusing.

English is so imprecise. The permanent magnet will feel the field for the same length of time as the electromagnet is turned on, with a one year delay from time on till felt, and similar delay from time off till felt. I think that is a correct statement, but it seems a bit obtuse.

The decreasing magnetic field is an EM wave that travels at the speed of light. The affect on the permanent magnet would take a year to propagate from the electromagnetic to the permanent magnet.

OK, except for math and logic proofs.

I think you mean that we suffer frustration if we try to use logic to understand something we are not ready to understand. Yes, that can happen, but sometimes we can use logic to understand better. However, we can make mistakes and come to an incorrect conclusion using logic. We need to test logical results against reality.

This is a good lesson on binary-decimal conversion. However, it does not answer the Topic Question, "Why do we divide or multiply by 2 when converting binary?" Moreover, generally science cannot answer, "Why something?" One can either learn by rote or intuition some text, process, image or emotion. Often, a person who learns some thing by rote may later have an epiphany, and suddenly intuit the thing. It's a process of understanding, and occasionally a person understands something novel, which documented becomes part of our collective knowledge.