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Non-sequitur. All numbers have equal chance of winning, so no choice, popular or not, alters your odds, but as swansont points out, unpopular numbers yield better average payouts. You seem to presume N is less than 64, which is not always the case. Even if it is the case, your conclusion is again a non-sequitur. Picking five random numbers under 32 gives the exact same odds of winning as picking 5 random numbers in the range of say 33 to 40. This is the simplest of mathematics: Every possible choice has the same odds as any other if the draw is random.

What are the pros and cons of this reproductive set up? I ask because my mother once remarked that this world would be a better place without male and female. She said this in response to my remark that male and female is a beautiful thing of nature. As times progress onward, the differences between male and female seem to becoming more and more confused. There are certain societal and political biases that seem to put one or the other sex at a disadvantage. Men are often given harsher sentences for the same types of crimes because judges view men as naturally more menacing than women perhaps because of the perceived muscular strength of men and that women are looked upon as naturally weaker and less competent. We still have a Girl Scouts for absolutely females only but there is no longer a male-only Boys Scouts. It seems as the male side of our species is especially becoming less relevant.

Decelerating the rocket just wastes all the momentum it already had. If you have delta-V left over, accelerate more, not decelerate. This gives maximum momentum transfer to the thing, which is what is needed to deflect it. Of course, it's best to hit it more or less from the side, which is inefficent for something coming more or less straight at you. Indeed, but also the harder it is to tell if the effort is needed at all, or if the effort will actually make the trajectory worse, due to miscalculation. Look at all the news about some asteroid that's going to hit Earth, and then it misses it by a mere million km. You can't send a defection mission out to every big rock that might get that close, but by the time we know it will hit, it's too close that a small defection is enough. It's also harder to get something out to an incoming object quickly if its further away. Takes more delta-V to get out there, leaving less to actually impart momentum to the thing. I don't think nukes are very effective in a vacuum. It will leave a nasty stain and small crater and will defect almost not at all, unless you can get the thing to embed itself a ways in without destroying the mechanism in the process. There is armor-piercing technology that helps with that sort of thing. Look at the bunker-buster bombs they have, designed to penetrate a long way and still explode, sometimes even hours later. But those bombs are heavy and not too fast, hitting at far slower speeds than what would likely occur in a rocket/asteroid interception.

Probably it has been said already and I missed it, but one way to think about it is that a brain (and potentially similar structures) are necessary but likely not sufficient to whatever one might define as mind.

How does your assumption square with reality? Is every woman constantly pregnant? Is the availability of women limiting the size of human populations? What is the evidence? If a hypothesis does not square up with reality/data one should revise one's assumptions, rather than doubling down. Starting with wrong premises results in wrong conclusions, even if the steps in-between are logical. Asking questions suggests that one is open to new information. What is your response to the information outlined in the posts above? In fact, have you perhaps bothered to google the term "gonochorism" and its evolution? That makes it way easier than trying to describe it the way you continue to do. Information is out there, but one has to seek it out (and be willing to learn).

I'm not missing anything. I'm sharing my thoughts. It seems logical to me that if you were to double the number of child bearers within a given species by making each and every member of that species a child bearer, as opposed to just half the said species, the population rate of growth would be considerably greater than otherwise. How many babies can a single woman bear during her lifetime? How many women can a single man impregnate during his lifetime? Most scientific research was the result of human thoughts and questions asked by philosophers. I'm not a professional scientist, just a human thinker. I proposed a what-if scenario here and thought some more versed in science could chime in. Perhaps my thread indeed belongs in the philosophical section. I will propose a new philosophical question here though. Why in fact is the human species composed of males and females in separate bodies? People ask questions and look to science to provide answers.

No problem, it all depends on how detailed or how far you choose to pursue the concept. One thing to consider however is that in order to look at stress and stain aspects. You require the force/work terms as well. For example far too often I've seen perpetual energy articles discussing some popularized perpetual device use nothing more than first order equations. However when the same setup gets examined using second order relations by others that the energy loss is found exceed the output power. As Swansont mentioned in physics one cannot arbitrarily choose to ignore this interaction (in this case different forces) or that but should take everything in consideration. Stress tensors are particularly useful in that as all forces are applied with a means of keeping track via the tensors regardless of angles. Not saying perpetual energy is involved here however the above is also useful for efficiency calculations.

Just a quick comment on this bit. This continuing question of "where is mind in the brain" is difficult to answer for some because they may not have fully considered the likely path of our brain's evolution. Theories about how our brain creates mind without some basic perspective or understanding of it's functional evolution is, IMO, no more than an uneducated guess. Included in my definition of mind I said that it is quantified by a brain's capacity to integrate dichotomous sensory data with its memory stores to produce behaviors independent of instinct. While investigating the likely evolutional path of the dreaming brain, I realized from my study that our brain retains significantly clear evidence of its path of evolution--from spinal cord to neocortex. Along that path in the human brain, three significant developments had to occur: The thalamus, sensory perception diversification, and memory. Prominent among these developments was the thalamus, which I have in previous discussion referred to as our proto-brain. but is perhaps best described as our instinctive brain. For millions of years, as our central nervous system (CNS) evolved, our instinctive brain's primary sensory intake was tactile. When you evaluate the current structure of our CNS from spinal cord to thalamus, you'll get a sense of the various stages of its evolutional history from simple sensory intake to increasingly complex forms of sensory intake. For millions of years, increasingly complex forms of tactile sensory intake evolved. This is important to note because tactile sensory detection reinforces the need for the instinctive responses that evolved through thalamic function. Diversification in our brain's sensory perception evolution came with the acquistion and increasing prominence of visual perception. Visual perception was a major diversion from tactile perception because it did not require direct physical contact with ancestral animals--with visual perception, these animals had a means to evaluate their responses without the energy expenditure tactile sensory responses likely required. From that last sentence, you should get a sense of my basis for mind in brain function. Although there's much more that I haven't shared, I said this would be quick and hope this suffices for now.

Where it would be, is non-flat space. Edit: snap

It would mean you aren’t in a cartesian geometry, i.e. it’s not flat. The sum of the angles will depends on the geometry.

what would it be then?

Ahem....

Regarding the sliding of a magnet off a sheet of steel, I guess that what is really happening is that you are not feeling the same force you feel when you try to lift it directly, you're not working directly against the magnetic field. Once you get to the edge of the sheet the area of the magnetic contact reduces, and with it the force holding the magnet to the sheet until finally the magnet is clear of the sheet. Triboelectric generation is looking more and more interesting these days. Won't be long before the free energy cranks are baffling themselves with that. Hmm, come to think of it, I've done nothing about adding generation to my device, ... reciprocation, triboelectrics, ... hmm ...

A large structure does not have to bend very much to account for this energy. As you say, it is a tiny metal sheet. If you lift a 1 g object 1 meter, a 1 kg structure only has to shift 1 mm Physics is quite successful, but relies on rigor and not hand-waving.

Ah, ok, you were talking with regard to the device and I was (at that time) talking with regard to the thought experiment. Cross purposes, sorry for the misunderstanding. Yes, I'm sure that at some point I will need to consider distortion in the fingers/tabs but engineers often just over-engineer things, add s fudge factor, rather than fuss about such details. This particular design is just a proof of concept and the objective was to make it easy for people to grasp the principal of operation. The rotor is designed so that the number and geometry of the tabs can be changed easily in order to test different configurations. That provokes images of some structure bowing down to hoist a tiny metal sheet up into the air. Sure, to some barely detectable extent a solid structure will distort due to the forces involved in the thought experiment I described but really, is it really fair to say in this situation that the structure is doing all the work and the magnet is doing none? That is a very strange way to describe the situation in my view.

The most basic electrical devices consist of the following elements: a resistor, a capacitor and an coil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductor The most basic electronic devices have the above elements plus a diode (or equivalent vacuum tube), a transistor (or equivalent vacuum tube), integrated circuits, microcontrollers, and processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit Integrated circuits, microcontrollers and processors are programmable, that is, they execute a program that someone wrote and upload to them or to RAM and/or ROM. Where stands your "steel wool" with the above?

We cross posted see my last post

Ok, the situation in the device though is that the magnets are not moved closer nor separated by the operator, rather the magnets move under the effect of their changing state of repulsion or attraction governed by whether there is a finger or no finger between them. So, in my view, energy is being exchanged between the magnetic fields on one side of the device and the fields on the other. Is this a reasonable description? The operator is not moving the magnets, not even by poking them with a stick, he is merely turning the rotor that determines which side of the device has a finger in the gap and which doesn't. Maybe I should rename my 'fingers' to 'tabs' to avoid the idea that there is any poking of the magnets going on. I don't see where there is any direct link between the work or energy or effort required to turn the rotor and the work or energy or effort produced by the switch state of the magnets, unless there is some reason to suggest that the eddy current drag is directly related to the output. The drag will certainly depend on the strength of the magnetic field on the side of the device that the finger/tab is passing through and the speed of the finger/tab through that field and, I guess, on the area of the tab that's in the field, perhaps even other things I have yet to consider.

Look at your own image is not the rotor plate larger than the magnets and the placement off center ? Now am I correct those magnets will be shifting inward and outward ? So as it shifts outwards as opposed to inwards you will get variations

Generally speaking, a self-limiting disease would not lead itself to a larger outbreak (essentially, if the effective reproduction number is >1. Rather, in a typical infection model the limit is based on proportion of immune to susceptible folks and is parametrized by e.g. infectious period and basic reproduction number). However, a combination of awareness training, testing and educating/isolating folks have managed to reduce the number of new infections (in the above framework it is basically reducing the effective reproduction number). Without that, it would likely have continued to circulate. As I said, the fact that it was going down was seen as a public health success, whereas the fact that it circulated to multiple countries was seen as a failure. The latter also showed us (together with the COVID-19 lessons) how badly most of the world is prepared to contain outbreaks. These numbers seem to to come from reports published (I think New England Journal of Medicine) and were from 2022. This particular outbreak was from clade II mpox, but past infections tended to hit younger folks (especially in Africa). That is another thing that has been discussed, mpox does occasionally break out, mostly in West in Central Africa. The 2022 outbreak also made headlines probably because it not only reached over 100 countries, but epicenters were in the Americas (especially US, but also Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) and Europe, which also explains the age demographics. Since 2022 numbers in those regions went down, but are still lingering at low numbers in Africa and a small surges in 2023 in South Asia and Western Pacific regions. Just to re-affirm that it is not simply gone.

Logically incorrect, even if the premise is true. Equivalent to “All dogs are mammals. I am a mammal, therefore I am a dog.”

No. It’s just that there’s no real difference. In one case it’s a person doing the work, in another it’s a structure doing it. The magnetic field is doing the lifting, just as with a chain, but it’s not doing the work. Do you know what “work” is in physics? It has a specific definition, as I explained in an earlier post. It’s not some general idea of effort or force. Work has units of energy; it’s energy transferred because of a force acting through a displacement. Magnetic forces do not do this; they are perpendicular to displacement. If a magnet is held by a structure, that structure will flex under a load; that is the source of the energy (energy stored in the structure’s configuration, and/or a reduction in its potential energy because the structure shifts downward) As I said, there’s no such thing as a perfectly rigid structure.

For once, we all agree!

! Moderator Note This isn't philosophy. If you think you can support your idea scientifically, I can move this to Speculations, but your premise is already over-generalized (brain = electronic device) and easy to poke holes in (chemical synapses have gaps that electric wiring doesn't).

This is stupid. A computer is not just wires. Only an idiot thinks that. Nor is a brain just a mass of biochemical wiring, either. Try to apply a bit of sense, for goodness sake.