Sensei

There are more than 3,200 isotopes of elements. Most of them are unstable or extremely unstable. Only a percentage of them are stable enough to form molecules.

The same can be said of molecules. But in the vacuum in cosmic space, once they are created, there is nothing to react for a long time. Rare (extremely reactive) molecules on Earth, in cosmic space are "common"..

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+most+common+molecules+interstellar

3 hours ago, nec209 said:

Can some one here explain how chemical compounds make up billions of chemicals?

Did you hear about polymers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer

"A polymer (/ˈpɒlɪmər/;[4][5]) is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits.[6] Due to their broad spectrum of properties,[7] both synthetic and natural polymers play essential and ubiquitous roles in everyday life.[8]"

By swapping one or more atoms for other elements, in different places, you get a different molecule, with slightly different physical or chemical properties.

How many different macromolecules, polymers or biopolymers (RNA, DNA) can be created from a few simple elements? Should we consider them as independent molecules or not?

If you type "iq test" in the search box of an Internet search engine, one of the first results is the "Mensa IQ Challenge".

https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge

They offer a test with 35 questions to be solved in 25 minutes, which is average 42-43 seconds for each. If you don't know the correct answer, they suggest you guess it..

They claim that time is not measured. If we believe this, it means that only points count. So you can get from 0 to 35 correct answers. The score will range from 85 to 145 IQ points.

19 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Since IQ tests have the celling of 160, are IQs higher than that possible or not?

Looking at my example above, you have 1) a limited number of questions you need to answer 2) limited time to do so (or unmeasured time) 3) the probability of guessing the correct answer without any intelligence.

ps. People in express chess often lose due to lack of time to move..

On 1/22/2024 at 2:57 AM, geordief said:

 

On 1/22/2024 at 2:51 AM, Sensei said:

Aren't CERN and the LHC examples of accelerators that accelerate quantum particles to near the speed of light?

New (usually short-lived) particles appear, and other particles are destroyed into smaller components, etc. etc.

That example occurred to me after I had asked the question.

So the particles collide and as a result new particles result.

Do they accelerate away from the region where the "parent" particle was?

Or do they  travel like  a photon ,either at zero velocity or at c?

If the latter then they don't accelerate  and the acceleration as in "particle accelerator " is a classical  process.

Calculations at CERN/LHC or any other particle accelerator, or near the speed of light, are done in CoM (Center-of-Mass/Center-of-Momentum) FoR (Frame-of-Reference).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass

In this FoR, all kinetic energies of all particles participating in this collision, must exceed the masses-energies of the all newly formed particles after the collision.

The remaining energy (if it exceeds the threshold *) is carried by the newly formed particles as their kinetic energy (including photons and neutrinos).

Calculations made in CoM are translated into laboratory ("lab frame", "local") FoR, to learn to what velocity particles are required to accelerate at particle accelerator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_reference_frame

*) in the case of Pion meson  it is called "pion threshold creation"

https://www.google.com/search?q=pion+threshold+creation

If you look at my 2017+ posts, you should find that I have repeatedly attached the URL to an article where physicists showed how to calculate pion threshold creation and how to convert from CoM to lab frame..

Check this out https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/particle_creation.html

Quote

Do they accelerate away from the region where the "parent" particle was?

Acceleration means change of velocity. Fly through vacuum ("near vacuum conditions") with no interactions is continuous without disruptions and at constant velocity, until some interaction happens. The more particles, the more interactions, thus slowing down and losing (kinetic) energy.

In particle accelerators, physicists specifically place strong magnetic fields to find out what are charges of the newly created short-living particles. This forces charged particle flying in "circles", which directions and radius depends on applied magnetic field, particle kinetic energy/velocity/momentum, charge, etc.

1 hour ago, geordief said:

Are there examples of how acceleration is treated in quantum theory?

Aren't CERN and the LHC examples of accelerators that accelerate quantum particles to near the speed of light?

New (usually short-lived) particles appear, and other particles are destroyed into smaller components, etc. etc.

9 minutes ago, WalidKhan said:

Hello Python community!

It is not here..

Although I answer questions about Python, I don't like it.

And it's thousands of times slower than C/C++/C#/Java..

@fiveworlds is right. Read about IEEE 754 resolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754

Table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754#Basic_and_interchange_formats

ps. In simple cases, it may help to change the order of operations in the equation. For example, adding/subtracting 1 to 10^-20 will result in truncated fractions..

Definition:

Quote

Trolling - anti-social behavior characteristic of online discussion forums and social media,  consisting of posting controversial, harassing, often untrue content in order to draw attention to oneself or to provoke, ridicule or offend other users[1][2]. The person responsible for publishing such messages is referred to as a "troll"[3].

Etymology:

Quote

The term "trolling" comes from trolling for fish - a method of catching fish with a hook, spinner,[4] because a troll "drops the hook" by bringing up a controversial topic, often unnecessarily, to cause an argument. By backward etymology, practitioners of trolling have been called trolls (from the legendary and fairy-tale creatures of Norse mythologies).

38 minutes ago, Carrock said:

Malicious interference can disrupt any communication;

That's why people invented checksums, hash functions, digital signatures.. and a pretty simple project for a first-year student with just socket(), listen(), accept(), connect(), send(), recv(), close(), fopen(), fread(), possibly select() (for async), which has just raw data, will grow to a pretty complex.. just to detect malicious data in our stream..

38 minutes ago, Carrock said:

the important point with O.T.C. is never ever  reuse it for any reason.

In the worst-case scenario, if you send an (unused yet) offset to the secret key to the other party (to regain any encrypted communication after introduction of any malicious data in the stream), MITM could use DoS/DDoS to cause the secret key to be depleted on the machines.. 64 GB / 100 Mbps (12.5 MB/s) = ~ 5243 seconds..

13 minutes ago, Carrock said:

I don't see why anything but noise would cause desynchronization.

We have two phones or two computers. They open a connection from one to the other over a potentially hostile environment, the Internet. One uses socket send(), the other uses recv(), and then vice versa. One byte sent, one byte received, so the sender's counter is incremented accordingly. The same thing happens to the counter on the receiving machine. All good if there is no MITM which intercepts the connection and injects the bytes in the middle of the stream, resulting in machines being at different offsets in the secret key..

19 minutes ago, Carrock said:

To (re)synchronise if frequently needed, use a predefined part of the key (different each time) to send e.g. ZZZZZZZZZZafdc74cf to indicate the next byte used for message encryption. Fairly straightforward software could be used to find which part of the key decodes as ZZZZZZZZZZ.

..all is good as long as there is no MITM, then why encrypt and decrypt messages..?

21 minutes ago, Carrock said:

The important issue here is to realize that crude and cheap is much better than sophisticated and expensive. An ancient phone with no internet access and only text and voice can't be hacked without physical access, assuming the phone designer was honest and competent. Some software would be needed for de- and encryption. If the phone was stolen, all its one time code would be compromised but not other phones with different one time code.

.. anyone can pretend to send a text message from any GSM number. The receiver sees the "correct phone number", but from MITM or whomever in the case of SMS/MMS. The message that will be decoded into the trash and offset to the secret key on the receiver of such a message will have a different value than on the 2nd machine.

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

To be a subject of Pegasus software, for what it costs to implement, one would need to be a very high value target. I'm under no worries about Pegasus.

Once the zero-day is revealed to public, anyone can use it against devices with older vulnerable versions of the operating system or software.

You can get root on any Windows 7 and 8 system (including Server and Enterprise versions) with default settings and on any Mint Linux system..

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

Citing a 2016 price list, the New York Times reported the NSO Group charged its customers $650,000 to infiltrate 10 devices, plus an installation fee of $500,000,

..it just tells that their customers are idiots..

15 hours ago, Carrock said:

A couple of phones, each with say 64GB identical one time code storage and no ability to change the software without physical access should be fine for a few years of communication.

If someone has an iOS older than 14.8, Pegasus can instantly remotely hack it, as long as they have Internet access:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/13/ios-14-8-zero-click-exploit-pegasus/

If someone has an iOS older than 16.6.1, Pegasus can instantly remotely hack it, as long as they have Internet access:

https://medium.com/@letshackit/apples-ios-16-6-1-update-fixes-severe-zero-day-exploit-used-to-install-pegasus-spyware-dca4aafd25ef

15 hours ago, Carrock said:

A couple of phones, each with say 64GB identical one time code storage and no ability to change the software without physical access should be fine for a few years of communication.

..sending random data to the recipient would result in desynchronization. They would be in different bytes of the key..

15 hours ago, Carrock said:

In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent.

The keyword here is "single-use", which is virtually impossible. Sooner or later you will end up sending the same key again.

Plaintext with all zeros XOR key = key. Basic human communication in ASCII has few zeros (8th bit will be mostly 0), but binary data has many zeros, e.g. an ISO image can have an area with 32 KB of zeros, UTF-16 usually have 0 byte every two bytes, etc. etc.

The key must be generated in some way. Discovering the key generation algorithm increases the chance of decoding the signal.

Instead of brute force WiFi password hacking, you can check the device manufacturer and see how they created the password creation algorithm..

https://www.google.com/search?q=access+point+wifi+password+generation+algorithms

or this:

https://hackaday.com/2016/01/27/tp-links-wifi-defaults-to-worst-unique-passwords-ever/

"TP-LINK’s WiFi Defaults To Worst Unique Passwords Ever"

15 hours ago, Carrock said:

In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked, but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent.

Desynchronization forced by a third party or transmission errors will require resending the data.

1 hour ago, iNow said:

Go home bot. You’re borken

..you are "borken" too, I am afraid..

1 hour ago, iNow said:

Has it helped litter go down at least?

I don't believe that this system was installed to combat littering or minor misbehaviors..

15 hours ago, TheVat said:

Though social shame doesn't work with teenagers in some societies, often triggering more of an undesirable behavior as an enjoyable bit of rebellion.

In the United States and UK, the names of criminals are published by the media.. and you can see the results - everyone knows the names of the serial killers (now even TV and Netflix series are created about them, what they did and how, with details), and they started to like it ("fame"), and copycats appeared, mimicking previous murders of serial killers based on detailed photos of police investigations that the media published..

Osama bin Laden was inspired by hijack of other airplane, Air France Flight 8969. Mass media and politicians worried to let this airplane flight to the France to Paris and hit some building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969

"We received this information directly from members of the Algerian secret service. And this information was very worrying. The terrorists' true aim was to crash the plane in Paris. — French Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua[6]"

Public shaming, by revealing detailed information about their bad deeds, works against some, but also inspires others.

14 hours ago, iNow said:

What would happen is the wealthier citizens would continue littering and carrying on with their day since they wouldn’t “feel” such a minor slap on the wrist, while the poverty stricken and struggling would go without yet another meal that day when they get fined for a gum wrapper being snatched out of their hand by the wind and blown across the street into an awaiting officers view. 

Welcome to China and its points system. People cannot travel on public transportation, buses, trains, planes, etc. because they have too low score.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#No-fly_and_no-ride_lists

ps. The neighborhoods surrounding the homes of millionaires and billionaires are usually pretty darn clean..

On 1/2/2024 at 1:35 PM, dimreepr said:

Glad to see you haven't lost your dislike of me, I hope it brings you comfort... 😇🙏

...my dislike is toward philosophy rather than you, my child..

ps. Once I said that if one wants to train the brain, one should train the creation of algorithms..

On 1/2/2024 at 1:35 PM, dimreepr said:

That's my point, you don't have too:

..if I will destroy you tube, will be it understandable answer from my side for disagreement for whatever you will say and backup it with a video.. ?

ps. You will say that their servers don't work.. I guess..

59 minutes ago, swansont said:

Temporarily. The topic here is genetics.

Accident. Next time it may not be case if someone takes gene-altering drugs.

ps. I introduced this as novel information in case it was not noticed by forum members..

In some people, the eyes turned blue overnight:

https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/babys-brown-eyes-turn-blue-overnight-after-covid-19-treatment/

2 hours ago, dimreepr said:

“One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. The yin to your yang.

It would fit this thread only if I suggested that "every man is a thief"..

ps. You do that quite often, like "pulling a rabbit out of a hat", which suggests that you have been preprogrammed that way..

ps2. You seem to have some unnatural and inexplicable attraction to philosophy.. The code should be fixed. Otherwise you will talk to me like in "Westworld"

I am a "master of efficiency".. On of the first "paid" jobs in my new coming in '90 was converting C/C++ to Motorola 68k and PowerPC assembler..

ps. "paid" because the service provider didn't pay as much as we agreed..

He unexpectedly earned too much and decided to screw me.

3 hours ago, iNow said:

And we’re once more aligned, even if getting here didn’t maximize efficiency ✌️

Passing you through online translator did not make you any more understandable..

11 hours ago, iNow said:

and I was indeed talking about the former…

What former (from my list)? Former are people working at polling stations..

..then you shouldn't be ambiguous (and pay special attention not to be ambiguous in the future)..

Otherwise there will be meaningless "what did you mean" or "misunderstandings" derailing the thread..

21 hours ago, iNow said:

his minions on honest civil servants trying to do serve their country as volunteers during elections.

...I was referring to "his minions"...

2 minutes ago, zapatos said:

No, they are typically retirees looking for something that lets them stay engaged in a meaningful way. The next week they'll be volunteering at the local St. Vincent DePaul Society food bank.

Aren't you mixing "volunteers" who count votes and work at polling stations with "volunteers" who help politicians from their party during campaign.. ? Because of course I said about the latter..

Here, people who work at polling stations get paid. This year, an ordinary member of the election commission received 22% of the minimum monthly salary. The chairman of the election commission, 29%. Quite nice for a one day job. They can't vote. They verify people's identities and then count the votes.

Indeed, they are mostly retirees.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

I've been deeply bored by computing ever since I was made to futz about with Fortran statements on punched cards at Oxford in the mid 70s. Christ it was dull. We had a ghastly and rather tyrannical S. African teacher called Sonya, I remember, whom we nicknamed "Biltong". To this day, my eyes water with boredom whenever the subject crops up, I'm afraid.

..one of the saddest stories I have ever heard..

5 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I have zero intention of interacting with ChatGPT. Ever. 

..because that would scare you to death..