exchemist

Right. So it's all ballocks and they should damned well stump up the extra.

Hmm. I wonder if it is far-fetched to suggest the tech bros are using the (bogus?) sense of urgency they have created around AI to persuade the authorities to give them what they want quickly, instead of insisting their data centres should be resource-neutral.

I must confess I got bored with this tedious article before it got to any explanation of why deserts are preferred. And I don’t really buy it, because there are plans for over a dozen of these bloody things in Scotland! I read an article about them in the FT. But at least the part I read did - eventually - get round to confirming the water is indeed for cooling and the net consumption is due to the use of evaporative cooling towers. Which raises the obvious question of why allow them to use this wasteful method instead of some kind of non-evaporative heat exchange. And if nothing else works in the desert, then refuse them permission to build there!

I do not understand why data centres are said to need to consume large quantities of drinking water. I believe it is just for cooling. But no power station uses drinking water for that. Why can data centres not use a closed loop of coolant and reject heat via heat exchangers into a river or the sea, like a power plant? If it is just cost then surely these tech bro squillionaires should be made to foot the bill, rather than devouring the precious drinking water of the citizens. Or am I missing something?

I think this is brilliant! +1 for finding it. I am impressed this comes from the Norwegian Consumer Council. I suppose Norway has little global clout as a country consuming these products so their best way to exert pressure is via ridicule on social media. I certainly intend to distribute the link to this video as widely as I can.

This was one of Write4U’s obsessions on the other forum. it isn’t science, though. Whereas weak emergence is.

Hmm, itchy beard time, then. 😉

If there are no known examples, in what sense is strong emergence a real phenomenon?

Well in the examples that spring to my mind at least, emergent properties most certainly can be derived from the behaviour of the small scale entities responsible. That is what statistical thermodynamics is all about, surely? Macroscopic properties of bulk matter are derived, quantitatively, from the statistical behaviour of molecules.

I may be being thick but I don’t understand what is meant in this context by putting the genie back in the bottle. Surely an emergent property is just the consequence, at larger scales, of a sufficiently large aggregate of entities at a smaller scale? Things like the bulk properties of a liquid being due to the aggregate behaviour of large assemblies of constituent molecules. I suppose you can get rid of (“reverse”) the emergent phenomenon by disaggregating them, but that seems a bit obvious. Can you expand a bit?

It was not me that made unprovoked accusations of “slurs” and “dogwhistles”.

My own contribution was simply to observe that, as governments are limited in what they can ask citizens to contribute towards the needy, it is inevitable that there will be those at the tail of the wealth distribution who are not helped to move out of it. It is regrettable but it is a fact. There was no implied moral censure of such people. Nor was there in my reading of other contributions.

As far as I can see, nobody on this thread has suggested any such thing.

What slur?

There was a middle class in the Victorian era. But certainly, most working class people at that time could not be considered “bourgeois”. Whereas now, to a very large extent in western societies, they can, this being thanks to the mixed economy approach that governments found themselves following as the c.20th developed. The Marxist analysis does not hold and did not in the 1970s, when I used to come across such nonsense at university.🙄

The passage you quote seems to think it makes a valid point merely by labelling those it wishes to attack as "bourgeois". But it does not address the key point, which is that human beings will always have a tendency to look after themselves first, and this limits how much altruistic behaviour can be expected. That applies to any peasant or factory worker, just as much as to a "bourgeois" gentleman. (What is particularly poisonous in that passage is the insinuation that even the law is merely the will of the middle class. That is both preposterous and dangerous.)

Arf arf.😆

One of the enduring features of human nature is the struggle between altruism and self interest. Political systems that try to impose altruism (e.g. communism) always fail, because people always want to look after their own interests first. Religions and some political creeds exhort people to altruism but it is always an uphill struggle and only partially successful. Thoughtful politics tries to strike a balance between allowing people to keep the fruits of individual enterprise and taking care of the needy. This is the social bargain that people in western societies accept. That being so, there will always be a tail of the population distribution curve that suffers hardship.

We had the E V Rieu translation read to us when we were kids. But I'm intrigued by the T E Lawrence version. Maybe I should look for it. I did read the 7 Pillars of Wisdom while I was working in the Middle East - thought it would be a good idea to see how an Englishman adapted to the Arab world.

Hey, look over there! A dead cat! [And don’t look at our attempts to undermine the voting system in time for the mid-terms]

Yes, so that would suggest to me the EM interaction and the weak and strong interactions are qualitatively different from gravitation, in that only the last can be modelled as due to geometrical effects of spacetime (or spacetime + nnn).

OK yes I gathered it was classical. To rephrase my question, what interests me is whether the basic concept - of treating the EM interaction in terms of 5D geometry of what could I suppose be called space-charge-time can in principle be adapted to fit with QFT, or whether the two approaches are inherently mutually exclusive. Without knowing much about the subject, it seems to me the QFT idea of a field mediated by virtual particle exchange is utterly different.

That's interesting. So it's an analogous approach to GR, but for the EM interaction. I see it predates QFT. Is this concept compatible with QFT, i.e. the EM field and mediating virtual photons?

As a complete outsider to entropic gravity, I must say I am rather excited by all this. It always struck me as odd that gravitation, which per GR is not really a force but a manifestation of spacetime geometry, should be conventionally treated like the other 3 fundamental interactions which are real forces, mediated by force carriers per QFT. Also it would appear that it might resolve other issues, apart from obviating the so far fruitless search for the (possibly mythical) graviton, viz. dark matter. Now that you have explained a bit about, it I shall keep an eye on this topic!

Actually I’m not puzzled by that so much. I was just wondering whether emergent gravitation might do away with some of the intractable problems people seem to have had developing a quantum theory of gravity.