exchemist

Indeed. @swansont ’s earlier comment about fermions is interesting in this respect. What makes a solid solid is not subatomic particles “touching”, but a combination of electrostatic repulsion and Pauli’s exclusion principle, which keeps electrons in an atom apart, thereby giving atoms a certain effective size.

Oh sure, but the OP was about using AI in the creative arts.

Fair comment. I'm afraid I find these attempts to assert and stretch the allegedly human-like attributes of AI rather irritating, so I expressed myself strongly. It seems to be part of the climate of breathless hype around the subject. I think there is far too little acknowledgement of the absolute dependence of these machines on human intellect. And as far as creative arts are concerned, authors and artists are rightly up in arms about the taking, and subsequent monetising, of their handiwork without acknowledgement or recompense. That is a live issue today and needs to be settled before airy contemplation of whether an AI program can be itself regarded as an author or artist.

The scope is rather broader than that. There are subatomic particles with rest mass that are not bound into atoms. These also qualify as matter.

Before getting into this sort of masturbation, a start would be for AI developers to recognise the intellectual property rights of the authors whose material their robots scrape off the internet. AI is by its nature an intellectual parasite. So it's a bit rich to suggest that AI should be given IP rights as if it were an author.

When we lived in NL I got into the naughty habit of making up pseudo Dutch/German words, because a lot of Dutch sounds like Germanised English. You get your injections and blood tests done at the “prikpost”, for example.

"Far reaching?". What do you mean by that? Look, the scope of the discipline of science is clear - and it has limits, obviously. It can't magically solve problems related to humanity's interactions and decisions. Science is a branch (only one branch) of knowledge. Knowledge does not solve problems. People do.

Yeah there was a road safety campaign about drink-driving while we were living in The Hague: posters everywhere. Bob was just a name they used for the nominated driver in the group. Amusingly, or perhaps not really, when my son was doing a summer job last year in the US and was out with a group including a couple of black guys, there a discussion about who was going be the nominated white person, in case of being stopped by the cops.

The last one I had was years ago, in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. This thing arrived after I'd had about half a bottle of wine with the meal and it was was drenched in alcohol. Very nice but I was a bit geplästert by the time we got home. (My wife was the nominated driver on that occasion. We used to have the Dutch: "Bob ik of Bob jij?" negotiation before taking the mother-in-law out for dinner.) I'm sure they are popular in Italy too, but I think the French invented them.

..........Not to be confused with baba au rhum (rum baba), a French dessert cake soaked in rum and syrup, which derives from the Polish "baba" for a yeast cake, itself named in turn after the Slavic diminutive for a grandmother. 😁

Science is humanity’s attempt to understand nature. There is no reason to expect it to deal with the issues you list.

Light takes a little over 8 minutes to travel 1 AU.

Substantial? I admit it's been years since I last read about this, but my impression was that while IQ tests did measure a difference, it was so small that it seemed just as likely to be to do with aptitude at doing the tests, for reasons of background, culture and upbringing, as it was to any genetic effect. Do you have a source in mind that we can take a look at?

Yes one sees this from time to time with celebrated scientists when they get old. There are several instances of them coming to believe their opinions must be right, just because of who they are. Linus Pauling and vitamin C? Hoyle and extraterrestrial origin of mad cow disease? Of course the equivalent also happens in other walks of life too. The moral appears to be not to accept the pronouncements of people just because they are famous, especially when they get old.

Very nice. Let’s hope that at last he gets it now. But I am not optimistic.

Yes, that’s because the distance between Jupiter and the observer changed. So the light path got longer.Your diagram fails to show this basic point.

I agree it seems more than likely that there is a hereditary component to intelligence. Intelligent parents tend to have intelligent offspring, though it is notoriously hard to disentangle heredity from upbringing and culture. But you are proposing something quite different: that there could be an innate level of intelligence that correlates with race. While that can’t be wholly excluded, there are good reasons to be highly suspicious of it, given that “race” has such a superficial genetic significance. Culture, on the other hand, has a very great deal to do with the collection of characteristics that people have in mind when they assign someone to a race. And we know that culture and upbringing have quite an effect on how people perform in intelligence tests. I’m not expert on this but my understanding is that the main genetic difference between people of largely European and those of largely African descent is that the European genome often has a small residual Neanderthal component, from interbreeding with Neanderthals in prehistoric times. Perhaps someone could select samples with and without this residue and attempt to correlate that with intelligence. I suspect however that the signal to noise ratio would be so poor that no conclusion could be drawn.

True, but does this matter? I'd have thought that if there are a few microseconds delay in our perceptions, this has no practical impact (aside perhaps from a few physics or neural experiments).

OK if you can indicate what measured differences you have in mind, we could perhaps take a look at what might be responsible. We would need to bear in mind @CharonY 's point that mixing of genes has some interesting results, e.g. that "black" Brazilians are more genetically similar to "white" Brazilians than they are to "black" Americans. (We would of course also need to bear in mind the effects of culture when it comes to evaluating measured behavioural attributes.)

As I understand it, one of the objections to attempting to correlate "race" (i.e. skin colour) with IQ is that skin colour is no more fundamental to the human genome than say eye colour or the presence or absence of ear lobes. So it would be a bit like correlating cancer incidence with TV ownership.

I suspect most of us have moments in which we wonder, fleetingly, whether what we seem to be experiencing is real or just in our minds. As far as science goes, we have a way round that issue by relying on reproducible observations of nature. That means others besides ourselves need to agree they see whatever it is too. So that gives us at least some reason to believe there is some kind of objective reality "out there", as it were. Of course we could be hallucinating what these supposed other people seem to be agreeing with us about, but going down that rabbit hole rapidly becomes paralysing, so there seems little point in pursuing that train of thought.

Yes that’s true but Marie Curie’s prize was about half a century earlier, back in 1903. Women’s emancipation had moved on a fair bit in the intervening years. I do dimly recall a rather catty comment in a lecture, from an old-fashioned (gay/misogynist) don at Oxford in the 1970s when I was reading for my degree, to the effect that Franklin’s contribution was the sort of humdrum, painstaking fiddly work suitable for a woman, as opposed to the brilliant insight of Crick and Watson. A bit shocking; perhaps there was a rather broader attempt to belittle the work that actually provided the data!

Yes that reference says Watson made this remark in a recent interview with Scientific American. So it looks as if no one at the time thought to put Franklin’s name forward. Maybe this was an attempt by Watson to put things straight at the end of his life, long after the damage was done. It’s such a shame she died so young. If she had lived longer, she probably would have had her contribution recognised.

That's not the impression given by the Wiki article on Watson, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin. According to that, Watson said she should have got the Nobel with Wilkins, but the prize could not be awarded posthumously (she died at 37, of ovarian cancer, apparently). But I don't know who wrote the Wiki piece of course.

Haha, then.