exchemist

That is a rather perverse conclusion to draw, seeing that incidence of cancer is associated with increased longevity, itself the product of human medicine.

I must admit this rings alarm bells with me. Especially the “Ancient Secrets” shtick. Basically work done is force x distance moved in the direction of the force. So sure a 0.23oz force can move heavy object, but only by as much as Fxd allows. In the case you mention, you don’t say anything about how the 10.5oz sled is moved. Is it on rollers, or sliding, on what surface, is it horizontal or on an incline, and so on. Can you describe it? (Videos are not acceptable here, by the way, so you need to describe in words the setup, with the aid of a diagram if necessary.)

Well as you say the rhythm is not fixed as in modern music but is fluid, corresponding more or less to speech. However there are notes you lengthen, indicated by bars over them or dots after them, or by what I call a "resistor" in the note after the lengthened one. The pitch of each note is easier to read, I find, as it is just a 4 line stave and the intervals are normally simple, without accidentals (there can sometimes be B♭s). It's quite hard to sing really well, but being so ancient it has a soothing, timeless quality that seems to connect one with those who have gone before, through the centuries. I like it as a musical exercise, too.

Ugh, that looks like something one might see in a medical textbook on venereal disease.😆

Yes some possible solutions there. Or else use a long enough search string to identify the performance I want unambiguously. Luckily, for the carol service most of the stuff I need is already on a playlist assembled by the choir director, so I can just reload the playlist each time. So it's just the stuff for each Sunday I have to deal with. This kind of thing, which I find needs a bit of practice as my sight singing is a bit shaky (though neumes are easier than regular score, I find): On the business of a new ad stating up spontaneously if I leave the video for 30secs after it ends, my son wondered if was because I had autoplay enabled, so that it was moving on to the next step down the rabbit hole that the algorithm was trying to lead me down. But I've checked and I have autoplay disabled so it can't be that. Must be just further enshittification: greedily desperate for that last tiny bit of ad revenue, at the expense of the user's experience. Arseholes.

So the irony is that, to get back to what you watched last time, you have to deactivate the “history”? Brilliant! 🤪

Yes YouTube seems to be becoming progressively enshittified. One specially annoying new feature of the YouTube app ( as opposed to the browser version) is that the algorithm gives you different results each time you enter a given search criterion. I use it to practice singing and often can’t get back to the recording I found last time. It insists on giving you a new selection. And the bloody ads get longer and more intrusive. Now I find if you stop at the end for more than 30 secs or so, a bloody ad will automatically start playing, even though you haven’t touched anything.

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).