TheVat

I am fairly confident that my generation has been able to retain its longer pre-web attention spans wow is that a gray squirrel in the yard haven't seen one this far west in years!

I laughed hard when Vivek compared himself, in his braving the roads to get to four events, to George Washington crossing the Delaware. Then he had his aides move a meeting with farmers to Zoom. Minus 18 here, at 10:30 AM, and was minus 24 last night. Never been happier to have PEX lines. Only a bit of one line froze, and thawed when I attached flexible furnace duct to a tee branch in the basement and snaked it into the crawl space under the kitchen (a newer wing of the house). Politico covered the diminishment of final days campaigning pretty well.... https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/12/winter-weather-iowa-caucus-00135420 The political industrial complex that had come to the state to close out the caucus instead found themselves walloped by a foot of snow that had ground the campaign trail — and the highways — to a halt. Days before the Iowa caucuses, the field was, quite literally, frozen. The weather prompted event cancellations for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, the two contenders fighting for a second-place finish in Iowa. It was, in some ways, a fitting beginning to the end of a caucus campaign that, with Trump’s dominance, had never truly felt like one to begin with.

National Weather Service data shows there has never been a colder Iowa caucus night than what is forecast for Jan. 15. The previous coldest was in 2004, when the high temperature for the caucus was 16 degrees. (F.) We may not warm above zero degrees (F) on Monday, said Des Moine meteorologist Chad Hahn. I would not be surprised if we dont get above minus 20 degrees for wind chills beginning on Sunday. -- from AP Wondering what skewing effect, if any, this might have on the results.

Why not use a search engine and find out what the current research is showing? It's hard to make sense of your statement if you don't share what you think those reasons are. Generally, social science data is notoriously bad for establishment of clearcut causal relationships. People, life, culture, physical environment, all are complicated and it's hard to isolate variables. Whenever I remember to carry my umbrella it doesn't rain. Clearly umbrellas somehow inhibit atmospheric condensation.

From the same Latin root as words like paisano or peasant. I lived in a predominantly Italian neighborhood for a couple years and heard "paisano!" used a lot as a friendly greeting among Italo-Americans. It no longer carries the meaning of rustic, just means fellow countryman.

Harder to pronounce, though. Leeuwenhoek is never referenced in a Queen song.

Though many of the hippies sought spiritual goals outside the Christian tradition, there were some who were Christian and in the US were called Jesus Freaks. AFAIK, they didn't control a navy, though some wore navy.

LOL for redirect their support to Liz Cheney . Immunity hearing today had this disturbing exchange... Trump lawyer John Sauer said Tuesday that a president who ordered the military to assassinate a political rival or sold pardons to criminals could only be criminally prosecuted if they are first impeached and convicted by Congress. Appeals court Judge Florence Pan, a nominee of President Joe Biden, posed the hypothetical questions to flesh out the bounds of Sauer’s immunity argument. Broadly, his argument relies on the theory that presidents are shielded from prosecution for official actions if there isn’t an impeachment conviction first. “Could a president order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival? That is an official act, an order to SEAL Team Six,” Pan said “He would have to be, and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution,” Sauer said. “I asked you a yes or no question,” Pan said. "If he were impeached and convicted first,” Sauer replied. “So your answer is no,” Pan said. Sauer responded, “My answer is qualified yes. There is a political process that would have to occur.” Yikes.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Never could make much sense of this oft-quoted Biblical definition, in how it worked evidence in there. Many hoped for the 5 sigma results on the Higgs boson at the LHC, which were evidence of things not seen. Hmm.

I saw a Homo Erectus drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. His hair was perfect.

Thank you. Is not the intersection of Mickey Mouse and Lady Chatterly one of the greatest things you could drop into the imagination of a humor columnist? Anyone who had to suffer their way through D.H. Lawrence's vastly overrated classic (I would rank it as his worst work) will appreciate Ms Petri's mash-up. I liked the bit about how Mickey couldn't remove his gloves during the love scene due to copyright reasons.

Black list not only had four times as much spring onion, but also additional onion puree that the white list lacked. That's your cuprit. Both high in fructans, which are fermentable oligosaccharides that are intensely gas producing. Severe bloat is just another way to say "I need to stroll around for a while, farting nonstop."

If I'm following this, I think iNow was just pointing out the black swan effect, as it impacts inductive reasoning.

Yes, I think even the grand old man of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, might acknowledge that causally embedded (as opposed to purely algorithmic) cognition would be needed to really have an AGI that understood a world and learned on its own as we do. I recall he was talking up these analog artificial neurons recently, in the context of what he calls "mortal machines" (not sure if he originated the phrase), which because of their analog nature cannot transfer the weights of their neural connections to other machines. Their understanding, their causal structure, is theirs alone - like we humans. The shifting physical connections and conductances are analog. I find Bishop's critique of digital cognition reasonable, in terms of its limitations. We humans can see how things interact causally and continuously, we can make analogies and follow them where pure reason and algorithms won't take us. Funny: Hinton believes this, but he still believes backpropagation algorithms (higher layers subject lower layers to a sort of computational evolutionary pressure) in a digital multilayered neural net could prove the most powerful AI in the end. He seemingly remains a connectionist who is very wedded to his backprop algorithms and the need for massive quantities of training data. His machines can never learn from a single example (we poor analog meatheads can do so, in many RW situations).

I think heat passes through a metal screen easily (metal absorbs, then re-radiates the heat and of course goes right through the small holes). The holes would want to be fairly small, to catch any embers that may pop out. In my state, you can't have carpeted floor next to the hearth, generally some kind of masonry surface or surface covering is required out to a certain radius. Might actually be in the UBC for the States.

Lady Chatterly and Mickey Mouse enter the public domain this year and all you get is this column.... https://archive.is/DvUSQ (paywall free screenshot of Alexandra Petri column in the Washington Post)

Be interesting if TFG is disqualified after the primaries, eh? Means the bound delegates (as the GOP calls them) would have to be freed, and then select whoever looks strongest against Biden in the general. They can't redo primaries, so it would basically create ~2500 delegates that can't nominate on the basis of their states primary results and would then defer to, I guess, old-fashioned party machinery. Back to the smoke-filled back room? Or would Trump just pick his backup (assuming he would ever admit to being constitutionally disqualified by a court ruling) and the party would bow to that? This could be the world's craziest goat rodeo. (if it isn't already)

Not sure why I bothered to post on-topic here yesterday, using a concrete example, but I won't repeat that mistake again. Good luck and adios.

A lot of confusion can be helped by finding a basic guide to evolutionary biology and learning the domains of microevolution and macroevolution and what changes they cover. Most online chats seem to focus mainly on microevolution. A common example is pesticide resistance. Unlike intelligence, it's pretty easy to define and then to track how it changes in species populations. (and it's another good example of rapid evolution where intelligence is not at all the focus) Corn borers didn't get smarter or bore in faster or change coloration to fool birds or lady beetles, they just had a small percent of each generation that had a higher tolerance for chemical pesticides and survived to reproduce. So now there are no pesticides that kill corn borers. And so we had to transfer specific genetic material from a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, Bt, to the plant’s genome so it would contain something that borers couldn't stand. And so it goes. The corn borer survivors will be ones that can eat Bt corn and they will proliferate. At some point, we'll just give up on that and send in the lady beetles and restore avian populations that like the borers more than the kernels.

It's called neuromorphic engineering - here is a recent attempt... https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-05-05-artificial-neurons-mimic-complex-brain-abilities-next-generation-ai-computing#:~:text=A team of researchers at,been published in Nature Nanotechnology. 2D materials are made up of just a few layers of atoms, and this fine scale gives them various exotic properties, which can be fine-tuned depending on how the materials are layered. In this study, the researchers used a stack of three 2D materials - graphene, molybdenum disulfide and tungsten disulfide- to create a device that shows a change in its conductance depending on the power and duration of light/electricity that is shone on it. Unlike digital storage devices, these devices are analog and operate similarly to the synapses and neurons in our biological brain. The analog feature allows for computations, where a sequence of electrical or optical signals sent to the device produces gradual changes in the amount of stored electronic charge. This process forms the basis for threshold modes for neuronal computations, analogous to the way our brain processes a combination of excitatory and inhibitory signals.

Had to Google this. Wow. $500-1000 fine for first offense and then it doubles again. Seems to fit your falls heavier on the poor scenario. Admit that I laughed when I got to the trafficking penalties. Gum trafficking, what a concept.

Ankle-worn cell jammer: brilliant! I rank that up there with EMP cannon for use on loud car subwoofers.

Very helpful @Genady, thanks. Intrinsic and extrinsic are clarified for me now.

The dogputer mental image (a K9 processor?) was amusing but not quite what I had in mind. I was speculating on an artificial system which included forms based on organic structures, not one using actual biological material. IOW, a strong departure from the classical digital Von Neumann architecture that has dominated IT for...almost its entire history. What you are referencing, with its potential for a locked-in consciousness, does indeed seem spooky and an ethical red flag.

Me too. Though social shame doesn't work with teenagers in some societies, often triggering more of an undesirable behavior as an enjoyable bit of rebellion. I used to live near a high school, so have unfortunately accumulated a fair amount of anthropological data on this. Fairly stiff enforcement would be required for that demographic, because moral lectures (How would you feel if I started depositing my trash in YOUR yard, hm?) would be ineffective. A friend of my parents, many years ago, had a rather unusual solution to someone tossing litter from their passing car into his yard. He took down the plates and, being a journalist, was somehow able to obtain their home address. He then mailed the litter (including some spoiled food) to them with a letter explaining that he was kindly returning to them what was theirs. A satisfying story, but an unusual bit of luck to see the perpetrators in the act.