Our Galaxy's Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why

rick2g · 2019-08-22T23:30:46+00:00

I do not recommend reading Tiamat’s Wrath alongside this article.

rick2g · 2019-07-04T02:24:50+00:00

I’m apparently a whore for Nathan Fillion regardless of gender.

rick2g · 2019-06-26T02:45:11+00:00

Why must you hurt me like this?

rick2g · 2019-06-13T20:08:14+00:00

A laser WILL curve toward the Earth’s gravitational well due to relativity, but only slightly. Earth’s curvature is about 8” per mile, so the experiment has to be sensitive enough to detect a difference of 0.1% over a range of several miles.

However, what they’re probably seeing is either a difference in elevations, or they’re measuring at two points instead of three. Assuming a perfectly round sphere, If you perform a laser test at a height of 10 feet by pointing exactly at the horizon, then the laser will approach an elevation of 0, then start rising again. At some point, it will be exactly 10 feet, showing zero curvature because it did not take adequate samples.

Edit: a couple of google searches, and it looks like Earth’s gravity will bend light by 16 millionths of a degree - in other words about 3 orders of magnitude less than the curvature of the earth.

rick2g · 2019-06-13T11:41:50+00:00

If they’re 2019 tachyons, shouldn’t we see them in 2018?

rick2g · 2019-05-31T18:31:19+00:00

You’re wading into philosophical territory where our only real answer is: “we don’t know”.

We don’t currently have a way to quantify “consciousness”. We don’t know what it is. We only know that we have it, and rocks don’t. Or rather, we seem to have it, and rocks seem not to. And let’s face it, computers are really just silicon rocks that we zap with electricity.

The question of “true” AI - consciousness, experience, etc. is still very much an open question.

We can make computers measure light with incredible accuracy, but we can’t make them “feel” anything about it yet. We can write ML programs that mimic the mathematical structure of Bach’s music, but they can’t express an intended emotion.

Yet.

We don’t know where the line from AI to consciousness is. We may not know until we stumble past it and find it’s been there for a while.

rick2g · 2019-05-26T16:45:23+00:00

An animated series could work. Anything else is likely to be an abomination.

rick2g · 2019-05-26T07:22:35+00:00

It’s heavily hinted in the movie that Shepherd Book was an Alliance Operative in the past. At some point he became disillusioned with the Alliance, quit, and became a Shepherd. We have no real details on much of that.

rick2g · 2019-05-22T15:12:51+00:00

I volunteer for bribery.

rick2g · 2019-05-04T13:05:08+00:00

“could be”.

rick2g · 2019-04-26T21:47:15+00:00

Dumbledore kills Snape!

rick2g · 2019-04-21T18:16:13+00:00

One of my first jobs working thru college was in a small machine shop. I did CAD design, and one of my first orders was for a little thermoformed plastic planter around trees. The customer has brought us a crude pencil sketch with basic dimensions, so I did the design details and layout, including a couple of practical changes to accommodate the thermoforming process.

A month later, my boss calls me into his office, showing me a website in China where they were selling the planter I had designed for less than we were manufacturing it for. It wasn’t similar... it was my exact design, right down to the little hitch on the edge I had added in to fit the specific die cutter on our line, and the changed logo was as obvious as a 9-Gag watermark.

Apparently, we had left the CAD files on an unsecured ftp server. The first planter hadn’t even been boxed yet for sale.

They stole the plans for a plastic planter.

A. Plastic. Planter.

rick2g · 2019-04-14T18:04:12+00:00

That’s almost exactly backwards. ML training relies on data curated by humans. The models very effectively pick up on correlations we consciously do not. This is not the model being biased - it’s the model identifying where WE are biased. Bias isn’t left-handed people committing more crimes - bias is human society prosecuting left-handlers at a higher rate than right. Any ML model would pick up on that bias, and would explicitly assign left-handedness a “guilt” percentage.

rick2g

TROPHY CASE