Perhaps if someone who gets the language did it for today's date, we'd both get some clarity. I've tried working backwards but the labyrinthine explanation doesn't project
One of the advancements against EW is having on-device mapping systems (this goes back to the Tomahawk in the 70s) so that the projectile can adjust its flight in the absence of GPS. This is what one of the real advances of AI promises to be - a vehicle that can identify and change targets fully autonomously. Will especially apply to unmanned underwater vehicles which (as far as I know) haven't been deployed but will surely change the dynamic on the seas
We had pretty smart weapon systems for a while now! P-700 Granit and Brimstone missiles were doing cooperative engagement and target selection for decades. BONUS rounds fit target recognition into small pucks. If we squint just a bit, many naval mines, especially something like CAPTOR, are "vehicles that can identify and change targets fully autonomously".
AI is not the limiting factor as much as sensors, energy, datalinks, logistics, and costs are. Yes we can miniaturise TERCOM now, but then where would the vehicle get maps from (battlefields change!), how would it see the terrain (at night? on a foggy, rainy day? deliberately dazzled/blinded with a cheap laser?), how far can it travel, how much payload can it take, where does it launch from, and how does it get to the launch point? Working through those questions and anticipating cycles of adaptation, I think it's easy to end up with a $1m JASSM-ER or a $3k 155mm shell (neither of which Ukrainians have in sufficient numbers).
For example, if you know there's an enemy platoon in that forest, why would you fly a swarm of autonomous tree-avoiding hunter drones there if you can drop some 155mm instead? The enemy can't blind a 155mm shell, EW wouldn't work, shells don't care about fog or darkness, payload-to-weight ratio is ~100%, and they're cheap. Of course if you don't have shells you have to be creative, but that doesn't mean the creative solutions are better.
On the other hand, according to the episode I linked, humble unarmed non-AI DJI Mavics have a very persistent and systemic impact. They provide 24/7 eyes in the sky over the entire front line, which makes tactical surprise impossible. This is very much not "AI swarming slaughterbots" many seem to imagine and invisible to folks on the sidelines like us, but that's why I'd be cautious of making inferences from the media we get to see.
This is what I thought the article was saying until I read it. But if most babies are cradled on the mothers left, that would lead to the babies left side being more interacted with by the mother. Since most sensory information is processed contralaterally you would think it would bias towards left-handedness by strengthening connections in the right brain which is clearly not the case.
However, smell (and taste, but I don't think that is relevant here) is processed ipsilaterally and vision/hearing have some ipsilateral processing so maybe I am wrong and it IS strengthening their left brain and leading to right handedness.
The result of subtracting 9999999999999998.0 from 9999999999999999.0 is 2.0. This result is due to the limitations in the precision of floating-point arithmetic in computers. When dealing with very large numbers, the precision can be lost, leading to such unexpected results.
these days it looks like ChatGPT generates and runs code behind the scenes for math questions (it used to be pretty bad at these kinds of math questions. you can click the little "view analysis" button to see the code it's running.
when I ask about this question it generates and runs Python behind the scenes, thus the incorrect answer.
Although it offers an explanation, which is something it could not do by just evaluating the expression. So the explanation is in its training set. And given that this is an understood flaw or limitation, it is possible it didn't even need to run any code.
I just don't believe there is any change of a free lunch. The entire point of sleep is to allow your brain to rest and process...spend a week getting only light REM sleep and you're gonna have a breakdown
I learned Fortran for a summer research job in college about 15 years ago. It was my first programming language and I used it to do some population modeling. I found an old Fortran book from when my dad went to school back in the early 70s and learned it from that which was a cool experience - I just had to skip over all the parts about entering your code into punch cards :D
> I just had to skip over all the parts about entering your code into punch cards
A few years ago I worked with a scientist who used a huge Fortran program with a long history. He described the lines in a text file that configured the program: "On the first card you put ... on the next card you put ..." They still call them cards! He was born after actual punch cards went out of use.
It's important that the CARVac (mRNA vaccine) part of the treatment targets specifically (though how specific, I dont know) dendritic cells which are "professional" antigen-presenting cells in the immune system. During an immune response, dendritic cells gobble up antigens and present them on their surface to help train the immune system so it's more trying to hijack that (very important) part of the immune response rather than training the immune system (and resulting in the death of the "infected" cells) in the way we're used to understanding mRNA vaccines.
Quoting from it: “ And that's what you see with the intramuscular dose as well: a good part of the dose goes to the liver, but in that case there's a substantial effect in the muscle tissue itself, and it's longer-lasting (out to about a week of protein expression)”
So, yes, an mRNA vaccine (the current ones, anyway) likely causes a fair amount of Spike protein to be expressed in your muscle tissue, but no one has noticed it causing the death of large amount of muscle tissue [0], and despite some searching, I haven’t found any evidence that anyone really understands what’s going on.
[0] People produce cytotoxic lymphocytes that detect bits of spike protein displayed by MHC1, much like CAR-T cells detect whatever they’ve been engineered to target on the surface of cells. Yet CAR-T (sometimes) kills massive numbers of tumor cells, and mRNA COVID vaccines apparently don’t cause the death of massive numbers of harmless cells that took up some of the vaccine. I’m curious why.
It’s been a while since I’ve been deep in the field, but the basics are you’ve got a first order action and a second order action.
T cells in this instance are directly cytotoxic. They find the ligand they bind to, and they begin lysis of the cell to kill it.
Meanwhile the intent of the mRNA vaccines that so many of us received over the last several years was to get B cells pumping out immunoglobulins which would soak up virus, reducing severity/duration of illness and allowing time for the bodies other defences to swing into action.
They’re not the same mechanisms of action (or at least they don’t rely on the same levers at the same strengths). Like everything in the human body, it’s a stochastic process so bits of everything are happening at once
Regardless of the intent of the vaccines, the evidence is fairly clear that they induce a CD8+ response, and the manufacturers seem fairly proud of this fact. Here a paper I found in a few seconds of searching:
Only thing I could find was a study in mice (which you should always take with a heap of salt) showing an increased incident, and a modest correlation in human studies but with a lot of caveats and a disclaimer that the study was in no way conclusive.
That is a good question. I couldn't find a citation for the original comment, but my guess would be either that they want an unbiased cohort OR, since its a bacterial treatment, they wouldn't want to risk the spread and possibly contaminating children after the trial was done.
In Nick Lane's Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, he talks about the importance of both methane and carbon dioxide and how they exist at the extremes of a complex metabolic oxidation-reduction cycle. Methane stores a lot of chemical energy in its C-H bonds which can be burned directly, or metabolized through repeat oxidation events to ultimately form CO2, which plants utilize with the help of the sun to form more CH bonds before ultimately breaking down into methane again. Hence, an exoplanet with both molecules in its atmosphere is a promising candidate in the search for life.
I wonder what life looks like on a planet which is over 8 times more massive than the Earth. Do animals have spines at all on a planet with almost 8g gravity? Does life even get to evolve into complex systems like animals under this much gravity? How about plants? Do they grow up or spread out instead?
If one day we get a visitor from this planet, they'll jump on our planet the same way human astronauts jumped on the Moon.
The planet's surface gravity is not 8 g. Surface gravity goes like mass over radius squared, and the planet's radius is 2.6 times Earth's, so the surface gravity will be 8 / (2.6)^2, or only about 1.2 times that of Earth.
No, the calculation I made did not assume constant density. I just used the direct Newtonian formula for surface gravity and plugged in the known mass and radius of the planet. (You could also use that known mass and radius to calculate the average density. But you don't need to do that to calculate the surface gravity.)
> If the planet were 8x mass but with same radius
But we know it isn't. We know the planet's radius is 2.6 times the Earth's radius. That's stated in the article.
That’s not possible for normal stable matter. The Earth’s density is about 5g per cubic centimetre. Iron is 7.8g per cubic centimetre. Osmium is the densest stable element at 22.6g per cubic centimetre.
Note that 8 times more massive doesn’t mean it has 8 times surface g, unless it’s exactly the same radius as the Earth. If the planet is larger you’re further away from the center of gravity.
For example, the Earth is 10 times more massive than Mars, but only has 2.6 times surface g.
The classic sci-fi "Mission of Gravity" explores what life would be like on a rapidly rotating planet where one experiences 3g at the equator and 700g at the poles.
As others have mentioned it wouldn't be 8 g. Life would be smaller. There would be speed differences. A lot of optimums and limits depend on how volume scales against area. Like the biggest terrestrial animals are limited a characteristic dimension (height or length) x being proportional to femur area x^2 being proportional to mass x^3. Mass grows proportional to x^3, femur strength (area) grows proportional to x^2, so you have a limit on how big a thing can be when you run out of available femur strength.
Higher gravity means this upper limit will be smaller. All sorts of similar scaling things will change optimum points for structural and energy reasons.
The gravity question is one I've pondered myself as a thought exercise. There's been discussions on how far up a plant can draw water as the defining limit to how tall a tree could grow. Some discussions as well on how tall an animal could grow based on how high blood could be pumped up. Which is a direction different from the structural support and sizes that I find interesting.
I can imagine an intelligent species on a high-G planet scratching their “heads” and wondering, as they surveil Earth, how anything could possibly survive on such a low-G planet.
Comparing rocky planets, density doesn't really matter at all. The range of possible densities for rocky planets is tightly constrained. What matters is the fact that surface gravity scales sub-linearly with regards to a planets mass.
M = 4/3*pi*r^3*d
r = (4/3*pi*d/M)^(-1/3)
a = GM/r^2
a = GM(4/3*pi*d/M)^(2/3)
a = G(4/3*pi*d)^(2/3) * M^(1/3)
We know that it's not (primarily) rocky though because the radius is 2.6 that of earth, but the mass is only 8 times. So it's about about 46% as dense as earth.
It would be really cool to run an experiment like this. Have some population of rats living in a large enclosure that is held in a large centrifuge for decades and see how they evolve.
Just put e. coli in an ultracentrifuge and do a few hundred generations of serial passaging and see what evolves, for starters. You could do this pretty cheaply without waiting decades or killing mammals. Apparently e. coli can proliferate happily at almost half a million g... https://phys.org/news/2011-04-bacteria-extreme-gravity.html#....
In addition to what others have said about the fact this planet doesn't have 8g at its surface, at 8g you could still have many lifeforms that exists on earth, but only the small ones. Gravity grows roughly as the cube of your size (because your volume does), but bones resistance only get n² (because it's the surface that counts), so the bone resistance / weight ratio is inversely proportional to your size.
Earth's surface gravity is really on the edge of what's feasible for chemical rockets; IIRC the limit is around 1.4g. Though as other commenters have mentioned, it's possible to have a much more massive planet that's also got a larger radius and thus has comparable surface gravity.
Some fun trivia—the planet Kerbin from Kerbal Space Program is the opposite case. It has a radius of 600km, versus Earth's 6378km, but is exactly 1 Earth g on the surface. This implies it's over 10x as dense.
I think an air-launched rocket would only be an incremental help. Chemical rockets on Earth are barely at 1/8th of orbital speed before they're out of most of the atmosphere (~60km altitude). You can't accelerate more without ascending because drag increases exponentially with velocity at a given air density.
Another way of looking at it—on a body with no atmosphere, the most efficient way to attain orbit is to be on the equator, point your spacecraft "east" (prograde to rotation), and elevate the nose just enough to avoid lithobraking on that mountain in the distance. If Earth were such a beast it would take roughly 7000 m/s delta-V to do this. IRL, because you need to get over the atmosphere first, it takes about 9000; the "gravity turn" is a compromise between losing energy to gravity/steering versus losing it to drag. So any exotic system—air launching a Saturn V is definitely exotic!—would help with efficiency, but I don't see that it would radically alter the situation.
In summary, as you said, the altitude is less important than the base velocity increase and atmospheric density reduction.
The former, because you're pushing maximum mass at t=0 (i.e. all the future fuel you need to burn), so any added velocity at rocket ignition time would compound throughout the rest of the burn cycle (or, to think of it another way, you've already overcome fully-fueled vehicle inertia with the benefit of atmospheric oxygen combustion).
Similar to how a multistage vehicle operates more efficiently, albeit without the benefit of atmospheric oxygen.
The latter, because you're essentially getting atmospheric density reduction for "free" (in terms of saving your on-vehicle propellant), and your propellant efficiency (in terms of propellant:velocity increase) scales better.
