Pharmacists are trained to know about medications: that's the major reason why physicians can't usually dispense drugs directly.

Physicians are (or should be) well trained to practice medicine. They're good at diagnosing individual patients, choosing treatments, and monitoring progress. They're invaluable collaborators in medical research because they have direct contact with the patients, and they're the ones who you hope are ultimately going to be applying any advances. But an MD doesn't involve the necessary training to do science. Unfortunately society has confused the two.

I'm a medical scientist. It would be ridiculous, not to mention illegal, for me to diagnose and treat patients. I simply don't have the training. But it's equally ridiculous, though unfortunately not illegal, for an MD (absent specific scientific training like an earned PhD) to design, conduct and analyze a proper experiment. Yet major research grants today tend to go to MDs and it's getting extremely difficult to get a faculty job in medical research without an MD.

Interesting I like the hidden scroll bars. They free up some extra screen space and it's been years since I actually wanted to click on one. Using a trackpad or a mouse that has any sort of two axis scrolling interface makes them superfluous.

In medical research, the problem is that most of it is run by amateurs. Medical doctors receive somewhere between no and very little scientific education, and conduct research in their spare time while not treating patients, yet in North America an MD is considered not only sufficient, but actually desirable for a "clinician scientist." There are some excellent scientists who also hold MDs, but it's secondary to their scientific training. Clinicians have very creative ideas about how to do science.

Half? In many fields (like medical research) it's essentially all, and there's no "at some point." Many places offer one or two year starting faculty appointments, at the end of which you're expected to have a major grant (success rate is somewhere around 10% on those). So you better get busy writing applications. Once you're established, you better keep writing them, because now you've got a lab full of people depending on you for their livelihood.

https://scholar.google.ca/scho...

I agree though, the world would be a better place if journalists writing pieces on science were expected to provide references.

Sure. Except that extracting them and tossing them in a fluidic vortex to untangle them will kill you.

Oh no, we can -- and should -- speculate. Consider everything we can think of. Consider.

What we should NOT do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking the verbal fecal output of doom-criers as the inevitable or even as the likely.

Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats?

Frankly, that would be awesome.

Except that the opinion of people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk is definitely worth more than any "majority" thinking differently.

Nosense. That's just hero worship mentality. Very much like listening to Barbara Streisand quack about her favorite obsessions.

Bill Gates' opinion is worth more than the average person's when it comes to running Microsoft. Elon Musk's opinion is worth more than the average person's when building Teslas and the like. Neither one of them (nor anyone else, for that matter) has anything but the known behavior of the only high intelligence we've ever met to go on (that's us, of course.) So it's purest guesswork, completely blind specuation. It definitely isn't a careful, measured evaluation. Because there's nothing to evaluate!

And while I'm not inclined to draw a conclusion from this, it is interesting that we've had quite a few very high intelligences in our society over time. None of them have posed an "existential crisis" for the the planet, the the human race, or my cats. Smart people tend ot have better things to do than annoy others... also, they can anticipate consequences. Will this apply to "very smart machines"? Your guess (might be) as good as mine. It's almost certainly better than Musk's or Gates', since we know they were clueless enough to speak out definitively on a subject they don't (can't) know anything about. Hawking likewise, didn't mean to leave him out.

Within the context of our recorded history, it's not the really smart ones that usually cause us trouble. It's the moderately intelligent fucktards who gravitate to power. [stares off in the general direction of Washington] (I know, I've giving some of them more credit than they deserve.)

You are crazy. Here is an example of the democratic process working, yet you desperately have to search for some conspiracy theory to continue your irrational hatred of the USA.

No. It's an example of a republic not working. What history books tend to call "decline and fall" when it's happened in the past. It is what happens when governments completely lose sight of, and concern with, and respect for, the principles that brought them into being.

This is real life, not a Tom Clancy novel.

Oh, we know. In Clancy's works the US TLAs are the good guys. That's not been the case for decades now.

It's deep, but it's dry. And it has a sharp rock floor at about the 100 foot level.

Go to a library.

If you drop the (US), then quite often. In Canada the maximum punishment for a provincial crime is two years less a day. Anything more serious than that is federal.

It's true in that those universal statements aren't universally true. Grass isn't green in the winter here, it's brown. The sky is blue outside my window currently, but yesterday it was gray. There's an awful lot of water around here that isn't wet during the winter.

The Hycopter uses its frame to store energy in the form of hydrogen instead of air

This makes it sound like there are all kinds of quadcopters out there that are using air to store energy. This is news to me, although given the low density of compressed-air storage I'd be pretty surprised if it's true.

Anyone have any idea why anyone would say this, as opposed to "instead of batteries"?