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Comment re: picky (Score 1) 94

Irrelevant... I'm not even disagreeing with you in principle! I'm just saying, there are people who raise hell about every little thing they can find that isn't to the letter of some regulation or rule that was written down. And there are those who pick and choose their battles instead.

And like the boy in the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story, the people you're constantly running to with your complaints (AND those around you observing it happening over and over) will eventually decide you're just a little too demanding for comfort. After all, if everyone else is ok with what's going on and you're always the one who isn't? At some point, they ask why you're still working there instead of someplace else.

Comment The Cause of Global Warming? (Score 1) 44

Can't go lower than 0 degrees Kelvin

Yes you can but it is really hard to achieve and it is something hotter than any positive temperature since the higher energy states are more likely to be populated than lower energy ones. Indeed, if the OP has achieved this it's possible they might actually be the cause of global warming...

Comment Weather vs Climate (Score 4, Interesting) 44

Get ready for arguments of bad measurements or data manipulation.

No, just misleading presentation of the data. The headline should be "Europe breaks record for Hottest June 3 times in 3 years". Breaking one record is just weather, breaking two might be considered unlucky but when you break the same record over 3 consecutive years it's hard to see how that is not a very clear signal for climate change.

That's my biggest beef about the media reporting on climate change. They do not understand the difference between weather and climate and they tend to focus on reporting the weather as "evidence" of climate. Indeed, as this article shows, even when they are literally sitting on clear data that show significant climate change what they choose to focus on is how hot it was last month!

Comment Re:Alternative Models (Score 3, Interesting) 41

Axions are arguably not as elusive as WIMPS - they mix with photons and can be searched for with low temperature experiments on much smaller scales than most DM experiments. The difference is that we have not been pushing their detection for as long as we have with WIMPS but they are, I would argue, easier to detect and hence less elusive.

LIGO goes after the intermediate BH masses - substellar size mergers are detectable with their projected upgrades at closer distances where there should be enough to mergers to detect close enough to see them if these are Dark Matter. As the mass drops, the number of BHs needed to explain DM increase and so the chances of a much closer-by merger increase.

The frequency is determined by the orbital period and for larger masses this is lower giving a shorter sensitivity period for really large mass BH mergers. Lower mass BHs would generate a detectable signal for longer but at lower amplitudes hence the need for increased sensitivity to see them - at least according the last talk I saw on this. While the mass range of BHs that are still not ruled out is not well theoretically motivated, I'd argue we should still cover since theorists are not always right. Small BHs under ~5 x 10^11 kg can be ruled out as Dark Matter since their lifetime is short enough that most would have decayed via Hawking Radiation within the age of the universe.

Comment Know vs. Suspect (Score 5, Insightful) 41

Maybe DNA tests have confirmed, but we have known this for a while.

There is a difference between knowing something is true and suspecting something is true. This is why we invented science: it let's us test our ideas to see whether the data support or refure them. This is why it is always important to check what you think you know against reality: you don't know something until you have the data to support it and there is always a chance that you may learn something new and surprising.

Comment But it's not "really simple" .... (Score 1) 156

The issue they're talking about here has to do with artists affiliated with multiple rights-holders, causing a big increase in costs to stay legal, trying to play their music in an establishment.

I'm no expert on this, but I did play in a local band once and got a taste of the music licensing "scene". Bars and other smaller venues NEVER liked paying these rights-holders, because the entire thing felt like little more than a money-grab. It's one thing if you set up a digital jukebox at your bar that makes the patrons pay for each song they want to hear. Then you can offload the costs on them. But most places just wanted to have music playing in the background, such as your corner bar where the bartenders act as the DJs, playing the CDs they think set the right mood for the establishment.

It's exponentially worse when you have these artists who might have signed deals so one of their songs' rights were sold to a movie studio to use in a movie, another is getting streamed from a site that paid for rights to do that with it, and maybe a whole album they released contains those tracks in a shared arrangement plus the rights-holder who released the album holding rights to the rest of it.

Now, the bar or restaurant plays the CD of music and suddenly, they owe ALL these people a cut as the tracks 1 - 13 play in sequence from it.

How many people can listen to your music you're playing at home before it constitutes commercial use of it you owe rights' holders for? I've sure been at house parties in the past that had more people there than my local corner bar did! It's all pretty arbitrary and they just go after commercial establishments because that's the easier money to milk.

Comment Alternative Models (Score 2) 41

We have no obvious path, and the ones proposed so far are even more elusive.

That's not really true. Axions - that solve the strong CP problem - are looking like an increasingly likely candidate for Dark Matter. LIGO can also test the hypothesis that Dark Matter is just small Black Holes - while the source of such BHs is not theoretically motivated it's not experimentally ruled out yet and if they were found we all know the theorists would come up with ideas of where they came from!

While you could argue that none of these are "obvious paths" with the death of the WIMP miracle I would argue that WIMPs are not the obvious candidate anymore either.

Comment Michelson-Morley (Score 2) 41

True, but 100+ years ago when the Michelson-Morley experiment did not find any evidence of the aether that was supposedly the medium that transmitted light, it helped to completely reshape our way of understanding physics since it directly led to the discovery of relativity.

Negative results can sometimes be very profound...although for LUX that is not really the case. I would not describe this result as exciting but it is useful. To be exciting they would actually have to have found evidence of Dark Matter and increasingly it is looking like the WIMP model for Dark Matter is not the one that nature uses.

Comment Give me a real filter (Score 1) 29

I don't want to unsubscribe to this or that.

I want to give natural language filters like "I never want to see a political email again, from anyone"

Or maybe "If they make it sound urgent but it's not urgent at all, don't show it to me and remind me a week before the actual deadline if it's at all important".

As others have said, unsubscribe links often do not work and it's probably all the Gmail feature will use.

Comment intelligence is not the prerequisite to survival (Score -1) 61

Are they really looking for intelligence in these LLMs or are they missing something else that slows down their progress? Is it intelligence, that we are trying to get out of LLMs? If so, I think they can be easily at least as 'intelligent' as anyone, they certainly have more information than any one person does. Maybe what they are looking for and not finding just cannot be found that way, that's because it is not intelligence they are looking for but some form of organic animal like behavior? In that case they will be looking for a while, not until we have robots everywhere that are more than a camera on a car, something that can touch, taste, smell, feel pain, hunger, consume to sustain itself, will the new level of 'intelligence' appear.

Comment Re:Not surprising it's more toxic (Score 1) 85

> lawns came over from the UK but really took off in the US during the post WW2 housing boom

I either have grass or mud and weeds. So I reseed any bare spots every Spring.

Do you mean people tolerated slippery mud and thicket all summer before the 50's?

I get that motorized mowers make everything easier but I see plenty of pictures of nice homes and parks from the 19th century with cut grass at the Historical Society.

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