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Comment Getting paid to play is brilliant. (Score 1) 46

There is nil utilitarian value in finding the wreck, but immense entertainment value because the public (as with Titanic) find exotic unusual death a fun distraction from their daily life.

Once found it will provide an excuse for exciting movies (what's more appealing to the woke crowd than a female pilot in that era?) and other wank.

The searchers get funded to dive in the Pacific, a very cool techy vacation. Kudos to them if they find the Electra, but if not nothing of value is lost and a documentary to be gained.

Comment Re: Don't be overconfidence battery tech progressi (Score 1) 120

As youâ(TM)ve pointed out many times, the UK is much smaller than Canada, and this means that EV charging is incredibly straightforward for me

In another slashdot post about EVs, a poster was saying that it 'feels like' it would be impossible to drive across Canada in an EV in the middle of winter.

I pointed out that A Better Route Planner exists, and he doesn't need to 'feel' anything about it, he can just go look. And yes, it turns out that with a modern EV, even in the middle of winter, you can drive cross country with zero issues. Charging added something like six hours or so on to the several thousand KM trip, and that assumed all fast-chargers and no overnight charging at a hotel or anything.

The minute you switch from that mentality to âoeIâ(TM)ll charge while I do something elseâ, it all just slots into place. So on road trips, I charge when I eat or while Iâ(TM)m parked up for the day (or overnight).

Yup. You *have* to change your mentality away from 'refueling is an activity/event in and of itself' to 'refueling is something that happens while the car is parked anyway while I'm sleeping/shopping/pissing/eating/whatever.'

Comment Re:This guy had a different experience (Score 1) 120

treating EVs as thought theyâ(TM)re inconvenient ICE vehicles instead of adapting your modus operandi even the slightest iota will lead to you having a shit experience.

Truth. I see this attitude a lot.

"I don't want to sit around for half an hour while my car charges." Yeah, that's why we don't do that; we plug in the car and wander off to do something.

But even *if* it's a charger in the middle of nowhere and you're stuck sitting there charging, I'd rather half an hour in the car, while the heater's running, than standing outside for a few minutes in -30c plus wind chill pumping gas.

Comment Re:WRONG USE PERCENTAGES HERE (Score 1) 68

Mice live about 18 months. A 10% increase is about 2 months. Some idiot sees the 10% increase and thinks 10% of 80 years = 8 years more human life. Nope. Longer lived creatures tend to benefit far less from these things. If something adds 2 months to a mouses life span, it will likely add about 2 months to a human's life span, not 8 years.

Also, the mice got something like 500mg of psilocybin per kg of body mass. For humans, 280 mg/kg is considered a lethal dose (LD50). It's really unclear how this research could transfer to humans.

OTOH, it's a starting point. Rather than concluding that this means humans should trip on massive doses of shrooms to live longer, we should think that further research may elucidate the specific mechanisms and yield other insights that can transfer -- and might even be vastly more effective.

Comment Re:Hallucinating (Score 1) 68

I'll trust psychonautwiki over your random speculation. Not to be mean, but I would like to add that if you're not familiar with it you probably don't have that much authority on the subject.

I agree on the matter of authority... but if you read the link, it largely suports what garyisabusyguy said. The link says:

the most commonly used mushroom is Psilocybe cubensis, which contains 10–12 mg of psilocybin per gram of dried mushrooms

Which is exactly what garyisabusyguy said.

It also says:

For example, if you want to consume 15 mg psilocybin (a common dose) from cubensis with 1% psilocybin content: 15 mg / 1% = 15/0.01 = 1500 mg = 1.5 g

But it also says that "strong" and "heavy" doses are 2.5-5g (25-60 mg psilocybin) and 5+g (50-60+ mg psilocybin). There's also a bit of inconsistency on the site, because if you look at the page devoted to Psilycybe cubensis, it gives different, slighly larger numbers. It says a common dose is 1-3g, a strong dose is 3-6g and a heavy dose is 6+g.

That all accords pretty will with what garyisabusyguy said, assuming his experience is with people who take doses at the high end of common and greater.

Of course, his ranges still suggest a maximum dose of ~84mg. A typical lab mouse weighs about 30 g = 0.03 kg, so they're taking a dose of 15 mg / .03 kg = 500 mg of psilocybin per kg of body weight. If an 80 kg human takes an 84mg dose, that's 1.05 mg of psilocybin per kg of body weight. So the mice are getting 475 times what appears to be a quite heavy dose for humans.

Further, the LD50 (dosage that is lethal 50% of the time) of psilocybin is 280 mg/kg of body weight. So the mice in the experiment got nearly twice what is usually considered a lethal dose in humans. It's unclear to me how or whether this can apply to humans.

Comment Science can be done outside the US. (Score 4, Insightful) 58

The sooner the culturally inevitable decline of the US is accepted the better rest-of-world can succeed it. Needing the US for anything is a long hangover from WWII destroying real and potential competition.

The world should be doing its own research to keep the fruits thereof from Wall Street's grubby tentacles. I grew up through the space race but now see no reason the US deserves to hog research it can only use to benefit our owning kleptarchs.

Comment I agree - don't copy voices (Score 1) 33

Personally, I'd expand a bit. Two games I've played recently are No Man's Sky, an open world SciFi survival craft game, and "Still Wakes the Deep", which is more a horror themed action visual novel.
Still Wakes the Deep is completely voiced, but utterly, absolutely, on the rails - there's always only one way forward. Thus, replayability factor is lacking.
No Man's Sky isn't voiced at all, but would likely make a lot of people cringe because of a large but still limited number of dialogues. Plus, well, probably whatever mechanic they use for the translation device, because you don't start knowing the alien languages. NMS has the "hundreds" of characters.
So I could see AI being used to not only create "hundreds" of different voices for all the characters, but to write different dialogue for them, even if it is variances on common themes.
Go from basically 100 characters with maybe different appearances to unlimited characters with like 100 archetypes.

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