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Comment Re:First steps? (Score 1) 86

They haven't had an unsuccessful one either. They're an amateure rocket group, that are working towards launching a person on a suborbital trajectory and that takes quite a bit of time, man power and money. They've come a remarkably long way since they started a couple of years ago, given their budget.

Comment Re:What's the Daenishmarkian word for 'scam'? (Score 1) 86

Exactly.

Kristan Von Bengtson is the co-founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, an amateure rocket group, that as its first goal are going to send a man 100 km up. Though they admittedly are a delightfully whacky, there's no scam.

See e.g. their launch of a guided rocket, test of their liquid engine (which went CATO during the test) or one of the many other videos available.

Comment Re:Good Question (Score 1) 655

Cats look a lot like rabbits after they've been cleaned. ;) I believe the alternative comes one of the world wars where people couldn't be so picky about where their protein came from. (Pidgeons are by the way known as roof-rats.)

Sure, there's biomagnification, but that applies as much to tuna, shark and other sea-living creatures that we eat without any ill effects. (If we don't overdo it of course.) I've been googling a bit myself, and though I did find a couple of recipes for dishes with cat, I found nothing to indicate that they are "highly toxic" as you previously stated. The closest I found was:
"Scientists have said that those eating wild cats could be exposed to harmful bacteria and toxins.",
which is true about all wild animals that we eat.

Comment Re:300 Hz (Score 4, Informative) 115

Human eyes "flicker" when they look at something. They will remain stationary for a time, then move quickly to another position. (See Saccade.)

The time for one of the fast movements between positions is in the order of 20 ms when reading, giving us a frequency of about 25 Hz. (It's only half a sine wave, so the period is 40 ms.)

Using the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, we get that we must sample the eye movement with a frequency of at least 50 Hz, otherwise we'll get aliasing. Now, bring in the engineering rules of thumb, which say that it's no good riding on the Nyquist limit, but you'll need to oversample the signal a bit in order to get a useable result (It of course all depends on what you'll be using the signal for. In feedback control you usually oversample by a factor of 8-20, and in signal processing in the neighbourhood of 2-8) and you end up with a samping frequency of 100 - 400 Hz.

So, in summary, 300 Hz sounds like a perfectly good sampling frequency, perhaps even a bit in the low end, depending on what you'll use the sampled signal for.

Comment Re:Ethics (Score 2) 99

A soul? Probably not. But then I've never seen any evidence for souls, so my best bet is that I'm as soulless as an average brick. It wouldn't be fair of me to look down on her for lacking something I don't possess myself.

Now, the question of if she's real is an interesting one, which has been discussed to death by various philosophers. The discussion usually goes something like:

Imagine that the test subject has a wholly human brain. There's no question whether the subject is real or not. Now, replace a single neuron with an artificial one. (In this case, simulate it on a computer and put cables in her brain to connect it.) Is she still real? Is she still a human? (I'd say yes, but others might say differently. Some might even say that she lost a bit of her soul.)

Repeat the procedure until she isn't real any more, or you run out of neurons to replace. If she stopped being real, at which point was it? what's so special about that particular point? (etc.)

Comment Re:"Liberty-Minded"? (Score 1) 701

Just to add to the historical anectode:

Henry Ford dealt the libertarianism/worker exploitation of that time a heavy blow, by not only introducing eight hour work days, but also doubling his workers pay in 1914. His company succeeded not in spite of him treating his workers well, but because of it.

I'm wondering if the time is ripe to see a Henry Ford of our time yet.

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