Thanks, that is very interesting. But something smells fishy.

1. 1 false positive from "over 641,533 faces" seems too good to be true. Very few systems of any kind are that good, and facial recognition? I don't buy it. And that's an oddly specific number to be "over". It does not pass the smell test.

2. "Shows no bias" is similarly too good to be true and doesn't pass the smell test. Didn't Apple have some problem in the last year or two with trying to spiff up faces, where black skin didn't work as well? "No bias" is not credible.

3. "Zero unlawful arrests" is weasel words. Just because an arrest has conformed to various legal standards, such as having a warrant, being cautioned, not beaten up, etc, does not make it a proper arrest. Lots of people are acquitted at trial after having been lawfully arrested.

4. The rate has not changed. Well, yes, it must have, if this is the false positive rate, since it presumably once upon a time had 0 false positives and now has 1, and the denominator has been increasing all this time unless the first 641,533 faces were all recognized in the first day.

5. The only credible answer. There may well be no national false positive rate.

But it's an interesting response. Thanks.

I don't know what she's been doing. But from the fact that it took 40 years to track her down, and that only because a non-cop found her, I'd say the evidence is strong I know what she *hasn't* been doing -- terrorism, or training terrorists.

Seriously, if she's been living for 40 years training terrorists who haven't done anything to draw attention to themselves or her, she's either been running a false flag terrorist school with the government's connivance, or she hasn't been running a terrorism school.

If society wants to punish her for what she did 40 years ago, fine. But stop pretending the police took a dangerous terrorist off the streets.

If she's been in hiding for 40 years, she's not exactly violent any more. Her capture has nothing to do with public safety at this point, more for revenge and closing the record with some HooRah We Got Her theatrics.

Might DOES make right; that's how government works. One definition is a monopoly on "legal" violence within their territory, although they aren't very good at it, considering how many riots there were in 2020 and the two autonomous zones where city governments surrendered their monopoly for a spell.

I'm sure you're familiar with the countdown protocol, all the pre-flight checks, etc. These power up a range of subsystems, motors, etc, so that everything can be verified prior to ignition itself. The complete sequence takes a very long time. Under normal flight conditions, you can't check for absolutely everything (instrumentation is mass, and mass is the enemy) but there's still a lot. However, during an engine test, you can pack a lot more sensors in.

This is where you'd want to be spotting loose connections, pumps that aren't quite even, pressures that aren't as steady as they should be, vibrations that shouldn't be there or do not match expectations, turbulent flows, and so on.

At ignition, it takes between 3-6 seconds to go from stopped to 90% thrust. For humans, that's near-instant. For a computer sensor that's operating a million samples per second, that's 3-6 million readings. A computer performing a billion calculations per second shouldn't have much difficulty in comparing 3 million readings against model predictions and determining if both the values themselves and the rate of change at each point such a sensor exists are all good. Emergency shutdowns during those first 3 seconds are perfectly viable.

Vibrations are the ones that are likely the most interesting, because those are likely to change before something breaks, not sure how fast you can make infrared sensors, but that's also an area where things are likely to alter before point of failure.

If you want to make the case that government should use facial recognition, you'll need some real data.

* One success ... how many false positives -- how many people were wrongly tagged? How many false negatives -- how many times was this woman seen but not tagged? Was she a hermit and this was her first public appearance in 40 years?

* How recent were the pictures of her which were the basis of her being tagged? Do you really want us to believe the only success story you have is based on artificially aging her photograph by 40 years?

Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.

If that turns out to be the case, we get to find out something about what reshaping the brain means.

Whilst that is perfectly true, it is questionable as to whether it is useful or necessary. If a rocket is being tested, then logically it should be heavily instrumented. If it's heavily instrumented, and the instruments are themselves competently designed, there is no obvious reason why the engine can't be auto-cut when problems start to arise. And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

The values may have independently been "within permitted range", but if the pattern of those values doesn't make sense, then something has gone wrong. There may well also have been subsystems that were insufficiently instrumented.

"They're the experts" is often an irrelevancy - we lost TWO shuttles and crews to political decisions, when the experts on the ground were ignored. DeHavilland lost endless Comets to basically the same blunder, when political decisions by management over the reality of metal fatigue overrode analysis by actual experts. Improper monitoring and inadequate computer controls will be from a burden of costs and time (both political constraints, not engineering constraints). As, indeed, will improperly manufactured parts, improper software (anyone rememebr Arianne IV's mishap due to buggy software?), improperly-defined constraints, and inadequate quality controls.

The experts are usually either well aware of mistakes or afforded no means of detecting them.

I see no reason not to think this was anything other than a management blunder.

If you're willing to settle for only $30 million, that should be enough to obtain a birth certificate and proof of residency in some remote village.

He told his Ferengi superior that he could keep the latinum.

This raises a very important question. If the CIA are taking shortcuts and making assumptions about anything, we should not be making assumptions ourselves that the CIA aren't doing the same elsewhere. I am, however, still waiting for biolabs and WMDs to turn up in Iraq - something for which they appear to have ALSO taken one person's unsupported word for. They also ratted out their own officers in retaliation for questioning the existence of "yellowcake" (that turned out not to exist).

I'd be wary of claiming there was a pattern, but... They do seem awfully incompetent.

Agreed. Deliberate adding of surface roughness (and even multiple surfaces) have been used in racing yachts for many decades. I think they started doing this in the 90s.

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.