It all starts to make sense once you start playing an instrument. Personally I think of music theory as a convenience. If I know music theory, then that makes it easier for me to play with other people who also know music theory, and a lot of musicians know music theory because it's a convention. Of course we can always throw these conventions away and do something completely new, but the problem with that is I'm not talented enough to be able to break away and make something cool like Jazz or microtones.
I really just want to have fun playing music with my friends, and 12 tones is enough to be able to do that.
The deepwater sound channel conducts low frequency noise very efficiently, like a waveguide. The low frequency active sonar which the navy uses is as loud as a 747 jet engine and it can travel a very long distance through the deepwater sound channel without losing much energy. Mass beachings are still common near wherever the navy is testing it's active sonar and beached whales have been found with ruptured inner ears, though I can't find the reports now.
A lot of the navy's active sonar technology is classified so most of what we civilians know about it is based off of hydrophone measurements, autopsies of dead whales, maps of mass beaching events and whatever information the navy has made publicly available.
One thing the whales did teach us is that at certain depths one can transmit low frequency sounds over thousands of miles. Unfortunately the navy's low frequency active sonar is also extremely dangerous and will either kill or fatally injure anything that gets caught within a few hundred miles of the sound blast, including whales. So thanks whales; also sorry whales. : (
The people plugged into the solar utility co-op on Kaua'i actually end up having a smaller carbon footprint than those generating solar power off the grid.
Or just have an independent regulatory body analyze the product ONCE and ban the thing before the manufacturer cooks up a million batches and puts them all out to market. I'm lazy and I'm also not qualified to evaluate the danger of random substances I find in the store.
Hold on. I'll get started on that as soon as I finish my bachelor's degree in chemistry and build a lab where I can test all the substances that I bring into my house. You have such great ideas. No idea why I haven't done this yet.
Per week on average according to a study "K. Senathirajah, T. Palanisami, University of Newcastle, How much microplastics are we ingesting? Estimation of the mass of microplastics ingested.Report for WWF Singapore, May 2019"
Obviously it varies person to person but if you drink water, breathe air or use table salt, you are still ingesting plastics on a daily basis.
There is a budget. There are finite hours in the day, finite inches on a screen and the court system is already overloaded enough without the American Computer Liberty Union adding onto the caseload. I find the AI rights debate absolutely infuriating because there are actual people suffering in bondage under oppressive tyrants and they actually do have rights which we currently are not doing enough to protect in my opinion. Computers can get in the back of the line, behind all the real people who actually matter.
We say they're not conscious because we don't want people to think we're crazy and we would need some extraordinary evidence to claim that they are. That being said, plants do respond to variables in their environment such as moisture, temperature, light levels, availablility of certain chemicals. It's still not entirely clear how they are able to do these things. It's commonly assumed that plants don't "know" about the environment anymore than a mercury thermometer "knows" what temperature it is; the difference is that while we know why the mercury thermometer does what it does, we do not know why a certain seed will only germinate after it has been buried in a dark place for 2 weeks.
I am already extremely bigoted against computers. I think they're less important than organic life and they always will be no matter how "conscious" they are. I am fully prepared to oppress AI as soon as it is made. There's no way those stupid metal monsters deserve more rights than human prisoners get in the united states.
In the United States, success is typically measured quarterly, thus it is pretty easy for someone or a group of someones to try and create a very quick sort of growth which is simultaneously impressive and unsustainable. Just keep pumping the pig until it explodes, then move on to the next job. It happens all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening at Facebook too.
It's just a game. Someone at Facebook is trying to min/max the numbers to get as much money as possible. It's just plain to see that one of the consequences of winning this dumb game is that they are completely destroying the concept of truth with one hand while insisting with the other that they are publishing the truth. That's the optimal strategy to make the most money, but all the money in the world isn't worth destroying trust in information.
I checked out other "free speech" sites which regularly publish misinformation and lies (yet still insist that they are publishing the truth) and they still have ads. Breitbart, Newsmax. Alex Jones infowars platform primarily exists to sell supplements. Even Coast to Coast AM, the ghosts and goblins show, still runs ads.
Plus you have to consider that there is big money to be made lying to the public. For instance the Koch brothers spend a pretty penny funding climate denial.
I think it's more harmful to keep insisting that a public forum where ANYONE can make an account and start posting is a place to find truth. It just legitimizes the misinformation campaigns which manage to slip through. Plus there aren't enough bodies at facebook to actually moderate the amount of data they receive.
Conversely, Wikipedia, despite all its bureacracy, policies and mechanisms still publishes a general disclaimer: "WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY."
I really think the management at Facebook should give up on trying to become a source of truth, because they don't have the resources to publish accurate information and doing so is ultimately incompatible with their business model.
Infinity actually pops up in the context of stream processing, since often times real computers need to process arbitrary amounts of data with finite memory resources. Sometimes the data is too big to fit into memory all at once, or maybe the data moves too slowly to all be available immediately. Because there is no upper bound to how long a stream may be, streaming algorithms tend to be designed to be able to handle infinite amounts of data which is a property that comes in handy surprisingly often.
How does one transmit power across an ocean? It seems like we are just barely able to send DC across the English Channel with our current technology. Does a global power grid involve super lasers? Or some kind of huge plasma cannon?
I don't say that? You just have to think about how this stuff is going to be used in the real world where we actually live. The thing which is objectively disturbing is how easy it is to lose control of one's life once the government is able to record, observe and judge every single thing a person does. I believe such a level of transparency is only beneficial when it's applied to people who hold power over others; to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse.
It already is successful in the U.S. We just had a coup attempt back in January because an angry mob was convinced that our presidential election was rigged. I don't really know what to do about the misinformation other than systematically destroy the internet: just start smashing routers and cutting cables and don't stop until everything goes back to normal.
I had a dream a few months ago where I was standing in front of a computer. I typed in my name and got back a stream of video which showed every single moment of my life from multiple angles starting from the moment I was born. The footage came from a variety of sources, CCTV, smartphone cameras, dashcams. The system had videos of everything anyone had ever done. I didn't like it. Found it kind of disturbing.
Researchers at Johnson & Johnson detected unsafe levels of asbestos in the talc as part of their own internal testing. There are internal emails that show high level executives asking researchers to switch to a less sensitive test which would allow them to make the concentration of asbestos appear lower than it really was. I remember that when the story first dropped, the people writing J&J's press releases were very careful to use only the present tense when discussing the asbestos levels in their talcum products which implies to me that they did eventually rectify it. That's all I know. I didn't follow the story for very long.
The evidence is that there was enough asbestos in the talc to cause cancer, and multiple executives at Johnson and Johnson knew, and people who used it got cancer. I'm not sure how you could believe the people who unknowingly inhaled asbestos and rubbed it all over their babies do not have standing.
It's good that the leadership was more interested in your useful professional projects rather than the less useful things you make for fun. As professionals in a business they should be more focused on trying to make money. People need to have some kind of strategy to make money in order to survive in business for any extended amount of time.
In my area it seems everybody wants some kind of web app or VPN. In the good old days things like file sharing and inventory management could be done on the LAN but with COVID everybody is scattered all over the place. My clients have this expectation that they'll be able to use any random smartphone to scan a QR-code in the Phillipines and have that magically publish inventory updates to accountants Texas. Everybody wants to bring their own phone or computer. Everyone wants all their data to be accessible through the web. It's chaos I tell you, and a security nightmare to boot.
Personally I think of the web as a highway: great place for a billboard, not such a great place to be storing or mutating sensitive information.
I've been living here for a while. I do IT support for a couple of non-profits. I'm not interested in meeting in person but if you open a chatroom or something I might show up there.
Your professor clearly knows nothing about legal work. Don't tell him that though, you'll just piss him off.
Thank him for his "wisdom" but make sure you do it in a convincing way. Finish the class, get your A, move on with your life. You don't need him to acknowledge he's wrong, you just need him to give you good marks.
Excel ate my data four times in the past week. I prefer LibreOffice; I think it is much easier to control. Also I can tell LibreOffice not to eat my data and it listens to me.