mannykannot

So maybe there are 13 other people in the same situation, except that they accepted the consolation prize? This may not be over... (and I would guess the decision here may well be appealed, anyway.)

Though the article does not mention it, there does not appear to be any dispute over what the program displayed to the plaintiff, and I would guess that the company is not asserting that the plaintiff's claims are fraudulent.

I was wondering that too, and that led to the question whether, without an atmosphere, all radio communications at any wavelength would be strictly line-of-sight. It turns out, however, that the moon has something of an ionosphere, though I don't know whether it would support over-the-horizon radio (or, for that matter, whether it tends to interfere with the accuracy of GPS, as it does on Earth.)

https://phys.org/news/2011-11-mystery-lunar-ionosphere.html

Indeed, but lip service is grudgingly paid to the notion that we are not, lest we succumb to the delusion that we know what's good for us.

It would take more subtle examples, embedded within what is mostly fallacy-free text, to evaluate the absolute and relative utilities of the two approaches to the problem - or, to put it another way, we should not hastily generalize from their performance on a few straightforwardly fallacious sentences.

The crash kicked up a lot of snow into the air, making me wonder if that helped suppress the fireball, as it seemed to die down very quickly. On thing leading to me think this might have happened is video from the recent firefighting in California, where the spray from the firefighting aircraft seemed to snuff out the flames as soon as it descended into them, before it reached the ground.

News of these things does come out from time to time, usually over a shorter time period, and these create embarrassment, shock, pain and anger, but has any had significant substantive consequences? Here is a hypothetical one to consider: FDR secretly informed Hitler that the US would support an invasion of the USSR - how far would be the consequences of such a revelation reach, if it were revealed today?

Despite Musk's whining about the FAA, SpaceX is not facing any difficulties getting its rockets launched from land, so there's no reason, at this point, to add something else with the potential to slow things down.

It did not even want to build a proper launchpad at Boca Chica, which did not work out so well.

Definitely - this launch is mentioned in the article:

"As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward the vessel’s own command center, known as the island.

"“I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.”"

The answer given in Stack Exchange and the Wikipedia article linked to in one of its comments provide explanations, though whether you find them convincing is, of course, up to you!

The Wikipedia article says there are solutions to the classical equations of motion: one in which the ball remains stationary forever, and then all those where, after an arbitrary period during which the ball is stationary, it rolls off the dome in an arbitrary direction. What makes this indeterminate is that the analysis of a single initial state yields multiple possible outcomes.

The article goes on to say "Notice in the second case that the particle appears to begin moving without cause and without any radial force being exerted on it by any other entity, apparently contrary to both physical intuition and normal intuitive concepts of cause and effect, yet the motion is still entirely consistent with the mathematics of Newton's laws of motion so cannot be ruled out as non-physical."

This raises the question of what we mean by 'physical', and whether theories of physics define the physical or describe something existing independently. I will leave that to the more philosophically minded; for myself, I will just note that as there are cases (and physically realizable ones at that) where classical physics gives answers that are not merely indeterminate but outright wrong (the ultraviolet catastrophe being a canonical example), I don't think anything of consequence hangs on this particular case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome#Solutions_to_t...

There is Nuclear lake on the Appalachian trail in Dutchess county, NY. Its name is or is not accidental, depending on how you look at it.

https://www.scenichudson.org/explore-the-valley/outdoor-adve...

Race is not mentioned in the article. Ironically, you are doing the very thing, here, which you claim spoils it.

The mention of culture is not out of place in the article, as the marshmallow test (which features quite prominently in it, including in its actual title) does have different outcomes in different cultures, and, in addition, it is hardly controversial to suppose that the way children are brought up is an important factor in establishing and maintaining a culture's cohesion.

Indeed - at no point does the article quote a geologist expressing surprise at the result. There are quotes saying, in effect, that new data overthrows or requires modification of a previously-held conjecture, but that is not the same as surprise. Experts in a given field are usually well aware of how conjectural a hypothesis is, as that is where current research is focused.

You have a point - there are probably no defined rules about whether security risk rules apply when POTUS is employing someone to do something illegal or unconstitutional.

If anyone gets to judge, however, it will be SCOTUS, not voters. It's hard to guess, right now, whether that's a plus for security.

How LLMs tackle addition is an interesting question in its own right, independently of whether their accuracy provides a metric for judging their ability relative to that of typical humans.

Other sources have pointed out that this will not help agriculture at this time, and just throws away water which might be sorely needed later in the year. In addition, the way it was performed risked damaging the downstream water-distribution infrastructure.

At best, this is just another example of the sort of nonsense we can expect from an administration which will not speak sense to power, but it could also be seen as a thinly-veiled threat to California and all other states dependent on resources controlled by the federal government.

Here's a case in which a dog, already knowing the name of more than a hundred objects, associated a previously unknown name with a previously unknown object. I don't know if there are any controlled, replicated studies demonstrating this.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-smartest-dog-nova-sp...

This would not imply a facility for language understanding and resoning to anything like the extent we have, but it is the sort of preliminary step that might have opened the door for language to evolve in our ancestors.

Sorry if that's not clear - I was referring to phreeza's reply to your question and the link you had posted below it, which is as far as the discussion had gone at that time. The refractory period, and its role in suppressing reflections, is mentioned in the reference you provided a link to.

That's an interesting question. One follow-up question I would have is whether impedance matching is a relevant concept here, given that the model has no inductance (I'm guessing that's because the flow of charge is in the form of ions moving radially through the membrane. If neurons were more like transmission lines, would we be susceptible to interference from distant lightning?)

I also skimmed the page and saw that equation 20 is not a wave equation (as the article says, it is a diffusion equation.) Again, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to say whether that renders the question of impedance matching moot.

Update: I see from the sibling thread and its excellent reference that the refractory period, where the sodium and potassium ions are being pumped back to their starting positions, suppresses reflection.

I think it would have been cool for SpaceX to put a teapot in the roadster's trunk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

An alternative view on the two practice approaches (or go-arounds?) is that he still made a shallow approach over the fantail.

The lack of communications means that the pilot could not be warned of the specific difficulties and dangers of landing on a moving aircraft carrier, over and above the ordinary difficulties of a short-field landing of the sort every pilot is supposed to be proficient in. In that circumstance, my guess is that minimizing the novel dangers would be the way to go, but, as you say, we are all just guessing here.

Yet the pilot apparently made a shallow approach. I suspect that was due to having not landed on a moving target before - setting up the approach for where the ship was, not where it was going to be when he got there.

At first sight, it might seem the situation is just like a high-wind landing on an airfield, but there is a difference: on an airfield, if you line up for, say, a 3-degree approach, but the wind is stronger than you anticipated, you will need more power, it will take longer, and your descent rate will be reduced, but your flightpath will be as planned, with that 3-degree slope. In the case of a ship moving away from you, not only will you need more power than anticipated, but the path you follow will be shallower than planned, as it ends further away than anticipated.

I mean just pointing its flight deck into the wind with sufficient speed to hold it there, as opposed to heading into it at 25 knots (which required firing up six boilers, so I assume it was not initially steaming at that speed.)

It was always possible that the airplane could have gone off the bow with insufficient speed to do a go-around, but it might also be the case that the shallow approach was a consequence of trying to land on a target moving away, and that made it difficult to spot-land. My guess is the latter, though of course I can't prove it.

With a 40 kt wind down the deck, one would need the brakes to avoid being blown backwards off it, or into a reverse groundloop which might well lead to the same outcome.

As the article mentions, the most dangerous aspect of the landing may have been the turbulence and downwash over the fantail. Given that this was a STOL airplane (and also given that the pilot would have had no experience landing on a target moving at almost his stall speed) it might have been safer if the ship just pointed its flight deck into the wind.

I recall from flight school one instructor who liked to demonstrate that the aging Cessna 150 he was often assigned to could be landed in the width of a runway (as performed at an intersection.)

I see what you mean. According to this map, you can get from the 18th. street station to the 1st ave. stop on the L in ten minutes, but not from 14th. street.

In the last paragraph, the author of the post you are replying to is saying something entirely consistent with what you are saying here. The title of the article, on the other hand, is suggesting something less nuanced, and ks2048's main point seems to be that putting arrows on the charts at 1971 does nothing to support the view that a singular tipping point occurred in that year.

My first thought was 'ah, yes.' My second thought was 'but what about nonlocality?'

Plus that they are near the ecliptic - comets may only be visible from one hemisphere (often plus some, but not all, of the other), even though naked-eye visible comets are typically further away than Venus.

You will not see this alignment if you are at the south pole or other points sufficiently south of the antarctic circle, either, given the time of year.

I don't think it then had the near-mythic reverence it now commands, and the theft was partly responsible for bringing its current status about.

I was curious as to whether its north pole is always inclined away from the sun, as it could be if mercury is in synchronous rotation around the sun. It turns out that it is not: it has a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance, rotating three times for every two orbits. On the other hand, its axial tilt is small - only 0.034 degrees [1], which I suppose means that the pole is always close to the terminator - but, as the angular size of the sun as seen from mercury is always a bit over a degree [2], I think that means some fraction of the sun's disk would always be above the horizon at the north pole (unless it is in a crater.)

Update: From this map [3], the pole appears to be on the rim of the crater touching crater Tolkein on the latter's right (see ahazred8ta's comment for a link to an annotated copy of the photograph), and in the photograph, that part of the rim is illuminated.

[1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/mercuryfact....

[2] Data from [1] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun:

   Solar radius: 7e8 M
   Mercury aphelion: 7e10 M
   Angular radius at aphelion = arctan 0.01 = 0.57 degrees.

[3] https://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3404/sim3404_sheet2_.pdf