Tag: Constants and Variables
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Similar oddity
Thinking about the oddity of Quisp, a mainstream product happily simulating UFOs and cheerfully treating UFOs as real for 60 years, while the government loudly maintained the opposite and sucked up all information that might prove reality. Avi’s project is odd in the same way. He’s totally convinced that his comet is a remnant of…
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Thinking like an astronomer
Avi is an astronomer, so it’s not shocking that he thinks like an astronomer. The ultimate goal of his project: = = = = = I am often asked why the Galileo Project aims to collect its own data on UAP rather than rely on numerous images taken by cell phone cameras. The reason is…
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Black-boxing Brinkley
Quoting from Frank Edwards’s career biography yet again: = = = = = In 1930 the AMA delivered a bolt from the blue: Brinkley’s goat-gland operation, they said, was an impossibility. It could not be performed as Brinkley claimed. Brinkley immediately filed suit against AMA seeking damages of $600,000. “I am not a member of…
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Morse is music
A column from Telegraph and Telephone Age in 1910. Morse is a way of speaking and hearing language, so it ‘logically’ should be processed in the same parts of the brain as spoken language. These 1910 observations indicate that Morse occupies the same areas as music. Experienced operators were not bothered at all by general…
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It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
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Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as…
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The Endicott experiment
One of the old FOIA files on the Black Vault site is an account of an Air Force experiment in telepathy. The researchers were working out of Hanscom AFB in Mass. They built a complicated set of computing machines in an attempt to eliminate the human judgment factors in the usual JB Rhine picture-drawing experiments.…
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Yet another grandma was right
Every fucking thing we learned in school was criminally false and wrong. Our “science” books mercilessly mocked Schiaparelli’s canals, Lysenko’s acquired characteristics, the old wives tales about stress influencing genes, and phrenology. Now, unsurprisingly, we have proof that the phrenologists were right. The shape of a face and skull does tell you a lot about…
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Yang is dumb.
Andy is at it again, pretending to solve our problems by introducing fancy gimmicks in the “voting” system. As far as I can tell from his glitzy but vague website, he doesn’t have any actual plans or proposals for economics or industry or peace. He just wants rank-choice “voting”. Pre-Yang nasty complicated voting: Yang’s New…
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
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Some fishy rambling on AI
Creativity can be measured commercially. A new product gains profit when it serves some people better than an existing product. Duane Jones emphasized the need to find your niche and defend it. An older product generally broadens and simplifies to be halfway pleasing to a broad range of cultures and places and personalities, which leaves…
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Might be on the right track
Most research on human vs chimp misses the point. Most research focuses on physical differences like skull shape and jaw shape to explain why humans speak and apes don’t. Feedback ‘factors out’ such differences. Within modern humans there are similarly large differences in size and shape of bones, and we all speak. Here’s a physical…
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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
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Will be interesting to watch
Japan’s former PM Abe has been shot and killed while making a campaign speech for his political protege. We constantly jabber about Historic Firsts and Unprecedented Events. This is the real thing, and this is going to throw a monkeywrench into a lot of global calculations. Abe was the perfect globalist and neocon in some…
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It’s just QC
Chart from the latest Gallup poll: This is a good sign of sanity on the human side. Most people understand who’s human and who’s demon. There’s some predictable R/D difference on media, since media is part of DNC. But even Ds are mostly negative (30% confidence) on newspapers and TV. Last week I was puzzling…
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