usenet weirdness

Nice experiment. As for the rest: Much bleating, little wool.

AFAICS they can't even add 2 + 2 = 4,

Jan

Well, to put it bluntly, Max Planck was, and you are not.

Depends on what you want 'proper' to mean. Whatever, it was adequate. (but with a heavy accent)

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" (probably not Albert Einstein)

Who cares about your guesses?

Guess you never will,

Jan

If there is any science being done by other species, or non-human aliens, we haven't heard about it yet.

Religions trains humans to behave as it likes, and uses them as tools to spread the faith, but science isn't actually a religion, though it might look that way if you didn't have any personal experience of the way it works. It certainly doesn't go in for elaborate rituals - though my friend who happens to be a professor liturgy would probably try to argue that Nobel prize awards come close.

Because I meet a lot who are looking for jobs. Coders mostly.

I give them a couple of very simple whiteboard puzzles and it's obvious that most don't understand electrical basics.

AI terrifies them, rightfully so.

They won't

Small and large, $200 Xilinx SOCs and Efinix $9 parts. But because he doesn't really understand electronics and can't read schematics, he has to be micro-managed.

There seem to be lots of jobs like that, people sandwiched into a very small range of the abstraction stack.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The two main phases of electronic design are

1. Having a zillion crazy ideas

and

1. Picking one to execute with enought discipline to get right the first time
2. And be willing to sometimes loop back to step 1.

Not many people are good at both, and even fewer are good at that last step.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That sort of inverts what's going on. Some scientific discoveries could be exploited by terrorists to kill lots of people, and that knowledge is doled out on a need to know basis.

There are all sorts of people doing scientific research for all sorts of reasons. Academies teach all kinds of knowledge, and science is just one of the branches of knowledge they cover.

Academic researchers are particularly enthusiastic about publishing their research - they want to attract attention so that students enrol in their courses, industry and the health care business funds their research and so on. A great deal of scientific research gets done by industry, and published (sometimes after being patented).

Society does have an interest in seeing it published - the patent system was set up to encourage people to publish their inventions and collect royalties from people who can exploit them.

I'm sure there a fat cats who are doing well, and don't want new inventions to cut into their markets. The fossil carbon extraction industry is precisely that sort of fat cat, and they'd be much happier if science wasn't documenting the relentless progression of anthropogenic global warming. They do spend a lot on climate hange denial propaganda, but they don't seem to have been all that effective in shutting down research on the topic.

This has all been true for a very long time. The enlightenment loosened the grip of elderly conservatives on public opinion

That's the thing about theoretical physicists. You don't know what they are going to discover. Some of the stuff they have discovered has been remarkably useful, and any group that persecutes them and encourage them to go off and work for some other group runs the risk of missing out on some useful discoveries. The Nazi regime didn't like Jewish theoretical physicists, so they went off to American and contributed to the Manhattan project.

It's analog, ....

Thanks for helping bring examples of what, hidden in the box, current theory's only account is "quantum" computing.

"Spooky action at a distance", then.

Queen Elisabeth II never published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. You'd probably have to have owned a share in one of her race-horses to be comparably close.

She saw my grand-father at the Calgary Stampede. That'd give me a three I suppose.

In the old days some kings ended up having lots of descendants. This is without even getting into exceptions to the "one sperm / one egg" doctrine, or "poly-cystic ovarian syndrome".

The deMoivre-Euler-Gauss after Bombelli complex numbers, and Cartan after Bombelli complex numbers, then about separately the Gaussian integral and the Cartanian rotations and reflections into the hypercomplex, about the attachment via the Cartesian coordinates the diagram, has there are various ways of looking at it.

General relativity did pull together quite a bit of earlier work.

I got taught about "ordered tuples", but didn't ever have use them.

Linear algebra about vector spaces is totally usual.

"Ordered tuples" of scalar multiples of vector bases essentially are models of structures of values of vectors. So, "using vectors" essentially employs them.

The quaternions end up being fungible, and then later tractable, about "sensibility, fungibility, and tractability", and not just because their products model taking rotations in fewer arithmetic operations, also because they can avoid the "gimbal lock" of matrix multiplication of vectors about the usual notions of affine space and matrix multiplication of representations of vectors as about the translation, rotation, skew, and shear.

That said, the framework is more complicated with regards to usual notations of position and orientation.

Mostly "gimbal lock".

Apparently if you let AI loose on a military problem it is unusually likely to want to use nuclear weapons.

Large language models do include text from all over the place.

Sometimes called the radio shack problem, early models of self-guided munitions were given points to reach their goals. Anyways, one time the operator sent it a signal to test an error mode, and the missile turned right back around and hit the shack, in, "anger".

Maybe they should have to watch a bunch of "Wile E. Coyote" first.

A usual dichotomy between "goal-seeking" and "risk-aversion" is among reasons why greedy idiots aren't given "launch codes". Prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, and so on.

Saying that "AI" is only a generative result of the vectorization and arithmetic coding and brainless would be seriously underestimating usual models of mechanical inference after models of cognition.

Such notions as transmission lines can be separated from the notions of "q-bits", as supposedly to compute all the solutions at once after superposition, where that's plainly like just the massive-wide parallel superscalar and after the surface acoustic wave transducer like the D-Wave that was built its theory by G.A. Maugin etc.

The Batavia-Baikal neutrinophone achieved signal transmission directly through the Earth in approximately zero time.

That's not what's going on. A group of somewhere between a hundred and about one hundred and fifty people is a many as most people want to deal with. "Competitors" don't get excluded - they just get contacted less often, and by only some of the core group.

But he did like Einstein's 1905 papers.

Sounds a bit improbable. Did anybody ever write this down back when he might have done it?

That may be your personal opinion, but it doesn't seem be widely shared.

So was Einstein.

But there are grade of smartness. Einstein clearly wasn't weak enough in grammar or expression for his errors to attract much attention.

People who can remember where particular bits of paper are don't need to keep their desks all that tidy.

And my guess is that your judgement isn't all that reliable.

You might think about working on your understanding of what the article actually said. If you got to be as good at physics as Max Planck was, you should be able to work out why Max Planck liked it. Quite a few people who were less impressive than Max Planck also liked it, so a lower level of competence might get you there.

A much more likely explanation is that he didn't fancy becoming some kind of figurehead to be rolled out on ceremonial occasions.

It would have distracted him from the scientific work that he kept on doing all his life.