This brings up the question about whether there are hereditary information transmission methods other than DNA. There are so many things we ascribe to “instinct” that might be information transmitted from parent to offspring in some encoded format.
Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.
> what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
However this specifically works in humans — and considering the diversity of actual human preferences includes, amongst many other things, non-existant dragons* — the first I heard of the term "superstimulus" was with the example of certain beetles that kept trying to copulate with beer bottles:
* Humans must have something guiding us, or we'd all be (a) bisexual and (b) equally often aroused by dragons as by those we could actually have a child with; the fact that dragons happen at all is simply an indication that our brains are likely using a very simple set of heuristics to get there, and simple heuristics is totally a thing that DNA could encode
Often human sexuality is rooted in power dynamics and these things are associations. I certainly am attracted to powerful women wearing whatever style of clothing my primary school teacher had...
Power is one of many aspects of human sexuality, but it's also part of much broader human social dynamics, and I have not seen evidence that power dynamics are unusually predominant in sexual vs non-sexual relationships.
I wouldn't say it's predominant. It just influences it, and for some people it's all about that and much less about anything like appearance or the sex itself.
I recall hearing about newborn birdsongs being learned "in utero" (not sure if quite the right term but lets go with that). In that case the channel for transmission was sound. It was apparently used as a shibboleth against brood parasite egg replacement. If the baby didn't sing the song that was being sung to it then the baby got abandoned by presumably disappointed parents. I suppose it could also be a 'health test' of sorts since sufficiently deformed or disabled offspring would also fail.
Parental teaching and learning is a spectrum and not a binary. We've found with relocating deer (to similar but not identical environments) doing worse until learning occurs over a few generations and they catch up. Animals may not be as intelligent as us but their ability to learn and adapt should not be underestimated.
You might be interested in epigenetic inheritence. We do know that some epigenetic marks are passed down but its still very much unknown how much heritable information is encoded in epigenetics.
While histones and methylation aren't DNA themselves, they're certainly incapable of functioning without DNA. I'd assume the parent poster was referring to further still mechanics.
> Does the fundamental limit of the amount of classical information encodable in the human genome (even with epigenetics & simultaneous encoding) imply a vast capacity for learning survival-beneficial patterns in very little time, with very few biasing priors?
> [Fundamental 'gbit' requirement 1: “No Simultaneous Encoding”:] if a gbit is used to perfectly encode one classical bit, it cannot simultaneously encode any further information. Two close variants of this are Zeilinger’s Principle (10) and Information Causality (11).
> Is there a proved presumption that genes only code in sequential combinations? Still overestimating the size of the powerset of all [totally-ordered] nonlocal combinations?
Still trying to understand counterfactuals in re: constructor theory
Observe the human response to dandelions; are they weeds or are they edible?
Do they have lobed leaves? What [neurons,] do mammals have to heuristically generalize according to visual and gustatory-olfactory features, and counterfactually which don't they have?
Or it's entirely learned, and then the coding for the substrate is still relevant
Any sexual hereditary information needs to be passed via germ line cells. So if it’s not encoded within a single sperm or egg cell, then it can’t be passed down via sexual heredity.
Information that might be passed from parent to offspring after conception is not hereditary by definition, and would be a type of learning, (ie birds singing to babies in eggs, antibody transferring from mother to baby)
Everything else you mention is very easily passed down via genetics which is not chemical signaling, but actual information encoding. And simple rules can lead to complex behavior.
Edit: Here’s an example to better illustrate the genes power of information encoding. Camouflage, which is a genetically heritable trait, can be incredibly complex. We can think of the information encoded in the genes for camouflage as a visual description of the environment that the animal evolved in. So the gene’s have actually encoded what the dessert environment looks like, or the sea floor, or the vegetation. That’s a single example, but every animal carries such complex information (how to navigate certain landscapes, how to survive current living pathogens in the environment, etc) within their genes.
Human babies pick up prosody in the womb from their mothers. Here's a random, seemingly comprehensive article about that that I haven't read yet (I know about this from other sources.)
You might enjoy the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson. It's his research that got me deep down the rabbit hole on this subject many years ago. (I have 1 vivid memory that I would call a "past life memory") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson
When I imagine, the "videos" are devoid of emotion or feeling, unlike my memories. This specific "thing" has a strong feeling and emotion connected to it, unlike the other thinking that is very sterile, it's the only thing I carry that I know I've not experienced but it has the association of memory qualia.
> all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling
Why do you presume they are chemical signals?
> pattern matching
Psychedelics show the absurd power of layered pattern matching in our brains and what happens when you disrupt those mechanisms. I would not discount it so readily.
It's a statistical guess, as with most phenomena. When individuals, alone, consistently travel toward direction without observable prompting, it's expected there is another stimuli. This may be an unseen force (birds following magnetic fields). However, it appears there is a genetic component.
Notably: "They also inherit from their parents the directions in which they need to fly in the autumn and spring, and if the parents each have different genetically encoded directions, their offspring will end up with an intermediate direction."
> They have at least three different compasses at their disposal: one allows them to extract information from the position of the sun in the sky, another uses the patterns of the stars at night, and the third is based on Earth’s ever present magnetic field.
They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
The link identifies it as genetic. If there were no genetic component, there would be consistency, regardless of genetic lineage.
> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
Knowing is a soft term, for which I provided a definition to answer a second order question. Diving into any further classification of "knowing", is a separate issue. The topic under discussion is not definitional knowing for other organisms. The topic is the genetic transfer of information, as per this article. Hence, graciously, it can be assumed that "knowing" is shorthand for this concept.
Yeah, there’s fundamental stuff that animals just don't know. Like cats have the instinct to hunt, and are good at that - but unless they’ve seen another cat eating prey, they don’t realise that that’s a thing that they can do, and you’d think that would be a pretty core learning to pass on.
Isn’t this the whole plot behind Assassin’s Creed’s Animus where they are able to look into (and “interact “) with the past based on information in the cells/DNA.
Related to this, pin tumbler locks on doors should be installed so that the bitting (i.e., the teeth on the key) face up when inserting the key. If you follow a standard orientation, you don't have to think about which way to orient the key when inserting it, especially in the dark.
There's a technical reason why "bitting up" (teeth up) should be the standard way to install pin tumbler locks. If the bitting faces up, the pins in the lock are directly above the bitting, and the springs are above the pins and not being compressed by the weight of the pins. If the lock is installed upside down such that the key goes in with bitting facing down, then the pins are sitting on top of the springs and may compress down over a period of years. A fatigued spring might not raise the pins to the shear line (the level needed for the lock cylinder to turn) and you'll be locked out.
It seems that most door installers and handymen don't follow any convention about up or down when installing locks.
I stumbled on an April 1950 article predating and predicting the H-Bomb: "Production of the hydrogen atomic bomb has been ordered by the President of the United States. Within one to three years, it is unofficially predicted, the first of the most awesome military weapons ever built may be ready for test."
And sure enough in the 1950s when the U.S. had a can-do government that could get things done on schedule did it within "one to three years" as predicted:
- Operation Greenhouse in 1951 as first successful release of nuclear fusion energy raised expectations to a near certainty that the concept would work. (1)
- Then on 1 November 1952, the Teller–Ulam configuration was tested at full scale in the "Ivy Mike" shot at an island in the Enewetak Atoll. (2)
Somehow I had the impression that in the 1950s, the government and the press (at the government's behest) were much more secretive about how the H-bomb would work, but I found the Popular Science article surprisingly informative. We say thermonuclear weapon rather than H-bomb these days, but I didn't see anything in the article that seemed inaccurate compared to what's known publicly today.
I'm convinced the US needs an existential threat to be successful. Our history is one of ineptitude and international meddling (to put it nicely). We need a USSR or something like it to keep us focused on our own shit.
Pretty sure we already do. The new "axis of evil" is Russia, militant Islamic states like Iran, NK (to the extent they matter at all... they won't, until they suddenly do, I think), and bringing up the rear being the most dangerous of all, China.
Somehow I had the impression that in the 1950s, the government and the press (at the government's behest) were much more secretive about how the H-bomb would work, but I found the Popular Science article surprisingly informative. We say thermonuclear weapon rather than H-bomb these days, but I didn't see anything in the article that seemed inaccurate compared to what's known publicly today.
The H-bomb design described in that article is that of the "Classical Super." It shows a fission bomb embedded in a larger mass of fusion fuel. The A-bomb is supposed to act as a spark to ignite the fusion fuel, which then burns to completion from its own fusion energy. This is the same sort of schematic explanation of H-bombs that I saw in popular science books and encyclopedias as a child in the 1980s.
The Classical Super design does not work. The Richard Rhodes book Dark Sun describes it such:
George Gamow found a way to dramatize how unpromising Teller’s Super had proven to be. John McPhee reports the story as Los Alamos physicist Theodore Taylor remembered it. "One day, at a meeting of people who were working on the problem of the fusion bomb . . . Gamow placed a ball of cotton next to a piece of wood. He soaked the cotton with lighter fuel. He struck a match and ignited the cotton. It flashed and burned, a little fireball. The flame failed completely to ignite the wood, which looked just as it had before—unscorched, unaffected. Gamow passed it around. It was petrified wood. He said, ‘That is where we are just now in the development of the hydrogen bomb.’"
The secret of a working H-bomb, not published in unclassified form until 1979 [1], is the Teller-Ulam design [2] using "radiation implosion." The atomic bomb is not placed to heat the fusion fuel but to enormously compress it. The A-bomb is kept separate from the fusion fuel but contained within a shared space. For a detailed unclassified description of how this works, see section 4.4 of the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, "Elements of Thermonuclear Weapon Design":
> the remaining ungrouped users, by process of elimination..."
This being hacker news, I can't help but appreciate the pure evil genius of this. It reminds me of some other cases cunning corporate ingenuity:
- Monsanto and their "terminator" seeds that prevents farmers from planting seeds they harvest, requiring them to purchase new seeds for every planting.[1]
- Volkswagen and how they programmed diesel engines to activate emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing.[2]
> Monsanto and their "terminator" seeds that prevents farmers from planting seeds they harvest, requiring them to purchase new seeds for every planting.
Kind of misleading to just state it like this if your source points out that Monsanto never sold this, pledged 25 years ago they won’t do this, and according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_tech... , they also didn’t invent it.
They are forced in the sense that it's a prisoner's dilemma type of thing: Farmers would be better off if none of them used exploitative seeds. However since they are competing with farmers who are using those seeds then have to do so as well in order to stay competitive.
I dont see how that is the case. How does one farmer using monsanto seeds mean another needs to as well? Each farmers seed choice has no effect on others choices. If the monsanto seeds cost more than they were worth farmers wouldnt use them. In fact saying that you need to use their seeds to be competitive makes it clear that you understand that the seeds are worth it, you just wish they were free or cheaper. But in order to create these seeds monsanto needs to be paid.
If you neighbor uses monsanto seeds, he also sprays pesticides that might kill your crops or make them have too much pesticides to be edible. It's also basically impossible to do organic farming besides such a farm.
This is an interesting twist of the original urban legend around these seeds. The story was that if you didn’t pay for monsanto seeds, and your neighbor did and planted them, and one blew into your yard then you’d be targeted by a lawsuit.
in reality though, i’d like to see this farmland so close to another that they can’t accurately spray or sow. there’s fences and access roads between fields, sometimes trees as well.
My guess would be it's about pricing. Let's imagine a world where there are only two farms, mine and my neighbor's. We're both using regular seeds, and we do a decent job, but it's not wonderful, and some years our yield isn't so great.
Then Monsanto comes along and wants to sell us a product that gives us better, more consistent yields, even better than our best harvests with the regular seeds. The catch, of course, is that we have to buy new seed from them every year, and can't propagate seed from the prior year's crop.
So my neighbor decides to start buying Monsanto's seeds, but I don't like the terms of the deal, so I don't. My neighbor sees amazing yields, even to the point of surplus. He decides to undercut me by lowering his prices because he has so much to sell, and can still make out better than before, with those lower prices. Nothing's changed for me, so I can't lower my prices. My neighbor's entire inventory sells out, but because of his surplus, only half of my yield gets sold. Fortunately I have some savings to fall back on, so I burn my entire savings feeding my family for the rest of the year, and then grudgingly buy Monsanto seeds for next year.
I'm sure this exact scenario doesn't scale up to the global agricultural system, but I think it's more likely than your naive "no one forces anyone to buy anything; if they buy it, it's because it's worth it" view of economics... things are rarely that simple.
In your story nobody is forced to anything. The farmer that doesn't like the monsanto deal made their choice, effectively rendering their farm business less competitive (unable to lower prices like the other farmer). That was predictable, it's also why the other farmer took the deal. Yeah, forced by market to not ignore progress to be better at what you do, that may be, but can't see that as negative.
They are forced in the sense that they don't have a viable choice other than taking a bad deal.
Note that the issue isn't ignoring progress. Neither farmer has an issue with using more sophisticated seeds. The issue is with the deal that goes along with the seeds.
You do realize that most farming is subsidized by the gov these days right? So in your scenario here, likely no farmer is making profit and the gov is paying the difference.
They were buying farms out and suing neighbour farmers for using monsato seeds blown by wind from their farms. Theyre pure evil. They have a deal with Bayer
> If the wavelength of the laser is chosen exactly right ... then maybe a special atomic nucleus could be manipulated with a laser, namely thorium-229. On November 21, 2023, the team was finally successful: the correct energy of the thorium transition was hit exactly, the thorium nuclei delivered a clear signal for the first time.
So what's the wavelength? I felt like the article left me hanging.
The answer is: 148.3821 nm
Yes, I admit that it's meaningless to me. It's sort of like a big news story announcing that Malaysia Airlines MH-370 has been located somewhere in the world's oceans, but not saying where because a number like 148.3821 km SSE of the Cocos Islands is going to be meaningless to most people.
148nm is on the lower end of UV-C. It's higher-energy than the furthest ultraviolet light that the sun produces (200nm). If it were produced artificially, it'd be heavily absorbed by the atmosphere to the point of near opacity. If the visible spectrum was an octave, where the "tone" of a color wrapped around from red back to blue the way G wraps to A, it'd be the blue one octave above visible blue.
Out of curiosity I googled to see if there's formal names to things beyond UV and a SO question came up saying Klingon has a word for a color that falls within the UV spectrum, Amarklor; it "falls between violet amarklor (dark violet or purple) and amaklor-kalish (almost black)".
Else there's Octarine from the Discworld books, it's the colour of magic.
Another one in that same SO thread is err, quantifying synesthesia in the study of "chromophonics", where sound is assigned a color and vice-versa, that is, one could name a colour after a sound, which matches up with the earlier "octave" analogy.
Indeed. In German, "blue" (blau) is sometimes used to say "drunk/inebriated" which makes the name all the more appropriate for a rock band, I think. :)
Teeny nit, the sun produces light well into the x-rays (mostly from the corona though). You're probably talking about sunlight making it through the atmosphere.
I'm talking about the blackbody radiation of the sun's surface, which accounts for almost all of the light. The X-ray flux at earth is 11 orders of magnitude lower than the blackbody-related flux.
Physics like this (really I'd call it materials science; it isn't but it has immediate practical applications on building things) is a bit of a sleeper in terms of importance. Small improvements in tolerances and materials drive huge changes in what is economically feasible at the other end of the science-engineering-machining pipeline. "We've built a higher precision thing" is usually huge news. Take semiconductors, where the entire industry is driving crazy value entirely from getting better at moving atoms around by a few nanometers.
Missing out on the magic number does seem like a bit of a problem, but really the expectations on the audience are already quite low. That number could easily turn out to be worth more than a trillion dollars to humanity at large, but I'd bet most readers just think of it as a party factoid.
This actually has significant practical importance, because it is hoped that using this transition of the thorium nucleus it will be possible to build atomic clocks even better than those using transitions in the spectra of ions or neutral atoms, because the energy levels of the nucleus are less sensitive to any external influences.
While in the best atomic clocks one must use single ions held in electromagnetic traps or a small number of neutral atoms held in an optical lattice with lasers, in both cases in vacuum, because the ions or neutral atoms must not be close to each other, to avoid influences, with thorium 229 it is hoped that a simple solid crystal can be used, because the nuclei will not influence each other.
The ability to use a solid crystal not only simplifies a lot the construction of the atomic clock, but it should enable the use of a greater number of nuclei than the number of ions or atoms used in the current atomic clocks, which would increase the signal to noise ratio, which would require shorter averaging times than today, when the best atomic clocks require averaging over many hours or days for reaching their limits in accuracy, making them useless for the measurement of short time intervals (except for removing the drift caused by aging of whatever clocks are used for short times).
The article points to a use I wouldn't have thought of.
The deeper you go into a gravitational field, the slower time goes. Therefore comparing clocks in different places gives a way to measure gravity. These clocks could be sufficiently precise to find mineral deposits underground from their gravity signature.
Magnetic anomalies also highlight inteesting places for minerals, the issue with both magnetic and gravity fields variations lies with determining the "true" depth to target (medium sized shallow target, or massive deep taget?) which is known as an inversion problem.
Linear inverse problem theory is an extremely powerful tool for solving inverse problems. Much of the information that we currently have on the Earth’s interior is based on linear inverse problems
Despite the success of linear inverse theory, one should be aware that for many practical problems our ability to solve inverse problems is largely confined to the estimation problem.
The problem is that the planet could be hollow and produce the same gravitational measurements on the surface and outside. It needs to be coupled with a model that introduces constraints for the inverse problem to be defined.
Since mining is only concerned with material that's within maybe 0.1% of the distance from the surface to the core, seems like you'd just need to move the sensor around and make sure the signal changes about where you'd expect for a mass of X Kg at a depth of Y meters instead of a supermassive chunk of dense material much deeper. Or, to put it another way, build a grid map of the area and subtract any background signal. Would that not work for some reason?
In practice, that's what would happen. Move around until seeing some larger gravitational pull, likely indicating some deposit. However, formally, this is not correct due to the mere fact that the gravitational force is proportional to 1/R^2, just like a Columb force. Thus, there are infinite numbers of mass distributions that produce the exact same gravitational field on the surface. The planet could be hollow, and we would not know it only from the field measurements.
A practical constraint is mass density, which has maximum and minimum values. We can make a crude approximation that the planet's density is constant, evaluate the field on the surface from the planet's shape and compare it with measurement. This would be more useful, but still, it wouldn't tell us whether there is a combo of water reservoir and a large massive deposit below it.
Most units of measurement are derived from the second, so the more precise our frequency standards, the more precise everything else can be. Things like interferometry and spectroscopy depend directly on very precise frequency standards.
> clocks even better than those using transitions in the spectra of ions or neutral atoms
I'd be interested to know how much more accurate a nuclear-state-transition clock might be than a conventional Caesium or Rubidium clock.
TFA seems to make the point that a nuclear clock would be more resistant to external influences, such as EM radiation, than an atomic clock, and so could be used in experiments where such influences might introduce unwanted uncertainty. But I'd like to know what the claim for greater accuracy is based on, rather than simply greater reliability.
You have the math turned around. Because the nuclear resonance is much more stable and high frequency the Q factor and accuracy of the measurement is higher. With a cesium or rubidium clock it's very difficult to control all the influences on how tightly the nominal resonance is achieved and the Q while impressive is a bit less.
There are some real challenges in realization: this will take optical combs and all sorts of other stuff to really take advantage of.
They also point out that because the thorium atoms can be embedded in a solid, and have motion << the wavelength of the radiation, the emission and absorption are largely recoil-free. This eliminates Doppler broadening. What broadening there could be was below the resolution of their pump beam.
More to the point >400nm is visible light, this puts 148nm well within the ultraviolet range. Though it's not too far removed from the visible spectrum, wouldn't surprise me if some animals could see it.
148 doesn't feel too far removed from the visible spectrum, but it's in the wrong direction for animals to make use of it. I'm no biologist, but I'd be shocked if there were any animals that had adapted sensitivity to a type of radiation that they are never exposed to in nature. The sun doesn't really emit much UV-C light:
It's useful to be able to see a little UV-A, perhaps, and very useful for predators to see 'heat' into the IR range, but if your eyes were sensitive to 148nm, the world would be pretty dark.
Maybe after a few million years, in the grinding dust in the back of my shop, something will evolve that has a symbiotic relationship to arc welders...
Also, even if there was some advantage to doing so, i'm not sure how animals could see a wavelength that short. They would need a photoreceptor protein which can absorb photons of that wavelength and turn them into some sort of chemical change which can trigger a signalling cascade. That protein would have to have a pair of molecular orbitals which are h * 148 nm apart. What can give you that?
The ethene double bond absorbs at ~165 nm, a benzene ring at ~180 nm, and building things out of those tends to increase the wavelength, not decrease it. 148 nm is single bond territory - could you have a chromophore which uses photons of the right wavelength to break a bond, and then somehow react to the presence of free radicals?!
A long time ago I saw some UV photos of flowers, compared to visible and IR. There were some distinct features. That suggests some insects could see them, but of course it's just speculation.
It's not speculation. Bee eyes have receptors for green, blue, and UV-A light, for example. But as BenjiWiebe mentioned, that's not the same as being sensitive to UV-C.
I'm sure there would be some value in seeing others parts of UV. Some minerals fluoresce from one type of UV light but not another, so they'd be dark in the bands that cause them to fluoresce. Mantis shrimp can apparently see into UV-B, but I'm not aware of anything living that can see UV-C.
Many animals do have more UV extension than you might initially assume useful: due to scattering following the inverse fourth power of wavelength the sky is lit in the UV a long time before sunrise.
Presumably wouldn't apply anywhere near as far as 148nm since as you note that light doesn't make it to earth.
Ah, yeah makes sense that animals couldn't see it if it's not really part of sunlight. I was thinking it was not physically impossible, but it would be remarkably pointless if the light is simply not there.
For comparison, over the last several years there has been a lot of research into optical frequency standards. Because they run at a higher frequency than (microwave) caesium frequency standards, optical frequency standards can be more precise. The current candidates https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1681-7575/ad17d2 have wavelengths between 750nm and 250nm. Caesium frequency standards use a wavelength of 32.6mm, so about 100,000x bigger than optical frequency standards.
Based on just the frequency, I dunno what makes the thorium nuclear transition much better than optical transitions. Unless the excitement (as it were) is about scaling up to even higher frequencies.
The key factor is the line width, or the range of frequencies over which the transition can be stimulated. The ratio of the stimulus frequency and line width is one way of expressing the resonator Q factor. In general, the lower the line width for a given transition, the higher the Q, the better the signal-to-noise ratio, and the more stable the resulting clock. (Imagine how much more precisely the frequency of a large bell could be measured compared to a cymbal or something else with a broader acoustical spectrum.)
Cs or Rb clocks give you a line width of a few hundred Hz at 9 GHz (Q=roughly 100 million), while quantum transitions in optical clocks can achieve line widths on the order of 1 Hz in the PHz region (equivalent Q in the quintillions.) There is a lot more to building a good clock than high Q, but it's a very important consideration ( http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/Q/ ).
What caught my eye is the ringdown time of the stimulated optical resonance, apparently in the hundreds of seconds. They talk about line widths in the GHz range, but that seems to refer to the laser rather than the underlying resonance being probed. It would have been interesting to hear more about what they expected regarding the actual transition line width. Probably the information is there but not in a form that I grokked, given insufficient background in that field.
It's kind of funny, the 148.3821nm light being used to excite the nuclear transition is undoubtedly ultraviolet. However, the distinction between X-Rays and Gamma Rays is that Gamma rays originate from the nucleus. So in some lights, the photons emitted by the nuclear phase transition back to it's base state could be called "Gamma Ultra-Violet."
Same here. Windows was my daily driver until Windows 7, but I stopped using any Windows platform as of Windows 10 because of the telemetry and spyware. I don't care how snappy Windows is, I'm not returning until they provably cut out all the spyware by default. I don't care if you can turn off a lot of the telemetry using a hundred little commands, registry settings, and menus. It should be off by default. Really, how is anyone OK with Windows sending every keystroke you type to Microsoft (for spell checking apparently) under the standard install of Windows?
I feel that macOS is unfortunately getting out of hand with telemetry as well.
> Or how else are we going to send secure messages in the future?
That's an intriguing comment. What do you mean by that? Do you mean a future when governments force tech companies to install backdoors in all end-to-end encrypted software we use? Or when AGI writes all of our software, designs all hardware, and AGI decides that it needs to monitor all human communications. Only half joking.
AGI won't monitor all human communication: only the human communication it deems cute enough to record and post to the group chat with the caption '<3 OMG they almost think they're AGI <3 so adorable <3 I love my humans <3 <3'
Other than that it'll probably leave us alone (with occasional new enrichment toys when it suspects we've been alone too long)
But why does Amazon no longer include order details in their confirmation emails? They did so before 2020. The most plausible explanation for this change is to prevent Google from mining your detailed purchase history.
Some other theories about this were discussed on Hacker News[1], such as forcing you to log back to Amazon to find out what was shipped in order to get you to buy more stuff, or to prevent people from building a shopping cart app that uses data from your Amazon emails.
>> all that complexity would have led to a gargantuan number of bugs and the universe would have crashed
> This has always seemed to me one of the best arguments against the simulation hypothesis.
Can you expand on that? Are you saying that if we were in a simulation, the observed complexity of the universe (or the complexity of particle physics) would have caused the simulation to crash? Ergo, we are not in a simulation?
My thinking is more that if it was a simulation they wouldn't make it so a single proton was so complex as to be almost impossible to simulate accurately. I mean is a simulation you might expect if to look like pixels or minecraft or something close up. Or maybe simple point particles. But I don't thing the equations describing a proton are exactly soluble and also the results very complex so the best you can do is a very approximate simulation.
I presume they use less water because a front-loading washer can saturate all the clothes with a shallow pool of water in a sideways rotating drum whereas a top loader could not possibly soak all the clothes in a vertical drum unless it fills completely with water. I assume that less hot water means less water to heat, so less energy used. (Heating water uses much more energy than a motor, so the motor running longer in a front loader isn't a big factor in energy usage.)
But no matter how efficient they are, I hate front-loading washers. A top loader can wash a load in 20 minutes; front loaders takes hours. That means extra noise for many hours and inability to do multiple loads quickly. And usually front loaders have a much smaller capacity than top loaders. Furthermore, once a front loader starts, it locks the door to prevent water spillage, but this prevents you from throwing in extra items that you found or taking items out part way through. And front loaders cost more, are harder to repair, and end up smelling bad (probably because of the rubber gasket--needed to waterproof the door--that accumulates gunk).
> A top loader can wash a load in 20 minutes; front loaders takes hours...
My front loader can complete a load in 15 minutes on its fastest setting, it can take hours, but only if you ask for it. There is no magic, the longer it takes, the better it cleans, no matter if it is a front or top loader. You choose the setting according to your needs. Also, with regular clothing, it makes very little noise except during the spin drying cycle. If it is behind a closed door, you can't hear it at all.
It is a rather recent model from Indesit, one of the most, if not the most popular budget brand in Europe. I paid 330€ for it, which is a typical entry-level price. Top loaders are almost non-existant here, so I can't say much about the price. The rest of the points are right.
Ours is similar. It also has a medium-speed cycle that runs in about an hour that does a better job than the fast cycle, but uses more water and electricity than the default (slower) cycles. That cycle is still probably more efficient than a top loader (though I rarely use it).
> A top loader can wash a load in 20 minutes; front loaders takes hours.
This doesn't seem accurate. The regular permanent press cycle on my front loader completes in about 40 minutes. There's also a "quick wash" cycle that takes about 20 minutes.
The last top loader I used also took quite a bit more time than 20 minutes. This was a good 25 years ago, so maybe they were just slower then.
I agree, this doesn't match my experience at all. I recently replaced a top loader that took about 30-45 minutes a load with a front loader of similar capacity. The front loader does all loads in about 30 to 35 minutes.
European washing machines typically take 2 hours or more on a standard cycle. They take longer in order to meet energy and water-efficiency requirements.
But they do have 30-minute (or less) quick wash option too.
> Furthermore, once a front loader starts, it locks the door to prevent water spillage, but this prevents you from throwing in extra items that you found or taking items out part way through.
Even if you ignore the European top-loaders with a horizontal drum (which are basically just like US top-loaders except more efficient, smaller, and that don't destroy clothes with elastics) that's not been true for decades.
Front loaders only have a few periods where water goes above the level of the door opening, and at any other moment you can pause the washing and open the door.
They might cost more in the US, I guess, new front loaders in the EU are cheaper (200-300€ for the base models that work fine and don't have WiFi or whatever) than what I could find when I lived in Canada though (which were more around 500-600 CA$ iirc) but nothing is really comparable.
And... they don't smell bad?
Frankly the most important difference to me is this central axis in American top-loaders and which clothes wrap themselves and which always ends up destroying elastics. But I think it's necessary for mixing the clothes, sunbed unlike frint loaders gravity hinders mixing rather than helps it.
If you do not regularly clean the rubber gasket _and_ leave the door open to dry out the rubber completely, you end up with a smelly, slimy mixture of clothing lint-infused mildew.
> Frankly the most important difference to me is this central axis in American top-loaders and which clothes wrap themselves and which always ends up destroying elastics.
You can buy modern top loaders do not have an agitator that destroys clothes.
The smelly front loader thing seems to be intentional planned obsolescence. They all keep a reservoir of dirty water at the bottom of the washer below the pump, and that water keeps the inside of the machine moist and full of mildew. Ours has a little emergency / cleaning drain hose, but it's so short that it pours back into the machine unless you hold a container inside the door (it's a Samsung). I can easily imagine a little third-party gizmo that clamps on to that hose, detects when the machine is done running, and then opens a valve to drain the water into a bucket or a floor drain. It'd probably cost $50 and more than double the lifespan of the washing machine.
I wish the energy efficiency regulations would be updated to ban designs that leave standing dirty water inside appliances.
A front-loading machine can wash in 20 minutes, but you'll need to look outside European consumer appliances to find one. European efficiency goals mean the machine washes with the same water for longer. Without that requirement, you can use a lot more water and complete the wash faster.
To prevent mould growth around the gasket, leave the front door ajar after use.
Even in Europe, washing machines typically have a quick-wash setting that takes 30 mins or less. But the standard and economy wash modes take much longer because those are the ones that must be measured for the appliance's energy efficiency rating.
> end up smelling bad (probably because of the rubber gasket--needed to waterproof the door--that accumulates gunk).
Do you never clean them or something? 2 tablespoons of bleach and run the auto-clean mode, wipe the gasket, and there zero issues. I do this like 4 times a year.
Some of your criticisms are valid (ie: can't add extra clothes after starting), but most of them are imagined or exaggerated (why would you want to take soapy part-washed clothes out after starting? Door seal can be wiped clean easily, etc).
The positives obviously outweigh the negatives for most buyers, considering front-loaders are almost universal now days in much of the world, even in non-EU countries which aren't bound by that market's energy-efficiency requirements.
>Furthermore, once a front loader starts, it locks the door to prevent water spillage, but this prevents you from throwing in extra items that you found
Usually you have a few minutes before that happens, and there are designs (from Samsung I think) where you have a small door in the door to add more.
I like front loading washing machines because you can still put things on top of them, they waste less space.
What is the name of those "top loaders" that also have a horizontal drum with a locking escape hatch on the side? My mind went immediately to those when seeing the word.
That’s exactly and literally what top loaders are in Europe. The drum has a hatch and the machine tries to position it next to the outer hatch for unloading.
There is a section of the drum that opens and closes. You rotate the drum to align the opening of the outer shell on the top, also protected by a door.
Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.