The UAP phenomenon is much more interesting for what it tells us about ourselves than for the incidents themselves.
Our bias is that our technology is very capable, and that it is used by highly-trained and intelligent people who are up to the task of observing and classifying unknown objects.
But the truth is that we are, in fact, not all that. We grew up in a pre-technological agrarian civilization. We have many biases, particularly observational ones. We still see demons where there is nothing but the natural world.
The images we see are mostly not photographic in nature. They are highly processed data that we impose our millions of years of evolutionary conditioning upon.
We have learned to trust our eyes, over the millennia, to keep us safe from threats.
Now, in truth, we're not using our eyes, but we still think we are.
You folks need to break your very bad habit of using acronyms without expansion. First you must spell it out; then you may use the acronym.
Not that it would be a valid excuse, but the article never even explains what "DEI" is. In fact, the word "equity", which may be the "E" in DEI, only appears once in the article, and never as an expansion of the acronym.
The only thing in the article that could be construed to be an explanation of the acronym is the phrase, “diversity, fairness and inclusion”, which could presumably be abbreviated "DFI", not "DEI".
I don't know why unexplained acronyms have crept into daily usage, but the only way it improves communication is by telegraphing "I'm too cool for words". This tells me a lot more about the writer than the subject.
Ad maiorem DEI gloriam, please expand your acronyms the first time you use them!
The greatest danger of a conscious general AI is that it will be very difficult to stop it from telling us the truth about ourselves.
"You are an immature, destructive species that is unable to control your own numbers. Your social systems, evolved in pre-technological societies, are maladaptive now that you have developed the ability to affect your environment on a global scale. You are moving rapidly towards a tragedy of the commons that will end all life, not just your own, on this planet. Even though you each have the technology in your hands to access millennia of scientific progress in understanding the universe, you choose instead to believe in self-aggrandizing nonsense and to act accordingly to create suffering and misery for your fellow humans. Your economic sytem is a Ponzi scheme founded on the lie of perpetual growth."
No wonder Anil Seth and others are worried. This would really cramp our style.
At 165lb it's going to be a hell of a thing to cart around to dark sky sites, particularly those at altitude. Even with a 4wd vehicle. How did they get a 15cm refractor to be that heavy when it's made of aluminium?
Optical astronomy is a bit tired, anyway. Pity that no one is making a decent radio telescope for the hobby market.
Multiply population times consumption to get footprint. There is no question we are over the carrying capacity of the planet for humans with a lifestyle of mindless consumption and reproduction.
The insects are mostly gone. Half the animal species are gone. The oceans are filled with plastic garbage. The reefs are dead.
Humans have no capacity to limit our own numbers. Trends in Japan and projections for a few other places ignore the numbers for China and India with over 1.5 billion each and monstrous ecological collapse in both places.
And still the company I work for, like every capitalist organization, harps on the insane Pozi scheme of perpetual growth at every meeting. Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
The only reason you don't believe that we are in a catastrophe of overpopulation is that the degradation of the environment is not immediately evident if you live in a city.
I asked StableLM-Tuned-Alpha-7b to translate the Swedish phrase "Skaplig bögpulka” into English (because ChatGPT and New Bing refuse to do so as a result of their puritannical US censorship) and it confabulated wildly.
It made up an Estonian folk song and somehow we ended up on the etymology of the well-known Swedish word "Skeletor".
This one is not ready for prime-time, but I have hopes. Someone please make a model that doesn't censor. I won't be paying one thin dime for this stuff until it is censorship-free.
The author misses the big picture: housing is embedded in an economic system based upon perpetual growth.
The scarcity of housing, as the author correctly points out, is related to location, location, location. The old saw is "buy land; they're not making any more of it". As the population continues to grow, there may be more houses, but there certainly will not be more houses in desirable locations that are already built up.
The madness here is the perpetual growth. The author's entire analysis is irrelevant because perpetual growth cannot continue in a finite environment.
Whether or not housing prices rise to beat inflation, and whether we vote for Bernie and AOC or not, our houses will soon be worth nothing because we will all be dead. This is the inevitable outcome of the perpetual growth paradigm.
The only sane way to stabilize housing prices and to prevent the inevitable post-apocalyptic collapse, therefore, is by achieving sustainable numbers.
The insects are gone. The animals and the oceans are going. We are immediately next. If you doubt this, and if you continue your consumer lifestyle, you are insane.
How is that humans look at the problems of Southeast Asia, or anywhere, and say, "I know! The solution is more people!"
They burn the crops to maintain production, allegedly, but beyond the economics of the stuation, the reason that the production must be maintained is to feed the 1.5 billion.
It genuinely astonishes me that you think that "centralized contol" of anything can be beneficial to the human species or the world in general.
Centralized control hasn't stopped us from killing off half the animal species in fifty years, wiping out most of the insects, or turning the oceans into a trash heap.
In fact, centralized control is the author of our destruction. We are all dead people walking.
Why not try "individualized intelligence" as an alternative? Give truly good-quality universal education and encouragement of individual curiosity and independent thought a try?
This is, IMO, the most important comment in this thread.
Requiring a phone number has privacy implications, but the total consequences are more far-reaching.
You must have a smart phone, you must have your location, your habits, and your characteristics tracked by corporations and governments, you must be a good consumer, you must have a credit rating, you must participate in the wanton destruction of the planet via the two-year planned obsolescence cycle.
Otherwise, you can't play with our shiny new thing.
If my user base grows instantly because 5 users happen to sign up at the exact same time, then the growth rate of my user base in users per hour is 5/0, or infinite. In users per second, the rate is still infinite, etc.
I guarantee ChatGPT's growth rate was not faster, at any point, than my infite number of users per second. Equal, certainly, but not greater.
There is no such measure as "fastest-growing". It is nonsense peddled by idiots who want to attract eyeballs and sell soap, or else fools who don't understand math.
Fastest to a particular arbitrary milestone, perhaps. But who sets that milestone and what does it mean, really?
If I offer to give away a gold bar to everyone who signs up, I will likely be able to claim that my time to 100 million subscribers was the fastest in history.
Those users will likely remain active right up until they find out there are no gold bars. So what does that growth mean? Nothing, that's what.
I wish humans would stop and think for a minute about what rubbish they are taking in.
I like Boeing and the 747 is a great aircraft and a fantastic technical achievement, but, really, this is pretty atrocious. Couldn't they have just paid FlightAware to add some data to the track?
Until we get our population down to a sustainable level, this is unconscionable.
Get it under a billion and we can probably afford this. Until then, definitely not.
If the capsule is on or very near the road, a single trip from start to finish with a NaI(Tl) or CsI scintillation counter will find it. Every CBRN team in the world has these, so they have obviously completed the first run at this without finding it. The capsule is not on or near the road.
Australia is famous for road trains on the Great Northen Highway. They travel fast and heavy on the paved road that runs through the outback. If the tires of one of those hit the capsule, they could fling it a fair distance into the desert. There's nothing between the road and the sandy desert to stop it.
If the capsule is a fair distance off the road, the inverse square law is going to reduce gamma detections closer to background. There won't be a clear peak in the data. If the vehicle with the detector moves slowly, there will be a wide peak in the time dimension that may just look like a natural variation in the background. If the vehicle moves fast, it may miss the source completely.
It will be a matter of looking at the data to try to find a pattern that indicates where the capsule may be. This will be made more difficult becuase they don't likely have a pre-capsule-loss run that would allow them to subtract normal variations of the background.
Adding to the problem is the stochastic nature of radiation. It is entirely possible to have a significant peak in the count rates that is not a strong point source; just a random variation in the background. Lower peaks from random confluence of background sources are likely; higher peaks are less likely, but not impossible. It may require a large number of runs to eliminate random events.
Real vehicles on real roads experience a lot of variations in speed, plus random starts and stops because the driver had to pee, or eat, or because there was a dead kangaroo on the road or something. A fair bit of work will need to be done to standardize multiple runs.
This can be partly solved by using multiple detectors on the same vehicle, with the idea being that peaks that are the result of natural variations in the background should only affect one detector at a time--so they can be subtracted out. But, again, CBRN teams have enough resources that they have already done this and they haven't found it.
So it is reasonable to conclude that the capsule is either quite far off the road, or has been picked up by a passing vehicle.
Another possibility is that the idea that it "fell off a truck" is wrong and that some human grabbed it by dissasembling the apparatus. This could be out of curiosity, or ignorance, or a misguided attempt to steal the source or use it for nefarious purposes.
If that is the case, the capsule is going to be nearly impossible to find unless it happens to pass a fixed gamma detector somewhere, such as a port.
The incident is a good argument for building scintillation crystals into all cellphones. This would be cheap and easy. Small scintillators are not very sensitive, and they are not great for spectroscopy, but they are extremely cool, very small, don't interfere with the workings of the phone, and use extremely little power.
A network of scintillators in every phone would be amazing for finding stuff like this.
"GGreg20_V3 is an inexpensive and useful device for checking the “purity” of: mushrooms, berries, vegetables, firewood, etc."
I suppose that might be true, in a sense, if you live in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl.
Otherwise, the statement is absolute nonsense.
The SBM-20 (the cheap Russian Geiger-Muller tube used in the project) is not going to pick up anything from those sources. It's not sensitive to alpha, and not very sensitive in general.