481–490 of 839 posts
Sort of meta, but I always shudder when someone says that science has "proven" something. What sets science apart from most other methods of seeking answers is its focus on disproof . Your goal as a scientist is to devise experiments that can disprove a claim about the natural world. This misconception rears its head most prominently in discussions at the intersection between science and public policy. Climate change…
Why is it that the smartest people in various fields constantly need reference materials, but medical doctors never look anything up?
• Qualia. What is this subjective experience that I know as consciousness? I've gone through Wiki, SEP and a fair number of books on philosophy and a few on neuroscience but I still don't understand what it is that I experience as the color "red" when in reality it's just a bunch of electric fields (photons). Why can't I get the same experience — i.e., color — when I look at UV or IR photons? These too are the very same electric fields as the red, blue, green I see all the time.
• Photographic composition. I'm a designer. I know them. I use them. But only empirically. I just do not understand them at a neuroscientific level. Why does rule-of-thirds feel pleasing? Is the golden ration bullshit? My gut says yes but I'm unable to come up with a watertight rebuttal. Why do anamorphic ultra-widescreen shoots feel so dramatic/cinematic? Yet to see an online exposition on the fundamental reasons underlying the experience. Any questions to artists are deflected with the standard "It's art, not science" reply.
• Wave-Particle duality. "It's a probability wave that determines when a particle will pop into existence out of nothingness." okay, where exactly does this particle come from? If enough energy accumulates in a region of empty space, a particle pops into existence? What is this "energy"? What is it made of? What even is an electron, really? I've followed quite a few rabbit holes and come out none the wiser for it.
• Convolution. It's disappointing how little I understand it given how wide its applications are. Convolution of two gaussians is a gaussian? Convolution in time domain is multiplication in frequency domain and vice-versa? How do these come out of the definition which is "convolution is sliding a flipped kernel over a signal"?
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It's a vector. madhadron doens't know what he's talking about. (To be excruciatingly precise, it's a ray in Hilbert space. But that's close enough to a vector for the purposes of HN comments.)
Any textbook exposing this mathematical formalization with rays? I'm interested by the mathematical aspect as well.
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Masks are for keeping your own particles from spreading far, not the other way around.
> Masks are for keeping your own particles from spreading far, not the other way around. Masks are for keeping your own particles from spreading far AND for lowering the probability of virions found in the environment from entering your respiratory system. Masks lower the probability when all other variables are held constant. If someone thinks wearing a mask grants invincibility and in turn chooses to increase their…
Both of you may be correct. I think the person you responded to may not have been precise in their framing.
I suspect that you had N95 masks in mind when you wrote masks, which doesn’t negate the point of the person you responded to, if they had surgical masks in mind when they wrote masks. Surgical masks are far more common than N95 masks since they are cheaper and do not provide protection against viral particles for the wearer.
Abiogenesis. I understand that this is not considered understood but I'd be interested in hearing a qualified scientist talk about how we get from "dumb" matter to self-replicating, goal-driven matter. The closest I've ever heard anyone get (in a personal conversation) is that chemistry is about transformation, so "dumb" matter isn't really dumb in the sense that it's static. Still lots of hand waving to get from bak…
Evolution. How does large scale randomness result in such complicated and intelligent systems, while after decades of research and all the computing power we have today, we still struggle to model and reproduce the intelligence of an insect.
If you want to feel the truth of evolution in your bones, you really do need to be familiar with biology on both the molecular and cellular level. You can get a feel for it with less, but it won't ever be obvious how and why it works unless you know it at that level. I don't mean to sound exclusionary - it really just does require a ton of background knowledge.
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Very simplified explanation: If you understand Turing Machines, you probably also understand other automata. So you probably understand nondeterministic automata [1]. A quantum computer is like a very restricted nondeterministic automaton, except that the "do several things a once" is implemented in physics. That means just like a NFA can be exponential faster than a DFA, a QC can be exponential faster than a normal…
The thing I don't understand about qc is how on earth can you read values from qbits without breaking superposition.
The idea is that you structure the QC system such that the computation is done using entangled states, but when it comes to measuring the qubits (to get the result of the computation) the state is such that you'll get meaningful results. This means the quantum state at the end of the calculation would ideally be along whatever axes you're measuring, so you get the same answer 100% of the time.
Has someone that thought they were taking LSD ever turned into a permanent schizophrenic zombie or in a mental institution, or is it all urban legend. If someone that didn't know they were predisposed to mental illness, is it applicable to dismiss their experience in order to maintain how safe LSD is? If any of this is true, are there any sources aside from "my friend's friend's brother took too much and now he is...…
Trust (knowing the chemist directly, indirectly, ...) in specific individuals > a largely unknown (but known to be imperfect) system, for many people anyways. Obviously this isn't practical for the not well connected, but it's all we got for now.
But as for your question, I've seen little to suggest it's anything more than war on drugs propaganda and hearsay.