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Too much serendipity

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Re: Too much serendipity

#81

Post by TacticalCoder »

fuzztester wrote: post #78
akoboldfrying wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say everyone understands that "quantum effects" refers to situations in which classical approximations break down. Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. "Disk corruption" doesn't necessarily mean anything is physically wrong with the disk, only that its content…

>Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. Guys, try this in your desktop or mobile app calculator: do square root of 2. then subtract from it the result that you see on screen. for me: √2−1.41421356237 i get: 3.095048801E−12 i.e. not 0. I discovered this on a physical Cas…

> what is your result, and interpretation of it?

that the square root of 2 is not 1.41421356237.

Re: Too much serendipity

#82

Post by autoexec »

Ductapemaster wrote: post #55
johngossman wrote: post #25

I recently learned that anesthesia is the same. Not only has no anesthesia ever been developed except through "serendipity." Not only that, but anesthesia that works for humans also effect a wide range of things including plants and bacteria. But why is an active area of research. There are even speculations that there may be quantum effects involved. Biology and chemistry are insanely complex.

There's a fascinating Radiolab episode about anesthesia that is worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia

Only if you can stand the format. Even when (maybe especially when) they cover a topic that I'm interested in, I find it infuriating to listen to.

It's filled with endless repetition and rephrasing of the same thing over and over again. For example here's a snippet from a transcript:

  JENN: ... to see if he can find anything in the interstitium that's happening that could explain this. And he finds ...

  QIUSHENG CHEN: Telocytes.

  INTERPRETER: Telocytes?

  QIUSHENG CHEN: Telocytes.

  INTERPRETER: Telocytes.

  JENN: ... these cells ...

  JENN: Oh, telocytes.

  QIUSHENG CHEN: Yeah.

  JENN: Telocytes, yes.

  JENN: ... called telocytes, which are a newly-discovered cell ...
The whole thing is like that, where they take something that could have been a single sentence and stretch it out over 3, 5, even 10 minutes of repetition and unnecessary detail and throughout all of it they randomly insert stock audio and sound effects of things that don't matter to the content at all. Like someone will say they went into work and the audio abruptly cuts to 15-30 seconds of nothing but the ambient sounds of an office environment.

The transcript might be easier for some to tolerate. The anesthesia episode doesn't seem to be too bad in terms of the number of sentence fragments, repetitions, and pointless interjections as some episodes. Even as transcripts some are extremely frustrating to extract information from.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia/transcript

Re: Too much serendipity

#83

Post by fuzztester »

anamexis wrote: post #80
fuzztester wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. Guys, try this in your desktop or mobile app calculator: do square root of 2. then subtract from it the result that you see on screen. for me: √2−1.41421356237 i get: 3.095048801E−12 i.e. not 0. I discovered this on a physical Cas…

It's just the difference between internal and displayed precision. sqrt(2) ≈ 1.414213562373095048801 So if you type in sqrt(2) - 1.41421356237, you're just getting the next 10 digits after that. 1.414213562373095048801 - 1.41421356237 _________________________ 0.000000000003095048801 = 3.095048801e12

yes, exactly :)

that's what i figured out when i first came across this, in school.

Re: Too much serendipity

#84

Post by cgh »

bityard wrote: post #26
cgh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re stevia, apparently how you taste it is determined by how sensitive your bitter taste receptors happen to be. It’s somehow also related to why some people can’t stand cilantro, for example. For me, stevia is simply sweet with no aftertaste so I guess I’m lucky in this regard.

You are! As one who identifies as keto, I have experience with a wide range of artificial sweeteners. Stevia is one of my favorites but I can definitely taste the bitterness. Which is why I only use it either in combination with other sweeteners (e.g. Erythritol), or in places where only a slight amount of sweetness is desired. Edit: I just had a thought: are we talking about putting it in coffee here? Because the bi…

Astounding fact: I have never had a cup of coffee in my life.

Re: Too much serendipity

#85

Post by pjs_ »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #12

I think it feels serendipitous only if you think of "sweet" taste (or for that matter any taste) as occurring in this giant continuum of tastes where hitting a specific spot on that continuum is probabilistically impossible. Ultimately, we experience tastes thanks to chemical receptors on the tongue, and as long as a substance triggers those receptors we experience a certain taste. Now of course if triggering needs a…

One interesting thing in this context is that you can taste the difference between water and heavy water, even though they look the same as ball-and-sticks. Also heavy water is said to taste sweet

Re: Too much serendipity

#86

Post by Guvante »

I will note that while 20,000 chemical compounds sounds like a lot I don't know that is true.

Aren't there hundreds of compounds in an orange?

I do agree with the conclusion though, we likely have tasted (or could have tasted) weaker options over the years.

I wonder if the real conclusion is "we don't understand the human body enough to predict what will work so getting lucky is our only option".

Re: Too much serendipity

#87

Post by fuzztester »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #81
fuzztester wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likewise when we say "numerical issues", it's understood that we're talking about situations in which the usual approximation of real numbers by floating point representations breaks down. Guys, try this in your desktop or mobile app calculator: do square root of 2. then subtract from it the result that you see on screen. for me: √2−1.41421356237 i get: 3.095048801E−12 i.e. not 0. I discovered this on a physical Cas…

> what is your result, and interpretation of it? that the square root of 2 is not 1.41421356237.

true, because the √2 is an irrational number.

but I was looking for an answer more along the lines that anamexis gave.

Re: Too much serendipity

#88

Post by swyx »

ptx wrote: post #50
GolfPopper wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an SF story I read years ago where the core concept was that humanity had somehow "missed" an obvious power-source/FTL drive, which meant that the "solution" to the Drake Equation is that the galaxy is full of intelligent, star-spanning empires that are effectively stuck at a late-1800s tech level (with starships), because getting to there was easy, and doing all the complex 20th century stuff humanity has…

Is it "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove? The Wikipedia description seems to match. (If so, ChatGPT got it on the second attempt.)

how do you use chatgpt to search for it?

i have been searching for a science fiction short story i read ~25 years ago - it was in a short story anthology book, probably not very famous because i've tried to plug it in and got nothing.

---

synopsis (since its a beautiful story and i may as well share it in case someone else here has read it and/or can prompt engineer chatgpt better than me):

- Humanity reached abundance but also got overpopulated - so the solution was to shard humanity by days. 1/7 of Humanity wakes and works on one day of the week, sleeps in cryopod the other 6 days.

- Main character is happily at work on a Monday tightening the screws on the planetary solar panels, when he notices a sleeping woman in another pod (another day, say Saturday idk) and falls in love on sight (i'm not 100% sure if it was physical-only, he may have read more about her or exchanged letters or something but cant fathom in-world reason how that would work)

- After a lot of personal cost and effort, he manages to get a once-in-a-lifetime exemption from the government to switch days, and wakes up on Saturday for the first time in his life.

- Goes over to see the woman... only to find she's asleep, because she just transferred to Monday because she also fell in love with him. He's barred from switching back because it was a onetime deal.

- Goes back to work to his new Saturday job... loosening screws on the planetary solar panels.

---

(above MAY be a hallucination of two stories, its been so long that i'm not sure anymore)

Re: Too much serendipity

#89

Post by tumultco »

WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #7

What a fabulous analysis! The serendipity is remarkably high! I suppose penicillin might be a good addition to the list of powerful compounds discovered by happenstance? Does this mean that innovation is basically a brute force calculation? Humans simply trying permutations until something hits?

To give some more context, Fleming's job was an antibacterial researcher, and also molds were also previously known to have these properties. In some ways, the lucky part was others finding his work and developing it. I found this video on the development of Penicillin a pretty interesting watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXmkDapHWg

Re: Too much serendipity

#90

Post by zetsurin »

autoexec wrote: post #82
Ductapemaster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fascinating Radiolab episode about anesthesia that is worth a listen: https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia

Only if you can stand the format. Even when (maybe especially when) they cover a topic that I'm interested in, I find it infuriating to listen to. It's filled with endless repetition and rephrasing of the same thing over and over again. For example here's a snippet from a transcript: JENN: ... to see if he can find anything in the interstitium that's happening that could explain this. And he finds ... QIUSHENG CHEN:…

My understanding is that regular human speech is generally this way.
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