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New human-like species discovered

bbc.co.uk

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Re: New human-like species discovered

#211

Post by gus_massa »

SEJeff wrote: post #180
gus_massa wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supposed thrust of the EmDrive is very small. But the device has a lot of wires with current that can be equivalent to an electromagnet, and very hot parts that can create air currents, and ... If you have not done few physics labs, it's easy to underestimate the measurement problems and the level of noise in experiments. Most of the Physics community thinks that this is an experimental error. One symptom is that…

I don't think the scientists at NASA are bogus. They managed to calculate when a probe would reach pluto that was only off by a few seconds. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done on that, but there are those that say it isn't breaking the laws of physics. We shall see I guess, but it has been replicated in 3 places now taht I'm aware of, two of which are serious science outfits.

The NASA is very big, they went to the Moon but they also published the infamous arsenic life paper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFAJ-1#Biochemistry ).

In a "massless" thruster, the theoretical maximum Thrust/Power ratio is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW if you don't want to break the conservation of momentum, special relativity or quantum mechanics. You could get this value with an ideal perfectly efficient laser beam. The latest NASA version proclaims (50 uN / 50 W) = 1 mN/KW that is 300x the theoretical maximum, so if it's not an experimental error, it must be breaking some of the currently supposed physic laws.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#212

Post by xanthor »

sysk wrote: post #204
samfoo wrote: post #23

Awesome to see the Rising Star Expedition on HN! I was working in Johannesburg while the expedition was active and my partner managed, through a serious of very fortunate events to become a caver on the expedition. Here she is carrying up some of the first bones they extracted - https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg . For those of you interested, the expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, and there was/is a fairl…

I had to re-read the comment a few times before realising that you wrote "caver" and not "cadaver".

That's incredible!

Re: New human-like species discovered

#213

Post by throwaway1967 »

dreyfiz wrote: post #210
throwaway1967 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but inste…

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a synt…

I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its nouns.

For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had. And so, Finnish affords itself the ability to have free word order and checksum benefits while doing entirely away with the concept of gender.

So I reject your explanation on the basis that it is clear to me that the declension of nouns into cases is what is responsible for the checksum and word order benefits, and not whether a language has grammatical gender.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#214

Post by RogtamBar »

lordnacho wrote: post #131
wpankey wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this. It has always baffled me that we are led to believe that all of humanity springs from one common root. Absolutely ridiculous and goes against common sense -what other species (of anything) has just one single representative??? Who's been selling this and why???

Nobody is saying there was a single pair of people at some point. But something like a population bottleneck resulting from the Toba eruption would mean all future people were descended from a small group of survivors. And those types of events happen a lot.

Small group?

It went down to estimated 1500 worldwide. That is plenty.

Note that last common ancestor of the most differing human ethnics is something like 180-200k years ago.

Furthermore, with the advent of denser living and agriculture, evolution sped up quite a lot.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#215

Post by eru »

ig1 wrote: post #50
HerpDerpLerp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you don't work in a biological field!

If they're in the same genus presumably the same CRISPR approach that's being used to inject Wooly Mammoth genes into Elephants can apply ?

DNA's half-life is too short.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#216

Post by dllthomas »

throwaway1967 wrote: post #213
dreyfiz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a synt…

I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its noun…

The free word order seems to come predominately from declension rather than gender, but I don't see how declension provides much in the way of a checksum.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#217

Post by javert »

throwaway1967 wrote: post #213
dreyfiz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a synt…

I'm sorry, but that still does not explain why the Romans created more gendered 3rd declension variants when using the neuters from the 2nd and 3rd declensions would have made more sense (since the things they were naming were sexless, like rivers and trees and other geographical things) while they would nevertheless have retained the "checksum" and "free word ordering" benefits from a language that declines its noun…

> For example, Finnish is utterly genderless, but it has more declension cases for nouns than Latin had.

That's consistent with simply making a tradeoff. So a Roman could say:

I don't understand why the Finns created more declension cases when they could have just used gender.

Re: New human-like species discovered

#218

Post by paxcoder »

3pt14159 wrote: post #182
PavlovsCat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I make a copy of a program and run it elsewhere, whatever I do to it on another machine won't affect the original copy. Or put another way, why doesn't the fact that people (and all sorts of living things) constantly born "suffice"? How similar to you do they have to be for it to suffice? If you really split hairs, even exact copies of a thing are never exact, since no two things can occupy the same space at the s…

Yeah, this is why I said it is a long discussion. I think about these types of things all the time, and I really discovered philosophy along the way. It's actually made me more religious (sans pageantry) because since I accept that I could be simulated / could be a simulation, I also have to accept the hellish horrors you list. But I have faith that an ultimate good / God / Omega would limit suffering and while I sha…

As a Catholic, I find your choice of words very interesting. The Faith teaches that darkness has no part with light, and no unholy spirit can stand before the Triple Holy (good and evil are said to be like water and oil). So the damned, who cannot stand (in) the presence of God (who is agape, the ultimate good, and triumphant), are thrown / throw themselves into Hell where they are immolated. Except souls are eternal, so they remain forever in that separation from God (the source of all good). "...people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment..." [Hebrews 9:27]
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