I know this is a great book, it’s been on my to-read list for about 5 years. But I never get to it. Is there not another (shorter) discussion I could read on this? Even an academic paper would be acceptable.
You could read Kurt Godels paper,but it's literally undecyperable. The book is one on the best reads ever. It will also teach you how to think in very very formal ways. It made Calculus half the class it was, and I breezed through finite math.
Propositional Calulus will teach you to think in symbols you cannot even fathom. This alone is worth every minute reading the book.
Every few years I reread it, and get a new sense of solving problems. The book can be divided into parts... But the whole...
As I said above, I'm not an expert. However, I read GEB on a whim when bored at school and I think it still informs my thinking 35 years later.
Move GEB up the reading list right now! The edition I initially read was hard bound and was quite worn. I bought and read it again about 20 years ago and found more treasures.
It is a proper nerd grade treatise for non experts who are interested in maths, music and art. Really: maths, music and art from a mostly mathematical perspective. Hofstadter's writing style is very easy going and he is a master of clarity without complexity.
I don't think you need any more Maths than you would get up to age 18 or so at school to understand the entire book and probably less. Even if you gloss the formal Maths the book still works.
Your criticisms are absolutely right. I upvoted you, but just fyi I think your response may come off as too blunt/rude, and get “downvotes”. It doesn’t really matter here, but maybe helpful to know in general, if you didn’t already.
Fair enough! You're right it's a bit blunt. I didn't take very much time to edit it. Hopefully folks are able to look past any gruffness and find the substance in it.
I feel like you might be confused about the statement. One platform gives 58% odds, the other gives 64% odds. This is obviously high, but also very far from virtually guaranteed. In 100 trials, we’d expect recession in ~60 events. There is no secret math hidden here, it’s just that.
US manufacturing output is at an all-time high. It doesn't feel that way because there aren't as many jobs involved. I understand you're not actually arguing this, just speculating, but, "we need to boost manufacturing capability" isn't a convincing argument.
Hmm that is interesting. I understand this plot is showing the gross output of US manufacturing, but it strikes me that it might be the relative growth that matters, not the absolute growth — I wonder if there’s a similar plot normalized by the total world output?
If this were indeed the case, I’m not sure tariffs are the right direction to do it.
Principally, that a company would need more guarantees on their capital investment that extend beyond a single president’s term. Since tariffs can be revoked at any moment, companies will want more assurances that the long path of capital investment will be worthwhile, or else they might find themselves disadvantaged before even getting off the ground.
They would find themselves lobbying the government to hold back the free market for them within a few years time.
I did see a talk where someone was making the case that if the U.S. depends heavily on China for steel, and Taiwan for chips, then if China invades Taiwan the U.S. would very quickly be unable to wage a war with both supplies cut off. So the goal is to build some capacity for such products domestically.
They also tied that to Trump's desire to get out of Europe and deescalate the Middle East, being that if the U.S. was already stretched across Ukraine and say Iran, it would be way to stretched to also wage anything in the far east.
I'm no expert by a long way, but I can see some logic in the argument.
> Even on an overcast day, the team saw over 545 watts of solar input
Let’s (generously) assume that was the minimum they saw, and let’s (generously) say they charged for 14 hours. That’s 7.63 kWh gained over the day, in almost ideal conditions. Flagstaff’s high altitude means stronger sunlight, and they can do regenerative braking as they come down the mountain. In my Nissan leaf, 6 kWh would get me about 20 miles. If they are much more efficient, they maybe got 50 miles from the charging on that day, and the other 250 from the charge they started with.
I’d love to be wrong about any of the above! Solar panels on cars would be so cool! It just doesn’t seem useful. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
The average car travels less than 50 miles on the average day though (more like 30 I believe). This means you don't have to charge except on roadtrips (provided you can park outside in the sun, and don't drive more than average. The battery can provide some smoothing out of day-to-day variability though).
Whether not having to plug in at home is particularly useful... hard to know if it's something consumers want.
Fully agree. The physics of solar panels on cars just doesn't work. It's bizarre that this is actively pursued by startups and concept cars from large manufacturers when it takes just quick back-of-the-napkin math to see.
A car has about 5 m^2 of flat space on the roof/hood/trunk so that's the maximum surface area that can capture solar energy at any given time.
The total energy to hit the area is 1000 w/m^2.
The panels can't rotate to track the sun so the effective area is the cosine of the angle. So you end up with about half the amount of effective sunlight hours as the actual daylight hours. So in summer you get about 6 hours of effective sunlight.
Good panels in real world conditions can give you 22% efficiency.
So in optimal conditions you get: 5 * 1000 * 6 * 0.22 = 6.6 kwh
That will reflect your best days. It can be dramatically less if it's cloudy, overcast, winter, far from the equator, car is dirty, parked in shade, etc.
6.6 kwh is about one tenth of the battery in my Hyundai Kona EV. With very conservative highway driving, 6.6 kwh can get about 40km of range and about 50km in city driving. It's what I get from plugging into my home charger for 30 min and what you get from a fast charger in about 3 minutes.
So besides some very niche uses, there's no sense in massively increasing the cost and complexity of a car by installing solar panels. Far better to put the panel on the roof of parking and just plug in for a few minutes while you park.
The energy dynamics will be closer to a heavy ebike or light motorcycle.
500-600 watts is plenty for moving along at 30-40mph, and with such a light bodyshell, you don't want to be going a lot faster than that.
Standard automobiles are something of a vicious cycle energy-wise - weight, range and speed aren't a linear relationship, so on short-range trips we're paying a huge efficiency penalty for long-range capability. Golf buggies, ebikes and so on can be 1/10th the weight and 1/10th the energy consumption.
With how cheap solar panels are getting, why not slap a few of them on the roof of every EV? Some days they get you 10 free miles, other days 20 or 30. If you’re a commuter, you’re basically driving for free at that point.
Sure it’s not enough on road trips, but why is that a problem?
The solar cells themselves may be cheap, I don't think putting them on the roof of a car (without ruining the aerodynamics) is particularly cheap, yet. Most people would be better served putting the solar panels on the roof of their house.
Yes also any one with a ev knows speed matters. Its not stated how long it took or average speed over the course. Not to mention a nice draft from the film car. Besides all that I would still love to have one.
You are not wrong, you are just missing the point. This is the ultimate commuter vehicle. Most commutes fall in the 10-30 miles range. On an average day, you might drive 30-40 miles. If so, you basically are powered by the sun on most days.
> they maybe got 50 miles from the charging on that day
They claim it's up to 40.
Best case you charge more than you drive; so your car has a enough in the battery every morning to make it back home after work. Worst case, you delay the moment when you have to charge by plugging in by some large percentage. The difference between charging your car once or twice per week and once or twice every few months top top it up. Perfect if you don't have a charger at home. Removes a lot of the hassle and cost related to charging.
Road trips are not something people do on a daily basis. Especially not in light/small vehicles. But when you do, a light vehicle with a longish range is a nice thing to have. And this thing is very efficient by design (light, teardrop shaped) and the relatively small battery probably charges pretty quickly. And you get a few tens of miles extra because of the solar. So it can do a 300 mile journey despite having a smallish battery. Which is what they just demonstrated. 300 miles is pretty good. Most EVs don't do any better than that.
More seriously, it seems to be essentially the idea that “surpassing human intelligence” is not the binary outcome many thought it would be, and that much of what passes for human intelligence interpersonally could be imitation of intelligence.
Yeah, the impetus comes from the Ashley Madison hacks.
Like, you had thousands of men paying real money to chat with (terrible) bots. To me, that was the passing of the Turing Test. But I know of nearly no person that could possibly fall for that scam. Even family members deep in dementia knew it was a joke. Yet Ashely Madison made a ton of cash.
That, to me, was puzzling. How could it happen that people that are that foolish would be able to hold a job or pay taxes? It made no sense.
So, the (bad) pet theory that I eventually came up with is that human intelligence is a lot wider than we think it is.
Can you say more about the impact of private ownership? I don’t watch sports at all, so this is news to me — what are the negative effects? Is it just you get teams with massive funding and others with none?
Yea, and to be fair the leagues try to compensate for this with varying degrees of success by regulating how much you can spend, subsidizing poorer teams, etc.
But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.
(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)
It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.
If I’m understanding correctly, not only do you get teams with massive resources, but also teams treated kind of like clowns to entertain their owner? That really is a crazy situation, lol.
It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:
- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise
- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning
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