> "The Oxford researchers proposed that the large spontaneous waves of brain activity that occur during deep sleep, or non-rapid eye movement sleep (non-REM), might suppress the brain activity that leads to tinnitus.2
I have a permanent tinnitus and my watch tells that I have a low level of deep sleep. I wonder how I could improve my deep sleep? (I am retired, live on countryside and have some physical activity)
I saw once a public request from a US administration for interested providers to create a LLM able to translate video meetings in Farsi (Iranian), summarize and propose following up actions.
There were training corpus in English, Hebrew and Farsi.
I guess it means the US had access to Iranian communication means. I wondered how it was possible to rely on a LLM to carry international relations. It seems a new low in stupidity.
The request was made on Innocentive (an open innovation website).
I wonder if it's possible to design a personal device that can track most of the 100+ biomarkers named in the front page of this website. I guess that do do so it must analyze more than the blood (through LEDs reflections), for example saliva or feces.
After all my watch tracks already 6/7 of them, why not 100?
Long time ago I used a fetal Doppler to detect heart failure in adults. It was not based on LLMs (2016) but on a HMM to learn the hidden states: The heart beats.
It was tested with the Physionet database. It performed quite well, but I didn't invent the algorithm; it came from a Physionet competition.
If I was a dictator in charge of a tens-of-trillions of dollar-equivalent economy, I'd do that.
Unfortunately, I really do mean "dictator" as we'd need to sustain a lot of R&D for a long time (much longer than a two-term US president for example), and even nations can't afford to spend a huge percentage of their economy on long-term projects so it has to be a fairly limited % of the overall money supply for that period. And one needs to be extremely cautious, no speed-running: a nation cannot afford to have a thematic repeat of the Apollo 1 fire with e.g. a 2000 km long Lofstrom launch loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
There's three options for that size of economy:
• The US space industry comes in two parts, (1) a jobs program ("Senate Launch System" etc.) whose stated goals change with almost every new president, and (2) New Space (where Musk got the lion's share, but now he showed what is possible the whole world is quite capable of following the same path). Neither half of this lends itself to an R&D program on this scale.
• The EU is not one nation, it's a glorified free trade area. The EU's budget independently of the member states is nowhere near big enough to consider this.
• That leaves China; they could, I think, if they decide they want to. Will they decide that? I have no idea. Fits belt-and-road, but they may consider it a pointless boondoggle.
I believe you might be a bit pessimistic. The USA studied nuclear ramjets in the 1950, as well as thermal nuclear rockets. Russia has a nuclear propelled missile [0].
Much as I like nuclear power for deep space stuff, even put them in the novel I've never finished writing, they're politically unacceptable* where they're most useful: take-off.
Basically all the people going "What if 9/11 was done with a flying Chernobyl?"**, some of whom are concerned voters, some of whom are the engineering team, some of whom are the foreign politicians who threaten to put sanctions on you.
Once you get to interplanetary, ion drives take away most of the advantage, because of how many people are willing to put a few extra years on a mission in exchange for not having to care about the risks.
Still, incredibly useful if you can get past all that.
* outside of warfare
** Which is essentially also something that happens in my novel, as the intersection of accident with Newton's first law
Please finish your novel, it looks very interesting!
> "What if 9/11 was done with a flying Chernobyl?"
I guess it's a PR problem, particularly with the perspective to have dozen of Starship rockets launched every year.
What do people prefer? A rocket that works within reasonable technological limits (a nuclear rocket with chemical first stage) or a monster rocket that works at the edge of what is physically possible (Starship)?
The issue, politically and for the public, is not so much nuclear for space travel, it's launching it into space, IMHO. I don't think anyone cares too much if you say that you will use nukes to accelerate your spaceship to Mars (as long as they can trust that this is indeed what you are doing) until you say that this means you will need to build those nukes on Earth and, especially, to load them onto rockets to launch them into space because what happens if it crashes or explodes?
> Please finish your novel, it looks very interesting!
Thanks, I've had similar positive responses from many people… unfortunately, spread over the last decade, because I keep finding it hard to tie all the bits together.
I'm better at world-building than plot, I have discovered.
To live on Mars requires a level of autonomy and self-sufficiency that I don't think we know how to do.
On the Moon we can learn but we have softer requirements, and we can still have near real time comms. Anything further and it's "you're alone, no-one can help you, no-one will even hear you in case of emergency". Faster transportation isn't going to fundamentally change that unless it's near Star Trek level.
IMHO, the rocket is just a small part of the problem.
Thanks for the insight. I mostly agree but I guess there are many humans on Earth that live without help available within a few hours, for example sailors in international seas.
Even traveling abroad in a developed country carries some risks, if you have some medical issue and are unable to explain yourself because of lack of medical vocabulary, the consequences may be dire.
While true, I think you're underestimating the extra difficultly of space here.
Mars is colder than Antarctica, drier than the Sahara, has an air pressure much much closer to vacuum than it is to even the top of Mt Everest (and a quarter of it condenses each Martian winter), the air it does have is 95% CO2 and 0.174% oxygen, the soil is as polluted as a superfund* cleanup site, the sunlight is at best 50% of the Moon's due to distance from the sun but planet-spanning dust storms can reduce that, because of the lack of free oxygen there's no free ozone layer and combined with the thin atmosphere in general it has higher ionising surface radiation despite the lower sunlight, and the return time to Earth even for nice options like VASIMR** are 39 days in the best launch window.
To give a toy example: If the water supply suffers a catastrophic loss, everyone dies in almost all circumstances before being able to get help (even if we had/when we get working VASIMR solutions at this scale, right now most discussions assume much slower and more delta-v-efficient Hohmann transfer orbits).
Same incident happens on the moon, emergency evacuation or resupply is possible before death by dehydration.
To get back to Earth from Mars with that kind of time constraint, we'd need an engine that can sustain close to 1g acceleration for about 2 days at closest approach; at maximum separation, unless I've messed up the formula, 1g would still take 4.7 days (with mid-point flip for deceleration). Basically, mytailorisrich is correct to describe this as needing "near Star Trek level" tech, because the closest we have to an inertial dampener right now is a very big magnet pushing on the water inside our bodies***.
** Claim I last heard was 39 days for a 200 megawatt reactor "with a power-to-mass density of 1,000 watts per kilogram", the good news is we can almost do that power-to-mass density with PV after accounting for Mars-gets-less-sun: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/10/25/276652...
*** The difficulty of making this useful is comparable to the difficulty of launching a spaceship with a big magnet on the ship that pushes against Earth's own magnetic field.
As I recall from last time I did the maths, if you did it with copper, the copper would boil before you did much useful.
I switched from Devuan (Debian without SystemD) to GhostBSD a few weeks ago. Until now it seems a very pleasant travel, even bringing back nice memories of Unix in the 1990 while using all the modern tools.
I suspect English is not your first language based on your profile and I'd like to give a tip: "until now" implies that what follows is no longer true, due to a recent event that changed it. "So far" is probably closer to what you wanted, which expresses that it's still true, but based on limited time / experience.
Yet does your conclusion contradict your premises?
"It just sees frequency. It digests without tasting. And then you land on the page and it says: phenomenological convergence. That's a collision. Because phenomenology is the opposite operation. Husserl's whole move was to un-merge — to strip away exactly the habitual pairings"
I have a permanent tinnitus and my watch tells that I have a low level of deep sleep. I wonder how I could improve my deep sleep? (I am retired, live on countryside and have some physical activity)
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