asciilifeform: as i gather, he's engaged in a contest of who-dies-first with adelberger
asciilifeform: basically he insisted that a negative result must come from one of the two eotvos torsion balances
asciilifeform: iirc, it was an even bet whether the effect - if real - is even large enough to measure with current instrumentation at all
asciilifeform: rather than some kid and ratty old instruments from us army
asciilifeform: so if trying, has to be the 'full nine yards'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it made sense to me. 'the lysenkoists refuse to even try' is bad enough, but 'see, somebody tried, it failed, shuddup' is quite possibly worse
asciilifeform: and the man can speak for himself, and really ought to
asciilifeform: anyone who wants to know what was going through his head - write to him! i don't relish playing 'broken telephone'
asciilifeform: that is, that a failure for any number of reasons unrelated to the physical prediction - such as my hands growing out of my arse - would set him back (if such a thing were possible) years
asciilifeform: in a way not accounted for by any previously known effect
asciilifeform: synthetic crystal of two chiral isomers of $censored that would have, according to the model, very small difference in energy of phase change
asciilifeform: well, he would have had to blow a rather expensive single-use wad
asciilifeform: i actually worked with a number of folks at the time who were ready to wangle access to the instruments for me.
asciilifeform: it was a perfectly valid objection, which is why the experiment will not happen publicly on this side of the coming civilizational demolition.
asciilifeform: (most of the 50k, in case anyone cares, covers two well-used microcalorimeters.)
asciilifeform: iraq had (past tense, note) army, industry, economy
asciilifeform: any more than montgolfier brothers had 'aviation'
asciilifeform: fact is, we haven't actually built computers yet
asciilifeform: the politics of cyc etc. aside, such projects are about as interesting as the historical proposals to go to the moon in balloons, shooting men from cannons, etc.
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: if you're thinking of a human-cranked systematization project, straight to doug lenat's 'cyc' (i'll spoil it for you: it was stillborn)
asciilifeform: 1) ocr doesn't work because 99.99% is still ludicrously low - human reader -who fully understands the text- still required 2) no ocr exists or is reasonably likely to ever exist for anything rich in notation 3) the machine-readability of most mathematical work is a fully ai-complete problem
asciilifeform: the whole affair went on in its current form far too long for the usual dance of the buggers - 'pretend it never happened' - to go as does
asciilifeform: if they did it, someone, somewhere, might dig up the fella who actually invented it
asciilifeform: physics - as a discipline - is 99+% tumour, with scarcely any patient tissue remaining
asciilifeform: whereas all kinds of bullshit, which cannot be observed anywhere, ever, even in principle - is entirely real to a 'string theorist.'
asciilifeform: 'For example, Newton's apple contains vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid) which is parity-asymmetric, and it would accelerate differently if the laws of gravity cared about the mirror images.' << lying scum, yes. implying that effect cannot exist because not observable with naked eye on naturally-occurring objects
asciilifeform: decimation: it is quite possibly impractical to make bga (ball grid array) ic packages without pb
asciilifeform: decimation: the 'gpu issue' happens on even more recent macbooks << it's been a thing ever since the mandatory switch to pb-free
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the merging of those two ideas yields a pretty powerful metaphor. << let's have the ps0t, yes. looking forward to reading it
asciilifeform: plus they churned inventory, the real immediate purpose of all usg .mil maneuvers
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you will notice the imperial mooks got utterly owned in that play << afaik usg accomplished their one non-negotiable thing in iraq - break the orcs into eternally-warring bantustans, 'vaccinate' against any possible emergence of a real sovereign
asciilifeform: (i did work through a good chunk of the maths behind al's eötvös adventures, for own edification and to attempt to come up with a way to rescue him - to learn how that went, see old thread)
asciilifeform: though i have not tried it personally, nor do i know enough about roaches to say if there are nuances not accounted for
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: ditto the roach repellent
asciilifeform: (i have no reason not to believe him)
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: any more information on the Chinese run << of al's eötvös experiment ? just some private correspondence, where he confirms the same story told on usenet
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: with the difference (see earlier in this thread) being that spears does not operate a multilevel mmmatron for cranking out copies of self
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ar has ru-style 'meetings' ? i.e. crowds of folks with prefab picket signs, paid chump change to wave around ?
asciilifeform: "what is the plan b of yonder artificial lake, once dykes fail ?" << 'what should one do when a shell lands in the trench ?' -- 'jump up twenty metres and scatter yourself around.' (brit., circa ww1)
asciilifeform: this one is gonna be short on manhattan project and long on amulets issued to the cannon fodder that 'ward off bullets with the power of jizzus'
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: check your time machine settings. you've arrived at the wrong war
