Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

Kalel

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Technically we should care... as it's pretty historical... but still out of reach of the average person.

SpaceX Will Fly a Japanese Billionaire (and Artists, Too!) Around the Moon in 2023

A Japanese billionaire and a coterie of artists will visit the moon as early as 2023, becoming the first private citizens ever to fly beyond low Earth orbit, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced tonight.

Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of Japanese e-commerce giant Zozo, has signed up to fly a round-the-moon mission aboard SpaceX's BFR spaceship-rocket combo, he and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced during a webcast tonight (Sept. 17) from the company's rocket factory in Hawthorne, California.
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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The tropical Atlantic is really hopping right now, and there could be some bad news in it for the Carolinas so soon after Florence.

 

danielravennest

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Free

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A one-word Turing Test suggests "poop" is what sets us apart from the machines
The researchers responsible, John McCoy and Tomer Ullman, clarify that the Minimal Turing Test isn’t a benchmark for AI progress, but a way of probing how humans see themselves in relation to machines. This question is going to become increasingly relevant in a world filled with AI assistants, deepfaked humans, and Google auto reply handling your email. In a world of human-like AI, what do we think sets us apart? What makes us different?

In the first of McCoy and Ullman’s two tests, 936 participants were asked to select any word they liked that they thought could be proof of their humanity. Despite the free range of choices, results clustered around a small number of themes. The four most frequently picked words were “love” (134 answers), “compassion” (33 answers), “human” (30 answers), and “please” (25 answers), which made up a quarter of all responses. Other clusters were empathy (words like “emotion,” “feelings,” and “sympathy”), and faith and forgiveness (words like “mercy,” “hope,” and “god”).
But, um...

In the second test, 2,405 participants had to choose between pairs of words, deciding which of the two they thought was given by a human and a machine. Again, words like “love,” “human,” and “please” scored strongly, but the winning word was simpler and distinctly biological: “poop.” Yes, out of all of the word pairings, “poop” was selected most frequently to denote the very essence and soul of humanity. Poop.
:poop:
 

craz

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This robotic finger attachment for your smartphone will gently caress your hand

What a world we live in.

Our smartphones are cold, passive devices that usually can’t move autonomously unless they’re falling onto our faces while we’re looking at them in bed. A research team in France is exploring ways to change that by giving our smartphones the ability to interact with us more.

There’s definitely an unsettling, creepy way in how it moves. Maybe it’s the way it drags its lifeless phone-body across the table to let you know you have a new message.
Okay who's getting one?

 

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It's annoying enough when they beep, buzz and play music. Why do I want them creeping across the table to get my attention?
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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Things I learn. (The first fact of 10)

Red dwarfs will outlive the Universe
That's a lot of neat information but I see a big problem with that headline. First the article says that red dwarfs will outlive the universe - which is a little weird of a thing to say by itself but anyways, later on it says

Based on studies of the stars in the Sun’s neighbourhood, it appears that red dwarf stars may account for up to 75% of the total stellar population of the Milky Way galaxy...
Assuming the Milky Way is a very normal galaxy, which it seems to be, how do you call the universe over or dead when 75% of its stars are still around and kicking?
 

Veritable Quandry

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Assuming the Milky Way is a very normal galaxy, which it seems to be, how do you call the universe over or dead when 75% of its stars are still around and kicking?
Well, all the good night clubs that I know of are around main sequence stars with about one solar mass.
 
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