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Science: Everything explained by PV=nRT, F=ma=Gm(1)•m(2)/r^2

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I didn't think number mattered, but placement. At bare minimum, for our type of life, you need one planet in the goldilocks zone to host it and one giant more distant to vacuum up the solar system's garbage to keep the bombardment to a minimum.

Hence you could have a viable 2-system, but the more planets the more likelihood you fill the right slots.

In my opinion what you need for a spacefaring species is an enormous system spread as far from the primary as possible, for stepping stones. Put a 50-planet system closer in on an arm with planets ranging out to say .1 parsecs and then a dozen or so stars within 1 parsec, and you have a stairway to heaven.
 
Kepler said:
Um. Um...

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I remember when that was first announced. Google started using neural networks for its translations, so instead of just learning how to go back and forth from Language A to Language B. The neural networks allowed it to do Language A to Language B AND Language A to Language C.

Somehow, the AI started to figure out how to translate between B and C *without* first translating to the common Language A.

It was a sitting there blinking at the computer screen reaction then as it is still now. AI is a hell of a thing.
 
aparch said:
I remember when that was first announced. Google started using neural networks for its translations, so instead of just learning how to go back and forth from Language A to Language B. The neural networks allowed it to do Language A to Language B AND Language A to Language C.

Somehow, the AI started to figure out how to translate between B and C *without* first translating to the common Language A.

It was a sitting there blinking at the computer screen reaction then as it is still now. AI is a hell of a thing.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-LQFXfnhrI&ab_channel=gan9e
 
Conservatism may be neurobiological.

A new paper in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences posits a Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV), an archetype defined by several truly toxic traits: a pathological need for recognition, a difficulty empathizing with others, feelings of moral superiority, and, importantly, a thirst for vengeance.

"The findings…suggest that victimhood is a stable and meaningful personality tendency," write the study's authors, a quartet of scholars associated with Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers solicited several hundred participants for a series of psychological experiments that tested their assumptions. As such, the results should be taken with a grain of salt—social psychology research suffers from notoriously thorny replication issues, since these kinds of experiments are not always great substitutes for the sort of thing being studied. In one of this paper's experiments, for instance, a computer split a pot of money between itself and a human participant; this person was led to believe the computer was also a human participant. Sometimes the pot was split unevenly, and the human participant was given a chance to take vengeance by reducing the computer's pot without enriching his own. Researchers discovered that participants classified as having higher TIV scores were "strongly associated with behavioral revenge" in this scenario.

TIV was also "associated with an increased experience of negative emotions, and entitlement to immoral behavior."

The study distinguishes TIV from narcissism. Narcissistic individuals also experience moral superiority and vengeful desires, but these feelings tend to spring from the belief that their authority, capability, or grandiosity is being undermined. TIV, on the other hand, is associated with low self-esteem. And while narcissists do not want to be victimized, high-TIV individuals lash out when their victimhood is questioned.

"The self-presentation of high-TIV individuals is that of a weak victim, who has been hurt and is therefore in need of protection," write the authors. "Threats to high-TIV individuals are related to anything that can undermine their self-image of moral superiority; or elicit doubts from their environment as to whether the offense occurred, the intensity of the offense, or their exclusivity as victims."

Writing in Scientific American, psychologist Scott Kauffman notes that "the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma and victimization with possessing the victimhood mindset. They point out that a victimhood mindset can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization."
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Basically, a conservative has such a weak moral constitution that anything can make him feel victimized. He has an eggshell character. The slightest thwarting of the infinity of things he preens as entitled to feels like terrible persecution to him, and he cries like a stuck pig.

Behavior by conservatives on the Cafe checks with this.
 
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Some random but very cool stories popped up for me the past few days:

2-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Unearthed in Tanzania

An international team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists has discovered a large collection of 2-million-year-old stone tools, fossilized bones and plant materials at the site of Ewass Oldupa in the western portion of the ancient basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai) in northern Tanzania. The discovery reveals that the earliest Olduvai hominins used diverse, rapidly changing environments that ranged from fern meadows to woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, to lakeside woodland/palm groves as well as steppes.
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Archaeologists in Turkey Unearth 2,500-Year-Old Temple of Aphrodite

An inscription found at the site—dedicated to the Greek goddess of love and beauty—states, “This is the sacred area”

Researchers surveying the Urla-Çeşme peninsula in western Turkey have unearthed a sixth-century B.C. temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite.

“Aphrodite was a very common cult at that time,” team leader Elif Koparal, an archaeologist at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, tells the Hürriyet Daily News.
Aphrodite was the ancient Greek goddess of beauty, love and procreation. At times, she was also associated with seafaring and war. Early sculptures show her clothed and largely similar to other goddesses, but around the fifth century B.C., artists began portraying her naked or mostly nude, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Many temples and shrines were devoted to her cult, with particular areas of strength in Cyprus and on the island of Cythera off the southern coast of Greece.
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A Tombstone Inscribed in Ancient Greek Is Found in Southern Israel

The Byzantine-era stone reads ‘blessed Maria, who lived an immaculate life’

Workers cleaning Israel’s Nitzana National Park as part of a conservation jobs program for the unemployed recently discovered a tombstone inscribed in ancient Greek dating to the late sixth or early seventh century. Almog Ben Zikri reports for Haaretz that the stone’s inscription reads “Blessed Maria, who lived an immaculate life.”

Researchers consider Nitzana, a site in the Negev desert close to the Egyptian border, important for the study of the transition from the Byzantine to Early Islamic periods.
“During the fifth and sixth centuries CE, Nitzana served as a center for the villages and settlements in the vicinity,” Tali Erickson-Gini, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), says in a statement. “Among other things, it had a military fortress as well as churches, a monastery and a roadside inn that served Christian pilgrims traveling to Santa Katarina, which believers regarded as the site of Mount Sinai.”

Erikson-Gini says Nitzana was founded in the third century B.C. as a station on a major Nabataean trade route. The Nabateans lived in the area between Syria and Arabia at that time, benefiting from the caravan trade between Arabia and the Mediterranean coast. The kingdom grew for centuries and eventually became an ally to the Roman Empire. Nitzana continued to be inhabited at various times until the 10th century, when it was abandoned.

In the 1930s, archaeologists discovered a trove of sixth- and seventh-century Greek and Arabic papyrus documents at the site, which is also known as “Nessana.” The documents include military, church and family records, as well as information about the caravan industry.

Researchers have since found a number of Christian tombstones outside Nitzana, but they are trying to learn more about the history of the area. Ariel David reported for Haaretz in July that archaeologists believe Nitzana was part of a thriving regional wine industry in the fifth century, when it was part of the Byzantine Empire. However, a plague pandemic and a volcanic winter in the middle of the sixth century may have devastated the area’s Christian communities. Islamic forces then took over the area in the seventh century.

“Unlike other ancient towns in the Negev, very little is known about the burial grounds around Nitzana,” Israel Antiquities Authority Southern District archaeologist Pablo Betzer says in the statement. “The find of any inscription such as this may improve our definition of the cemeteries’ boundaries, thus helping to reconstruct the boundaries of the settlement itself, which have not yet been ascertained.”
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13 mysterious mummies discovered in Egyptian well

Egypt has uncovered a mysterious collection of coffins thought to contain human mummies that have been sealed inside for more than 2,500 years.

The 13 unopened coffins, which were found piled on top of each other in a well nearly 40 feet (12 meters) deep are so well preserved that the original detailed designs and colors are clearly visible, according to Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Archeologists who made the discovery at Saqqara, an ancient site that lies about 20 miles south of Egypt's capital and is also home to landmarks including the Step Pyramid, believed to be the world's oldest, are expected to make more discoveries at the site in coming days.
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What a desert looks like when it ends in a sand "cliff," Namibia:

yw75v53n76k61.jpg
 
Definitely not a dumb question. My supposition is that it just means no pattern has been found *yet*. I suspect a quick Google (didn't try it myself) would bring up many examples where patterns have been discovered in phenomena that had formerly been presumed to be random. We are pretty darn good at finding patterns in things and breaking codes that had held for dozens or hundreds of years.
 
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