In tech, blind support of anything is simply based on superficial aspects like popularity or marketing without any specific supporting arguments around price, performance, etc.
Thus it’s easy to distinguish the two by asking in-depth questions. IE it’s fast! How fast?
The problem is that in most engineering discussions "big tech does this" is instant discussion win, while a solution that deviates from what coworkers perceive as "standard" will never get accepted, even if you use logical arguments.
I mean, if I'm doing a project with one other person, we can use logic to get to the best solution, but if it's three people in a group or more, then the most charismatic person becomes the leader, and the rest does whatever the leader wants, even if they make bad calls.
Overall yes, but they do present non trivial medical risks for some people.
Similarly, the risks for specific drivers in specific vehicles making specific trips isn’t the same as the risks for the average driver making an arbitrary trip.
The goal of H1B isn’t to simply suppress wages for the highest paying professions, it’s to make up shortfalls. Lack of high school French teachers in Alaska can be an issue not just a lack of programmers with an AI background.
As such, if only one applicant for underwater welding is submitted the industry likely doesn’t require extra workers even if you’re willing to pay 500k/year. I’d still weight things so people paid 5x as much have 5x as likely to be picked which would discourage company’s submitting hundreds of applications for lower wage jobs.
The computing power of cellular machinery in ~3lb of human tissue which includes neurons, are many orders of magnitude larger than 1e6 or even 1e12 H100s.
Quite literally your finger has more compute power than 1e6 H100s, we just use that computational power to stay alive rather than “think.”
Do you think a single neuron has more compute than a H100? I'm not sure even energy based theoretical bounds on computation power allow this even in principle.
It’s allowed because the energy limits in the Landauer's principle are based on irreversible state changes.
When an Antibody doesn’t match a surface protein there’s computation with zero energy loss because there’s no change in state. It amounts to a “free” if statement as long as the result is false and it’s almost always false. Though in a larger context it’s really inefficient as it’s a random process only effective because of how many Antibodies flood the body and how quickly they bounce around and can preform this computation.
Cells heavily leverage this kind of computation to the point where it’s not generally thought of as computation until something happens.
Thanks for the explanation--that was helpful. However I am not sure if microscopic states of the neuron are propagated as signals to nearby cells or only some sort of macroscopic state (like the sort of abstraction of thermodynamics) and I suspect there are bounds to the speed of change and number of these macroscopic states.
I guess at some point we should only count computations above some abstraction level otherwise we also undercount the computation power of a gpu.
Are we broadly in agreement? Even if we disagree above the relative computation power of the two
What do you even mean? You are comparing apples and oranges. Can an H100 churn through deterministic instructions to get to a fixed result in a computer's combinatorial envelope fast? No doubt.
However an abacus does not know how or what to add to achieve a goal.
Can an H100 or a bunch of H100s achieve better biological control than the human brain in real time as a self directed agent?
No i mean a neuron has input electrical signals and outputs. Do you think I cannot simulate a single neuron to fidelity on a H100? Probably theoretically it is possible that it cannot if it's leveraging some physics to do optimization but I think in practice it's possible.
Fwiw I think 10e6 h100s can act as a competent self directed agent with the right algorithms yes
I think 1e6 h100s could run something that’s intelligent enough to hold a meaningful conversation as in AGI assuming we figured out the appropriate algorithms and training methods.
But your description of Neurons is off. They output chemical signals, which is why painkillers can dull the signal etc. Many drugs bind to receptors on neurons which then block signals which wouldn’t work if these where electrical connections.
The do respond to electrical stimulation, and it’s often said they use electrical signals to carry information along the body of the neuron but the actual signal only moves up to ~120 m/s a long way from how fast electrical signals move. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
As to simulation of a neuron, the brains got 86 billion neurons and the peripheral nervous system is doing useful work here. A full fidelity simulation of even one neuron is completely off the table simply because it’s an analog system where timing matters to an arbitrary precision, but what’s good enough is really just a question of context. Good enough to test new drugs for depression? No, though good enough to drive a car is a reasonable goal.
The absolute amount of clean generation mostly just correlates with the amount of electricity demand.
Texas uses 475 TWh / year of electricity, California 251, Florida 248, Ohio 149, and down it goes.
Meanwhile Texas only has 33% carbon free electricity vs 49% in California which are still below outliers like Vermont 80%, South Dakota 81%, and Washington 83%.
Unfortunately, WV and Kentucky are coal country with under 7% carbon free.
Yea. It's trite, but a lot of things are literally bigger in Texas. It's easy to do really misleading stats around Texas because it just does more of everything than the rest of the US. It can both build more green energy and still pollute more than everyone else.
California is also significantly bigger by economic output while using half as much electricity. There's probably some hidden factors there, like Texas engaging in more electricity intensive industries than California does or California using more fossil fuels for things Texas uses electricity for (this one seems improbable), but it seems like a very strange discrepancy.
I have to assume most of the electricity use in TX is cause it's over 100 degrees in most of the state for most of 9 months every year, and a lot of California barely gets over 75 for more than a few weeks. Texas lives and dies on air conditioning, which is a nearly fully electrical use. Colder places use energy, but it can be a mix of electricity, gas, propane, and other options. AC is almost always electricity.
Maybe there's also an industrial angle, but you can live in CA without power almost all year. There's a lot of Texas where if the power goes out for a few days, all your food is spoiled and you're probably about to die from heat with almost no alternative.
I had my AC go out in October in Texas and it was 88 degrees in my house within 6 hours. A lot of houses and apartments really aren't designed for natural ventilation in the way that you'd want in order to be able to naturally cool a space.
It’s a bunch of things. Home solar and insulation requirements isn’t directly showing up on these comparisons but they matter. In 2023 California got 19TWh/y from home Solar vs 3.7 for Texas. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1419901/us-residential-g...
The California as a wide range of temperatures, directly next to the ocean is milder assuming the wind is from the west, but it gets much worse with El Centro seeing average July high’s of 107!
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/California/city-tempe...
PS: A less commonly considered advantage for solar is rooftop panels provide shade and by converting sunlight into electricity it effectively lowers their albido reducing local heat gain.
I mean, that table says the average high for almost all of is in the mid to high 90s. That's not that far off from what I said.
Additionally, sure, California has plenty of desert that's as hot as Texas, but most of the population is in LA, San Diego, or San Francisco, which are all coastal and relatively temperate. Most of Texas's population is in Dallas(97), Houston (93), San Antonio (95), or Austin (97) which are all generally in reliably hot areas. Houston may have an average summer high of 93, but that's also coupled with a brutal humidity.
The equivalent California population centers are SF (66), San Diego (75), LA (82), and Anaheim (87). All generally livable temperatures, especially given their overnight lows are in the 60s. Most of Texas has summer overnight lows in the mid to high 70s.
Yes, Texas isn't that much hotter than the rest of the US south, but it's also insanely more populated. Houston with it outlying suburbs nearly has the population of all of Mississippi put together. For the most part, large quantities of people don't live in the other really hot parts of the south except for Florida.
If the argument is temperature and therefore AC alone explains the drastic difference in per capita electricity use the numbers just don’t add up. If half of Texas electricity use was AC and all of California stayed 75 the sure however…
I agree there’s a big costal population in CA, but those city temperatures are really deceptive as even just the suburbs of those cities get hot. San Bernardino which still is part of the LA metro area and just 50 miles from the ocean jumps to 95f in July. The closer to the ocean you get the cooler things tend to be but most of the greater metro area is in the 90’s not 75f.
Just looking at the Central Valley Fresno, California population 550,000, 97F in July. Sacramento 525k 95f Bakersfield 420k 98f. And that’s not counting a host of smaller cities and towns or the southeast.
Something like half of the population of California see’s 95+ temperatures in July where they live. So yes San Francisco being surrounded by the ocean on one side and the bay on the other stays surprisingly cool, but it’s just not that much land, 875k people live in SF proper and most of the state is very different.
> But if you're going to claim that most of Texas only drops below 100 for winter, you're going to need a citation.
I didn't intend to imply that. I'm not insane, I literally live in Texas. I know it gets under 100 during the summer. I'd be shocked if anywhere in the world spent a single 24 hour period over 100 most years.
I was being hyperbolic, but not by much. In 2023, Houston saw 97 days over 95 degrees. Dallas saw 84, San Antonio 110 days, Austin 109. For most of those days, the low is still over 70. It gets to around half the year in most of the major population centers if you lower it to 85 degrees. Los Angeles only rarely gets over 100 days over 85 and SF almost never sees more than 100 days.
The practical effect is the same - you generally run your AC nearly 24/7 to keep your living areas below 80 degrees from April through November. It was already in the high 80s last week in a lot of the state.
In each of your examples, you show 3-4 months of days over 95. But yet you said "over 100 in most of the state for most of 9 months of the year". Not by much would be a fraction, not a difference of 200-350% of your example.
Just looking at electricity is unfair though. How much of Vermont's, South Dakota's and Washington's heat come from clean electricity and how much is natural gas? If you want to compare apples-to-apples you have to look at things like residential carbon intensity separately from industry.
Careful once you start adding elements individually you’ll tend to focus on those supporting your viewpoint rather than the total. Electricity is after all used by more than just residential homes. If you want to look at “Total Energy” in a more brand context than electricity that’s not just heating and electricity it also includes gasoline and industry etc.
So on average people in Texas drive 16,171 miles per year vs 10,949 for Washington state etc. Similarly the oil industry both flairs and burns a great deal of fuel in order to crack longer hydrocarbons into shorter ones etc.
However, in the widest definition all of this is just a rounding error. It’s actually plants on farms which have the largest energy supply/demand by a huge margin, but being free we rarely consider it in such calculations.
Yes, but a state like Vermont is going to outsource 100% of the carbon intensity it takes to produce gasoline and natural gas to another state. Then use a very small amount of electric energy compared to fuel and gas. Comparing only their electricity usage is very disingenuous.
Vermont is exporting a great deal of the electricity it generates as well.
A nationwide map of carbon intensity by demand would have very different numbers in the electricity column. Such a viewpoint is reasonable, but you need to maintain consistency in definitions for such comparisons to be meaningful.
If you’re going someplace cold you’ll want warm clothing and if it’s sunny then sunblock is a big deal, but in general you don’t need much stuff on a trip.
My guess is you're not hiking for 10 miles in possibly chilly rain in England or wherever. (Or needing a shell because of wind.) An umbrella doesn't really work and you're probably not wanting to just walk all day drenched. In a city, yes, umbrellas are often a reasonable alternative.
Calling it a valid paradox is questionable, there’s a little mathematical sleight of hand required for the particle to actually stop in finite time. It doesn’t work for say particle sliding up a sphere.
To work the curvature of the dome is infinite is at the apex, which then breaks many things. There’s a lot of disagreements around this paradox and much older related examples because Newtonian physics is somewhat ill defined: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8833/1/dome_v3.pdf
Since many thought experiments allow for objects to be composed of infinite one-dimensional points that somehow form higher-dimensional bodies, an infinite curvature could be interpreted as the apex being a single point supporting the point at the bottom of the ball. Both points should be perfectly aligned and in perfect equilibrium.
It has no reason to roll unless the placement was uneven, and if it was uneven, it would not break determinism.
On the surface this looks like a non-sequitur. I'm not sure what people getting exposed to strong magnetic fields while getting an MRI has to do with detecting a magnetic field. Are you saying something like "we should have been able to detect this"? This doesn't seem correct to me, because the magnetic field is through the aperture of the MRI -- ie head to toe in most MRI applications. If the MRI field is orthogonal to earth's typical magnetic pole, you wouldn't expect the same signal. I'm skeptical of a claim from a person that they can "detect" the earth's magnetic field, but I don't think "we have MRIs" implies anything about that ability.
> I don't know if its rare? I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.
If it were not rare, and simply because most people haven't held a magnet against their nose, people would definitely feel it during an MRI scan, since those are much much much stronger than any regular magnet. An MRI will rip a nose piercing right out of you, a regular magnet you'd have around the home couldn't do that.
“I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.”
I don’t think they comprehend just how strong an MRI is. You don’t need to be inside the machine for it to be the strongest magnetic field you’ve experienced, that’s likely true if you’re in the room nearby. Sure it falls as the square of the distance, but those suckers are big. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo
For comparison earths magnetic field is ~50 microtesla vs an MRI at 200,000 to 7,000,000, with 1.5 million microtesla (aka 1.5 T or 15,000 gauss) being common.
That doesn’t really matter here. ~300k people in the US get an MRI per year (significantly more are near the things) and they have been around since the 1970’s.
If simply waving weak magnetic fields in people’s faces were enough for anything close to 1% of people to notice then it would be common knowledge at this point.
When the signal is strong enough you don’t need careful experiments to pick out the difference. IE the rest of the universe outside of earth isn’t made of antimatter because our telescope’s aren’t on fire. https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/
In electromagnetic fields both an electric field and a magnetic field are produced. They are orthogonal to one another (in 2D with 2 vectors this is perpendicular, orthogonal is when the vector is in a different dimension with respect to multiple reference dimensions). So, detection of a magnetic field could be based on the detection of this orthogonal electric field in the presence of a magnetic field. Highly sensitive electrical detection cells triggered by a magnetic field would be orientation specific, because the more "out of orientation" the less strong the signal.
Also, we could easily have chalked this effect up to a "weird side effect" of metallic taste during MRI[0] which would be more pronounced when the head is moved during the MRI[1].
Hopefully it is clear now why "I think lots of people would have noticed it" is not a great argument against the possibility of humans evolving the detection of magnetic fields. Please let me know if I can clarify anything.
Apparently you have not had an MRI or studied MRI.
1) The people operating the MRI are outside the magnetic field.
2) The patient in the MRI is oriented such that the magnetic field is directed from head to toe (where the effect on sensing apparatus in place which might detect earth's magnetic field while standing or sitting would be approximately zero, no matter the magnetic strength).
3) Instructions for the patient in the MRI are to remain as still as possible to reduce imaging noise. So, most patients do not move their head much at all.
I'm sorry you seem to be unwilling to even consider the physics, and apparently didn't bother to look at the second reference. I am also sorry that I am having trouble explaining concepts that most biomedical engineers readily understand as the reasons why "but MRI!" is not a valid argument. Regardless, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
> The people operating the MRI are outside the magnetic field.
That’s not how magnetic fields work. It’s not some sci-fi force field that cuts off instantly, the field drops off quickly but it doesn’t disappear. Which is why as mentioned in your second link workers noticed the effect.
> unwilling to even consider the physics
Again, you’re seemingly unaware of the actual physics involved.
MRI’s operate via two different electromagnets which create magnetic fields. A really strong one which is on 24/7, and a separate field which is turned off and on in operation and thus doesn’t correlate with earths magnetic field.
So when you walk up to the machine you’re “in” the same giant field just as when you’re inside the machine (or even sitting in some other room in the hospital if we want to be pedantic). This is why it’s relatively common for chairs etc to be yanked across the room and smack into the machines.
And thus, if people could directly sense the orientation of earths magnetic field, being anywhere near an MRI would be a really obvious and novel experience.
Oh good, they noticed the effect too. It's almost as if many people experience the effect, but somehow to you it's impossible for any humans to be able to take advantage of the effect at lower field strengths.
When you walk up to the machine it's not turned on. Then non-participants go to the small enclosed control room and then the magnet is activated. Every time you respond you reveal how little you know about MRI and weaken your case. You should stop while you are behind.
Also, you should lookup faraday cage. They're like magic to someone who has never heard of them, and they're used in MRI control rooms.
I feel sorry for your apparent inability to accept you might be ignorant about anything. I hope you grow out of it one day. Enjoy your weekend, I won't be responding again.
Permanent magnet scanners are permanently "on" by definition.
Resistive electromagnet scanners, in theory, can be turned on and off. However, it may take 30-60 minutes for their magnetic fields to stabilize after being off and hence they are generally left continuously on during daily operations. To save electricity, they are usually turned off or have their power levels reduced after hours.
Superconducting scanners remain on at all times as long as superconducting temperatures are maintained. The main field may be ramped down for servicing in a controlled manner with minimal loss of cryogens in about 30 minutes and restored in a few hours, but this is performed only occasionally. In the event of an emergency, all superconducting scanners have a "quench" button that releases liquid helium into the atmosphere and turns their fields off within a few seconds. Dumping that helium is inherently expensive and only done in a serious emergency.
“Faraday cages cannot block stable or slowly varying magnetic fields, such as the Earth's magnetic field (a compass will still work inside one).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage
Hahaha. Thank you for the laugh. It must be great walking around with such an unwavering sense of superiority. Enjoy the dark joy of your perceived vast superiority and try not to have a breakdown when you come crashing back to reality. May you never crash and forever be certain in your vast delusions of superiority all the rest of your days. Very rarely have I seen a more foolish certainty. Congratulations.
Thus it’s easy to distinguish the two by asking in-depth questions. IE it’s fast! How fast?
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