> It’s true that birth rates must eventually flatten out and become sigmoid
All positive growth eventually flattens out and becomes sigmoid, but a lot of phenomena experience negative growth and nose dive. No gentle curve, but a hard kink and perfect flat line at zero. Forever. I think it would be a stretch to categorize that pattern as sigmoid. Predicting a sigmoid pattern for negative growth implies some sort of a soft landing (depending on your definition of soft).
We can think of many populations that are no longer with us. So just a caution about over applying this reasoning in the negative case.
People put up with what they have to put up with. Many millions of people have lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes with basically zero options to do anything about it. I think that's where we're headed and by the time a sufficient amount of people realise how bad their situation is, the moment to do anything about it will have long since passed. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue this time.
Instead of discounting some of the results, can we alternate the value of the coin each toss? So on the first flip, heads is 0 and tails is 1, then on the next flip, heads is 1 and tails is 0.
That'll obtain the right average but won't have the same pairwise relations as an independent, unbiased coin.
That's probably easiest to see if you imagine approaching an infinitely biased coin (100% heads, 0% tails). Your strategy alternates between 0 and 1 almost always. The listed strategy throws away most flips but gives actualy unbiased results when a pair does pass.
Another way to look at it is from an entropy perspective. An unbiased, independent coin flip has 1 bit of entropy. A biased coin with, e.g., 99% heads has 0.0807 bits of entropy. On average, you need at least 12.377 such flips to emulate an unbiased, independent flip. Any strategy without some sort of rejection/continuation/... (like your proposal) is doomed to fail.
I haven't checked if their proposal is actually optimal. Empirically, it's suggestive of having room for improvement. I'm seeing something like 101 flips on average instead of 12.377 for that 99% bias example.
A general direction you could go is to use blocks greater than 2. For example, you flip the coin exactly 64 times, and discard the result unless there is exactly 1 tails and 63 heads. This happens about 22% of the time, so it's on average 290 flips to get a single sample. When you do get that sample, you convert the single tails' position within that 64 block into binary, and get a 6 bit number uniformly distributed 0-63, i.e. you get 6 bits of entropy. So on average 6/290=0.02 bits of entropy per flip, twice as good as using blocks of 2, though only a quarter as good as the theoretical upper bound.
I picked "block of 64 with only a single tails" since it was simple, and I'm sure a mathematician could figure out how to optimize it much more, but my general point is to agree that there's definitely ways to get closer to the theoretical upper bound you mentioned.
You know, the one where Germany is falling in stature on the international stage so it pulls itself up from it's bootstraps so it can once again rise up to an international superpower. I forget the title. I think they made a sequel.
I think that this proves that dividing by zero produces the set of all numbers, which is what it looks like to me when you graph this problem (y=1/x) using increasingly small positive and negative values for x. Smaller positive x values tend to positive infinity, smaller negative x values tend to negative infinity. When the x value reaches zero you have a vertical line from positive to negative infinity. ie dividing by zero corresponds to all numbers. That's how it appears to me. So 0/0=2 and it equals 3 etc. I admit this doesn't seem that useful.
This is alarming. Does anyone know what the current state of space weather protection/mitigation is for electricity grids in the west?
IIRC in 2012 the Earth missed a giant CME by one week, and had it hit Earth there would have been 80% casualties in the US (according to a US government committee), due to the fallout of failing electrical transformers. I'm not aware that this issue has been rectified - probably due to the magnitude of the task.
“IIRC in 2012 the Earth missed a giant CME by one week, and had it hit Earth there would have been 80% casualties in the US...”
By casualties do you mean injuries/deaths (to people)? Do you have a source? From what I could find, it would be really bad for infrastructure, but not something that would outright kill or injure most of the population.
It's not like predicting the weather, if that's what you're asking. The solar observatories watch the sun constantly, so we see when elections occur, but there is little to no warning before they happen.
I'm not so sure that the Dark Triad model is that useful. Reading about narcissistic personality disorder and anti social personality disorder will probably yield a better understanding of these cluster B types. Both are low in empathy and high in selfish behaviour, but they have very different aims and produce very different results. The narcissist main goal is to acquire narcissistic supply and is willing to feast on those closest to them to get it. Psychopaths main goal can be sex, money, power, control and they usually do not care at all for the admiration and opinions of others (with the obvious exception of narcissistic psychopaths).
Can anyone comment on the design of the cell, specifically why it is long and thin, which would work against the square cube law. Is a large surface to volume chosen for thermal reasons?
The cells are pressure vessels, so normal cube-square scaling laws don't apply. Instead you need to use pressure vessel scaling laws, which also account for the needed wall thickness.
Pressure vessel scaling laws say that all cylinders have the same mass efficiency, and making long thin cylinders is easier than making short squat cylinders.
As I understand it, something like a lead-acid battery using volumes of acid and volumes of reactants so a cube gives them more power with the same surface area. NiMH batteries use boundaries between states instead of acid. Therefore, you want long thin batteries of alternating materials to make them more efficient.
Or, to put it a different way, NiMH batteries require a large interior surface area, and so the square/cube law forces them to look longer and thinner as they get larger.
As per the article, these Nickel Hydrogen batteries are very different to NiMH
> Nickel-hydrogen batteries look and work unlike any other battery. They consist of a stack of electrodes inside a pressurized gas tank. The cathode is nickel hydroxide while the anode is hydrogen. When the battery is charging, a catalytic reaction generates hydrogen gas. During discharge, the hydrogen oxidizes and converts back to water.
All positive growth eventually flattens out and becomes sigmoid, but a lot of phenomena experience negative growth and nose dive. No gentle curve, but a hard kink and perfect flat line at zero. Forever. I think it would be a stretch to categorize that pattern as sigmoid. Predicting a sigmoid pattern for negative growth implies some sort of a soft landing (depending on your definition of soft).
We can think of many populations that are no longer with us. So just a caution about over applying this reasoning in the negative case.