Today I Learned

[Jarvis323]

TIL that the language "AI" ChatGPT, perhaps not surprising, is pretty good at spewing technobabble:

"[...] We find that it is effective at paraphrasing and explaining concepts in a variety of styles, but not at genuinely connecting concepts. It will provide false information with full confidence and make up statements when necessary. [...]" -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.08155

Admittedly I didn't read the paper and the above quote is taken out of context (For comedic value. YMMV.) There may well be something of value here but at first glance it sure sounds like they made a crank-bot.

Some of the humor is lost when you read some of the more serious discussions here about whether it can pass exams though. Still, GPT-3 is impressive but maybe they need a math-bot to go with it. :)

EDIT:

In fact, if you read the text under the heading “jailbreaks” in the first link I’m not sure it’s funny at all. So it goes.

Essentially, what it is trying to do is write something like you might expect a human to write as a follow up to the prompt based on the examples it has.

The crucial point is that this means it isn't trying to get the "correct" answer. And if it were to be trained with technobabble (it probably is) along with real scientific source material, then it might be difficult for it to know the difference sometimes. Similarly, it may be trained based on things written by crackpots or popular science articles and things like that. If your prompt resembles a question that has a lot of bad answers in the training data, then it will do a good job (according to its "goal") by giving you a bad answer.

Assuming it is trained really really well with such an assortment of sources (so that it could delineate what kind of answer to give perfectly), then still which kind of answer will depend, perhaps subtly, on the prompt.

It already can successfully take some cues about style really well. You might try something like "Explain <x>, accurately, at the research level, in the style of Albert Einstein, using mathematics, and format your answer in latex." or something like that, and it may do better.

In the long run, it might help to have some settings which automatically insert optimal cues for getting the best answers to scientific questions. It might help as well, if the the goal is writing scientific articles, to train it or fine tune it purely with text books and research articles.

But to really make sure it gives accurate answers in science and math, you may need to dedicate a lot of qualified human effort to "grade" its answers to help train it.

 

[Hornbein]

TIL of artificial gecko skin. A lot better than suction or stickiness.

 

[Borg]

TIL about the longest crewed flight - over 64 days set in 1959!

The aviation record that refuses to fall​

Midair refueling didn't exist for a Cessna so they had to invent their own version which was a bit tricky at night.

 

[BillTre]

"The Secret Guide to Innovation: Discover what gets you excited about tomorrow! Get excited about doing it! Do it!" - Futurist Jim Carroll

 

[berkeman]

TIL that the AMA rules for Supercross racing say that if a race is red flagged after at least 3 laps and less than 90% finished, that there will be a restart in-line in the order of the racers at the red flag. I've never seen a restart like this in Supercross or Motocross. Thankfully it went well, but you could see every one of the racers after the leader in the restart pulling a goggle tearoff after the first turn...

 

[dlgoff]

Do I see you in there berkeman?

 

[berkeman]

Do I see you in there berkeman?

I'm the guy off to the side in the Alpinstars Medical Crew uniform...

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that hobbyists use something called "static grass" to add realistic looking grass to their models. There are companies that sell this product along with electrostatic applicators. Some people prefer to DIY the applicator, though.

 

[Hornbein]

TIL that Isaac Newton observed the Magnus Effect. He wrote

I had often seen a Tennis ball, struck with an oblique Racket, describe such a curve line. For, a circular as well as progressive motion being communicated to it by that stroke, its parts on that size, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous Air more violently than on the other, there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the Air proportionably greater.

A good explanation, for 1672. He then experimented to see whether light showed a Magnus Effect.

I also learned that the Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society in which he published are not only all on line, they are still being published. The most recent issue is about sociology and while I have yet to read it it appears most enticing.

Finally I learned that my area of Indonesia is blocked from editing Wikipedia. (Their reference to the Philosophical Transactions has volume 7 instead of 6.) Whatever. It'll just stay wrong then.

 

[Nugatory]

What, so insisting that you are in no way a woman but definitely pregnant causes medical staff to wonder if your answers to their questions might be worthless because you are deliberately obfuscating the biology that they actually need to know about in order to care for you?

Who knew.

Trans people are generally quite aware of what is biology and what is appearance. There's no obfuscation of the biology here - on the contrary, Wakefield is (metaphorically) screaming at the top of his lungs that his medical providers should be paying attention to the biology not the appearance. Note also that Wakefield does not use masculine pronouns, a really big hint to anyone who is paying attention that they should be careful about making assumptions.

As I read this story, Wakefield's experience is different only in degree from the experience many women report with auto repair shops.

 

[epenguin]

This classical chocolate box design which scarcely changed in 90 years will be instantly recognised by everyone, in Britain at least.

Today I learned that the man majorly responsible for it was known to me for something completely different – he was the novelist Nigel Balchin. I had not known anything of him except from reading and enjoying several of his novels a very long time ago.

So I thought I would say TIL... But anything I said seemed to call in its turn for explanation, and it expanded. And so wasn't suitable for TIL where items drop out of sight pretty fast. So I just posted it in the History section. Where items are perhaps not seen in the first place by many people. So I am mentioning it here too! The subject is quite a lot relevant to the practice and history of Science.

 

[Hornbein]

Eighty year Harvard study shows that the single most important thing in late-life health is strong social relationships.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/st...showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/

 

[Hornbein]

Today I learned of the K-Max helicopter with crossing rotors.

 

[gmax137]

Charlie Kaman was a true genius.

I used to watch his helicopters test fly over the potato fields across from the CE offices in Windsor, CT

 

[Hornbein]

TIL a miniature solar system was discovered in 2017.

The orbital year of each planet is between 1.5 and 19 Earth days. How cute! With so many small planets so close together moving at high speed the system is much more chaotic than ours. That is, in both systems very small differences eventually magnify into big differences, but while in ours it's a million years for a difference to show in TRAPPIST it's more like twenty years. While the system may be unpredictable, this has been going on for billions of years so it seems stable enough. It has the smallest and dimmest sun known though surely there are plenty more like it, they are just too dim to be seen easily. TRAP is only forty light years away, that's how it was found. The sun burns so slowly this is expected to continue for another ten trillion years. Is that an aeon?

https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...he-orbits-of-trappist-system-planets.1048977/

 

[Borg]

While the system may be unpredictable, this has been going on for billions of years so it seems stable enough.

Is it truly known that they've been in that orbit for billions of years as opposed to having decayed recently into its current configuration?

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that an old plasma display can be used as a sketch pad that you can draw on with a laser pointer.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

TIL that monoclonal antibodies are used to selectively deliver cancer-killing drugs to tumor cells

 

[Hornbein]

TIL that Uranus was originally Georgian, after King George III. Nations unfriendly to the British Empire would not accept this.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

TIL that Uranus was originally Georgian, after King George III. Nations unfriendly to the British Empire would not accept this.

So they used a dysphemism for King George instead?

 

[jack action]

TIL that the WD-40 name represents 39 failed attempts at making the product:

It took them 40 attempts to get their water displacing formula to work, but on the 40th attempt, they got it right in a big way. WD-40 Multi Use Product was born. WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula. That’s the name straight out of the lab book used by the chemist who developed the product.

 

[gmax137]

I heard a similar story about 7-Up.

 

[kyphysics]

. . .how to beat inflation

 

[Ivan Seeking]

TIL about the latest in cyber security. Eeeeeesh!

I predict that in ten years, cyber security hardware/software will be the number one cause of failures in automation.

 

[Rive]

I predict that in ten years, cyber security hardware/software will be the number one cause of failures in automation.

I'm kind of surprised. I thought it already got the lead by now.

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL about the remarkable engineering subtleties within the deceptively simple PVC ball valve.

 

[BillTre]

Ball valves are cool. i have used thousands of them.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I'm kind of surprised. I thought it already got the lead by now.

So far it has caused us to jump through more hoops, but I haven't seen huge problems. But the degree of protection is going to increase dramatically for the typical factory.

It certainly gets harder and harder to do our jobs. For example, it has been impossible email a program to many companies for years how. We used to be able to change the extension from an EXE to something like XLXS. But they finally got smart about that. Some companies have even started banning all external storage devices. So how are we supposed to hand off a program?

Ever since Stuxnet we have been walking on thin ice.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

TIL that cocaine can make rats love jazz.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688895/

I knew it all along!

 

[Hornbein]

TIL that cocaine can make rats love jazz.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688895/

I knew it all along!

"Of the 20 rats examined, eighteen of them showed a preference for Beethoven, and only two showed a preference for Miles Davis. "

The rats preferred silence to Beethoven's Fur Elise. The scientists considered making music that the rats liked but have yet to explore this avenue. They noted that music has an effect on the human brain similar to popular forms of drug abuse. They were able to get the rats to prefer Beethoven over silence by injecting them with a cocaine solution in association with Beethoven's Fur Elise.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144275/

Hipster rats : Outnumbered!