I bet you didnt know that

cdeb

Technically Brigadier Sir Nils Olav III.

There's a statue of Brigadier Sir Nils Olav II in Norway.

All sounds rather Hitchhiker's Guide-y.

DEFTLEFTHAND

I think the Irish Wolfhound 'Aengus' of the Irish Guards BA regiment also has some sort of military rank bestowed on him.

maudgonner

valoren wrote: »

In 1996, two more were dismissed for conduct unbecoming of Tower residents.

Caw!

You can't leave us wondering! What did they do?

maudgonner

maudgonner wrote: »

You can't leave us wondering! What did they do?

Dive-bombed too many visitors perhaps?

njs030

valoren wrote: »

The Tower of London always keeps a minimum of 6 Ravens on the grounds for superstitious reasons. The idea is that if all the Ravens of the Tower were lost or flew away, then the crown would fall and Britain with it. One of their wings are clipped to prevent them flying away.

During the Blitz, only 1 Raven remained. Churchill ordered more to replenish the numbers. The Ravens are enlisted as soldiers of the realm, they are issued attestation cards in the same way as soldiers and police. They are prone to dismissal for disorderly conduct as well.

In 1986, one Raven lost it's appointment to the crown after developing a habit of attacking TV aerials.

A special decree had to be issued.

On Saturday 13th September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory, service therefore no longer required

In 1996, two more were dismissed for conduct unbecoming of Tower residents.

Caw!

There's 7 ravens, 6 plus a spare. 6 is the minimum number according to the superstition so 7 are kept in case one dies, is kidnapped (it's happened before) or moves out (has also happened, he went to live in a pub!)

Buckfast W

I also believe that during the second world war Churchill had more monkeys brought into Gibraltar for the same superstitious kinda reasons.

GritBiscuit

One of the luckiest, unlucky people has to have been Tsutomu Yamaguchi. On August 6 1945, Yamaguchi was visiting Hiroshima. He survived the atomic bombing with relatively minor injuries and returned home to Nagasaki on 9 August.

He told his boss about the bomb that wiped out a city and was called crazy. Shortly after, the American bomber Bockscar dropped the now infamous Fat Boy atomic bomb on the city. Yamaguchi survived that too and became one of the "hibakusha" (explosion-affected people). He went on to live until he was 93.

maudgonner

Atoms for Peace wrote: »

It takes a man, in a tweed suit, five and a half seconds to fall from the top of big Ben to the ground.

From the top of the tower? Or the top of the clock? Or the top of the bell?


Big Ben is actually the name of the bell, although it's often extended to include the clock, and the tower too.

The clock tower is in fact named the Elizabeth Tower, named in honour of QE2's diamond jubilee in 2012. Before that it was simply called the Clock Tower.

pedigree 6

This is a satellite picture taken today by NASA.
It shows the Celtic sea south of wexford.



But it also shows a coccolithophore bloom just off the Bristol Channel.

Coccolithophores are one-celled plant-like organisms that live in large numbers throughout the upper layers of the ocean. Coccolithophores surround themselves with a microscopic plating made of limestone (calcite). These scales, known as coccoliths, are shaped like hubcaps and are only three one-thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.

In areas with trillions of coccolithophores, the waters will turn an opaque turquoise from the dense cloud of coccoliths. Scientists estimate that the organisms dump more than 1.5 million tons (1.4 billion kilograms) of calcite a year, making them the leading calcite producers in the ocean.

Most phytoplankton need both sunlight and nutrients from deep in the ocean. The ideal place for them is on the surface of the ocean in an area where plenty of cooler, nutrient-carrying water is upwelling from below. In contrast, the coccolithophores prefer to live on the surface in still, nutrient-poor water in mild temperatures. (We've had no storms lately on the sea and sea temperature is on the warm side of average. 13 degrees Celcius ).

Coccolithophores are not normally harmful to other marine life in the ocean. The nutrient-poor conditions that allow the coccolithophores to exist will often kill off much of the larger phytoplankton. Many of the smaller fish and zooplankton that eat normal phytoplankton also feast on the coccolithophores. In nutrient-poor areas where other phytoplankton are scarce, the coccolithophores are a welcome source of nutrition.

In the long term, the plants seem to be good for the environment. Coccolithophores make their coccoliths out of one part carbon, one part calcium and three parts oxygen (CaCO3). So each time a molecule of coccolith is made, one less carbon atom is allowed to roam freely in the world to form greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming. Three hundred twenty pounds of carbon go into every ton of coccoliths produced. All of this material sinks harmlessly to the bottom of the ocean to form sediment.

The coccolithophores' short-term effect on the environment is somewhat more complex. This effect again has to do with the formation of their coccoliths and the chemical reaction involved in the process. The chemical reaction that makes the coccolith also generates a carbon dioxide molecule, a potent greenhouse gas, from the oxygen and carbon already in the ocean. While much of the gas is sucked back in by the coccoliths (all plants take in carbon dioxide for food) some of it escapes into the atmosphere and immediately becomes part of the greenhouse gas problem. Scientists are concerned in the short term that greenhouse gases will cause the upper layers of the ocean to become more temperate and stagnant. This would increase the number of coccoliths in the world, which would produce more greenhouse gas.

However the coccolithophores also affect the global climate in the short term by increasing the oceans' albedo. Albedo is the fraction of sunlight an object reflects--higher albedo values indicate more reflected light. Coccolithophore blooms reflect nearly all the visible light that hits them. Since most of this light is being reflected, less of it is being absorbed by the ocean and stored as heat.

So that's some information on coccolithophores.:)

Junkyard Tom

Mallow in County Cork was a fashionable resort in the 18th Century due to its warm water springs which were considered to have healing properties.

Capt'n Midnight

pedigree 6 wrote: »

But it also shows a coccolithophore bloom just off the Bristol Channel.
...
Three hundred twenty pounds of carbon go into every ton of coccoliths produced. All of this material sinks harmlessly to the bottom of the ocean to form sediment.

They grow better when there is a plentiful supply of certain nutrients.



"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you the next ice age."
- John Martin

pedigree 6

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

They grow better when there is a plentiful supply of certain nutrients.



"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you the next ice age."
- John Martin

Are they the same type though?
The ones mentioned in that article use silicate for their shells.
The ones I mentioned use calcium for their structure.

sbsquarepants

pedigree 6 wrote: »

So that's some information on coccolithophores.:)

I'm a bit confused - do they heat things up or cool things down?

Actually - same question on clouds. They block heat both from arriving and from leaving, do they have a net effect of heating or cooling?

While most historical instances of mass hysteria are religious in nature, there have been some episodes of bizarre and apparently inexplicable hysteria, some quite horrific.

One of the strangest outbreaks of collective obsessional behaviour was the 'dancing plague' of Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. It wasn't the first plague of this kind, there were sporadic outbreaks of group hysteria involving dancing for the three hundred years between the 14th and 17th centuries.

In the Strasbourg of August 1518, over 400 people danced until they dropped from exhaustion and their feet bled raw or continued until they died. At the peak of the plague, fifteen people a day met their deaths.

Opinions at the time about the cause of the plague were varied. Everything from demonic possession to a lack of sexual fulfilment was blamed, and cures from exorcism to tight wrappings to keep the limbs still, to a diet of sheep eyeballs was recommended to halt the plague. One of the cruellest 'cures' was to keep the victims in a blackened room with no light, noise or stimulation until they quietened, feeding them only the blandest food. Some people were kept like this for long periods of time and never recovered from the psychological damage. The dancing plague dissipated as quickly as it arose after a number of weeks.

More modern thinkers hypothesize that the plague was prompted by a kind of survivor guilt at losing many to the Black Death, combined with the societal stress of mass multiple bereavements. There are also theories on poisoning, usually involving mouldy bread or ergot poisoning.

My favourite explanation was put forward by the clergy at the time, who felt that wicked wives deliberately danced and enchanted others to dance incessantly, to irritate and discomfit their husbands.

Beyondgone

Candie wrote: »

While most historical instances of mass hysteria are religious in nature, there have been some episodes of bizarre and apparently inexplicable hysteria, some quite horrific.

One of the strangest outbreaks of collective obsessional behaviour was the 'dancing plague' of Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. It wasn't the first plague of this kind, there were sporadic outbreaks of group hysteria involving dancing for the three hundred years between the 14th and 17th centuries.

In the Strasbourg of August 1518, over 400 people danced until they dropped from exhaustion and their feet bled raw or continued until they died. At the peak of the plague, fifteen people a day met their deaths.

Opinions at the time about the cause of the plague were varied. Everything from demonic possession to a lack of sexual fulfilment was blamed, and cures from exorcism to tight wrappings to keep the limbs still, to a diet of sheep eyeballs was recommended to halt the plague. One of the cruellest 'cures' was to keep the victims in a blackened room with no light, noise or stimulation until they quietened, feeding them only the blandest food. Some people were kept like this for long periods of time and never recovered from the psychological damage. The dancing plague dissipated as quickly as it arose after a number of weeks.

More modern thinkers hypothesize that the plague was prompted by a kind of survivor guilt at losing many to the Black Death, combined with the societal stress of mass multiple bereavements. There are also theories on poisoning, usually involving mouldy bread or ergot poisoning.

My favourite explanation was put forward by the clergy at the time, who felt that wicked wives deliberately danced and enchanted others to dance incessantly, to irritate and discomfit their husbands.

I was at a rave in Clondalkin that was the same as that. They blamed "yokes". Maybe they had Yokes back then too?

Beyondgone

Beyondgone wrote: »

I was at a rave in Clondalkin that was the same as that. They blamed "yokes". Maybe they had Yokes back then too?

My first thought was that it was a prototype rave.

castletownman

Travelling through the country last week, I learned of Bosnia and Herzegovina's peculiar system of government.

Firstly, the country itself is split into two entities, namely the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (comprising of 51% of the land-area) and the Serb Republic (49%). Of course, ethnicity-speaking, the country is split between Serbs (Orthodox), Croats (Christian) and Bosniak (Muslim), with the 2013 census breaking the cultural balance down to 48% Bosniak, 37.1% Serb and 14.3% Croat.

Naturally enough, in a relatively newly independent country still scarred from the war, the government structure was a delicate issue. So they came up with a three-way presidency. One Bosniak, one Serb and one Croat. Each elected separately, and taking turns to act as Prime Minister for one year.

That's the general gist of it for what I can remember from my tour-guide, but it is explained more in depth here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/08/bosnia-herzegovina-elections-the-worlds-most-complicated-system-of-government

Oh and another thing I found interesting. Mostar is one of the hottest cities in Europe, with temperatures hitting 40C in the summer months. For some reason, I also associated Bosnia with a more "Russian" climate when growing up

AllForIt

I have heard a few ppl in the media recently talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) who suggest that as time goes on, as computers get more and more powerful that they are getting closer and closer to a comparable intelligence to us human beings. I.e, they can think by themselves.

There is absolutely no truth to this whatsoever.

Since the advent of the first computer, the basic fundamentals of how a computer works is no different in any way shape or form whatsoever to how they work today. All that has occurred over the decades is that computers have become faster at what they do.

To make an analogy, the combustion engines of today work in fundamentally the same way since they were first invented and the only difference since then and now is that the technology has been refined to work more efficiently and faster than originally designed. All an engine has ever done is get you from A to B and that's still all it does today.

In exactly the same way a computer does exactly and only what it could do when the first computer was invented and it cannot do anything now it couldn't do before, except faster.

Thus, it does't matter how much faster or how much more refined your computer becomes in the future it will still in essence be as dumb as the first computer that ever existed. And no computer will ever have any inherent intelligence as seen in science fiction movies.

Tell me how

AllForIt wrote:

Thus, it does't matter how much faster or how much more refined your computer becomes in the future it will still in essence be as dumb as the first computer that ever existed. And no computer will ever have any inherent intelligence as seen in science fiction movies.

That's not entirely true I think. Because computers are so much faster, they can process way more computations than early models (waayyyyyyyy more) and thus determine what an appropriate answer is, thereby appearing intelligent.

The memory capacity means that it can hold the answers of the billions of computations and play out different scenarios to again output an apparently intelligent answer.

This is how a computer beat Gary Kasparov, by being able to compute all possible moves (and likely future moves by Gary) in order to win.

It wasn't intelligent (in humanistic terms) it was just able to think really really quickly and remember the answer of each question it considered.

You're view I think, is like comparing libraries to Internet search engines and saying that because they essentially both can provide answers to questions, they are essentially the same thing. The search engine searches vastly more documents than are in your average library in a fraction of the time it would take to open one book.

My scepticism regarding AI is that if you delve deeply enough, someone has written lines of What If functions or other code to form the basis of questions being asked and answered. It's the sheer volume of questions asked answered and results accumulated, compared and selected which again, makes the machine appear intelligent.

Of course, you could argue that most humans aren't naturally intelligent but are "programmed" through education and training in a similar fashion to how a computer is coded.

Persephone kindness

Originally Posted by Candie View Post
While most historical instances of mass hysteria are religious in nature, there have been some episodes of bizarre and apparently inexplicable hysteria, some quite horrific.

One of the strangest outbreaks of collective obsessional behaviour was the 'dancing plague' of Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. It wasn't the first plague of this kind, there were sporadic outbreaks of group hysteria involving dancing for the three hundred years between the 14th and 17th centuries.

In the Strasbourg of August 1518, over 400 people danced until they dropped from exhaustion and their feet bled raw or continued until they died. At the peak of the plague, fifteen people a day met their deaths.

Opinions at the time about the cause of the plague were varied. Everything from demonic possession to a lack of sexual fulfilment was blamed, and cures from exorcism to tight wrappings to keep the limbs still, to a diet of sheep eyeballs was recommended to halt the plague. One of the cruellest 'cures' was to keep the victims in a blackened room with no light, noise or stimulation until they quietened, feeding them only the blandest food. Some people were kept like this for long periods of time and never recovered from the psychological damage. The dancing plague dissipated as quickly as it arose after a number of weeks.

More modern thinkers hypothesize that the plague was prompted by a kind of survivor guilt at losing many to the Black Death, combined with the societal stress of mass multiple bereavements. There are also theories on poisoning, usually involving mouldy bread or ergot poisoning.

My favourite explanation was put forward by the clergy at the time, who felt that wicked wives deliberately danced and enchanted others to dance incessantly, to irritate and discomfit their husbands.

Ergot Poisoning.

Persephone kindness

Ergot poisoning was very common before the mechanization of farming as deep ploughing by mechanized ploughs is part of prevention. There are various symptoms depending on the variant of fungi. But the most common symptom is hysteria and madness. Sometimes seeds treated with mercury were the cause also though.

It's widely believed ergot poisoning was the culprit of accusations of witchcraft throughout Europe and at Salem. The symptoms described are the same.

AllForIt

Tell me how wrote: »

That's not entirely true I think. Because computers are so much faster, they can process way more computations than early models (waayyyyyyyy more) and thus determine what an appropriate answer is, thereby appearing intelligent.

The memory capacity means that it can hold the answers of the billions of computations and play out different scenarios to again output an apparently intelligent answer.

This is how a computer beat Gary Kasparov, by being able to compute all possible moves (and likely future moves by Gary) in order to win.

It wasn't intelligent (in humanistic terms) it was just able to think really really quickly and remember the answer of each question it considered.

You're view I think, is like comparing libraries to Internet search engines and saying that because they essentially both can provide answers to questions, they are essentially the same thing. The search engine searches vastly more documents than are in your average library in a fraction of the time it would take to open one book.

My scepticism regarding AI is that if you delve deeply enough, someone has written lines of What If functions or other code to form the basis of questions being asked and answered. It's the sheer volume of questions asked answered and results accumulated, compared and selected which again, makes the machine appear intelligent.

Of course, you could argue that most humans aren't naturally intelligent but are "programmed" through education and training in a similar fashion to how a computer is coded.

If think you have slightly missed the point.

It doesn't matter what amazing things your smartphone or computer does, it has all been pre-conceived and designed by a human being, by software engineers. So the computer is just mimicking and duplicating the thoughts of the software engineer , a human , who instructed the computer to do such.

Therefore there can be no innate intelligence in computers because the human being cannot give enough instructions to the computer to fully mimic human intelligence because the number of thoughts a human is capable off is as good as infinite.

Persephone kindness

AllForIt wrote: »

If think you have slightly missed the point.

It doesn't matter what amazing things your smartphone or computer does, it has all been pre-conceived and designed by a human being, by software engineers. So the computer is just mimicking and duplicating the thoughts of the software engineer , a human , who instructed the computer to do such.

Therefore there can be no innate intelligence in computers because the human being cannot give enough instructions to the computer to fully mimic human intelligence because the number of thoughts a human is capable off is as good as infinite.

AI intelligence is a thing. It exists it's just not the same as human intelligence. No matter how advanced they become it will be different. Subjectivity I mean Qualia is hard to recognize.

Will Artificial intelligence mean subjective intelligence ? Who knows. Maybe the human model of intelligence will not fit.

When you can ask a computer ..'What is it like to be you?' And you get an answer that you don't expect but at the same time you understand. You could say that is intelligence. And when you as a human listen to more and more of this info start to be able to predict the computer it's more proof.

When I say ...what is it like to be you..i don't mean literally ask. I mean you could ask your dog ...but he won't answer. But dogs tell us ..in their many little ways ..about their experience. And we can understand what scares them or what their learning ability is or when training is too strenuous.

So when we have to ask what is it like to be a computer ...and there is an answer different to being a table ...that is going to be interesting.

Esel

^ The Turing test.

Wossack

AllForIt wrote: »

I have heard a few ppl in the media recently talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) who suggest that as time goes on, as computers get more and more powerful that they are getting closer and closer to a comparable intelligence to us human beings. I.e, they can think by themselves.

There is absolutely no truth to this whatsoever.

Since the advent of the first computer, the basic fundamentals of how a computer works is no different in any way shape or form whatsoever to how they work today. All that has occurred over the decades is that computers have become faster at what they do.

To make an analogy, the combustion engines of today work in fundamentally the same way since they were first invented and the only difference since then and now is that the technology has been refined to work more efficiently and faster than originally designed. All an engine has ever done is get you from A to B and that's still all it does today.

In exactly the same way a computer does exactly and only what it could do when the first computer was invented and it cannot do anything now it couldn't do before, except faster.

Thus, it does't matter how much faster or how much more refined your computer becomes in the future it will still in essence be as dumb as the first computer that ever existed. And no computer will ever have any inherent intelligence as seen in science fiction movies.

you could say the same thing about the human brain - its had the same hardware (grey matter) for how long, and its only advancement of the software (language, numeracy etc), that has unlocked its potential

pickarooney

Esel wrote: »

^ The Turing test.

Has anyone ever applied the Turing test to a group of humans? I'd say a fair few would fail.

jimgoose

As some Unknown Soldier once said, asking if computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim. As soon as we know what exactly "thinking" in the human context actually is, we'll be in some sort of position to pronounce on whether machine-based AI systems do something similar or not. My own view is that any sufficiently advanced process that produces a result very like that of "thinking" is functionally indistinguishable. In the case of deep QA-based systems like IBM's Watson, aside from a million dollars or so worth of hardware to run a basic instance of "him", the trick is to run several fairly well-known analytics algorithms simultaneously and then compute which and how many of these produced the same answer. This greatly increases the probability of the system being correct when presented with analytical problems such as playing a highly-skilled human at Jeopardy, analysing a particular medical case against all available related data, and so forth.

Buford T. Justice XIX

Happy World Milk Day, folks:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Milk_Day

http://www.worldmilkday2017.com/

jimgoose

This gentleman is Seymour Roger Cray:



This is the man largely responsible for the multi-core, multi-threaded supercomputer in your pocket, and indeed the whole mainframe/supercomputer scene as we know it today. He was an electrical engineer by trade, born in the sleepy town of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin in 1925. After cutting his teeth at Engineering Research Associates of Minnesota and aspects of the design of various UNIVAC models, Cray eventually designed and built the Control Data Corporation (CDC) model 6600 in 1963, recognised as the first true "supercomputer" device. He followed this up not too long after with the CDC 7600, which was five times faster again. Cray's genius in both digital and analog electrical design and engineering enabled him to consider all manner of aspects to computer design, primarily focused on keeping the processors "fed" with data. This included such strokes as ensuring that every electrical signal path on his machines' circuit boards was exactly the same length, thus eliminating such timing problems as clock-skew. As he said himself, "Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.". This machine caused some consternation at IBM, who despite their massive resources weren't able to get within an ass's roar of it in speed terms. As Thomas J. Watson Jr. put it, "I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor."

In 1972 Cray left Control Data to found Cray Research. In 1976, he came up with this:



That is a Cray-1 supercomputer, a vector-processing machine that absolutely trounced everything else in the Universe, sold to the NCAR for €8.8m and launched the superstar-status of Cray machines insofar as countries started falling over themselves to get into the "Cray Club", i.e. to host a Cray supercomputer installation somewhere in their territories. He followed this up with the Cray-2 (which used artificial blood in it's cooling system, which you could see via transparent channels in the machine's outer "skin", prompting some to wonder if the thing was alive in some way!) and the commercial failure Cray-3, although the latter being an engineering marvel in itself. Here's a Cray-2:



By the 1990s a number of massively-parallel machines had been commissioned, which offered a price/performance ratio that even the mighty Cray could not touch. Recognising this Seymour, who had hitherto resisted massively-parallel designs ("If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?") set up SRC Computers to concentrate on a new generation of designs. He intended to bring his legendary know-how to the sticky-wicket of effective communication between multiple parallel CPUs and memory/IO subsystems, but unfortunately was killed in a road accident in 1996, aged 71.

Cray Research Inc. lives on, and four of the top ten supercomputer installations in the World bear the name of the great man. He had a tunnel in progress under his house, and when struck by the engineer's equivalent of Writer's Block, he would retreat under the house and dig. He said elves would appear in due course and offer solutions to whatever intractable problem had been eluding him. Seymour hadn't much time for either operating systems or programmers. Once more, as he said himself:

"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late!"

"Memory is like an orgasm - it's much better if you don't have to fake it."


Farewell Seymour - I presume wherever you are now, things are running a whole fuckton faster. :cool:

Persephone kindness

Your computer can commit suicide if you give it one simple command.