andrewducker | Interesting Links for 08-12-2022

1. Support for Independence hits 56%, 51% of people to vote SNP (53% if it's a defacto referendum): (tags:scotland independence polls )
2. Transphobes are now attacking...The Samaritans.: (tags:lgbt transgender bigotry OhForFucksSake suicide )
3. BBC plans to switch off broadcast TV and move to internet-only programmes: (tags:bbc thefuture streaming broadcasting )
4. Discovery of world's oldest DNA breaks record by one million years: (tags:genetics dna prehistory )
5. The Art Game and the Money Game and how the ending of Minecraft was set free: (tags:games art money copyright Microsoft contracts )
6. Sats: MPs and peers fail tests for 11-year-olds as campaign groups call for overhaul of 'high-stakes' exams: (tags:exams children politics )
7. First UK coal mine in decades approved: (tags:UK coal environment globalwarming )
8. Europe First: Brussels gets ready to dump its free trade ideals (because the USA and China both already have): (tags:Europe China USA trade )
9. Two inhaled covid vaccines have been approved. Here's what you need to know.: (tags:vaccines pandemic )
10. AI learns to precisely manipulate individual atoms: (tags:ai atom physics research )
11. How Many Fundamental Constants Does It Take To Explain The Universe? (26, at the moment): (tags:physics )
12. People expect identical twins to be *really* identical: (tags:twins genetics statistics )
13. Humans are surprisingly poor at picking up cues of aggression in dogs: (tags:dogs behaviour psychology )

3) If that happened in the US, it would render my tv set useless. In theory we could connect it up to our internet, but it seems far too complicated a job to undertake. So we just watch internet-only video on our computers.

6) I agree with Flick Drummond: it's the grammatical terminology that's puzzling; I was never taught using those terms. However, in the displayed question, "Which option is punctuated correctly?" the answer is NONE: it needs an Oxford comma! (Aside from that, it's the first one.)

11) What the heck is a dimensionless constant? How do you measure mass, for instance, without a unit?

12) I've known two pairs of identical twins (all male). Physically, once I saw both twins in the same place at the same time, I never afterwards had any trouble telling them apart. Personality-wise, they were alike, but I've known other pairs of brothers, even father & son, who were just as much so.

13) I don't think I apply here, because I read everything from a dog as a sign of aggression. I literally cannot tell the difference between a dog bounding towards me in joy and one bearing down to tear my head off. It always looks like the latter. This is why dogs terrify me.

3) I think there are a fair number of people in the same situation as you. And right now you can watch things on your TV by simply plugging it into an aerial, and tuning in to free content. If we also require people to have broadband then I worry there will be some people who will simply be excluded. If nothing else, broadband goes wrong a hell of a lot more often than a TV aerial does!

11) Usually it's when you're scaling something against other things. But seeing as they're saying "by scaling these mass parameters to be relative to the gravitational constant, G" - surely it's then at least notionally in the same units as G? I now have questions!

13) Unpleasant though that sounds, it's definitely safer than reading everything as joy and getting bitten by the occasional badly behaved one.

3) Oh, it's more pathetic than that. We don't have an aerial. We have cable, from the same firm that provides our internet service (they're covered by one billing). And I still have no idea how to connect the internet up to the tv monitor.

11) But if you measure something against other things, you're using the other things as the unit. I've seen lots of discussion of sub-atomic particles measuring their masses against the proton (the best-known one, I guess). "The neutron has a mass slightly greater than a proton," e.g. In that case, your unit = 1 proton.

13) Yes, but it does mean I flee the room in terror on encountering any dog that's not lying placid in the corner. It's worse when the owner says, "He doesn't bite." Yeah, that's what they all say, and I'm not waiting around to find out. Fortunately I don't know many people with dogs any more, and those who do know to keep them away from me. When I was a child, almost everyone had a dog (no cats, literally: I never met a cat till I went to university), and it was agony.

And I still have no idea how to connect the internet up to the tv monitor.

It depends enormously on how old the TV is. If it's old, then it probably requires adapters and fiddling and stuff. This issue gets treated lightly mostly because newer TVs increasingly have all of that built-in -- you just connect to the wifi and go.

(Which still doesn't mean it's trivial. It took me a minute or two to set up my mother's TV, but I wouldn't want her to try to do it herself.)

11. I don't think it means that they're in the same units as G. The mass ratios are in kg/kg, hence dimensionless, and G is in Nm^2/kg^2. But obviously kg is an arbitrary mass, so what it means when it says you can scale the mass parameters to G is that whatever number of particles makes up that arbitrary mass, the ratio between the masses of that number of particles of two types will remain constant.

My parents do not have broadband. They don't want broadband. They have no use for broadband.

Exactly the demographic I am worried about.

I don't know how much it costs to broadcast TV, but it surely can't be *that* much compared to the number of people who still watch TV that way.

Interesting Links for 08-12-2022

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