Good science fiction premise. The presence of the Moon and its stabilizing effect on our planet's climate, the presence of Jupiter with just the right mass to have a stabilizing effect on bombardment while not destabilizing planetary orbits, and then the presence of a primordial black hole allowing the monkeys to study dark matter physics once they reach space. Almost like it was an experimental setup.
"clever joke" aside: why? Primordial black holes are a rather completely different category from super-massive black holes, with masses theorized as small as a single plank mass. Not a lot of sucking happens when PBH are involved.
Fig1 in the paper shows the exact size of the PBH:
> FIG. 1. Exact scale (1:1) illustration of a 5M⊕ PBH. Note that a 10M⊕ PBH is roughly the size of a ten pin bowling ball.
Yes it would have. Planck mass black holes aren't even mentioned in this paper, I'm confused as to where this came from. PBH = 'primordial black hole' meaning formed at the beginning of the universe, not Planck Mass Black Hole, which, you're right, would have evaporated instantly.
Things are weird when dealing with Planck quantities, so "almost certainly", but only almost. The main point was that PBH are generally small and look nothing like what people think of if they've only heard of black holes from popular science and sci-fi.
I suppose given the enormous force gradients around even a basketball sized black hole, it could potentially be turned into one of the most efficient ways to convert matter into energy by building an accretion disk around it?
If you get the timing right, you could just shoot those at the enemy near the speed of light, and they would explosively decay right as they arrived. If the mass was low enough, they'd be effectively invisible, wouldn't they? Screw antimatter bombs, these would be pretty horrific. Instead of kilograms' worth of matter-to-energy conversion, you could have hundreds of tons worth. Wonder what that would be in megatonnage?
Other than the whole "you wouldn't be able to move it around" because unless you have a portable gravity projector, that thing isn't going anywhere: it is a gravity sink. Your enemies would have be lured into range, at which point, longbows will do a much, much better job =D
Yes, the amount of gravitational potential energy release is much higher for the same mass than you get from fusion. I’ve seen estimates of 10% - 40% of the mass-energy of the in-falling matter.
You “just” need a way to get the matter there and a way to capture that energy.
Am I the only one who just doesn't find this very interesting? I mean it's just a coincidence that "buffalo" is a verb in American English and also a place name, as well as an animal.
I just don't think this leads anywhere interesting.
For somebody with a Cognitive Science degree like myself, the interesting place it leads is that it is a grammatically correct sentence which almost every native speaker who is unfamiliar with will claim is not. Why? If we can reason out that it is grammatically correct, but our built in grammar parser will evaluate it as incorrect, what is it we don't understand about the way our brain processes linguistic information?
So if someone came up to you in at a party or any other social environment and said "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" and then walked off, your interest wouldn't be piqued?
No, not really. People do all sorts of crap for all sorts of reasons. Some people are literally insane. Some people do things at your expense. Some people just like to amuse only themselves. And then throw drugs and alcohol in the mix, there isn't much reason to believe that people are always rational actors which have to be taken seriously.
- It shows “corner cases” in our own human languages where meaning is not clear even when a sentence is grammatically correct. (This possibility is perhaps more obvious to tech people, but a surprise to many)
- It shows how understanding a sentence is so different from reading. When, with some aid, one finally can read the buffalo sentence and understand it, it’s amazing to realize how it “clicks”. As technothrasher said, this is interesting to those understanding how the brain works.
- As others noted, reveals how much of human language is about defaults and convention, and NOT about parsing based in grammar. This was something that had to be learned; early thinkers sometimes assumed that the brain was just a parser.
- For hackers, it’s interesting to find ways to “break” a human language while playing by the rules (grammar).
AFAIK the task is looking for volunteers (who have the necessary low-level knowledge) and/or funding. The mailing list at openmcl-devel@clozure.com has some threads related to it - see https://lists.clozure.com/pipermail/openmcl-devel/
As a Lisp neophyte, I've been watching the Clozure CL situation with some interest -- I really want to give it a try, especially the macOS/Cocoa bindings, but my only Mac at the moment is an M1. A couple of specific questions I've been wondering about:
1) Does the port require a rewrite of the compiler? It seems like it was only ever released for 32-bit ARM, not even generic ARM64? How much of that work can carry over to an Apple Silicon port?
2) Will the announced rewrite of Core Foundation in Swift and/or the transition to SwiftUI put the CCL Cocoa bindings at risk of obsolescence anyway?
My current job doesn't demand much coding out of me, so I feel lucky that I'm able to focus my personal learning efforts on interactive development environments like Lisp and Smalltalk, and grateful that solid free implementations are available in any event. If somebody does start up Apple Silicon CCL crowd-funding, I'd be in for at least $100.
You could look at the LRB (London Review of Books). While obviously it is mostly book reviews there are other essays in there too. The writing is rather literary, which may or may not be a positive, but it is entirely free of clickbait. It's probably the nearest thing to a left-wing equivalent of The Economist.
