Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2023 June 28

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June 28

Determine sex of bird

Can someone explain how something like this works? The sex of a bird can be determined with accuracy by pendulum?

Is it something related to lunar gravity and influences on male/female reproductive cells? (as in human menstrual cycle)?

Or is it the Sheldrake Effect?

Or Coriolis Effect?

How does it work??

Thank you -- Iqbal 146.200.127.227 (talk) 01:03, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

No, no, no, no, no and no because it doesn't work. I gave the video a Thumb Down for fakery because a pendulum swing is here again exploited for the pseudoscience of dowsing. I wish I could reward the OP in similar manner for their very silly suggestions. Philvoids (talk) 09:06, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

This actually seems to be something that quite a few people think works. Iloveparrots (talk) 22:36, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

It's been used and debunked for more than 100 years. But of course no claim is too stupid for lots of people to believe it. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sex-detector-1920-poultry-eggs -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 22:44, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the birds get hypnotized by the magic pendulum, after which they are open to suggestions of gender transition :). Seriously, you can perform any magic trick by doctoring a video, but I don't think for one second it will work any better in practice than reading tea leaves.  --Lambiam 11:43, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

You need a Chicken Sexer (not to be confused with a Hühnerficker). -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 18:01, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Astrology doesn't work either, but I bet no-one is going to tell me their exact time, place and date of birth, just in case it does. MinorProphet (talk) 22:30, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

No takers, then. MinorProphet (talk) 00:37, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Is there any sort of particle beam that could actually be dodged by a person/spaceship if used as a weapon?

Just been working my way through my Deep Space Nine DVDs again recently and noticed how quite often the phaser/disruptor/whatever particle beams used by the various species move just slow enough to be dodged in battles sometimes. I'm aware that for all intents and purposes a real laser beam would act as a hitscan weapon, but it's specifically made clear in-universe here that these are NOT lasers. Are there any sorts of beams in the real world that would act like this? Iloveparrots (talk) 22:08, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

A stream of dried peas shot through a blow gun might be successfully dodged by an agile target. Let the distance between the gun and the target be $d$ and let the velocity of the particle as it shot remain constant with a speed limit of $v\ll c,$ and assume that the sum of the diameters of particles and target equals $\Delta .$ Also, assume that the target can accelerate in any direction with any acceleration up to a maximum of $a$ in magnitude. Then, assuming that each particle can be tracked from the moment it leaves the gun, it can be computed where it will be if it can potentially hit the target. If the risk exists, the time elapsed is at least $d/v.$ The target should make sure not to be within distance $\Delta$ of the projected trajectory at the projected time of potential impact, which they can manage if $a>2\Delta v^{2}/d^{2}.$ However, this will not work if the attacker can effectively lay a cone-shaped curtain of particles around the target and make the cone progressively narrower. Then the target's only hope is to accelerate away and outrun the particles; we need to incorporate the manoeuvrability of the gun (or the turret on which it is mounted) into the calculations.  --Lambiam 23:53, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

In a cone-shaped curtain of particles, the particle density is lower than in a narrow beam, so it may still be safe to pass through. These ships in Star Trek are pretty fast even on impulse drive, so dodging the beam sounds plausible for any beam slower than a Lorentz factor of 5 – if speeds and distances are indeed what they could realistically be in space battles with such drive systems: gigametres and megametres per second. Which they are not, judging from the exterior shots. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:02, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, it looks like ship-to-ship combat in Star Trek shows takes usually place over a distance of a few thousand meters, at most. Iloveparrots (talk) 10:48, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I always got the impression that when one of these "beams" missed their target, it was meant to be due to miscalculation in where they were targeted, relative to the location of the target (at the time of calculation or by the point the firing was initiated). Of course, computationally speaking that makes very little sense: it should be exceedingly easy for a computer with even today's number of computations per second (let alone a computer from the 24th century), and which was specifically designed to sweep a beam such as to catch a target, to accomplish that task with very little chance of evasion.

FWIW, the USS Defiant in DS9 was sometimes seen rolling on its axis to dodge beam weapons. As far as I remember, anyway. But in universe, it was supposed to be an exceptionally fast and manoeuvrable ship. I don't think that the Enterprise did that in TNG (maybe it did in the movies, can't remember). Iloveparrots (talk) 21:24, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

But that's kind of par for the course for that era of sci-fi and Star Trek in particular: much of the applied physics (excluding the stuff that is so fantastical it is never likely to happen) happens ridiculously early on the fictional timeline (I think we're supposed to be making warp bubbles in like the next twenty years?), whereas computation and AI, even for tasks as simple as what is really little more than basic geometry, seem painfully weak, relative to the amount of time that has passed. Still, I suppose as conceits made for the sake of action go, it still makes more sense for the computer to miss (or the system to allow for human error) than for a ship to "outmanuever" the speed of a particle beam, and I think it's the former, rather than the latter, that is supposed to be happening in those scenes. I'll grant you, though, those beams also sure seem to be moving slow sometimes too, as far as the visual representation is concerned. Well, whatever: 90s Star Trek was rarely good technical sci-fi: it is essentially humanist porn. Oh yeah, Jean-Luc, tell me about the dangers of dogmatic thinking, appeals to authority, and dehumanizing social policies...tell me all night long! SnowRise ^{let's rap} 11:34, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

The computation and AI seem weak? Only when it suits the plot.  Card Zero  (talk) 13:24, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Well Data is the prototypical example: there is every reason to believe that autonomous androids will be ubiquitous in a matter of decades, or at least as technological threshold matter, could be--it remains to be seen just how frequently robots will be adapted to a humanoid in form, in the final analysis. And yet Data and various other autonomous robotic entities are treated largely as cutting edge developments in, what was Next Generation, the 2360s, or something like that, if memory serves? And even as regards Data's more extreme computational capabilities, while there's considerable debate as to how far into the future the logarithmic development of processing ability will extend, even the most conservative estimates would make the processing power achieved in Star Trek's timeline laughable (again, especially considering we're talking about a society so advanced they can bend space-time and manipulate additional spacial dimensions for their propulsion and communications technologies respectively). We even have an exact figure for Data's processing speed, straight from the horse's mouth: 60 trillion operations per second. That's like the bus that most super computers today would use to POST. The whole issue is further confused by the fact that the writers for the show weren't really familiar with the subtleties of differences between neural networks and conventional digital programming, so they mix and match all kinds of technical terms in nonsensical ways (to say nothing of the dollop of technobabble on top of it all), but no matter how you slice the cake, Data's a potato clock relative to how much time is supposed to have passed.

And again, considering that in the same period of time we've learned to teleport, 3D print on the molecular level, heal wounds instantly with a wand, have prosthesis that allow us to have entire new senses, create artificial gravity, time travel, program memories, create tangible holograms, and turn invisible--to not even exhaust the list of the things that are supposed to be within easy reach of our godlike but nebulous command of physics that is presented as the every day baseline default for that narrative. There's a Next Generation episode where a conwoman uses a ship equipped with just the basic "every day" technology to convince a technologically less advanced culture that she is a god, and the Enterprise crew have to expose her. But it's like "No, I mean, it's not 'like she is a god' to these people: she just literally is, for all intents and purposes, a god. Just about everything you can imagine a "god" could do, she can genuinely do, if you scale up her technology a little. All of you are space wizards." And yet Data is basically running off of hardware with the operational speed of a higher-end crypto-coin mining PC in 2023. Not to be too on the nose or anything, but "Does not compute! Does not compute!" SnowRise ^{let's rap} 15:21, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Futrology is a sketchy business. I think the Karl Popper quote is "future knowledge, by its very nature, cannot be predicted". And despite being buoyed up by ChatGPT (which I think is merely overawing people with its bigness), Artificial General Intelligence may be entirely unrelated in nature and is notoriously always N years away. The meta-analysis mentioned there found that N has always equalled 16 to 26 years. There is an underlying supposition that because the thing we call AI improves over time, it will eventually turn into something human-like, in just the same way that steadily growing pumpkins eventually turn into coaches. You are criticizing Star Trek for 1) predicting the arrival of putative future technology on what turned out to be a premature timescale, and 2) failing to predict the arrival of putative future technology on the timescale that you predict it will arrive on. Though I must admit you're not alone, there is some kind of consensus on the idea that AGI will arrive soon (and always has been). But future discoveries are not determined by voting for them.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:39, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

No, I think you're misinterpreting exactly which phenomena I am talking about, in which contexts, and what exactly I am saying about them. I never referenced AGI, nor is it directly relevant to my observation--i.e. that the development of computation and AI was vastly (indeed, comically) underappreciated by those writers, while the prospects of other relatively fantastical developments in applied physics are presented as absurdly rosey. None of that is even a matter of much speculation: it's pretty easy to establish objectively, in fact. On the computational side we have commercially available GPUs that have the rough number of operations Data is said to have, 340 years in advance of this fantastical future where you can disassemble a person and put them back together, molecule by molecule, from a hundred miles away. It would also be a trivial matter to use a narrowly modeled, mass-data-set trained AI module to create optimal firing solutions for a weapon that fires along either a geometric ray or the contour of cone, which was the speculative context in which we were talking about these metrics. Meanwhile, most of the developments in applied physics in this world are so nebulously defined and inconsistent with fundamental physical laws that we can safely predict most will never exist, and certainly not in the form demonstrated, and on the timeline predicted. If you think we're going to be creating warp bubbles during the possible lifespan of the remaining Beatles, well...ok, but I'm still pretty comfortable about saying "Uhhhh, naaaahhh..."

Those basic, vaguely quantifiable facts (taken from our present day reality and the fictional lore of the narrative, respectively) are not really affected one way or the other by the question of whether or not Data possessed generalized intelligence: he clearly is meant to have not just generalized intelligence, but in fact a greatly expanded and optimized abilities in terms of tasks he can perform and the speed at which most of his cognitive tasks take place. Great, but if anything that just further highlights how nonsensical this all is, because we're talking about a being that is supposed to be able to perform these feats of capability on hardware that couldn't handle even a smallest subset of those tasks, even with genius software and/or robustly trained adaptive models. So clearly something isn't right there, and I don't have to talk about a "putative" anything (nor was I seeking to) in order to establish that their predictions were not just backwards in certain respects, but in fact centuries off, in both directions.

And none of this should be taken as knock against Star Trek: nothing I said was meant for the purposes of trying to tear the show down or nitpick it to the point of implying that it is bad art. Star Trek was never meant to be the kind of show that got any of this hard science very right...or even remotely right; I made a point of saying that at the outset. Some sci-fi is meant to be prospective, looking to where we are headed, technologically or contextually. Star Trek has a small sliver of that, but even then, it's terrible at those predictions (other than that it anticipated the ergonomics and mechanics of touch screens pretty well, it must be said). From the beginning, Star Trek was introspective: it largely uses allegory to discuss who we are now, and what paths we might choose to go down next, socially speaking, by using the lens of this fantastical, improbable, not-infrequently ridiculous (from a technical perspective) vision of the future. I mean that was literally the entire raison d'etre for the show: Gene Roddenberry was frustrated that he never got to talk about racism, sexism, nationalism, militarism, or provincialism in his prior work, because of the conservative nature of the medium at the time. So he created this proxy world where he could unload our weaknesses and possible solutions for how to get past them into plain view, but in a form palatable for audiences of the time. The computers and the propulsion systems and the basic laws of physics don't make sense because those were not the priorities of the writers, even by the development of The Next Generation.

And that's perfectly ok. At what it does, no show was ever any better than that one (The Next Generation), to this day. It's so good in fact, that despite it's absolutely terrible hard science bona fides, I have no difficulty saying it is somehow still a contender for the best sci-fi work ever developed for television. But by the same token, you can't tell me that I'm wrong to say that they greatly accelerated any realistic timeline for development of some forms of technology, while greatly undervaluing the speed of development in others. That's just not even debatable, frankly. By even a charitable analysis, that show's modelling of the speed of computational advancements is about a hundred times slower than reality. And the speed of major developments in various areas of physics is accelerated by...well, to adopt a phrasing: warp factor 9. And it is those mistakes (if 'mistakes' you even want to call them; arguably 'conceits' is more accurate) which go some way to explaining the inconsistencies the OP was inquiring about, which is the context in which I raised these miscalculations/misapprehensions. Because a Macbook with the right software could run those targeting solutions better than the Deep Space Nine computer and Worf combined seem to be able to. It's silly. And it's fine. And it's ok to believe both of those things. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 17:58, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Forgive me, I see now that you didn't in fact refer to AGI: I just assumed that was what you were talking about, because it was what I meant by referencing Data in the context of AI. But Data's 60 teraFLOPS (have I got that right?) must be seen in the context of his positronic brain. Presumably operations using anti-electrons count double, or something ... but it isn't entirely ridiculous to say that it's not the operations that count but what you do with them. I note from the AGI article that Kurzweil's estimate of the performance of the human brain in FLOPS was surpassed by computers in 2011.

But anyway of course you're right that it's silly if a 1980s Star Trek computer can't target a laser, which jet fighter avionics (or 8-bit home computers) of the time would have done easily. So could an analog computer from the 1940s, probably.

(I changed the "positronic brain" link because it turns out we have a specific article by that name. Of course.)  Card Zero  (talk) 18:43, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Haha, yeah, come to think of it, there is an episode where Data mentions in passing to a fellow "cybernetics" nerd that he did essentially overclock himself by replacing whoozit filaments with whatzit fibers or some such technobabble nonsense. Funnily enough, that's an episode where they create some more artificial lifeforms if memory serves. That's another funny thing about the timeline of AI in Star Trek; for a field that seems to have largely stagnated for three and a half centuries, they sure do seem to routinely create artificial sentient beings "by accident", lol! It makes you wonder, is the Enterprise's computer the most powerful computational device in the known galaxy? And even if it is, still, how could you not know that it is capable of virtualizing human/Data-comparable consciousness? How could you possibly engineer such an impressive and complex piece of computational hardware and have no idea that it can crap out people like ChatGPT generates bad essays?

Anyway, all joking aside, yes, you're correct that the raw processing power is just one component of trying to speculate as to what Data's actual limitations would be, within the fuzzy logic world of Star Trek. This brings us back to something I was saying earlier: the writers really just can't seem to decide whether Data's "brain" is a synthetic neural network, or digital/conventionally algorithmic computer? Various of his mental capabilities and qualities are said to "develop" as he "learns", but then he was also heavily "programmed" by his creator. There are potential ways to get these concepts to work together, but none of the language they ever use to "clarify" matters ever works together self-consistently. But note that operations per second is already a metric of performance, whatever the architecture of the "positronic brain". And yes, you are correct: 1x10¹² flops = one teraFLOPS. Now an operation per second is not strictly speaking synonymous with a FLOPS, but its as good as an other analogical comparison we are likely to get here. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 20:15, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

But, uhh, we've quite wandered from the OP's inquiry now, so I'm gonna reign myself in! SnowRise ^{let's rap} 20:18, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

"Rein", not "reign" (unless you should be addessed as your majesty). Clarityfiend (talk) 19:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

One couldn't possibly comment. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 12:24, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

You might like Deep Space Nine then. As the series goes on and Roddenberry's influence wanes, it kinda becomes a deconstruction of the Federation's utopian dream. It's pretty dark in places. Well, as dark as you can get for Star Trek. Captain Sisko and his crew come across as far more "the ends always justify the means" than Picard and the TNG people.

Sort of thing I'm talking about:

- Sisko, when faced with a group of separatist rebels/terrorists/freedom fighters (take your pick) who had used a biological weapon against the Cardassians drops cobalt bombs into the atmosphere of one of their colonies and is like "I was being nice to you before because I was somewhat sympathetic to your cause, but now I've had enough of you. That's one. Surrender to me now or I'll do the same to every single one of your colonies".

- Major Kira, when confronted by a Cardassian civilian who was maimed by an explosive device she planted during the war (which also killed multiple women and children) and was out for revenge, pointed out that "you invaded my planet, stole my land and killed millions of my people in your concentration camps - as far as I'm concerned, every member of your species was a legitimate target".

- When the Cardassian equivalent of the KGB or Gestapo secretly assembled a fleet of warships and set out to launch a preemptive (and unprovoked at the time) assault against the homeworld of the Dominion in an attempt to turn the planet into glass and murder everyone on it - completely against the wishes of their own government. And the Federation were like - "don't try to stop them - they might win, and then save us a lot of problems in the future". (spoiler: they didn't)

Unprovoked? I think not. The Dominion had already signalled its aggressive intentions. Also, neither Sisko nor the Federation could do anything to stop the Cardassian/Romulan sneak attack, as I recall. Clarityfiend (talk) 19:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

- The entire thing where Sisko went along with entirely fabricating evidence of a Dominion plot in order to bring the Romulans (who at the time, wanted peace) into the war. Then being okay with blaming the murder of a Romulan senator and the crew of his ship on the enemy if it helped his plans.

Went along? Let us give the Sisko his due: he initiated it. Clarityfiend (talk) 19:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

- Section 31. An organization within Starfleet that had little to no oversight from anyone else, dedicated to the idea that humanity must prevail, at any cost. Used a biological weapon in an attempt to literally genocide the enemy. This actually won the war, as the cure for the virus inflicted on the Dominion was held over them in order to force surrender. The whole "your utopian dream is wonderful - but space is dangerous - and you still need men like me to protect you from people who don't share your views" speech...

- Gul Dukat. Man, he was probably the most complex character to ever appear in a Star Trek series. The guy was basically a Nazi, but at points he was shown as having redeeming features so you started to think "maybe he's not so bad" or "maybe he's trying to change". Then it's shown that the guy's motivation is filled with cognitive dissonance. As the overseer of the Bajoran Occupation, he closed some of the death camps, reduced the work quotas for the labor camps, reduced the amount of child slaves, increased food rations for the slaves, offered attractive women a comfortable life as "comfort women" for the Cardasssian officers and ensured their families would be taken care of, etc. - and he was like WHY DON'T THEY LOVE ME, THEY ARE AN INFERIOR RACE AND I'M ONLY TRYING TO BE A FATHER FIGURE TO THEM???? (IOW, he wanted the love and respect of a people he considered a degenerate race). Then he went completely nuts and said that maybe he should kill them all if they won't acknowledge his greatness, to the point that even his most evil allies thought he was a psychopath and wanted nothing to do with him. One of the most disturbing characters ever presented to screen, in my opinion.

As I said, dark stuff. Iloveparrots (talk) 21:00, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

A homo sapiens and a single helper invents and builts an ICBM-launched warp ship without help in a post-nuclear world war wasteland and on 4/5/2063 he flies in it, goes faster than light and lands (at least according to a film released 11/22/1996). Everything got fucked when a random hippie saw a hard crash landing of a 29th century timeship in the 60s and soon started Chronowerx® Corp with an intentionally punch pulling version of isograted circuits (still better than integrated apparently) and kept ahead of the rest of the electronics industry till the mid-90s when the reverse engineering Moore's was running out so Trek is not the future but a timeline where isograted circuits are 50 years old. There's an episode where DS9 time travels to 2024 and their 2024 is laughable. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:24, 30 June 2023 (UTC)