/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10802553
Highly evolved biological systems are better than machines.

>>10802557
What is construction machinery?
What is microscopes/telescopes?
What is clothing?
...
Et cetera

>>10802571
What is a pump that weighs 300 grams lasts on average 75 years and during that time pumps about 200,000,000 litres nonstop.

>>10802572
Answer: Something that isn't the topic of this thread.

>>10802576
Answer: the human goddamn heart.

>>10802553
bump

>>10802553
Because a machine can't give you a free pass on the 4th ammendment when you train it to bark at someone on command.

>>10802585
I suspect this is the answer

>>10802585
Sir, our dowsing rods pointed to your vehicle as we were doing our drug sweep please step out of the car so that our resident psychic can check your auras.

>>10802553
set it in motion,

that this flatworld joke is really about putting the universe, or at least earth and our solar system into a disc

dont fail me, seriously, dont make me wait

training dogs is cheap

>>10802553
They do also use mass specs in some places.

>>10802572
Now let's consider how much maintenance the heart needs

>>10802591
>>10802594
NOOOOOOOO!!! The cops need that civil asset forfeiture money to keep us safe!!!

>>10802668
All it needs is fuel and air.

>>10802585
>Because a machine can't give you a free pass on the 4th ammendment when you train it to bark at someone on command.
^^^This.
You guys no drug detection dogs are complete bullshit, right? They don't actually do what people imagine. When you arrange studies where the police officer is misinformed that the drugs are somewhere they aren't, guess what happens? Their dogs "coincidentally" bark at those same exact false drug locations.
If anything drug detecting dogs are impressive not for the ability to pick up scents but for their acute psychological insights into the minds of their human handlers. They can tell by body language what their handlers hope they'll do, and they go ahead and do exactly that because the doggos are smart and know doing so will result in praise and treats.

>>10802699
That's super interesting - send a link for that study

>>10802585
>Because a machine can't give you a free pass on the 4th ammendment when you train it to bark at someone on command.
^^^This.
You guys know drug detection dogs are complete bullshit, right? They don't actually do what people imagine. When you arrange studies where the police officer is misinformed that the drugs are somewhere they aren't, guess what happens? Their dogs "coincidentally" bark at those same exact false drug locations.
If anything drug detecting dogs are impressive not for the ability to pick up scents but for their acute psychological insights into the minds of their human handlers. They can tell by body language what their handlers hope they'll do, and they go ahead and do exactly that because the doggos are smart and know doing so will result in praise and treats.
>>10802691
>The cops need that civil asset forfeiture money
lol. Don't get me started on "self-funded" police departments. War on drugs is such a fucking racket between that and the private prison corporations who spend millions on lobbying to keep as many easily violated drug laws on the books as possible explicitly (per their own earnings calls and reports to their investors) because their business model depends on maintaining a prison occupancy above their *contractual* quota (as in yes, the state actually goes into a contract with them that says they will guarantee the continued supply of X number of prisoners for their prison, not because there actually are X number of people who deserve incarceration but because financially that's how many people the private prison corporation requires to be profitable).

>>10802711
this is a based post - send me the link to the dog study

>>10802704
Will do in a minute. Sorry for your dead post link there, was a sleepy retard and wrote "no" instead of "know" and you replied before I could correct my homonym blunder.

>>10802704
>>10802713
Here's the original study:
www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/20110223_drug_dogs.html
And here's an NPR article about it:
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-police-bias-when-handling-dogs-that-bite
Hilariously the police responded by refusing to cooperate with any further research initiatives on the topic. Instead of, you know, actually working towards FIXING the horrible systematic violation of civil rights under false pretenses.
>On the surface, the study tested the abilities of fourteen certified sniffer dogs to find hidden "targets." In reality, the dogs' human handlers were also under the magnifying glass. They were led to believe there were hidden target scents present, when in fact there were none. Nevertheless, the dogs "alerted" to the scents multiple times — especially in locations where researchers had indicated a scent was likely.
>"I think the findings were a little surprising," Lit says. "I don't think the number of incorrect responses was what anybody was really anticipating out of this study."
>Police dogs searching for drugs sometimes "alert" for them when they're not there. That raises questions about the influence of the dogs' handlers. As NPR learned, there is now an effort by some in the training community to eliminate the influence of their handlers' suspicions to make dog searches more fair.
>Lit's study made headlines in the U.S. and abroad, as it seemed to question the impartiality of police K9 teams. In most states, an alert by a certified drug-sniffing dog gives police the right to search your car; some cops jokingly refer to the dogs as "probable cause on four legs." With this study, that probable cause looked shakier.
>Dog trainers and handlers denounced the study and its methods, and Lit couldn't get their cooperation for further research. Dr. Cynthia Otto, another researcher who runs the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, recalls the backlash.

>>10802717
So dogs can smell drugs but they can also read their handlers like a goddamn book.

>>10802725
More the latter than the former.
And everyone using these dogs is aware of this today. They don't care. They just want an excuse to make an arrest, not an actual diagnostic approach to identifying drugs.
If they could replace the dogs with a judge signature forgery machine to issue their own search warrants they would.

>>10802711
This.
Drug dogs are Clever Hans writ large.

>>10802711
Hmm, interesting, but I suspect your post might be bs as well, just to be clear you are not biased, state your opinion and your views on recreation drug use, especially light drugs like cannabis or mushrooms.

>>10802553

Lol. i'll tell you a secret about these dogs. They don't actually work and usually just bark at everything they are put on. They just get sent in to give a plausible deniability for the police to mess up your car.

>>10802852
What I personally believe in is completely irrelevant to whether my claims are valid. You should check the claims by looking into them independently yourself, not by trying to see if I'm the sort of person you prefer.

>>10802852
>>10802894
Or to put this another way, just because the world's first case-control epidemiological study assessing the carcinogenic effect of tobacco was conducted by Nazis doesn't mean smoking is good for you.

>>10802894
I can accept that dogs might not be good at detecting specific scents when we actually need them to. However second part of your post was mainly your opinion with hardly any hard data and facts. I just want to know is there more to your opinion and do you have bias. Do you think we should just create an extremely sensitive device that is accurate 100% of time detecting particles in the air like the scent of illegal narcotics in the vicinity/direction of the device and stop using dogs altogether. That would make it much easier detecting drugs, cheaper, more convenient and also make it easier to secure convictions (imagine installing something like that in goverment offices, airports, public places,cafes,restaurant, it would notify police automatically when drugs are detected).

>>10802928
>bias
Again, that's completely irrelevant. If my post was created by a freak accident where lightning struck someone's computer and randomly produced the string of characters it contained it would still have no bearing on the post's validity.

>>10802928
>>10802938
Also if you doubt any claims I made, ask me for proof regarding the specific claim. That'd be a lot more productive then trying to see if I have a "bias."

>>10802928
Dogs are easier to roll out. With machines despite the Probable prowess you need to teach a ton of people, buying it and possible improper use. Granted these all are minor in theory but thetes been countless times in a developed country where doing basic implementation of new tech is hampered by Good ol' incompetencult and refusal to change.

>>10802553
We have, but they are useless because you cannot train them to bark at suspicious brown people.

>>10802938
Its irrelevant when stating scientific facts, when you just provide your opinion it becomes relevant.

>>10802572
Based.
The best thing about breeding traits is you don't even need to know how it works. You just need to test which animals can do it best and then spam their DNA.
If only we could do this with humans... oh well I guess that's impossible and immoral, we should leave this thing which we have the ability to control completely to chance and to prior interventions in breeding like antinatalist propaganda telling smart, moral people not to breed due to the fact that their kids could grow up to be white supremacists, because it's irresponsible for the environment while careless people don't decrease their reproduction, and because it's more important to adopt from the third world.
Also Christianity, which helped popularise this disturbed mindset, which says that the smartest, most moral people should become celibate.
Totally not dysgenic. I'm sure it'll all be fine when we're a bunch of retards ruled over by a tiny caste of intelligent people who have no problem with deceiving us, 100% believe in inherited traits when looking at their friends and family, and are reducing humanity to cattle status. Haha glad that hasn't happened

>>10802711
you sound like a druggy

>>10802571
Those are not biological systems, but tools created by one for its needs.

fun fact Military predator drones can carry 7 shipping containers worth of cocaine...

>>10802717
Wahtabout the studies based on using bees?

>>10802572
There are dam irrigation pumps that pump that amount of fluid in an hour's time and have been in operation for similar amounts of time.
>> on average 75 years
no

>>10803791
And theyre 300 grams?

>>10802668
ok then how "simply" would you regenerate your machine rusted and broken off by fatigue mechanism parts? and how would your machine adapt to an outter failure like falling off?

because they cute doggos

Biological noses will always be superior.
Even in 500 years from now, biological noses will better.

I wonder tho, in 500 years, would they genetically engineer a dogs nose onto a human so the police officer could smell and search for drugs just as well as a drug sniffer dog? That's a slippery slope to state sponsored furrydom.

>>10803861
they pump more in an hour what takes that 300 gram pump a lifetime to accomplish. Who cares about mass?

>>10802553
specificity. Similiar explosive detection devices detect everything. They can get thrown in a loop because some of the same chemicals occur that occur in explosives also occur in things like hair products. A dog is better at picking out the mix of chemicals in context than machines are. At least now, explosives detection machines require a skilled operator to do this. For now. This is a great task for machine learning

>>10802553

well we kind of created the dog in a sense

>>10802572
>this shit keeps me up at night

>>10802987
>Its irrelevant when stating scientific facts, when you just provide your opinion it becomes relevant.
No, it really doesn't. Who I am has nothing to do with whether or not my post makes sense. If you find my post "biased," you can go look up the information somewhere else and form a different opinion. Although I don't know that I'd even agree there's much opinion in there in the first place.
"Self-funded" police departments aren't an opinion. That's a real phenomenon where certain police departments make so much from asset seizure that they no longer need to accept taxpayer money. They're free to operate off their own drug-bux bankroll.
Private prison corporations spend millions on lobbying to influence state policy decision makers. That's not an opinion. You can see exactly how much each private prison corporation has spent on lobbying because they're legally required to disclose this information.
Contractual prison population size quotas established in written agreement between private prison corporations and the state isn't an opinion either.
And private prisons stating in their earnings reports to the investors that their business model depends on prison populations being maintained at or above a certain size isn't an opinion.
As near as I can tell the only point to saying "interesting, but I suspect your post's bullshit because you're biased" is to make a passive-aggressive attack on it without needing to clarify what specifically you think I'm lying about.
Hence why I keep telling you to be more specific and either check what I'm saying independently or else request elaboration or proof on some particular claim I've made that you're doubting here.

>>10804073
Human noses are shit tho, really wish evolution would speed up and remove most of the useless crap connected to the nose
You'd have to go full muzzle, but at that point it would be far easier to make a portable device with a biological sniffer attached

>>10803791
>on average 75 years
>no
Where do you live?

>>10804270
>Who cares about mass?
Obviously not your mother or we wouldn't have tides.

>>10803315
Are you retarded?

>>10804892
It needs to be constantly maintained.

>>10804869
Woah man thats like so crazy dude. Brainlet.
>>10803791

>>10804944
When's the last time you shut down your heart and had a mechanic replace parts of it? It constantly maintains itself.

>>10804950
and?

>>10804952
And that is the holy grail of engineering and design.

>>10804950
The heart doesn't maintain itself. Remove a heart from a body, sit it down on a plate, and tell me how much maintaining it does on its own.

>>10804958
I can't tell if you are seriously goalposting or just legitimately retarded.

>>10804950
>When's the last time you shut down your heart and had a mechanic replace parts of it?
I wouldn't bring up heart surgery if you're trying to make hearts seem impressive. They're pretty fucking fragile and you're probably more likely to die during heart surgery than almost any other kind of surgery you might go under for.

>>10804954
No it's not, we make vastly superior pumps. The heart is completely trivial.

>>10804963
I'm not the same anon you were exchanging posts with if that's what your problem is here.
I think it's bullshit for you to talk about how great the heart is as though it's some perfect tiny self-contained machine. It's clearly not that at all since you need a large slew of interconnected structure and functionality from the rest of the body to keep it going. The heart on its own might seem elegant in structure but that's not the real machine you need to be comparing. The real machine is the entire organism's body.

>>10804968
>sometimes one breaks down
ok...
>>10804970
>we can make better ones
debatable...
>>10804976
This is a conversation about what advantages biological systems have over man made mechanical ones. I was using the heart as an example to point out the weakness of steel and concrete. I never said they don't have their place, I work with metal and sit inside concrete and glass every day. As a side note every engine or pump needs other components to make it function the heart isn't unique in this.

I feel like you all have lost the thread.

>>10805004
>As a side note every engine or pump needs other components to make it function the heart isn't unique in this.
I'm not saying the heart is unique in needing other components. I'm saying compare one self-contained system to another. Don't compare a self-contained artificial pumping system to the heart on its own, that's disingenuous.
There's a massive difference between the idea of an isolated heart somehow maintaining itself and working for 70 years with very little required to keep it going vs. reality where you need an entire complex and very far from simple or elegant organism to maintain a heart.
Heart only seems like a super-efficient machine with minimal expenses if you ignore the organism needed. The organism actually maintaining the heart is extremely far from an efficient pump system, and the heart crashes into irreparable destruction pretty quickly when taken on its own. An artificial pump doesn't fail beyond repair just because you remove it from a system it's connected to. You can pull it out, leave it sitting there for years, and then hook it back up and have it working fine again.

>>10805096
You just keep saying the same thing in a different way.

>>10805167
And its still correct.

>>10804950
>>10805167
It is being constantly replaced, cell by cell.

>>10803173
who cares you'll be dead lmao

>>10802553
Because dogs are more than just our emotions projected onto an animal, for thousands of years they have sought to justify their existence to human beings and for thousands of years they have been wildly successful at that effort. Sniffing for bombs and drugs is just one of the many ways they continue their own species and prove themselves worthy of our companionship. We may have other means to sniff out a bomb, but dogs don't have that luxury and they know it.

>>10805167
>You just keep saying the same thing in a different way.
Yes, it's frustrating having to come up with new ways to phrase it. Would help if you'd just understand it the first time around.
I'll try one more time: Biological hearts only seem impressive in the way you're framing it because you're disingenuously talking about some nonexistent cartoon version of them where they're super-efficient and elegant, a version anyone could only ever begin to entertain as the case if they leave out the entire convoluted organism it's hopelessly dependent on to even have a chance at working.
If you needed to build something like the entire human body just for the sake of a pump that would be a pretty fucking shitty pump.
A mechanical pump is nothing like that. A mechanical pump doesn't die beyond any hope of repair just because you disconnect it, and it doesn't require extremely high maintenance conditions 24/7 sealed away from any exposure to the elements just to not permanently shut down.
In a lot of ways biology is actually horribly *inefficient*, something people overlook because they mix up constant mindless movement along the *immediate* paths of least resistance with an efficient final product.
I like to think of nature more as "lazy" than "efficient." By analogy, the lazy man might drop out of school, not bother looking for a job, get addicted to crack cocaine, end up homeless, and have to exert a lot of energy dealing with the harsh realities of survival as a homeless person with mental illness and drug abuse problems.
Meanwhile the efficient man would plan out an *overall* low effort path and would get a basic degree, get a job, and enjoy a relaxing life on a comfortable salary with modern amenities and little stress or struggle.
Artificial engineering gets to do the latter and operate in terms of a plan that'll get you somewhere efficient. Biological evolution just keeps falling down the paths of least resistant and whatever is able to exist and persist does.