The amount of radiation from regular flying probably has no risk as well.
Aircrew have higher risk for certain types of cancers, but it's not clear if radiation plays a role in that. And of course they spend way more time on air than any regular airline customer.
Well and as anything radiation it is always a question of how you come into touch with it.
E.g. getting hit by radiation briefly from the outside is different than having a radiation source inside your body for potentially ever (heavy metals are known to do this).
I am not sure how it is with mushrooms, but as someone who grew up in the Austrian South with similar laws regulating mushrooms I think this was the reasoning. So not that the radiation dose of one of those mushrooms would be problematic, but that it contains radiating particles that happily enter, but not so happily exit your body.
Do infinite sequences of integers exist? Especially all the ones that can't be compressed into a finite description? I don't think that's clear at all.
At least for me, doing examples and computations is the best way to learn math, and also very important in research. Often an opaque general statement becomes clear after doing a few small examples. In linear algebra, I personally find some of the courses have too few computations, some concepts are best learned by working an hour by hand on some annoying 6 x 6 matrix..
That said, "working an hour by hand on some annoying 6 x 6 matrix" is how I was taught linear algebra. I got a rare B in the course (even though I aced all the tests!) because there was so much busy work I just refused to do it all. I got literally nothing out of the course in terms of understanding (there was neither time to think nor any real direction given) and a year later I couldn't even do the work anymore. I ended up picking up Axler.
Agreed. I had an additional conflict in that I am a naturally sloppy person, and the worst part of doing matrix calcs by hand is that I'd often make a calculation error due to an inability to read my own handwriting, which would lead to terrible marks again and again.
Even assuming that the concept of "game" would exist elsewhere seems like a ridiculous assumption. All of the things you are saying, even "purely mathematical" are just reflections of the way humans sense the world. Any alien species you are imagining here is just a reflection of mankind.
Anyway, since probably won't know anytime soon, and perhaps never, this kind of speculation is a bit useless. But if we ever found an alien species, it seems unlikely we would be able communicate with them any more than we can communicate with a piece of rock.
"Playfulness" is fairly widespread among the intelligent animals of Earth. Mammals, birds, and cetaceans all seem to "play". From there it isn't that hard a guess that they might also "game", and for similar evolutionary reasons.
Unless we're going to argue that Earth has some sort of unique concept of "playfulness" built into the original single cell, it's not that hard a guess that a good chunk of aliens out there might recognizably "game".
Is everyone who thinks we stand no chance of communication really comfortable claiming that we're just soooo unique that we won't be able to communicate with anything? Because it's the exact same claim, just from a different viewpoint. Personally I think it's just fashionable misanthropy that will dissolve the instant you spin it in a direction where it might perhaps look like one is claiming it in a way that makes humanity look special.
Your guess is as good as mine. My guess is that all intelligent life in the universe would be "soooo unique", not just the one on Earth. So it would be very improbable any life form would be similar to that on Earth.
However, it could be probable that there are two life forms in the universe which are similar. But then they would probably be too far apart from each other to ever be able to communicate.
I'm not saying that every alien species would have the same concept of a game, but you really think it's "ridiculous" that any other alien species might have a similar concept of a game? Adversarial games are not even that far removed from the normal competition that is part of natural selection that yields intelligence in the first place.
You're making a lot of assumptions about things that you claim are impossible or would never happen, without explaining how you're coming to those assumptions. And the "communicate with a piece of rock" bit is just flat-out bad argumentation, as rocks aren't intelligent and thus cannot communicate by definition.
Well so far we do not know, so again this is just speculation. Your guess might be as good as mine. There does not seem to be any serious scientific results in this direction, other than nonsense like the Drake equation.
I think the variety among the possibilities for other intelligent species (if any) would far outweigh the number of them. Hence it might be probable that there would exist two similar ones, but it would be very improbable that any of them would be similar to humans.
The point about "communicating" with a piece of rock was exactly that we cannot communicate them. Even if we would run into an alien species (which seems unlikely), it seems very improbable that any meaningful communication could happen.
The Luzhin Defense is about chess. But perhaps the same novel could be written about a mathematician, I first learned about the novel while reading this article by V.I. Arnold: https://www.math.ru.nl/~mueger/arnold.pdf
> Quickly after the park was established, Whittlesly describes white superintendents trying to make the area “safe” by removing “primitive savages” from the park, claiming they didn’t live there to begin with as they were afraid of the geysers. Those claims were completely untrue; in fact, the Yosemite Indians — as well as Sheep-eaters and Mountain Shoshone tribes — lived on and revered the land, and many others also considered the geysers to be sacred. Tribes such as the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads and the Kiowa would travel through the land as well at other points of the year, for hunting or in search of obsidian for arrowheads.
> Making the land safe wasn’t the least of the problems for the Native American tribes. In a “park” now protected and preserved from “the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit,” how were the tribes to eat, sleep, hunt, gather food, light fires? They weren’t. Forced off the land now considered a natural preserve by the government, Indians were once again removed from their ancestral home.
So sure, we could say national parks are "absolutely american"..
Aircrew have higher risk for certain types of cancers, but it's not clear if radiation plays a role in that. And of course they spend way more time on air than any regular airline customer.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/aircrew/cancer.html