“That system, although it has undergone radical changes, is still similar in several key ways. So similar, in fact, that in 2017 the Boeing 737 MAX 8 could be produced with an egregious design flaw, kept hidden from the FAA, which resulted in two preventable crashes at unready airlines in developing countries, killing (coincidentally) 346 people. And so, while it is true that flying today is much safer than it was in 1974 — passengers today need not worry about their planes crashing because of badly designed doors — the same basic factors that led to the DC-10 cargo door saga still exist and still cause accidents.“
Kyra might have to sadly walk even the caveat on this one back after yesterday’s incident on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 (another 737 MAX), which had an in-flight decompression emergency in which a body panel blew out due to some defect related to an unused doorframe obscured behind the paneling in that section. Thankfully it didn’t crash, but if the panel had hit some control surface on its way off of the plane, it might have been a much less happy story.
Not sure the caveat ever made sense… the next full hull loss due to a badly designed door is, really, always just a matter of time + financial incentives + regulatory gaps.
And, since we now know (after Asiana 8124) that an untrained and motivated individual can open the damned things in the most critical phases of flight, ejecting a exit slide into the path of an engine in the act, I’m not sure a caveat for even what we’d currently call well-designed doors is reasonable.
There's probably an unavoidable element of trade-off in the design of a door which normally must not open, yet must do so in a wide variety of abnormal situations.
Sure… and you shouldn’t feel particularly safe sitting beside any such door, especially if there’s an astronaut that really wants to exit the craft between you and it, if it’s got a failure state that lets it open in any situation in which it normally must not open.
Putting aside the low probability sitting next to an astronaut who if in any frame of mind, if it turns out that the problem with this door plug is also manifest in emergency exit doors, then yes, there are grounds for concern.
That door that fell off in the Alaskan Airlines flight the other day are plug-type doors. They're not actually doors with handles and passengers aren't able to open them.
I wasn’t implying that this blank plug was passenger operable… my implication is that now humanity knows that that the non-blank plug doors that do have handles can be opened in the critical descent and ascent phases (due to insufficient pressure differential) the caveat doesn’t mean much.
And it doesn’t… you can be killed by a poorly designed blanking plug (it’s just sheer luck no one died in the Alaska incident) or by a properly designed door operated at the right time of flight by someone with either delusional or malicious intent.
DJI is pretty great with telemetry, logs are stored locally and on the cloud with many ways to access your data. Not so great with privacy due to governments having a tight watch on drone flight, making it very likely your flight data is monitored.
This is completely legal in the US on both recreational and commercial licenses, so long as you have visual line of sight to the drone and the ability to regain direct command of the drone via RC (and are following all other flight rules). It is commonly used for video work, such as programmed aerial timelapses.
“I first came up with a prototypical free energy principle when I was eight years old, in what I have previously called a “Gerald Durrell” moment (Friston, 2012). I was in the garden, during a gloriously hot 1960s British summer, preoccupied with the antics of some woodlice (small armadillo like bugs—see Figure 1) who were frantically scurrying around trying to find some shade.
After half an hour of observation and innocent (childlike) contemplation, I realized their “scurrying” had no purpose or intent: they were simply moving faster in the sun—and slower in the shade. The simplicity of this explanation—for what one could artfully call biotic self-organization—appealed to me then and appeals to me now. It is exactly the same principle that underwrites the ensemble density dynamics of the free energy principle—and all its corollaries.”
I wonder if the simplicity of his proposed wood lice model applies to the jumping bean larvae as well?
I don't think so. He died in 1971 so it's still in copyright though I doubt anyone would care much. I don't know exactly which volume of punch the original article is taken from, and it's possible that that's up there somewhere.
Oh, and I just double checked and my copy was published in 1930; the second edition was 1932. So quite likely the original article was in one of the 1929/1930 run.
This is still a partial knowledge situation - you have the information that there are a certain proportion of colored balls in the chamber, but not the information about their order. The probability includes the information we do know and allows inferences about information we don’t know.
They didn't say that it has "nothing to do with the object it describes" though. It has to do with your knowledge, which itself has to do with the object your knowledge describes
Well, it's getting philosophical now. We do not have a way to experience the true nature of the coin. We can only experience an "image" [0] of the coin and we summarize all "images" of that object into knowledge.
[0] by image I do include your vision, but also hearing, feeling and other methods of perception.
I do not think there is anything very philosophical here, just the point that the claim in the post I was replying to was demonstrably false.
I am intrigued by the idea of the coin having a "true nature" that we have no way to experience; I would like to know what this elusive "true nature" is, but if we cannot experience it, I don't suppose you can tell me. Instead, I will settle for an explanation of how you know it has such a true nature.
I don't think it's demonstrably false: If you don't know that the coin is weighted, the probability is 50%. Probabilities are predictions and estimates, not fundamentally about the thing itself, but about what we know about the thing.
The principle of indifference? I know that it is a commonplace assumption, but feels to me as though one is assuming one has more information than is justified. Coming back to the article's "economist's wager", is it rational to bet with even odds on something you know nothing about? If the assumption is interpreted as a testable hypothesis about outcomes, why would complete ignorance imply any particular result? On the other hand, if it is interpreted strictly as a statement about one's knowledge, why present it exactly as if one had sufficient knowledge of the situation to know that the probability is 0.5? Maybe the author will have an answer in part 2.
> If you don't know that the coin is weighted, the probability is 50%.
No, if it's weighted it's not 50%. Your prior probability is 50%, but neither a Bayesian nor a frequentist would claim the true probability is known before testing.
There is no such thing as "true probability" in Bayesian interpretation, it only exists in frequentist world.
Notice that it is possible to build a robot which flips a coin in such a way that it's always heads - sure you might need to build a different robot if the coin is "biased"(you probably mean its weight distribution is uneven) but it's still possible.
But that’s the thing: the “true“ probability is unknowable, and may even be an ill-defined concept. It is a deterministic process, so “probability“ is just a simplifying concept to describe our best guess belief about how the coin behaves in the aggregate.
The true probability requires an infinite sequence of tests, so it's by definition unknowable. But it's what any sort of statistics attempts to approximate.
But, once the approximates are within undetectable differences from the "true probability" then you are done.
Because not only is the true probability unknownable, it is also unencodeable, but, if we are to accept a limitation on encoding, then we CAN give a true probability subject to that.
Like.... if we are to determine a coins probability to 1 decimal place, then we can do that.
Of course not. If you're a frequentist you can say your best estimate is 100% heads with an unknown variance, and if you're a Bayesian you work out p(a|b) = p(b)p(b|a)/p(a) and update your priors (which will not give 100% heads). The more coins you flip, the better you can estimate the true probability
Ok, so let's imagine you build a servo-driven flipping machine to carry out an infinite series of tests and notice, after a thousand of them, that 99% of the time, the coin flip matches the orientation of the coin when it's loaded into the machine.
What have you learn about the coin's true flip probability?
You've learned that the system of coin + machine has resulted in the same orientation 99% of the time. You can put some error bars on that, investigate the differences (did that 1% where it changed happen disproportionately with a certain side of the coin up?) and from that provide an estimate for whether the coin is fair. If the confidence intervals aren't small enough for you, you can do more experiments. The confidence interval will never be 0, until you've either done an infinite sequence of trials. (Only axiomatic logic can have confidence interval 0, and it doesn't make statements about the real world, only about the axiomatic system in use.)
So, let's say that we continued the servo tests 1e99 times, with the coin loaded in each orientation equally. We measured 50.00% flips for heads and tails, and continue to see the 0.99 correlation with the initial orientation. The 1% of the time that the correlation doesn't match, it doesn't seem to show any bias for one side or the other.
So after an "infinite" number of tests, we continue to get 50.00% frequency of heads, but with an 0.99 correlation with the orientation when loaded into the machine.
Now I load a coin into the machine and ask you to name the true probability that the result is heads. I don't tell you the initial orientation, but I know it privately.
What's the true probability of heads? Our testing found precisely 50.00% frequency of heads. But are you still sure the probability is an intrinsic property of the system, rather than a property of your state of knowledge of the system?
We can continue the pattern; maybe the 1% error itself correlates to 0.99 with someone running the microwave in the kitchen. This drops the line voltage and causes the servo to impart a little less momentum to the coin, causing it to flip one fewer times on average. Neither of us have currently checked that the microwave is running... And so on...
But what do the error bars themselves mean? Are they not probabilistic in nature themselves?
Say you conduct a thousands trials and calculate the error bar based on the results. If you conduct a hundred such experiments (each consisting of a thousand trials) and one of the experiments violates the error bar, does that invalidate it?
>What have you learn about the coin's true flip probability?
Nothing because you only tested the coin flip machine in aggregate. If you have a different throwing mechanism the results could be completely different.
Kyra might have to sadly walk even the caveat on this one back after yesterday’s incident on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 (another 737 MAX), which had an in-flight decompression emergency in which a body panel blew out due to some defect related to an unused doorframe obscured behind the paneling in that section. Thankfully it didn’t crash, but if the panel had hit some control surface on its way off of the plane, it might have been a much less happy story.