It's interesting that there are essentially no pictures of the actual device anywhere on this page (except for a lone image, from the back of a user's head, where all you can see is the strap and the edge of the front).
Aha, I see now that they're trying hard to hide the battery pack wire. Almost all the shorts are showing the right side of the device to hide the custom battery jack.
Another ISSDC alum here, but from a little more than a decade earlier. It really was a unique experience. I remember the finals at Kennedy Space Center fully exercised the extent of your mental and physical stamina both. It also delivered lots of surprisingly applicable lessons for startup life around coordinating technical teams in high-stress, high-stakes environments.
Nobody debates this. The point is that 0.1c propulsion is not necessarily 100+ years away. And its 40-year transit time is not "barely feasible," it's comparable to present deep-space mission timelines [1].
I used to work on solar power plants and solar tracking technology back in the late 2000s. Even back then, I remember frequently discussing that "eventually panels will be cheap enough that we'll just wallpaper the world...". It's really nice to see that coming true.
Lordy, I clicked on this, fully expecting a discussion of a shape-pattern in the board game of Go, and somehow didn't have a thought in my mind for the real, completely different, meaning.
This reminds me of "trompe l'oeil foods"... dishes that appear to be one thing, but are another entirely. Or maybe optical illusions more generally.
I wanted to actually build first-hand intuition on all of the choices around hyperparameter choices, activation functions, network architectures, etc. So I've been rigorously exploring them by training and testing models off of the mnist dataset.
Coming up soon: vision transformers, depth-of-architecture on CNNs, batch size investigations, and more.
Let me know if any of you have any suggestions of things to investigate next!
I'm all for innovative ideas in supporting families and children, but the examples from the article hardly count as "successfully reversing fertility declines".
- Nagi, Japan. TFR: 2.95 (replacement rate is ~2.1). Astonishing. This is the only true success in the article.
- Nagareyama, Japan. TFR: 1.5. At this rate, the population will drop by ~25% every generation.
- South Tyrol, Italy. TFR: 1.64. Marginally better than Nagareyama. Noticeably better than the rest of Italy (TFR: 1.2), but still a population in strong decline.
- Czechia. TFR: 1.6 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...). Better than the European median, but not exceptional. Roughly on a par with Lithuania (1.63), Belgium (1.59), and the UK (1.57). Noticeably behind France (1.79). None of these countries at such TFRs are even capable of maintaining their population at a stable level, and should all be regarded as undergoing some level of population collapse.
"successfully reversed declining fertility rates by consistently improving and working on family policy" not "successfully reversing fertility declines"
It's kinda sus that you leave the whole "rates" part out
- Japan (1.2) and Tokyo (.99) vs Nagareyama (1.5 considering it's in Chiba and Tokyo) & Nagi (2.95)
- Considering the Italian Birth Rate is in freefall whole South Tyrol is holding steady and above not just Italy's but also the UK.
- Czecha had a 1.8 until a drop to 1.6 during 2021 to 2022 according towards your dataset with Belgium, Lit. and the UK are now below
Considinder Czecha had a 1.1 in 2000, its only just makes it more impressive
It's influenced by the population wave caused by a communist president in early 1970s. The results are subpar if you normalize for that. There are a lot more adults in the age to have children right now than before, but it's going to drop hard very soon.
One thing that perplexes me about this topic is that people don't just pull up a historical birth rate chart, find the bit not that long ago when fertility rates were around 4, and then ask "why was it 4 then?".
Followed by asking "how can we restore those things?".
I really doubt it was because any of the popular reasons trotted out whenever this topic comes up, which usually blame money, despite us having much more money now than in days past when birthrates were way higher.
I wonder why it's so hard for people just to say simple things like "it's because everyone carefully uses contraception now, and treats sex as a consumption good, because they want it but not its result - a scenario most of them treat as on par with catching malaria".
That sounds crazy, and amazing. As I've now got a kid of my own who might eventually be interested, could you point out _which_ intensive wilderness school in Washington that is? I did some googling, but wasn't able to find it.
https://wildernessawareness.org/ - I went there over 15 years ago now and did what is now called The Immersion adult program. The capture the flag type event was around 4 days long, there was another capstone experience that was around 4 days on a survival trip. I think they probably still do these activities but I'm not certain. I thought it was a great program for me. They also have programs for kids and teens including summer camps. I've heard great things about the teen wolf tracking expedition and I imagine their other programs are great too.
There are a few other wilderness schools in the area, some of which may have similar activities, so I am not sure if that is the same one the GP was referring to.
