[ExI] Riddle?

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-04-28 18:25, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>> It seems that the information was sufficient for some.
> 
> The missing information was that song.  I had never heard of it
> before, nor was the riddle phrased in such a way as to suggest
> investigation of such a possibility.  Be careful with cultural
> assumptions like that when judging how easy or possible a riddle is.

The question was originally written for AI with the assumption that 
nearly all available text on the Internet was part of the AI's training 
set. For people, that assumption is unwarranted. But asking people 
nonetheless served as a useful control.

> 
> For instance, if I were to go on about a girl who demonstrated her
> love by learning as she once taught, I would not expect most members
> of this list to guess that I mean...
> 
> (break inserted so you can try to guess)
> 
> ...Pearl from the Splatoon franchise, who met a foreigner, taught said
> foreigner the local language, fell in love with said foreigner, and
> eventually learned her love interest's native tongue.
> 
> Perhaps a little easier to guess - Spike in particular might guess
> this one - would be that I'll soon be facing some critics of my
> criticality...
> 
> (another break inserted, for the same reason)
> 
> ...when, next week at NETS 2025 (this might be discovered with a Web
> search, but the speaker lineup is probably too recent for most
> publicly available AIs to be aware of), I present the results of a
> study I've been leading on nuclear thermal propulsion, including
> specific details of the engine - basically a flying nuclear reactor -
> "achieving criticality" in nuclear engineering parlance ("turning on
> and warming up" is a not too inaccurate translation), to an audience
> which I have good reason to believe will include skeptics (for good
> reason: the application I'm investigating hasn't been seriously
> attempted in a long while).

I think that nuclear thermal rocketry will be an important stepping 
stone technology on the way to full on fusion engines so good luck with 
your endeavors. Keep the list apprised of your progress please.

Stuart LaForge

> Quite a few in "my circle" would get both of those quickly.  There are
> probably literally millions in the world who would get that first
> riddle, and the second might be guessed by anyone going to that
> conference or anyone who knows the basics of nuclear engineering and
> guesses (or reads online) that I've been working on a project in that
> field.  The overlap is not so large.