Agreed. It seems like life requires positive feedback. The first life probably didn't require a very biased handedness of the surrounding chemicals - it caused an imbalance by having a chiral mechanism that made more of its own chirality.

I've also heard some folks say that the weak force in physics, being the only one that doesn't exhibit P symmetry, must have been involved. Give me a break - a handedness-breaking mechanism is neither necessary nor sufficient to jump start life.

If a live human customer service agent in a chat is mostly just rubber-stamping the advice their AI assistant gives them, does that qualify as a human interaction? There's no crisp line between content assisted by AI and generated by AI. Without such a crisp line it's hard to make an effective law.

Either they store energy locally, or they link up to make one huge global net that includes not only some part of the planet that's sunny or windy, but also some hydro dams that can be tapped or not depending on market conditions.

Another angle: storing and transmitting money is way easier than storing and transmitting energy. A network of grids that includes some demands that can be time-shifted (some industry, some kinds of warehouse-level refrigeration, some pumping workloads, etc.) would also help. Bigger is better, and it would be awesome to do for energy what the internet did for data.

Tritium's half-life is 12.33 years. If the leak is dilute enough to be within federal limits today, then a century from now (8 half-lives) it will be a factor of 256 weaker.

I've done zero independent research into the hydrology of this site. Often, groundwater moves slowly. It's at least plausible to me that the combination of dilution and time could make this event free of any serious health consequences. However, if a leak like this was unintended then perhaps there are not enough safeguards in place. Were we just lucky that a more persistent or toxic substance wasn't involved this time?

I respect your point of view and overall I agree with your argument. However I want to pick a nit just in case someone sees this and it lets them avoid parenting pain down the line.

I wanted to point out though that there is a widespread misconception that breastfeeding has been shown to cause better outcomes (health and intelligence) in children. It's true that breastfeeding is strongly correlated with better outcomes and higher achievement later in life. However, breastfeeding is also correlated with wealth and privilege. When you control for these other factors, the signal vanishes.

My wife had some difficulty breastfeeding, which prompted me to do some research in the medical journals to see how important it really is. From what I can tell, it seems like breastfeeding and good outcomes for children are jointly caused by high socioeconomic status. If there's a direct causal link between choosing breastmilk over modern formula, it's very weak. The immunoglobulins in breastmilk are not a significant factor in your baby's overall thriving. Modern formula has all the nutrition a baby needs.

Breastfeeding has some psychological benefits, but it also causes more inequality between the sexes. Overall, my stance is that breastmilk and modern formula are both excellent options for your baby. There's enough evidence to say that if one is better for the baby than the other, it's only by the thinnest of margins. While I applaud breastfeeding support groups, I take a stance against the peer pressure and shaming that often accompany them; some women make it seem like a duty to breastfeed, and like it's child abuse not to. To them, I say "be nice!" I've seen some pretty wacky pressure that's ended in multiple nights of unnecessary tears. Being a parent is hard enough. Coercing a mother to breastfeed is not helpful to anyone.

This opinion is unpopular, but I hope it will encourage more civility. If you agree, know that you're not alone. Here's an article that supports the formula-positive POV: https://www.health.harvard.edu...

If it's implemented correctly, a carbon offset program can help green investments go wherever they do the most marginal good. If there's a sunny, windy place without much capital but with a lot of potential manual labor that could build solar and wind infrastructure, building there would potentially do more good than putting a solar panel on another roof in Germany.

I hear a lot of criticism about carbon offsets. Maybe they have not been administered fairly overall in the past. Just because there's room for improvement in how they're implemented doesn't mean the idea is rotten. In fact, if they were administered properly and they properly accounted for the good they actually do, they might represent the fastest way to do the most good.

If I have a critique of this program it's that they're excluding fossil fuel companies, kind of arbitrarily. Who exactly counts as a fossil fuel company, do hybrids like BP? Does the seller of fossil fuel sin more than the buyer and burner? Do companies providing petroleum for plastics production count? This exception sounds like a tough-to-administer feel-good mess aimed to please the less thoughtful environmentalists.

It's clear that carbon offsets can be bungled. I'm not pessimistic enough to think that bungling is inevitable, and I for one would like to give it another chance. They know the pressure's on to make an accountable program; let's see what they build and promise to adjudicate it fairly.

It may be in some places. Among the teens and 20-somethings I know, climate change is seen as the #1 cause for activism.

Your post is at odds with the stories my personal contacts have told me. Covid is more than a bad flu, and the mRNA vaccines seem to help a lot.

I'm not confident I'm going to persuade you that this time, the governments and big pharma were mostly right. However I don't believe it's possible for any organization to pull off the kind of global-scale conspiracy it would take to fake so much evidence that corroborates with the official story. Too many people with divergent interests would have to have been in bed with each other instantaneously - it just doesn't pencil out.

Your caution and willingness to question the official party line are both appreciated, but in this case they're probably not going to carry the day.

Speak for yourself! I'm a straight man but I don't want to fondle the breasts of just anyone, even if I could do so without negative consequence. I also hate golf (except mini golf) and I drive like a grandpa. I like fruity cocktails and cry at the movie Totoro. I refuse to take any action that's driven by anger.

There's a culture of encouraging men to act as if they're testosterone poisoned. I like to undermine it when I can.

Women tend to be much better than men at accepting diversity of gender expression. I'd like to encourage men to feel like it's OK not to act like a stereotypical bro, especially if you don't actually feel like a bro. Man to man, if you also don't feel like performing maleness that isn't really in your heart, that's OK by me. It doesn't make you gay or any less of a valid person.

How long is New Orleans still going to exist if there are a few additional degrees of global warming? Our beef consumption may summon Katrinaâ(TM)s big sister.

Thanks for the awesome comment! Have you read Greg Eganâ(TM)s Permutation City?

It could design superior genes that could help boost crop yields. It could also retroactively break nearly all the public-key encryption humanity has used to date. It (probably) cannot break all possible encryption schemes, and it (probably) cannot solve many of the computer science problems known to be the most difficult.

It probably won't accomplish anything practical this decade, but it might next decade or later this century.

One silver lining to all this worry is that maybe, *finally*, folks are going to take many-worlds quantum mechanics more seriously. A 1024-qbit quantum computer keeps track of 2^1024 complex-valued amplitudes, and these "worlds" have a physical effect on the outcome of the computation so it's hard to deny they are real. It's also hard to imagine some kind of non-quantum way that a tabletop's worth of matter could encode more than a googol cubed degrees of freedom.

If I'm wrong then please tell me. However if the first thing quantum computers turn out to be good at is disproving all those "disappearing-worlds" flavors of quantum mechanics such as ones where human observers are uniquely good at making systems disobey the Schrodinger equation through their observations, then so much the better!

You might not be 100% right there. Eukaryotes probably arose through endosymbiosis, where one archeon tried to eat a eubacterium but got indigestion and developed superpowers. It's thought to be the one, singular, craziest event in the history of the development of complex life on the whole planet, and it was the precursor to every complex life form now alive.

I'm not saying that evolution wasn't involved at all. I am saying that eukaryotes probably didn't evolve gradually from prokaryotes; rather, two different prokaryotes hybridized in a once-in-a-blue-moon freak event, and each component subsequently underwent evolution to make the most of their crazy circumstances.

If that sounds unbelievable/interesting, check out the book "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane. It rocked my understanding and appreciation of eukaryotes.

If prokaryotic life were super unlikely to arise, then you would expect (given that it did arise at all) it would have happened at a random time picked from a uniform probability distribution between now and when the Earth started. What we see is prokaryotic life emerging by when temperate Earth was about 1% as old as it is now. it would be a big coincidence that prokaryotic life arose pretty much right after Earth was cool enough to have water.

Coincidences do happen occasionally, and the fact that prokaryotic life started so early might have been a lucky fluke. It's also possible that a series of lucky flukes was needed to develop complexity as fast as we did.

On the whole, it may be a bit more probable given the timing of big life changes that a planet like a young Earth would give rise to prokaryotic life with a high probability every 10 million years or so, and that would explain why life started so early on Earth.

We have an N of 1 (so far) for when both simple (prokaryotic) and complex (eukaryotic) life emerged, so we can't draw statistically certain conclusions. Even if (null hypothesis) prokaryotic and eukaryotic life were equally rare, then 1 in 100 planets like Earth might have as lopsided a distribution of timing as we see in our fossil record. Still, the statistically weak evidence we have is more statistically compatible with the picture that prokaryotic life was pretty much bound to happen early on and that eukaryotic life was a fluke, possibly a massively unlikely one.

Exploring more worlds where life did arise should give us better statistics; until then I remain open to your viewpoint but I give it a lower probability of being correct.