I was a little nervous, especially given the paperwork, which read, "This experimental vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, emotional trauma, or death."

So I can see where it looks grim.

I wouldn't consider you one, no. But my understanding is that roughly 20% of Americans believe there are microchips inside of covid vaccines. Into the Anti-Vaxxer box they go! I've also stuffed people into that box after they've told me it's better to die than get a vaccine, that God does not want us to get vaccines, or that vaccines cause autism.

I'm not against people thinking for themselves. I'm not against people being able to decide what to put into their bodies. I'm against ignorance masquerading as independent thought. I'm against encouraging people not to treat their diseases with modern medicine, especially when the reasons given are obviously false.

That's the real anti-vaxxer label. It says "Don't listen to me, there's not even a small chance that my ideas are right. They will needlessly hurt you." If someone has put that label on you then I'm sorry. It's a common thing that people do, thinking that everyone who disagrees with them must be idiots. But sometimes they ARE idiots, and dangerous ones at that, and it's important to be able to distinguish between the two.

Chromebooks don't work for FAT apps

So use NTFS.

*runs away*

"Whiffy." As in, "This ham has been laying in the sun all day, and is starting to get a bit whiffy."

It means that AI can't write or fix all possible programs. It is of course possible to write an AI to fix a certain kind of bug, or generate some limited subset of programs. Say you could have an AI that spits out the source code for calculators for any specified base, like hexadecimal, oct, or base 42 if you like. And if you put more work into your AI, you can have it generate more complex things. The incompleteness theorem states that no matter how complex you make your AI, there will always be some programs it can't write or debug. It does not mean that the AI is not able to write any programs at all.

That Florida and some other Gulf states will become cesspools experiencing disaster after disaster?

What's this "will become" business?

It just means that it's harder to make than a small, simple vehicle.

Gee whiz, what a policy! But I figure that if I only reply to your posts I'll be OK.

I was a TA in computer science many years ago, and worked in the lab with students trying to program 1st and 2nd year assignments. There is a mental discipline that needs to be developed, where you can systematically break down an abstract problem into pieces, and visualize how those pieces logically work together. Not all students had it, but some were able to learn it by the end of the course, and some were not. It was simple: the students who could learn tended to be the ones who enjoyed solving problems on computers. I had a few students who admitted to hating programming and did still did quite well, but on the whole actually having an interest in programming, and seeing it as a valuable skill, was a tremendous asset. I found that while a certain level of intelligence is required, enthusiasm is almost as important.

When I hear stuff like this: "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma" I immediately become suspicious, because the energy required to sustain the fusion is typically only a fraction of the power needed to run the entire plant. For example, JET had a QPlasma of 0.67, which means they produced 67% of the energy needed to sustain fusion. Sounds like they got pretty close to break-even!

From the JET wikipedia page: JET set the record for the closest approach to scientific breakeven, reaching Q = 0.67 in 1997, producing 16 MW of fusion power while injecting 24 MW of thermal power to heat the fuel.

But at the bottom of the page: JET's power requirements during the plasma pulse are around 500 MW with peak in excess of 1000 MW.

That's because they're proudly stating their QPlasma while omitting the QTotal, which appears to be the norm in the industry. And even these numbers don't consider any losses from converting the heat from the plasma into electricity.

This video explains it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The reason ITER won't generate any electricity despite having a QPlasma of 10 is because the QTotal will be about 0.57. It's a tremendous achievement, and one that gets us close to break-even, but not enough to generate any power. And yet QPlasma is the only number ever reported.

I'm a fan of fusion energy and I hope we eventually achieve it, but anyone who only reports QPlasma and omits QTotal is trying to deceive you.

Fair enough.

So... Dr. Trang has the ability to ban or limit the production of PFAs, but is refusing to use it because she's in bed with big PFA. Instead, she's come up with a method to destroy PFAs, which isn't nearly as good, as a form of greenwashing, so that she can continue to profit from polluting the world. All while pretending she's just doing what she can to help?

Dastardly!

From TFS: Ghosting is disengaging from a relationship (short-term or long-term) by ignoring all calls, IMs, text messages, emails, etc. from a paramour until the problem ultimately solves itself.

I too was a skeptic, but a friend of mine says he saw someone get ghosted with his own eyes. It was late at night, in an abandoned Starbucks. The moonlight white as bone, his friend's face illuminated by the haunting glow of the cellphone. Text after text to his girlfriend, with no response. "Maybe she went to bed" he said nervously, glancing at his watch. "Yes, that must be it", and he breathed steamy air on his cold hands in a pitiful attempt to warm them. But them a notification popped up from Steam. A friend of yours... is playing Don't Starve. And the name? His GIRLFRIEND's.

OoooOOOOOooooooO.

To be honest, I've re-read the article a few times and I don't see anything interesting in it. When two particles are entangled, you can measure the state of one particle and convert the results to a series of -1s and 1s. You know that when the other particle is measured, you'll get the exact opposite series - every 1 will be a -1, and vice-versa.

In their game, Alice and Bob are supposed to create a little grid of 1s and -1s. Then the referee asks for the value at a specific position in the grid, and if they're the same they win. But Alice and Bob don't create complete grids and submit them to the referee. Instead, the referee asks them for the value at a grid position and they both generate it. So they measure their entangled particles and one of them inverts their value, which guarantees there will be a match.

But that's just the basic behaviour of entangled particles. By inverting one particle's results, they can act as two pseudo-random number generators initialized with the same seed. If Alice and Bob had to generate a complete grid and submit that instead, and they had some way to always win without knowing which position the referee would examine beforehand, then that would be something very interesting.

Am I missing something?

That's cold comfort for those that live in hot places

Perfecto.