As you can see, _geothermal_ energy is an insignificant contributor

Then explain why the Antarctic ice 'hotspots' ...
https://theconversation.com/ex...
"https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-happening-to-antarcticas-ice-13684"

... seem to correlate to known areas of Antarctic subterranean volcanism
https://blogs.agu.org/geospace...
"https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2017/11/13/new-antarctic-heat-map-reveals-sub-ice-hotspots/"

There is little doubt that man-made pollution and mismanagement of resources can effect the climate.
But these climate issues in the Himalayas are almost certainly due to soot and aerosol/industrial pollution.
There is no direct proof that CO2 is causing it, except for the usual hand-waving and polemics.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
https://www.scidev.net/south-a...
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/201...
https://www.treehugger.com/nat...
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/ea...
https://www.thethirdpole.net/e...
https://link.springer.com/chap...
https://www.nature.com/news/po...

"If your statement took into account the effect of temperature on formation of the hole, then it would have been worth reading."

In fact, temperature does explain why the stratospheric polar vortexes occur only in the fall, winter and spring, because the Sun is lower in the sky and tends to heat the stratosphere but not the troposphere. This creates a vertical temperature gradient, which when coupled with the Coriolis effect, creates a thermal wind ("polar vortex") high in the stratosphere, at about 300 hPa altitude (9200 meters). This doesn't happen in the summer because the Sun heats the troposphere and stratosphere more equally. So the stratospheric polar vortex AND the ozone holes formation coincide in the fall, winter and spring months. They are not observed in the polar summer.

" Just like how letters in a bottle can be released in the Atlantic and end up in the Pacific "

Your analogy is not very good at explaining why CFC's don't cause holes or thinning in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the CFC's are consumed.

So what percentage of bottles released in the Atlantic end up in the Pacific? Is it more than 90%? More likely it will be less than 0.00001%. Most of the bottles tossed into the Atlantic, stay in the Atlantic.

So, most of the CFC's in the world are released in the Northern Hemisphere. But all (that's 100%() of the large and recurring holes occur only in the Antarctic. And only in the winter, when the Sun is not shining. (So not much UV is hitting the hole anyway).

As for thinning, more than 90% of it occurs in the Southern Hemisphere, relatively little thinning occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, even though that's where most of the bottles (of CFC's) are released.

This suggests that CFC's have little or nothing to do with ozone holes, which seem to be strongly associated exclusively with Antarctic stratospheric polar vortexes.

... oops, forgot to negate
So this almost pure CO2 atmosphere causes no warming of Mars.

"Either scenario needs plenty of CO2. And there’s just not enough. The polar caps are actually quite shallow deposits of carbon dioxide, and even exhausting all of Mars’ existing CO2 resources still creates just 15 millibars of the atmospheric pressure — on Earth, roughly 1,000 millibars is considered average pressure at sea level."

Not enough CO2 on Mars to warm it, eh? But that's a completely bogus comparison, suggesting Mars could only have as much as 15 millibars, while earth has 1000 millibars. But that's comparing apples (total CO2) to oranges (O2, N2, Argon et al)

Acttuallly, the partial pressure of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere (with 3 times greater gravitational force) is only 0.5 millibars. And we're told that's too much for Earth, because it is causing very dangerous warming.

If you compute the ratio of CO2 mass (not weight) per square meter of surface area of Mars compared to Earth, you'll discover that Mars has roughly 30 times more CO2, over each square meter of surface than Earth does. And if you release those additional resources mentioned in the article it shoots up to 60 times greater than Earth.

So, how much that huge amount of CO2 (compared to Earth) warmed the Martial surface. The current mean temperature at Mars' surface is 210K, which is the same as the expected black-body temperature. So this almost pure CO2 atmosphere causes warming of Mars.

Doesn't this suggest that it is water (in all of its physical forms) that warms and regulates the temperature of Earth's surface, and that the warming effects of CO2 are greatly exaggerated?

@me: "The extra C,H and O needed come directly from CO2. "

The H comes from H2O, I should have said.

Americans are so overfed that they tend to regard carbs as some kind of poison. In fact, for most of the world, it is the most important foodstuff, providing basic energy for life.

The article even acknowledges this fact, and even admits that CO2 doesn't lower the absolute amount of vitamins and other nutrients in rice, but (because it is a basic food for plants) actually causes a substantial increase in the rice carb content. The extra C,H and O needed come directly from CO2. Virtually all of the carbon in plants is derived from the CO2 they breathe in. More CO2 means more growth and carb content.

But, instead of celebrating the larger rice plants and increased rice crop yields caused by CO2, it condemns this "abundance" using typical scare words like 'devestating', 'catastrophic', 'severe deficiency' etc. This reveals the intellectual dishonesty of the "green-collar" criminals who are trying to scare the world into achieving it economic sabotage of the so-called "rich nations".

@Tashkinov
Khorosho skazano.
The problem is that our so-called 'modern' CPUs can only do exactly what they're programmed to do. Yes, they can perform incredibly complex calculations, such as pattern search and recognition, many orders of magnitude faster than humans. But that's not really the same kind of 'intelligence' that we can clearly see in the behavior of living creatures.

The behavior of CPUs is deterministic, i.e. tend to produce the same output, for a given set of inputs. Biological creatures, OTOH, tend to behave non-deterministically, that is their behaviors, given identical inputs, tend to produce varying sets of output behaviors, with ranges of variances that are difficult to predict.

Nature itself is only partially predictable. (We like to call the part we can't predict "noise".) So the behavior of electro-mechanical robots is very noisy because robots must process noisy sensor data using deterministic methods. Their programs merely react to input, so the humans who write their programs must somehow 'teach' them how to anticipate and react to all possible input scenarios. Which of course is computationally intractable, even for a planet-sized digital computer.

So, mathematically, robots are modeled as servomechanisms, which can operate automatically (more or less) by measuring responses received on their sensors and applying a kind of negative-feedback to reduce the variance of possible behaviors caused by 'recognizing noise' in a non-deterministic world.

We living creatures are much better at this kind of 'automatic behavior' because we are intrinsically non-deterministic machines, whose behaviors don't always 'make sense', but get us, sometimes, to some desired goals, more effectively and efficiently than simple 'random' behavior.

I believe there is a 'Life Principle', which is not yet fully understood, that makes this possible, by imbuing living creatures with mechanisms for consciousness (self-awareness) and motivation (desires and fears). So living creatures tend to have real-time 'situational awareness', which allows them, in effect, to connect to reality and understand and react to the world in terms of their own fears and desires. More or less.

Humans seem to have a lot of this kind of intelligence. Bumblebees not as much. But even the humblest earthworm seems to perceive a buzz of reality which helps them find the dark moist places they love (and avoid the dry, prickly places they fear). Digital computers perform more poorly in these simple reality tasks. (But can compute Pi to a million places easily!)

Will humans be able to build robots with this same kind of Life Principle? I think so, but first we have to study biological life more and actually figure out how it works, up to understanding how consciousness, fear, love and hate operate at a microscopic level.

Currently we can't even draw the simplest circuit diagram for 'consciousness', or build any simple device that 'understands' reality like we (think) we do.

... namely that these nanorods are incredibly small (5 nanometers), such that they can be 'liquefied' and used as "semiconductor paint". So it's primarily a breakthrough in 'scaling down', not multitasking. Conventional LED's have always had the capability to detect light. (Ever hear of 'photo-diodes'?). But exploiting this dual-functionality has always been inefficient, due to the relatively large size of individual LED's (on the order of millimeters).

As stated in TFA:
"Shim concedes that is possible to use a LED light bulb as a light-emitting device or as a light-detecting device. Even more, for thin film inorganic semiconductors this is relatively easy thing to do, and, in fact, sort of similar to what the researchers have done here at the individual nanorod level. But because the researchers have made the LED pixel from this colloidal nanorod, it can be processed in solution and in turn be used to make large arrays of LEDs."

> A number of the current hardware random number generators use either resistor noise or balanced diodes.

Yes, by sampling avalanche noise etc. But these devices have to be carefully timed and balanced to eliminate sampling biases. I doubt that such finicky devices would be used in remotely deployed systems. Indeed, the pseudo-random generators tend to be far more useful, in a systems engineering sense, because test sequences can be easily generated by repeating a seed number, for regression testing etc.

In any case, I don't think human free-will (if it indeed exists) is the same as perfect randomness, because I think we'll all agree that human behavior is somewhat predictable on a broad scale. But at the smallest scale, human actions can seem to be very "surprising", yet simultaneously "intelligent". Is that free will? I don't really know.

But so far, no functioning robot, AFAIK, has made any decision that it was not programmed to make, even if it was just flipping random switches.

This is journalistic BS, disguised as 'science'. Like all computers, these robotic vehicles do only what they are programmed to do. Even so-called "random number generators" are deterministic, given the seed which generates them.

We won't be able to impart true "free will" to machines, in the human sense, until we eventually verify that we humans actually do have free will and understand how it works in us. Including understanding self-awareness ("consciousness") and how human reasoning and volition works. (Seems to be and "analog" process, not "digital").

There are two Boolean flag vars in the Registry which turn off the automatic update and free-offer notifications. Using the builtin registry editor ("regedit") drill down to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows] and look for key entries 'WindowsUpdate' and 'GWX'. If they're not present then use the editor to create new key names WindowsUpdate and GWX in the Windows key list.

Then to disable auto-update add a dword named DisableOSUpgrade under WindowsUpdate and set it to 1 (true)
"DisableOSUpgrade"=dword:00000001

To disable the freeWin10 upgrade offer notification add a dword named DisableGWX under GWX and set it to 1 (true)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\GWX]
"DisableGWX"=dword:00000001

That's it. Now you can turn the automatic Windows-update back and not worry about Win10 being installed. Also you won't be nagged about the free Win10 offer.

There is a saying, attributed to Mark Twain in 1919: "A lie will travel halfway around the world, while Truth is putting on her shoes."

The attribution is somewhat doubtful, since Twain died in 1910. But still a quotable quote.

The image posted in the article seems to be the output of some kind of scanning microscope (note the vertical scan lines). Perhaps a 3-channel confocal "optical" microscope, which scans the image separately with red, green and blue laser beams, then combines them into a final image (like a "color" TV image). So it's really a false-color rendering of 3 mono-chrome images (but "true" color in the sense that each beam captures the actual color response of the inks in the printed image (like a TV etc).

The article doesn't mention the resolution of the actual image but, eyeball counting the scanlines, it looks like somewhere around 160x80 or maybe 200x100. With 25,000 dots per inch, that's about 984 nanometers per dot, slightly larger than the wavelengths of visible light (380-870 nm).

The limit of optical resolution is about a half-wavelength, so there seems to be enough headroom left for improving this result.