But that's where most border crossings happen from the UK. It's not the edge case. It's most of the cases. For all other border crossings, you would have to book a ferry.

There is no passport control at the border of Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. (And between most E.U. countries).

There is also the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California.

It has been opened and closed several times as the Feds and state of California tussle over it.

California greenies want it closed. The Feds want it to operate, even at a loss, for supply chain security.

It is currently operating with DoD subsidies, but production needs to be ramped up.

It always boils down to the question: Does it matter?

Does it matter if you have 9 or 10 dollars, if all you want is to buy an ice cone for $3.50?

Does it matter if there are 9 or 10 parking lots if you know 5 of them are occupied, and you want to park your car?

Sometimes, 9 or 10 is a question of life and death. Are there 9 or 10 people in the burning building, and have we account for all of them rescued from the fire? Sometimes it is totally irrelevant.

Same with Dark Matter. If we want to account for effects on cosmic scales, it is really important. For gravitational effects in our Solar system, not so much.

We could also call it "apparent gravitational effects, which don't fit our models right now, but would fit perfectly well if we assume about five times more mass than we can actually account for."

No, it's Nibbler poop, as we all know.

People have a very important source of knowledge which is totally missing from AI: experience.

A person knows what "hot" means, because it has touched a hot surface during its lifetime at least once and felt the pain. A person knows how a speed bump affects the car ride, and how lemon tastes. A person knows which shape fits into which hole, because as a child, it has played the game.

Persons learn all the time by formulating hypotheses about the world and then experience how it works out.

AI totally misses this feedback. Or as my father uses to say: AI talks about color like a blind person.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

DuckDuckGo's LLM generates this, for example

... (emphases added) and if you click "more" it may change to say that RHD vehicles drive of the *left* side of the road (LHT, which is true).

The Spain outage would have happened with Nuclear exactly the same way. It was not a problem of not enough power. It was a problem of too much power, which was not absorbed by the consumers, and caused a build-up of over-voltage, which could not be dumped anywhere. When the grid automatically switched off power sources to damp the swing, it over-corrected, leading to a power loss of more than 2 GW, which then caused the shut-down of large electricity consumers. With a fat nuclear reactor, you would not have changed anything. Still, the grid regulation would have overreacted, with the same consequences.

Where I live, a railroad crossing limits the top speed of the rail to 80 mph - definitely not high speed rail.

High speed rail is always grade separated. (How many non-grade separated roads you know which allow for a high speed above 80 mph anyway?)

Contrary to common belief, Britain has not very much rain. It just happens to rain often, but very small amounts. Rome for instance gets more rain per year than London, it just gets it in some very intense rainstorms, and is dry for other periods during the year.

Usually, you do. Our digestive tract has evolved to extract the energy from our food as good as possible, given the parameters. It's not easy to fool it into ignoring available energy, and the methods to do it aren't very healthy.

Actually, no. Transporting 13 kT of explosives to Hiroshima by plane and dropping it there alone would have amounted to a lot of energy consumption compared to transporting a single 4 metric ton device. You would need 3000 planes instead of one. Imagine the energy required to build 3000 planes and fly them all at the same time to Hiroshima! And 13,000 metric tonnes of TNT aren't cheap either. The US did not even had to mine the uranium for the bomb. They got it from Germany in April 1945, when they raided a nuclear research facility in Central Germany.

Additionally, the nuclear energy content of U-235 has not to be put into the uranium. It sits there since the Uranium was created during that supernova, which created the space dust that formed our Solar system 4.6 billion years ago. For Antihydrogen, you have to actually provide any energy that is then confined in the antimatter. It is more or less an antimatter based battery which you have to charge first.

The energy you need to create a single antimatter bomb will be some magnitudes larger than the energy needed to bomb you into oblivion. No one said creating Antihydrogen was in any way efficient.