Average age of death is not a good metric for severity of a pandemic, and there is good reason it is not used by epidemiologists. Here's an example to see why. Imagine we have two diseases A and B. Disease A kills 30,000 people all of age 50. Disease B kills 30,000 people of age 50, another 20,000 of age 25, and another million of age 80. Notice that the average age of death of Disease B is higher than that of Disease A. But B is pretty clearly a much more serious problem.

One of the lessons about the last 60 years of space has been that the longer term you set an ambitious goal, the less likely it is to happen as priorities change, and people aren't that motivated. The US managed to land people on the moon in 1969 largely due to a combination of four things: access to incredible talent and resources post World War II, Kennedy setting a before-the-decade-goal, a competition with the USSR, and Kennedy then getting martyred which made changing any of his major goals really difficult. 17 years is a lot longer than Kennedy 9.5 years, and I doubt that Modi is particularly interested in becoming a martyr symbol so his country sticks to the same space goals.

Giving people a rough idea of size, 100 meters being about a football field is a reasonable approximation to give people a rough size they can wrap their heads around.

The pandemic is very much not over. About 500 people are dying in the US weekly due to covid. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html. That's not as high as it was, but not nearly over. More concerningly, hospitalization numbers are up, and wastewater numbers are very high right now https://biobot.io/data/). Unfortunately, getting more granular detail now is tough because the CDC decided to stop doing regular updates to their public facing date set, in part it seems to give the public the exact feel you are repeating, that this is over, and they can go and relax about everything.

All of that said, permanent virtual schooling is not a good idea. I'm a school teacher, and it really did not go well. The most motivated students handled virtual schooling well, and the others mostly did not. Keeping students engaged and working with each other virtually is tough, and getting them to interact in contexts where they have to actually work with each other is really hard. And having hybrid setups, with some students in person and others virtual was incredibly draining on teachers, and made a lot of lesson plans and other things much harder to implement. That said, having this an option which a small fraction of students use (which is what New York seems to be trying to do), may if implemented well still end up working ok. Since this appears to be opt-in, rather than a default, one is going to be seeing it for students who have other issues and who are themselves often coming with more driven family members who are engaged with their kids education. This might not be awful.

And closely connected cultural biases. For example, Jews are as a cultural group fond of medicine and do a lot of science. There's been a massive amount of work especially on Ashkenazic Jewish genetics, to the point where there are now standard Askhenazi specific genetic tests many do before they get married to make sure that both members of a couple don't share the same deleterious recessive alleles. Between this and the sort of relative bias you bring up, this might explain a large fraction, if not a majority of the matter in question.

1 and 2 are very different than 3,4,5 because they require us to be fundamentally wrong about basic physics. It is likely that no room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors can exist, but they don't require us revamping anything to the extent that FTL and antigrav would. This is an important distinction for evaluating how plausible a given claim is.

He didn't write much in the way of textbooks. Every single one of his books is a popularization, not a textbook. And his books, especially the most recent ones, often have serious issues. His most recent book on quantum computing was deeply flawed, and got basic points wrong as detailed in Scott Aaronson's review here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=... .

It is painfully clear from his latest attempt at a book that Michio Kaku does not understand anything about quantum computers, has made zero effort to understand them, and in general has said a lot to sell and get attention. This book review by Scott Aaronson is pretty damning: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321.. So it should not be too surprising that Kaku is saying things like this. There is no good reason to think that any of the things we want AI to be good at are things which quantum computers substantially improve. And since general evidence is that human intelligence does not take advantage of quantum computing, there's no strong reason to think that any of this is either necessary nor sufficient for anything with AI.

This isn't an application that does that though. This is an application which does so *after* being told to try to come up with something to use those ingredients with. One has to already have identified that one wants to use ammonia or whatnot as a food ingredient before it says anything at all.

Does your car need to have a warning sign not to put saltwater in the gas tank, or your stove to have a warning that says "Do not leave the gas on an extended period and then light a match?" Does someone saying that we don't need to be worried about those make someone a shill for Big Car and Big Oven?

Testing system limits is not a bad thing. Using a system which can take any output and acting like it is *newsworthy* when the system does something like this is the problem. I filed a bug report not too long ago because a certain program was crashing whenever it tried to open a file with a certain character string. That isn't newsworthy.

The system did this when people were giving it non-food items and asking it what to do with them. So what? All that means is that the AI tried to do something with them. If anyone is seriously asking what foods they can make by putting cleaning fluids into their food, and they are going to take the results seriously, I doubt they were long for this world anyways. More broadly, this is part of a pretty annoying thing where every time there is a new AI system, some people try to deliberately see what most outrageous things they can get it to say, and then try to turn that into news, when it really isn't. Congratulations, you got a large-language model to output something ridiculous. Yay you.

And it is not even like the company is trying to do anything more. They had a separate plan to do satellite launches off an airplane. That got spun off as a separate company, Virgin Orbit. They even got to space a few times. But then they had some issues and apparently Branson only cares about his fancy tourism business, so they VO went bankrupt. So there really was a chance to have something actually productive here and they didn't really bother with it.

Hmm? Nutrition density of nonmeat diets can be as high as with meat diets. And no, a typical cow is not just wandering around eating grass, but is getting a large amount of grain https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/grass-fed-vs-grain-fed-beef. In fact, in terms of per a calorie, the amount of tilling and land use a cow uses is far higher than a human eating the same amount of grain based products. We have actual data on what this sort of thing looks like. See e.g. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/environment/the-carbon-footprint-of-food-diets/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/climate/diet-vegan-meat-emissions.html. And sheer amount of landuse, aside from climate change is much larger for the cow. A plant based diet uses about a quarter as much land as a meat based diet. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets. But the point here is not even to reduce to a zero meat diet, which understandably many people find unpleasant. Meat is really tasty. But reducing meat consumption is still something one can do. And of course, of the many things listed, diet was only one of them. If you don't want to do that, I understand. So by all means pick some other things listed and try them instead. Every little bit helps!

We cannot definitely identify a specific month being hot due to climate change, but it looks likely, and the general trend of many temperature records being broken around the globe should be concerning. At this point, pretty much no matter what happens we're going to have some pretty serious climate related issues. However, every little bit of CO2 we avoid putting out lessons the size of those problems while also giving us more time to make adjustments and take steps to either mitigate damage or to do more research into geoengineering if that proves necessary. So what can you do to help?

There are three major categories you can help out with, personal, political and charitable.

In terms of personal activity, you can take steps to reduce one's own carbon footprint. Eating less meat is an example, but there are many other things also. Installing solar panels on a home, reducing how much air conditioning was uses in the summer or reducing the heating in the winter help. Adding insulation to houses helps with that also. One can also drive less or even better not have a car, and try to use public transit and the like. Of course, many people do not have that as an option simply because where they live or other life obligations. So if one does need a car, then when one gets a new one, trying to get an electric car can help a lot. Only a small fraction of grid power needs to be from non-fossil fuel options for EVs to produce much less CO2 than conventional cars, and right now in the US, that applies almost everywhere with Wyoming and West Virginia being the only obvious major exceptions. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/28/climate/how-electricity-generation-changed-in-your-state-election.html. If one is installing new heating or upgrading, consider strongly getting a heat pump system. They are not that expensive now in many places, and the modern ones work well even in pretty cold climates. All of these things do not just reduce CO2 but they save you money.

Political activity means supporting parties and candidates who will help push for policies which will help deal with climate change, both by reducing CO2 and by taking steps to mitigate climate impact. Who this means varies a lot from country to country, but right now in the US, this generally means supporting Democrats and their candidates. The Democrats are not great on many aspects of climate change, and there is a subset of the party especially on the extreme left end which is unfortunately against nuclear power, but by and large the party is has many politicians taking major steps. The recent Inflation Reduction Act https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bidens-green-energy-law-is-turning-out-to-be-huge-201035230.html is succeeding both in helping the economy while adding a lot of green power. There used to be Republicans one could point to who were concerned about climate, and some of them like Christie Todd Whitman were really good about nuclear power. But by and large people like Whitman and others with similar concerns like Arnold Schwarzenegger have been largely pushed out of the party as it currently stands. This does *not* mean voting for any Democratic candidate. Some of them, especially some local ones can be actively counterproductive on climate related issues, especially if they support NIMBYish approaches to housing, since denser housing is an important way of reducing CO2 from car commuting. But this by and large is the direction that support needs to go in.

The third category is charitable. There are multiple different charities which can help here. Everybody Solar https://everybodysolar.org/ buys solar panels for nonprofits like homeless shelters and science museums. The Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ helps get solar power for locations in developing countries with little to know electric power. This not just brings up their general standard of living, but it also helps make sure that as those developing build up, they don't run through the same heavy fossil fuel phase that so many other countries went through. In terms of wind power, the best I'm aware of is the https://www.greenenergyconsumers.org/newenglandwindfund New England Wind Fund which helps get more wind power in the Northeast of the US. The Northeast right now has very little wind power, and there's a lot of excess wind. So adding more power to the grid there is easy to do without causing stress on the grid due to its intermittent nature. I don't know of any good nuclear power charity unfortunately, otherwise I would recommend it. But all of these are good places. And every little bit helps.