The solar system consists of multiple objects each with velocities that differ enough to make the question about which part of the solar system the object's speed is measured relative to important. Logically it would make the most sense to quote the speed relative to the Sun but since I'm guessing the speed measurement was done from Earth it may be relative to us. The difference in velocity between the Earth and Sun is sufficient that it makes a big difference.

For a car it's pretty obvious that the speed is relative to the local surface of the Earth - it's both the most relevant number and the one that is easiest to measure. Here the easiest to measure number (reltive to Earth) is not the most relevant (relative to the Sun).

You are completely missing the point. Apolitical is not "both-sideism" it's "not-taking-a-sideism". Trump's policies ignore scientific fact and his budget is slashing science research funding that will cause the US to lose its scientific lead. There is plenty there to criticise scientifically i.e. using rational, reasoned arguments based on evidence without any need to take a political stance.

Just because Trump is destroying all the social, legal and ethical norms does not mean that everyone else has to join in.

Would it? I'm not sure I could tell you the political affiliations of the supreme court justices in either the UK or Canada.

Well I'm trying to warn you about the problems of politicizing science and clearly my karma is paying the price but that's a price worth paying.

That depends very much on the planned use for an EV. Where I live in Canada we get no rebate at all and when we were looking at a new car a few years ago for run-about-town use we thought about getting an EV...at least until we saw the price after which we went ICE. Had there been a rebate to bring the EV price down to the point where the reduced fuel costs would have made it a worthwhile investment we'd have probably got an EV. Charging infrastructure was irrelevant to that decision because we only planned to use it around town and park it at home every night where it could be recharged..

Given how slow EVs are to recharge I suspect most people use EVs that way. The last thing I want to be doing is planning 0.5-1 hour stops every day when driving just to charge the EV even if there are plenty of fast chargers in every town. Until chargers are fast enough to be comparable to the 5 mins it tkes to fill a petrol tank or battery capacities increase so that you can drive all day and then charge overnight at your hotel EV adoption is going to be hampered for long distance use.

No, it's not scientific to choose politicians instead of pointing out the conqsequences of their chosen policies and then letting voters decide whom to vote for. We should be striving to keep science as apolitical as possible so that people on any part of the political spectrum can trust what scientists say and know that it comes from science and not politics. It's inevtiable that some politics will creep in because we have to get funding for our research but inviting politics in through the front door by endorisng a candidate like this was just stupid.

It's the same reason why in most countries (yes, I know not the US) judges have to remain politically neutral in public - if we knew the political persuasion of judges and they then make a legal decision in favour of a political party's position it immediately looks like they made the decision for political instead of legal reasons. Just look at the US supreme court - when the democrats controlled it republicans railed against its "political activism" and now the reublicans control it democrats are railing against it's political decisions. They are both right which is why having a court that makes what look like clearly political, instead of legal, decisions should be intolerable to all Americans, regardless of their political party.

Actually one of my problems with the article is that it completely fails to mention what the quoted speed is relative to. I'm guessing it is relative to the sun and not the Earth but since the Earth's orbital velocity is almost 30 km/s (well over 100,000 km/h) relative to the Sun it actually makes a significant difference whether the speed is relative to Earth or the Sun.

That's the problem with old laws in the UK. Some of them have become ridiculously lenient, like ones imposing financial penalties that a centuriy and a half of inflation has rendered largely meaningless. However, some others allowed exceptionally harsh penalties - specifically the death penalty - to remain at least a theoretical punishment for crimes like piracy, treason and some military offences until 30 years after the death penalty was "abolished".

Fortunately, with them being old laws piracy was defined as the sort involving ships not computer games.

Overall it may reduce global warming since war hurts the economy and lowers the population meaning that there are fewer people around afterwards to burn fossil fuel or buy things created by fossil fuel. Indeed multiple studies after the 2008 market crash showed that the reduction in the economy also led to a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. At the extreme end nuclear war is believed to cause nuclear winter where the dust thrown into the atmosphere causes a significant drop in temperature lasting for years.

That is exceptionally unlikely. All current designs for fusion reactors are complex and expensive to make and, even if you have a magic wand that can produce fusion reactors for almost no cost, they are all going to be large power-station sized facilities unless you also discover some completely new physics and that means expensive transmission lines whose size and hence expense depends very much on the amount of power being consumed.

So unless you also think we will have cheap, room-temperature superconductors as well, or a new way to generate clean, almost limitless power at power in the home, we will be metered for the forseeable future.

If you are earning $10M/year it does not need to last long.

It does, it radiates away into space. That's why the Earth, which receives over 1.3kW/m^2 in energy from the sun, has not been baked to a crisp over the billions of years it has received such energy: it just wamred up the to point that the rate of radiating energy matched the rate at which the sun adds it. Since the rate of radiation is roughly proportional to the temperature to the power 4, adding additional heat sources to the Earth (especially ones many orders of magnitude less than the power of the sun's heating, has negligible effect on the temperature.

The reason that global warming occurs is because CO2 is very good at absorbing radiation in the wavelengths that objects at the Earth's temperature want to radiate at. This traps heat from the sun by reducing the amount that is radiated until the Earth heats up enough that the new rate of emission overcomes the effect and since the sun's power is many orders of magnitude higher than any human power sources this effect is many orders of magnitude larger than direct heating. For reference the total global power generation was about 3.5 TW in 2024 averaged over the year while the sun's power hitting the earth is about 167,000 TW.

It's not risky it's insane. The only way that could possibly happen is if someone came up with a brilliant idea that turned out to be spectacularly easy realize. The problem is that the last ~70 years of fusion research has been filled with the exact polar opposite: brilliant ideas that all looked easy to realize but that all, without exception, turned out to be impossibly hard to make them work.

We'll achieve fusion in the end but expecting it to be 7 years away is insanity - I suspect it is still several decades away at best although nothing would make me happier than to be wrong.

Scene: a queue of customers in a shop. Customer at the head of the queue with a total of $19.10, hands the cashier a $20 note to pay. There is no till just an electronic card reader and a cash drawer.

A frown appears on the cashier's face as the sudden realization that skills learned in their "advanced" maths class will now be called on after years of neglect. They reach for the calculator only to remember that the batteries died this morning and nobody has had a chance to replace them. Concentrating hard finally an epiphany - $19 is just $1 less than $20 so they quickly hand the customer a dollar.

But no, the customer hands it back saying this is too much change. Panic sets in as the cashier realizes that they had forgotten the decimal place! How can they be expected to do university-level maths? They don't have a maths degree! Faint wisps of steam rise from their ears as mathematical machinery deep in their brain rumbles into action straining against the buildup of forgotten Tiktok videos and What's App messages. Finally, seemingly from nowhere comes the answer - it's 90 cents! With a flash of relief the cashier opens the cash draw only to be confronted with 25, 10 and 5 cent coins and a new seemingly impossible puzzle of how to choose the right coins to make up 90 cents....

My takeaway is that given the wonerful level fo maths education we now seem to have, sadly even cash transactions require working technology today.

Both Canada and the UK have national health care and their academic salaries are on very different scales so clearly healthcare is not relevant to the level of academic salary.