> Thinking starts with foundational knowledge taught in schools

Every smart person I know would laugh at that idea.

If a kid can't think by the time they get to school, they probably never will. Dumb kids can't learn much and the idea that a 100-IQ teacher can teach a 150-IQ kid how to think (or anything much else really) is laughable.

Government schools were created to turn kids into compliant industrial drones. They have served no purpose since all the industrial jobs were shipped to China, but teachers' unions have ensured that millions of teachers continue to have jobs anyway.

Also Africa has a heck of a lot of sun in patterns that are more consistent all year round. Close to the equator you may get less sun in the day but you don't get a 4x difference between the peak summer production and minimum winter production as we do here.

More consistent output means it's easier to plan around, and not having winters at 40 below zero means even if the power is out for a while you're probably not going to die.

Lastly, of course, with local power production there aren't thousands of miles of copper cables and tall metal pylons to cut up and steal.

I'm sure you're familiar with the countdown protocol, all the pre-flight checks, etc. These power up a range of subsystems, motors, etc, so that everything can be verified prior to ignition itself. The complete sequence takes a very long time. Under normal flight conditions, you can't check for absolutely everything (instrumentation is mass, and mass is the enemy) but there's still a lot. However, during an engine test, you can pack a lot more sensors in.

This is where you'd want to be spotting loose connections, pumps that aren't quite even, pressures that aren't as steady as they should be, vibrations that shouldn't be there or do not match expectations, turbulent flows, and so on.

At ignition, it takes between 3-6 seconds to go from stopped to 90% thrust. For humans, that's near-instant. For a computer sensor that's operating a million samples per second, that's 3-6 million readings. A computer performing a billion calculations per second shouldn't have much difficulty in comparing 3 million readings against model predictions and determining if both the values themselves and the rate of change at each point such a sensor exists are all good. Emergency shutdowns during those first 3 seconds are perfectly viable.

Vibrations are the ones that are likely the most interesting, because those are likely to change before something breaks, not sure how fast you can make infrared sensors, but that's also an area where things are likely to alter before point of failure.

Someone on the email list said it can give a 6-8% performance boost because the pointers are half the size so you get better cache utilization. For some uses that's going to be a noticeable win.

That said, I've never heard of any software using it rather than just requiring a faster CPU.

Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.

If that turns out to be the case, we get to find out something about what reshaping the brain means.

Humans are omnivores. We're not designed to live on vegetables.

If eating meat was bad for us, we would have evolved out of it long ago.

> As evidence has grown that inflammation, metabolism and mental health may be far more connected than scientists once believed,

I remember some bloogers talking about how many of our health problems were caused by persistent inflammation years ago. But The Science said they were cranks.

Weird.

Whilst that is perfectly true, it is questionable as to whether it is useful or necessary. If a rocket is being tested, then logically it should be heavily instrumented. If it's heavily instrumented, and the instruments are themselves competently designed, there is no obvious reason why the engine can't be auto-cut when problems start to arise. And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

The values may have independently been "within permitted range", but if the pattern of those values doesn't make sense, then something has gone wrong. There may well also have been subsystems that were insufficiently instrumented.

"They're the experts" is often an irrelevancy - we lost TWO shuttles and crews to political decisions, when the experts on the ground were ignored. DeHavilland lost endless Comets to basically the same blunder, when political decisions by management over the reality of metal fatigue overrode analysis by actual experts. Improper monitoring and inadequate computer controls will be from a burden of costs and time (both political constraints, not engineering constraints). As, indeed, will improperly manufactured parts, improper software (anyone rememebr Arianne IV's mishap due to buggy software?), improperly-defined constraints, and inadequate quality controls.

The experts are usually either well aware of mistakes or afforded no means of detecting them.

I see no reason not to think this was anything other than a management blunder.

My house is a relatively normal size (1800 square feet), and it still takes more than three full minutes for water in my shower to reach full temperature when I run it straight hot. If I also turn on both faucets in my bathroom, I can get that down to about twenty or thirty seconds, which is barely tolerable.

At my mom's house in Tennessee, the distance the water has to travel is comparable, but it takes only ten seconds or so.

It's a huge downside to all the water-saving showerheads and faucets that were forced upon us here in California decades ago. We waste a lot of time and energy to make up for a water shortage that exists only because of decades of politicians being short-sighted and kicking the desalination can down the road over and over so that the money doesn't get spent on their watch.

If you're willing to settle for only $30 million, that should be enough to obtain a birth certificate and proof of residency in some remote village.

He told his Ferengi superior that he could keep the latinum.

This raises a very important question. If the CIA are taking shortcuts and making assumptions about anything, we should not be making assumptions ourselves that the CIA aren't doing the same elsewhere. I am, however, still waiting for biolabs and WMDs to turn up in Iraq - something for which they appear to have ALSO taken one person's unsupported word for. They also ratted out their own officers in retaliation for questioning the existence of "yellowcake" (that turned out not to exist).

I'd be wary of claiming there was a pattern, but... They do seem awfully incompetent.