No Child Left Behind - teach test taking, rather than subject matter or how to think.

Continually being told "all you have to do is believe" - and similar fake encouragements.

If you look attractive, you'll get into hollywood - why study anything?

If you are strong, you'll be in professional sports - why study anything?

Teachers' hands being tied in how they customize their lesson plans for the students they have.

Attention spans are __gone__.

I'm probably missing half a dozen.

Everyone uses VPNs to bypass the Great Wall and get news from the outside world. Sounds like Britain's moving in the same direction. What a sobering thought!

They usually say the opposite of what winds up happening.

I’ve seen this from personal experience. Pure coding jobs are evaporating; the only way to make a living is by building new products or shifting into sales and marketing related work.

Why is this even news? Everyone has credentials that have leaked. It’s frustrating, but that’s the risk of using any service these days.

Reforestation is a thing, at least in North America. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has planted millions of acres of new forest (see United Nations FAO and USDA Forest Service for data). The U.S. currently is planting about 60,000 acres of trees annually, plus another 130,000 acres of regeneration.

The people overseeing this work are forestry experts, so one can assume they are planting the correct trees for a locale, in the right concentrations and groupings.

The real problem is that Brazilians are chopping down millions of acres of forest every year (albeit, decreasing). This is insanity. Also, because of food shortages and famines, some Africans have been stripping bark from trees, as well as harvesting the wood. Deforestation of that continent not only removes habitat for fauna (chimps, birds, etc.) but also leads to expansion of desert. Africa's just a total disaster.

the posting software eliminated the subscripts; that should read CO2 and O2 above. :D

About a million tons of plastics are being dumped into the oceans every year, and this material is suspected of damaging the ecosystem. Algae absorb CO and emit O quite efficiently; 60% to 70% of the Earth's oxygen is made this way. Another 10% to 20% or so comes from several huge rain forests, notably the Amazon.

We should focus on eliminating plastic and other potentially damaging substances from the ocean, and secondarily perhaps limit over-fishing that distorts the food chain.

Also, plant more trees. There's no better, or cheaper, way to de-carbon-ify the atmosphere than trees, especially during their major growth years.

This seawater-filtering scheme sounds expensive and strange, and probably would create more problems than it solves.

It's just a small test project, funded by the UK government, a proof of concept. How exactly it will prove the concept, though, is left as an exercise to the reader.

I had thought quantum entanglement doesn't copy information; it actually realizes the original information at an arbitrary point in space-time (I added the "time" because I believe it's not restricted to 3 dimensions).

The teleportation you describe is much more conventional: a machine scans you down to the molecular level (the mechanism, let alone the amount of data storage, needed to achieve this is left to the imagination), transmits this data to Jupiter, which is an average of 43.2 light minutes from Earth.

The receiving machine then rebuilds a copy of you, molecule by molecule. If the checksum matches, it sends a "Success" response, and the transmitting machine then disassembles the original you.

And for the record, I will never get in one of those things.

The gravity is a nice bonus... but acceleration would need to be maintained at 9.81 m/s to achieve one gee.

To get to 100,000 mph by the midpoint to reach Mars at its closest approach to Earth, per Grok, a = 0.0357 m/s
This is far less than one gee.

Unless I'm doing this wrong.

But luckily, we can have a spinning habitat to simulate gravity. For a six month journey, this would be a necessity; it wouldn't do for the astronauts to reach Mars with atrophied muscles and bones.

What happens to the kinetic energy of the astronaut who is instantly transported to another point in space? Standing on the Earth's surface, we are actually moving at a rather high velocity due to rotation and orbital motion. Just plunk someone down on Mars and they might go flying up, down, or sideways at thousands of km/hour.

Given this is now twice that this company's lander fell over after making it all the way to a soft landing on the Moon, maybe they should implement robotic arms to simply push the craft upright. It would cost money and development time, but seems worth it if it salvages a $65 million project.

Alternatively, an array of attitude jets could prevent the problem, unless the craft landed partially on a crevice, in which case... launch up a couple of meters and float to a new spot?

I use Grok and openai both. I've almost completely stopped using duckduckgo (switched away from google years ago except when duck fails me). AI is a slightly different experience but really saves a lot of time by distilling many information sources into a nice concise bullet list and summary.

Tesla's Optimus is not the first humanoid robot, nor the best; Boston Dynamics has been making incredible human-like machines for years.

But Optimus has one major advantage: it has a massive software backend. Tesla recognized early on that both cars and robots are really just mobile extensions of a central processing system. The Optimus is intended to be always connected, and to share its expertise as it learns. Similarly, their vehicles are connected, and share traffic data to help drivers avoid congestion and accidents.

The Chinese humanoids look very much like Optimus, just as the Chinese EVs are basically copies of Tesla vehicles. That said, the Chinese are innovating at a mad pace, and Tesla's main advantage seems to be its advanced software (as Chinese car makers admit), at least right now.

An interesting analysis I heard recently on one of the Tesla analysis youtube channels (The Tesla Space, I think): Tesla is probably going to lease its robots rather than attempt to sell them all. It will "uber" them to companies that need such machines but can't afford to purchase a fleet of them. Just pay $50/hour per robot, train them, and put them to work on the assembly line or in the shop. The revenue stream is constant, and can grow almost arbitrarily.

Fun times ahead.