And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.

Give it a little more time. B-b

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.

So current AI training procedures - which amount to "read all the internet you can" - fall for astroturf campaigns. Why am I not surprised?

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.

It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.

For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.

is it just me, or does that sound like a sexy place?

I hear chines live-food-animal markets are called that because they typically sell seafood (fish, lobsters, etc.) which are kept alive in big water tanks.

Traffic is horribly non linear.

So is fluid dynamics.

It's also very complicated and counter-intuitive, to the point that even experts had to resort to models in wind tunnels and scaling laws, until supercomputers and their algorithms could model it down to submicroscopic levels and handle the details of the positive-feedback transitions.

By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause. "Just keeping away," he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.

Some driving techniques make traffic behave like fluids: Compressible gasses (Car ahead of you slows - you slow some but progressively more as you get closer, Car beside you jogs left two feet, you jog one foot. etc.) Liquids (cars close up and hold constant distance) Crystals (at a traffic light or full stop, cars close up into a tight ordered array.) Condensation (similar near-constant spacing but not so ordered and flows (more easily), Chrystallization, Melting, Sublimation, Evaporation (when the obstruction clears and the first cars can speed up, then later ones, ...), laminar (smooth) flow, turbulent flow, shock waves, ...

Spacing out lets you behave more like a gas - or the first of the liquid behind a bubble - rather than a liquid or solid. When a sudden speed reduction throws a shock wave at you at several times the traffic speed, you can let the gas compress or the cavitation bubble shrink, diffusing the shock wave into an acoustic wave and avoding a collision with the car ahead. It also lets you even out the flow, remaining laminar rather than starting an eddy and going turbulent.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are ... indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditions ...

If that works out, then we can look into what additional driving tactics could be enabled by an infrastructure that brings in information that is NOT available by local observation, presenting it to the driver in a way that does not cause more problems by distraction that it solves. That would let drivers get some of the advantages of self-driving car network communication, too.

Maybe self-driving cars can be trained to be cooperative, which would probably result in better driving.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are simple enough to be easily understood, indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditons, work when only some people use them, and can be shown to be good for success of the person using them.

Then we could just teach them and gain some of the benefits via voluntary actions driven by enlightened self-interest.

(Sort of like teaching Objectivism to prison inmates - practically the only thing, short of certain real religious conversions - that reduces recidivism, by giving him a recipe for going straight and showing what's in it for the convict if he uses it after release..)

... this suggests any galaxy (with a central black hole will also have a few hypervelocity stars flying around ... spiral arm or star /star cluster /cloud formation ...

And if so, this should have been going on since galaxies with central black holes were a thing - which is quite early. What might this mean for more recent inter- and galactic architecture?

Perhaps galaxies are just the accretion disks of big black holes.

(In any case, this suggests any galaxy (with a central black hole will also have a few hypervelocity stars flying around in elliptical orbits from near the center to somewhere much farther out, or on hyperbolas off to bombard the neighborhood.

Nasty traffic problem.

I wonder if this is related to spiral arm or star /star cluster /cloud formation, creates some (currently mysterious) stellar event when one hits another star, or grows the star into a new thingie or big black hole as it scresms through the local background gas and dust and collects a lot of it.