So you would also need to provide for the interaction between the different magnets. I guess if it's all yours, you could orchestrate it better.

I started out this comment trying to argue in the other direction, because of growing up (and still living) in a multilingual country. But then I started to think of the general population around me, which are all bi- or multilingual to some degree out of necessity. Some are sharp as nails, some are dull as bricks (if that is even an appropriate approximation for "young minds"?) I think the more general trait that keeps minds "youthful" (or vice versa) is an insatiable curiosity about everything around you - including other languages. I have a strong suspicion it works more like a positive feedback loop: exercising the mind makes it more healthy, but a healthy mind is also more likely to seek out opportunities to be exercised.

Doesn't Apple have their own device?

If there was something that could do heating and cooling, I'd be happy to go talk to my employer's HR department to see if they could include it in the Dress Code. (They don't seem to have much more important stuff to do anyway.)

The AC in my office seems to have only 2 settings: 2 hot and 2 cold. Typically on the same day. In the mornings, up to about lunch, it struggles to get from ambient to official room temp, then just as it gets there, people start leaving again and it needs to adjust to that loss of body heat.

Yay for WFH, where you can dress and heat to your own heart's content.

Until the token quota for the month is used up, then those humans sit around and twiddle thumbs, because they can't get anything done anymore without AI.

... but which part of "spy" don't you understand?

That's not a bug, it's a feature. We get *nix machines to get work done, not for emplotainment.

I'm not going to critique the fine article directly, but wood is a much more renewable source of energy than fossil fuels or even nuclear. If you have some land around your house, you are probably also not very dependent on logistics supply chains.

There are some stove designs (typically under the name of rocket stove) that have been developed to provide nearly complete combustion. Hence, they can be fed with pruned twigs and shoots - no need to grow mature trees, fell them, and split the logs - or wood chip pellets made from waste. Let me restate that: Because they are so efficient, they use a lot less wood than the conventional fireplaces and wood stoves people are used to, leave much less ash residue - and also conceivably release a related lower concentration of lead. Some of these designs employ piping the exhaust through considerable thermal mass to capture most heat, and the exhaust is virtually odorless. One enterprising fellow heated a tipee in Montana or somewhere in winter (yes, only a sheet of canvas between indoor shirtsleeves temperatures and outside snow).

Unfortunately it seems it is human to get stuck in "old ways" - e.g. old heating methods, and not knowing or accepting there are better ways EVEN for the same fuel. Another example is building codes (in my non-USA locale) that used to be still adequate for when heating was cheap. On the other hand I guess I can be glad that I live in a more temperate climate where it seldom goes below freezing, so often some layers of clothing are sufficient.

I recognize none of those names - producers, actors, etc. (apart from the Cavil guy, but as TFS says, he's also a bit old now). But what the heck, the last time I saw a feature of any kind may have been 2020 or so ("some" digital medium, due to C19).

I guess the same thrills that made ol 'doppio zero so attractive to schoolboy me will still be in play in new installments, so I'll give it a pass again.

Not disagreeing, but there are some nuances.

I maintain a ("warm") compost pile, and also an earthworm farm. A lot of the wood pulp-based packaging I have goes to them: egg cartons (made from recycled paper), air fryer liners (marked compostable), used paper towels and tissues, corrugated cardboard boxes, etc. There's a couple of problems though: some items (e.g. take away coffee cups, milk cartons) are made waterproof with a plastic lining. Packaging may be coated with a high-gloss surface finish for attractiveness, or a lot of inks of unknown content. Even brown boxes have stickers and tape on them that are not compostable and are hard to remove. So a lot of these paper-based packaging is still not compostable and does not solve the problem (the same "contaminants" also make them difficult/costly/impossible to recycle).

Almost all of the wine, beer, olive oil, vinegar, pickle jars, and other glass containers that have gone through my kitchen have labels on them that are pretty hard to remove with only warm water and soap (although a few are easy). Not sure how much of a problem that is at the recyclers. The collection points I use for glass state nothing about labels, only the type of glass to be accepted (typically only bottles). Guess it would be much less energy-intensive to clean and sterilize bottles, re-fill them, and stick a new label on, as compared to melt them back down.

In other words: "nothing to see, move along" ?

Thanks for the list - and doing the originally linked article's job for them.

What is interesting to me is that there are also countries here that produce oil (e.g. Nigeria, Angola, Norway, Canada), and for some of which at least, their oil industry is presumably a major part of their national GDP (I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now.)

You seem to be not too familiar with earthworm farming, but fact they DON'T need soil (or regolith) where they are living, breeding, digesting, and producing castings (= "worm poop"). And you don't need the worms present when you harvest the castings to transfer to your growing medium - the microorganisms in the castings is what you are after, and they do the symbiotic work with the plants (as with the humus from the original article). In fact, the typical earthworm species (Eisenia foetedia) that is most often used due to being a prolific composter, does not survive in your vegetable garden that well, since it is a species from the leaf litter in European forests. They are better off staying in the worm farm, to digest more organic material, and breed more little wrigglers.

Source: the plastic bin containing vegetable peelings, carton, and other organic materials, next to my fridge, that the earthworms seem to be thriving in. I did add some crushed eggshells to it (apparently some roughage like that is nice for them, but optional). While these shell fragments do have some sharp edges, this is probably not comparable to regolith (of which I don't have any readily at hand to test on the worms).

If my law-abiding, nothing-to-hide life is so uninteresting, why are they all after the minutiae of it?

It's good that they do these experiments, as it shows risks regarding heavy metal toxicity.

Vermicompost obviously contains lots of earth microorganisms that live in symbiosis ("living together") with plants here on earth - getting nutrients from plants (mostly carbs produced via photosynthesis, light not being available under the soil) and also supplying nutrients (nitrogen, minerals etc. from inert soil, converted to a bio-available form that plants can utilize) and even water. No surprise here, foodweb is a known concept by now with many people interested in this.

But I don't know that it would be the most practical to ship vermicompost from earth in large and continuing quantities. It might be better to initially ship the earthworms themselves (or at least their eggs) as well as (organic) foodstuffs for the humans there. This could then serve to ramp up a growing population of earthworms on the moon. Should be obvious though that this will be in a sheltered environment, not on the exposed raw lunar surface - like with earth-origin humans and their earth-origin-crop plants. This would be a live ecosystem being constructed from the ground up, protected from a hostile environment - not inert or sterilized materials.

Having a colony of earthworms would allow the setup of a vermiponics system (~"aquaponics" using worm casting nutrients instead of dissolved salts) for growing food plants, using some inert substrate for a physical support structure for the plants - no dependence on a possibly toxic growth medium. Potatoes and other root crops are successfully grown here on earth, together with the customary leaf and fruit crops. After the food has been eaten and the waste passed out again, the worms can come into play again, to convert this back into compost, as has been done successfully here on earth with multiple wet or dry vermicomposting toilet systems.

One drawback with vermicomposting is the amount of time it may take - much less of a problem here on earth if you've got some space and a friendly environment. (This is one site I found via websearch that was quite interesting regarding construction, ramp-up and maintenance here on earth, gives some feel of what could be possible.)

Ironic that these little miracle workers considered for the moon are named "earth"worms.

I'm interested how the difference in gravity would influence them.