And let us also not forget figures such as Gregor Mendel and Georges Lemaitre, both Christian priests, that helped established the concepts of evolution and cosmology as we know them today. Religion and theology was the place to start if you were looking for answers 150 years ago (or earlier!). But inquisitive minds like the above did not stop there.

Can't wait to try this in public transportation: "Hey Meta, play "Never Gonna Give You Up"!"

McRockface?

Woosh!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Texas?

So, you are telling me there is a place where the subscription costs nothing, you pay as you watch, and the catalogue is larger than everybody else's combined? Where do I sign up?

I was at an industry conference a year ago, where the chinese presenter kept repeating "We *must* have robots" [for modernizing production]. Every time, she stressed that "must" really strongly. Anecdotal, of course, but her presentation and all chinese stands at the conference were about robotic factory automation. Also, in contrast to previous years, they were less about pitching their products and more about bragging their capabilities. So I got the impression that there could be a larger - government - mandate behind all this. So, I don't think the Chinese government is ordering companies to hold off automation, at least not any more in this particular industry.

Source?

Sad to see the internet heading in that direction.

Indeed, the "west" was underestimating the Chinese behemoth for as far as I can remember. When I was at school they were producing cheap knock-offs that were selling in flea markets. Then the western industry started expanding in China, lured by the low wages, while they were actually selling-off their trade secrets. Gotta love globalization! Then I was at the university and my professors were making fun of their Chinese colleagues because they were trying their best and it was not good enough yet. By the time of my PhD the leading scientists in my field were Chinese. To me, it was *obvious* that they would sooner or leater learn all there is to learn about how to improve quality, how to make production more efficient, how to build new things. Underestimating the intelligence of 1.4 billion people has a lot more to say about *our* intelligence than theirs.

If you are lucky, it can be both.

The gel was cut and the 10% loss was after healing. A stretch of 46x sounds pretty good, so one could easily desing the application to stay below this maximum strechiness. But even if the gel rips under unforeseen conditions, a short repair in the field that recovers 90% of the functionality soulds awesome compared to what we have now.

Emoji analysis

until Bobby signed up.

I don't understand why people think that civilizations are supposed to collapse quickly. My impression is that civilizations degrade over several decades, even several generations. One possible exception is the calamity brought upon the Bronze Age civilizations by those absurd Sea Peoples. But today it would take severe nuking to bring down a civilization that fast.