Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.

We know that brain function is altered by the blood chemistry changes made by gut bacteria. This means that any mental illness exacerbated by this route where the chemistry added is verifiably unique to an undesirable bacterium can be targeted by the immune system.

Will this be all mental illnesses? Obviously not.

Do I know of any such chemistry? No, which is why I said "in principle". The potential for the vector exists and the potential for training the immune system to attack it exists, but the reality of such a vector actually existing is unknown and the safety of attacking it is also unknown.

"Potential" and "Unknown" are very important words here. They mean that we do NOT know if the probability of such a vaccine being possible exceeds zero, but equally we do know that a key underlying requirement has a probability that isn't zero. But that is all that we can definitely say at this point in time.

Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.

Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.

Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.

So a murder suspect can appear in court and explain that someone gave him the wrong photograph, so it's not his fault?

The US, and many other countries, need to put forward a new law -- if an excuse applies to officials, then it applies to the citizenry. This is not because officials don't sometimes need extra freedoms, but because the vast majority of manmade disasters are "perfect storms" and because this case is a perfect illustration of the banality of evil.

Legitimate causes are just that and they won't cause problems. If, indeed, they are truly legitimate. Excuses mean that they knew they were doing wrong but felt that finger-pointing would confuse the issue for long enough for the storm to die down. Innocent people do not make excuses. Innocent people don't need them.

But this isn't something officialdom will ever accept. Nor will they tolerate a loss of power. So you don't take away their power, you merely insist that powers they claim are the same everywhere for everyone, and that the powers they deny are likewise denied to all. The sensible ones will see in seconds precisely where that's going to go and will get rid of the stupid ones very quickly. Not because they're morally better, but because such a rule is highly volatile and self-interest takes on a very different meaning when the consequences are unpredictable.

Those of us who have rubbed elbows with our fellow student-athletes in Intro to Astronomy should know that the visible surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere, and it is the first layer at which the gas density has gotten low enough that photons are no longer trapped and can fly off into space, giving what we observe as sunlight.

I thought this was a parody of one time Senator from Indiana and later Vice President:

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

On the Dark Side of the Sun, of course.

In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

Just for context, when its predecessor RIPA, Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, came in it was said to be used only for cases such as terrorism etc.. Instead, it was found that councils started using to check people were putting things in the right rubbish bins for collection.

Robust safeguards indeed.

I've honestly no idea if it's possible, but if they could find a way to get Steam Input into there or the equivalent of their own then I could use it. I have an original Steam Controller, you used to be able to use it on non-Steam games but for a few releases now Steam took that ability away. Some way of emulating or creating an alternative to Steam Input would be superb.

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.