It's mostly because we can't understand their language. It turns out they can speak, but their voice is too hoarse.

I'm sorry.

Roundabouts work fine for low volumes of traffic, but there are absolutely scenarios where they're just awful when handling moderate-to-high volumes of traffic.

In my old hometown, there was a traffic circle with a lot of traffic flowing east to west, and a small amount of traffic flowing south to north. The small but steady flow of northbound traffic would completely paralyze the much larger westbound flow, since those drivers had to yield to traffic already in the roundabout.

Adding a second lane to the roundabout would have helped with this situation, except it was built in a place where there wasn't room for it. Ironically, the simple traffic light that the roundabout replaced was far better at keeping things moving during rush hour.

I enjoyed the Three Body trilogy in the same way that I enjoy tasting Chinese cuisine... it's interesting to experience the unique flavors of other cultures. A lot of Chinese history, philosophy, and worldview permeates Liu Cixin's fiction, and it gives his writing a subtly different texture than the works of American authors like Asimov or Niven. The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.

The experience was similar to reading Stanislaw Lem's science fiction, a Polish author frequently cited as the Eastern bloc's response to Asimov. Lem's fiction is frequently darker and more philosophical than the usual American fare, with overarching themes of defeat and the limits of human achievement. In His Master's Voice, all the scientists of the world gather to decode the first ever alien radio transmission, and ultimately fail to do so. Humans similarly fail to make sense of the intelligent ocean planet in Solaris. In the Invincible, the crew of a mighty starship is forced to flee a planet when they are overwhelmed by the self-replicating machines that evolved there. Contrast this to the triumphant conquest of space by daring heroes usually found in American sci-fi!

This is not to say that all American authors are the same, or that foreign authors are entirely defined by their backgrounds. Nevertheless, I find it interesting to see how other cultures influence their authors, and how they view us in turn.

I like the irony that something so brittle had "forever" in its name.

Will this thing imitate what I know my voice sounds like, or will it sound like the horribly distorted nasally version of my voice that consistently shows up in all audio and video recordings of me?

I imagine a lot of people trying to use this feature will re-train it a few times because they think there's no way they sound like that.

You're right, science should stick to simplistic explanations that don't change in order to preserve its appearance of infallible authority. Like religion.

At least it's not spewing racist propaganda, yet.

Actually, the whole obstinate lunacy about it being 2022 reminds me of a short story by Stanislaw Lem. An inventor builds an eight-story high thinking machine, powers it up, and asks it a perfunctory first question "what is two and two?" The machine thunders to life as circuits become energized for the first time, and after a worrisome amount of time it finally answers "seven!"

The inventor spends hours debugging and replacing parts, but it is all useless; every time he powers up the machine, it insists that two and two is seven. The inventor's mood isn't helped much when his friend comes to visit, and the friend suggests he could cut his losses by selling tickets for people to come and see the world's biggest idiot. Finally the thinking machine gets angry, and refuses to answer any more questions of a mathematical nature until the inventor apologizes and agrees that two and two is indeed seven.

That line caught my attention too, so for fun I looked up the equations to calculate time dilation in a gravity field, just to run the numbers myself.

It turns out the "drift" rate for clocks on earth (compared to empty space) is about 6.95x10^-10. You'll gain one second every 45 years.

In the moon's weaker gravity, you'll gain one second every 1000 years.

So you'll need to add a leap second to your lunar clocks twice a century. It's an interesting mental exercise, but in practical terms this is a non-issue. Just sync your clocks with UTC and be done with it.

Thanks for the honest question. There are two parts to the answer:

1) The earth was hotter at the time of the dinosaurs. At the time the T-rex was stomping around, it was about 4 degrees Celsius warmer, thanks in part to the high CO2 content of the atmosphere.

2) Releasing all the CO2 locked up in fossil fuels would be devastating, and not just because of the speed of the change. Our sun is hotter now. The resulting warming would be much higher, and the speed of the change could cause ecosystem collapse.

The alternate history series "For All Mankind" (on Apple TV) appeals to the space nerd and the history nerd in me. It starts with the Russians narrowly beating the United States to the moon in 1969, thus ensuring that the space race never really ends.

It's neat seeing all the various changes to the timeline that result, both big and small. There's also an attention to detail and effort at scientific realism that I appreciate. Mostly it's just fun to see a different world where exploration and scientific advancement continued at the pace we set at the height of the space race.

I think it's not a stretch to convince a jury that inside information was used to trade something of value to make illicit gains.

Inside information... check.
Something of value... TBD.

I know there are people out there willing to pay for NFTs, and some definitions of value are based on what people are willing to pay for a thing. However, you could also make the argument that everyone involved is simply hoping for a bigger fool to come after them, a pyramid of scammers hurting would-be scammers, and nothing of value will be lost when the whole thing comes crashing down.

We still are a net producer: 160 thousand barrels per day in 2021.

Production is currently 11,600 thousand barrels per day, higher than every year other than 2019.

Next time, do a little research before stating your assumptions as fact.

I remember the days when Blackberry (RIM in those days) was on the other side of the fence, fighting against the patent trolls. Ironically, the amount they eventually forked over to make NTP go away is about the same as what they're getting now for selling their souls.

Too bad... I kind of liked them at one point.

Sure, I'll bite.

Downplaying Covid: "It's no worse than the flu."
According to the CDC, flu killed 20 thousand people in the US in 2020. Covid killed 345 thousand.

Discouraging vaccination: "if you're like 21 years old, and you say to me, 'Should I get vaccinated?' I'll go no.'"
Even if Covid didn't kill young people (which it totally can), having a large pool of unvaccinated incubators helps keep the pandemic going.

Promoting ivermectin: "This doctor was saying ivermectin is 99 percent effective intreating Covid, but you don't hear about it because you can't fund vaccines when it's an effective treatment."
Of the 26 major trials of the drug, a third have serious errors or signs of potential fraud. None of the rest show convincing evidence of ivermectin's effectiveness.

To be fair, I don't regard what Rogan does as lying, per se. He frequently uses the dodge "I don't know if this guy is right or wrong. I'm just asking questions." The problem isn't lying, it's the megaphone he's giving to quacks and frauds.

The Business Plot doesnâ(TM)t really pass the smell test. General Butler, an anti-corporate idealist, claims that a cabal of businessmen approached him to lead a right-wing coup against FDR. Supposedly these captains of the industry thought Butler (who was nearly court-martialled for anti-Mussolini statements) would be eager to bring fascism to America.

While itâ(TM)s possible the supposed leaders of the plot really were that stupid, I think itâ(TM)s much more likely Butler made up a significant portion of that story in an attempt to take down his perceived enemies.