You can calculate the average size of the expected small density differences in the 3000 K hot plasma, and for each Dark Matter model, which vary for instance by amount of Dark Matter or properties of Dark Matter, you get a different distribution of those differences. The actual differences physicists measure fits a model, where there is five times as much Dark Matter than baryonic matter, and the Dark Matter does not interact with itself or normal matter.

The other difference was that the consequences of a nuclear exchange were far more tangible. There was no question that even if you did survive the initial bombardments, life afterwards was absolutely going to suck. Radiation has so many awful ways it can kill you, too.

Climate change, though? Depending on your age, it might not even be a problem you'll have to concern yourself with. Trump, for example, is most certainly going to excuse himself from this mortal coil before the shit ever gets close to hitting the fan.

IIRC he's not particularly keen on being among the first to go to Mars. At least not until Mars has blackjack and hookers.

The stuff in DHH's blog post and Wikipedia entry is pretty tame. Again though, this is viewed from my perspective as an American who really had no problem with all of Obama's deportations (mostly because he didn't make a giant media circus out of them).

It's ironic you should bring up Kirk, because a lot of otherwise reasonable people didn't know all about all the awful shit he'd said either, before proclaiming him to be a decent fellow. Usually what happens is that folks hear "He was just expressing conservative viewpoints" and they don't bother to look into it further to see how deep the rabbit hole actually goes. This is the problem with assuming that someone has identical viewpoints as someone they might claim to "support".

They gave Trump this thing. It had to be worth some change. So, samesies?

By US standards the guy seems fairly middle of the road. He'd have to amp his rhetoric up a bit before he'd make MAGA territory here.

Could also look at it like playing a recorder. Unless you're someone who pursued music as a hobby or career, public school was probably the last time you picked up one of those instruments, and if I asked you to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb", the rendition would probably be terrible. Doesn't mean the school necessarily did anything wrong with how they taught you to play, just that it wasn't something you used regularly enough to reinforce the knowledge in your mind. Eventually most people's brains just purge the cruft in favor of things we find more interesting.

I'm pretty much like this with math too, and struggled quite a bit completing my math work in school because of it. I understood the concepts fine, but my brain just doesn't cooperate with the execution. I found it extremely frustrating not being allowed to use a calculator, but it all makes sense once you realize that grades aren't actually about how well you understood the material, they're about measuring the traits of a good future corporate drone (which also is something we're going to need a lot less of with the advent of AI... oops).

Using a calculator just takes away the tediousness of having to do mathematics. I recall one of my math teachers actually not being opposed to the use of calculators, because (and I'm definitely paraphrasing here after so much time has passed) "If you don't understand what you're doing, a calculator is not going to give you the right answer."

Granted, yes, it creates a reliance upon the underlying technology being utilized, but we've collectively done that with a lot of things (even going so far as designing entire communities around the assumption that most people will have access to a car).

There was a TV game show based around the premise that adults do typically forget most of what they learned in grade school. The main reason older generations tended to retain a better basic working knowledge of arithmetic was because they didn't carry around a smartphone in their pockets.

Maybe it was because I went to school in crazy ass Florida, but in middle school shop class I distinctively remember using several power tools, and two types of welders.

Turned out I was actually pretty decent at welding, which did end up influencing my career path. Can't say I'm entirely pleased with the income, though.

So just don't take things that far, then. I mean if a construction worker took his jackhammer out for drinks after work too, yeah, we'd say that's a problem. As long as we're teaching kids there's a time, place and appropriate use for their tools, and that they're not a substitute for genuine human interaction - that's how education is supposed to function.

The AI genie isn't going back in the bottle. Education has to prepare future generations for that, one way or another.

Possibly producing another generation that has an even greater desire to vote for the party that wants to roll things back to some romanticized version of the past? Maybe it actually would be a better idea to start teaching students how to adapt to the world they're going to be living in, rather than the one it used to be. Crazy idea, I know.

Damn these kids and their newfangled paper! Back in my day, we were taught how to pound reeds into papyrus and if you're not doing that, you ain't learnin'.

A lot of it comes from the Cosmic Microwave Background. It is nearly, but not fully the same everywhere we look. There are minuscule aberrations at the 10 to the power of minus 4 Kelvin, and they have certain frequencies. The frequencies are consistent with a medium where normal matter has a temperature of about 3000 K, but is embedded in a type of matter which does not interact - neither with itself, nor with normal matter.