1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

Because Sweden does not need them (yet). Thanks to its geography, Sweden has many pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants.

And still, White Phosphorus is deadly in doses of less than 1 ppm. Enumerating elements is completely meaningless when talking about toxicity. What matters is the substance which contains the elements. And two chemically closely related substances can be harmless and absolutely toxic. Botulinum toxin, often called Botox for short, is deadly in doses above 2 ppt (or about 150 nanograms for a grown adult), and all it contains are the very same amino acids, which make up about 15% of your body weight.

Same silly argument.

But still, it's a different place, and different people in charge. Intellectually knowing that flash flooding can happen and applying it to your immediate environment, where you never experienced it, or the last event was decades ago, are two very different pair of shoes.

Still, Renewables grow faster than Coal in China. 25 years ago, 80% of all electric power in China were generated by Coal, in 2024, it was less than 60%.

Phosphorus, especially in its modification called White Phosphorus, is one of the most toxic substances known to Man. Also, copper is pretty poisonous.

Luckily, posphorus is quite reactive (that's why it was used as an agent in matchsticks), oxidizes fast, and will form phosphoric acid when exposed to air, which indeed is not toxic. It is similar for copper, albeit some copper oxides are themselves toxic.

Especially everyone supervising the operation of the Mystic summer camp should be made aware beforehand that they are in a flooding area, which would be under water even with less rain (but not catastrophically so), and be alert to the weather forecast for a possible evacuation. But people forget, and 20 years no flooding feels the same as totally impossible, and flooding itself is often seen as getting wet feet. The idea of being washed away by 45 feet of water was completely out of the minds of people.

Germany, which is known for being well organized, had a similar catastrophic flooding in 2021 (184 dead) in the Ahr Valley. Also here, the Weather Service had warned about heavy rainfall and possible catastrophic flooding, but it did not register with the people responsible for civil protection.

That's a real problem with once-in-a-century events. People just can't imagine the possible damage, and are completely unprepared or even consider preparations as wasteful and an obstacle to business, development or personal freedom.

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Axions are as elusive as WIMPS - they are only hypothesized and not detected yet. Yes, they make a lot of sense, but so did Supersymmetry, and now, particle physicists have given up on it, because they just could not detect any supersymmetric particles.

As I said: There are proposed paths, but they have even more work cut out for them. In fact, I called them more elusive.

And LIGO can't test the small Black Holes hypothesis. It measures gravitational waves in the wrong frequency band. The lowest mass it can detect is about the size of a neutron star binary (~ 3 solar masses). Advanced LIGO will be able to detect masses down to a single neutron star (1.4 solar masses), still too large for the hypothetic small primordial Black Holes.

The Minesweeper strategy is in fact the only way to do Science. Each theory in Science can be formulated as a negative, as events ruled out by the theory. That's how falsification works. If something happens which has been ruled out by the theory, then the theory has a flaw.

The "Time to move on" call is all nifty and fine.

The problem is: Where to?

We have no obvious path, and the ones proposed so far are even more elusive. Physicists would love to move on, and the ones leading a promising new way will be hailed as the Newtons and Einsteins of the 21st century. Currently, we are in the process to mark out all possible places to look, and we are crossing out the squares we have searched so far. Each square cleared is a success, because it narrows down the places to look even further.

No. Canada gets more than enough sunlight to make Solar viable. In fact, 90% of all Canadians live south of the southernmost point of Germany.

But you need a lot of electricity to keep all the ice cool for your tea.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.