How being diplomatic works.

For all the attempts to correct the warts and remove limitations to make Pascal usable for large system development--Modula 2, Ada, Oberon, Component Pascal--it appears that Pascal World has coalesced around the Delphi 7 object Pascal dialect for which Free Pascal is the mullti-platform compiler?

Isn't a particle detector a form of gambling?

"C'mon, baby, give me another sigma that I can publish this paper!"

I see this as a way of dealing with owner anxiety of an unexpected battery replacement expense, maybe a major maintenance done every 5 years and 80,000 miles, not something done on a daily basis.

The condition of a battery can depend a lot on how it has been used-cycles, depth and rate of discharge, amount of fast DC charging, temperature conditions.

I always wondered about the Model Y making battery replacement as a long-term maintenance item nearly impossible. I think the justification were some strong claims from Tesla about their battery packs lasting longer than anyone would want to keep the car going, which seems optimistic.

I think the use case for battery swap is to support a kind of "power-by-the-hour" battery warranty akin to the arrangement airlines have with the jet-engine manufacturers.

If there was a way to replace the battery that didn't require hundreds of dollars in labor fees, an electric vehicle owner wouldn't have to worry about the unexpected expense of a battery wearing out. The motorist would "lease" the battery, essentially pay a subscription fee for the use of the battery, receiving a replacement when warranted.

The way this would work is that the software on the car would record how much wear-and-tear your driving put on the battery in terms of time, mileage, rates of charging and peak rates of discharge along with time spent at different state-of-charge, much like a jet engine warranty is for a certain number of bringing-the-engine-to-takeoff power "cycles" along with a "rating" applied to the engine as to what constitutes full power in all but emergencies. To make this transparent to the motorist, the system could display the amount of use put on the battery and remaining life.

The key to this battery lease arrangement is that it is relatively simple to exchange the battery. You would not be doing battery exchanges for increase range--that would open the can of worms of exchanging your relatively new battery for a battery someone had "beat on.". The exchange in this leasing arrangement also may give you a reconditioned used battery, but you are paying for "drive cycles" and are not put at financial risk if the battery you receive cannot complete the warranted drive cycles.

Get off my lawn!

with 5000 Navy enlisted personnel who haven't had enough to eat.

Forget it. He's rolling.

but every astronomer's shy friend. Statistics.

Making wild assumptions about the prevalence of 3-body star systems with the requisite properties, you could come up with fat error bars on the prevalence of this scenario as a Type Ia progenitor?

Journal article!

There was a cohort of grad students living in university housing at a small institution of higher learning in the Greater Los Angeles area in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains who stayed up that late to watch a certain TV program because they all lacked a normal social life. This television program from Canada featured members of the Toronto Second City improvisational comic troupe, and this program was shown in Los Angeles following NBC Saturday Night Live. Several of the actors went on to appear on Saturday Night Live and later in movies. It is the shared culture of those grad students, and at least one of them, who happened to be from Canada, went on to contribute scientifically to astronomy.

This program, if you can believe it, was even more out-of-the-mainstream, subversive and edgy and not ready for prime time than the Saturday Night Live of the late 1970s. Toronto was a "second city" to the Canadian cultural center of Montreal, and Canadians I have known carry a resentment that Canada is a "second country" to the U.S., and the television program, originating in a fictitious "downmarket" generic North American city named "Melonville" built heavily on those themes.

One of the sketches was called Celebrity Blow-up, which parodied the sort of TV content that could be developed at a downmarket, North American TV station, featured a pair of actors dressed in denim coveralls who spoke ungrammatically. Their guests were other comics doing character impressions of well-known Hollywood actors who were known to over-act or otherwise have a high opinion of themselves as actors and be ripe for comedic parody. Each "guest" was encouraged to "blow up" on screen, where they literally exploded, which in turn was a cheesy video special effect within the budget of a downmarket TV station originating this fictitious TV program. Lacking cultural refinement, the denim-wearing hosts would find this entertaining and yell, "he blowed-up, real good!"

Your astronomer colleagues, who just might include my Canadian friend from over 40 years ago, are excited about the prospect that a nearby recurrent nova would "blowed-up, real good!", which is as realistic as an overacting Hollywood actor vanishing in an explosion on camera, but since you are from a time, a place and a different cohort of students in graduate school, one perhaps not reliant on watching a low-budget Canadian-import TV program as a shared cultural experience, the reference doesn't have any context, for which I apologize sincerely.

to Slashdot.

Do you think someone could post lots of garbage code on the internet, the AI bot would Hoover it up to train its model, and then the AI would emit garbage?

To quote the SCTV parody sketch Celebrity Blowup where celibrities known to over-act would literally explode in front of a TV audience, are you saying T Coronae Borealis could "blow up, real good!"? The literature I have seen is skeptical that ordinary novae, especially recurrent novae can retain enough mass after outbursts over time to blow up, real good in a Type Ia supernova.