Thank you. I am now better informed. (You didn't say it, but I guess that is where the idea came from.)

Ahhh, a special Facebook group for everyone who owns one of these cameras and has a subscription to support it. Quizzes, contests, prizes!! More! Kids, get your parents to buy one of these cameras. Loads of fun! No home should be without one. Oh, I forgot. This is in America! No home should be without two or three or more of these cameras.

Special product announcement! New camera specially designed for your cat's kittylitter tray. Don't have a cat? That's OK, just get one for your boyfriend. The possibilities are endless!! Only in America!!

We should *edit out* of ourselves our dangerous inclination to adopt and follow trends, fads, and all kinds of nonsense, most of which is a waste of time and resources, some of which is actually dangerous, and occasionally of which is catastrophic.

As supporting evidence, I offer https://science.slashdot.org/s..., and all of its implications.

A small point : "la" rather than "le". As in "la même chose".

I thought we knew a long time ago that bending ice creates a small electrical charge. I vaguely recall that it is similar to the well-known piezoelectric effect.

The effect of our cold winter temperatures on EV batteries is well-known in Canada.

Most drivers are also aware of the similar, though less dramatic, effect of cold temperatures on lead-acid batteries used in conventional automobiles. Smart drivers of ordinary cars have a "block heater" installed in the crankcase of their car engine to keep the oil warm (therefore less viscous), to make it easier to start the car by putting less strain on the car's 12V battery. I have done this with every car I have ever owned.

My next car will probably be an EV and I will certainly consider how to keep the battery warm in the winter-time.

Speaking from my own experience owning a small, non-commercial website, the drop in organic traffic (human visitors) is more like 50% over the last year.

My website has been scraped many times, and continues to be scraped, by various bots and other agents, including the major, so-called "artificial intelligences". I expect that my drop in traffic is due mostly to people asking questions that are answered on my site but reading only the summaries provided by AI and never checking for the details that might be found on sites such as mine. I suppose, why bother to visit a real website when you can get a short, half-but-sufficient answer from a convenient large language model with a cool name?

The information on my own website is based on my own research (unless stated explicitly otherwise) and is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike copyright. Recently I directly queried ChatGPT with a carefully worded question based on some information from my own website. The answer I got was almost word-for-word from my own website, with not a single reference to the source. Not one credit or reference to my website.

In spite of regular and frequent updates, revisions, and additional material to my website, legitimate (human) visitor traffic has declined by at least 50% since about a year ago. One wonders why anyone would continue feeding the AI bots.

Besides that, isn't it just like Microsoft to define "intelligence" as the ability to make some amount of money, no matter how, and no matter using who as an agent (who, in turn, uses this so-called intelligence)? Ha, ha! Mark me as predicting that they will fail at this.

Think I have heard of it but have no idea what it really is.

Yes. Thank you! I see it now. It is not the reflectivity of the surface, but the brightness (or lack of it) *underneath* the surface that is a concern. It is obvious now but I had missed it. (Ain't the mind wonderful!) Thanks again.

It seems to me, then, that "darkening" is the wrong word for the authors to use in describing what is happening. "Darkening" implies greater absorption and penetration which seems to be the opposite of what is happening (assuming that I understand what is being described). "Brightening" implies less absorption and less penetration, at least to me, but perhaps that isn't a good adverb either. What would be a less confusing word to describe the change in the ocean's reaction to light??

Maybe young people of this tendency should have to pass (by themselves) an IQ/aptitude test before being granted full citizenship on turning 16/18/21 years of age, otherwise it is off to El Salvador with them.

I have lost count of the number of times my own website has been scraped, sometimes by the big names and sometimes by bots that I didn't know existed. It's not just the html content that they scrape but often all of my original graphics (charts and diagrams) too. Of course my site is covered by copyright (Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-commercial, and Share-Alike 4.0) but I doubt that ChatGPT will ever tell you that this got this or that piece of information from me or my website. Some say that "search is dying" and I see some evidence of this in the falling number of organic visitors to my site. Maybe I should just take down my site, save a pile of money in domain registration and hosting fees, and move on to some other, more satisfying activity.

IIRC, Cygnus X1 was discovered by its very strong radio emission, as opposed to its visible light emission (although the visible spectrum might have been peculiar and provided an early clue). As a radio telescope operator/technician at the time (1963) at the Algonquin Radio Observatory, I did many runs on Cygnus X1 for the supervising astronomers. As you point out, this was long before gravitational wave detectors were available.

Yes. And anyone with a background in physics or related fields is probably bound by a strict definition of 'simultaneity' and the velocity of light. But journalists and some others, well, not so much.