The '3%' failure rate is quite a success in preventing an epidemic. The epidemic
must GROW its infected base by more persons, as old cases return to
uninfected life-as-usual. That 97% inoculated-and-immune sea of people are
the potential next victims that NEVER contract and pass on the disease to others,

Similarly, one might prevent forest fires by having 97% of your trees
fireproofed. It's unlikely a fire will hop to the next tree when
most of the neighbors don't burn.

In short, a crowd of folk with 97% immune would result in an
exponential decay of cases after any initial burst, rather than a rise.
Health officials certainly are aware of this.

We all should be aware of this.

Vaccination is a preparatory exercise for 'human immune systems', so that those systems aren't learning while working, but rather learning beforehand, It's not interference, it's education. It fights better when it knows the enemy before first contact.

The observation is a weak one, correlating the release of gas
with the ship passage (presumably creating pressure waves that disturb the muck).

Would natural (tidal, volcanic, storm-caused) disturbances release
less methane, or more, or the same amount, in the absence of shipping?

There's no clear benefit to that fix.

Yeah, the headline 'no safe amount' reference is a clue. It's unlikely
anyone can identify 'safe amount' subjects. The headline term 'new research'
doesn't hold water either, this was a review of many old studies.

Correlation can mean that health issues cause diet, or diet causes health issues.
Neither is unlikely.

I just ran across How to Lie with Statistics the other day.
My hardback is first edition, 1954.
Maybe we should pay the copyright holder and train AIs on that text?

Yeah, that's the ticket. It takes a programming background to do the edit,
and typing skill makes the job easier.

Since a typing course is only gonna cost an hour a day for a few weeks, it's well worth
it for a long lifetime of easy access to the written word.

What's really old, is the knowledge that the Earth's core is hot. The crust has
a known thermal gradient, and is moving that heat at conduction-through-dirt rates
consistent with that gradient. You'd have to run a heat engine to bypass a LOT
of vertical distance, in the downward direction, to tap that.

And, as you tap it, the bottom of your heat engine gets cold. That means
it's not sustainable, unless you find a magma flow and tap the heat of a river of molten rock.

The sustainable 'amount of energy' (really, power) you can get from the planet in
this way is about 1/16 watt per square meter. Mile-deep holes are more
expensive than solar cells, and sunlight is delivering 'way more energy than that anyhow.

Good grief! To patent is to PUBLISH a description that allows replication
by an artisan of the invention. There's very little software
nowadays that could be contained, inclusive of the user interface,
the memory model, the subroutine libraries, and the output functions, in any
reasonable amount of patent office deposited paper.

Folk doing agile app development rarely envision a blueprint for their work,
it's just too much time to spend on a document
(that's why we see so many bugs).

Any attempt to fight in court on a software patent would be won by
whichever legal team has the most staying power,
and could easily drag on like the old SCO/IBM fiasco of 2003-2016...

Maybe there's something about supernovae that makes the black hole jet more visible, and there's just a cluster of supers near one axis of a major black hole. It's consistent with the other direction of jet being less bright. And, only requires a concentration of naturally occurring supernovae in that spatial region.

Yes, commercial nuclear power IS effectively delayed into uneconomic
timescales in many instances. But, it only takes the Navy a couple of years
to get a nuclear submarine built; those small reactors do not incur the time-waste
that a commercial power plant has to deal with.

It's entirely possible to make commercial nuclear power feasible, with modern
engineering designs, if by modular engineering we can employ a multiplicity
of small units, to suit prompt needs rather than projections 40 years into the future.

There's no need to have a complete network of 2G and 3G base stations, for a utility that only bills monthly; you could interrogate the meters by having a mobile cell (that only recognizes the meters, not old phones) and just applying a traveling-salesman algorithm to visit enough sites for brief powered operation. It only has to handle tiny transactions with a customer-list of addresses, not a full metropolitan area of active users. Retiring the older meters can happen at a sedate pace, starting with the most rural regions.

Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock (2021) does a good sci-fi treatment of
one scenario where this sort of thing makes economic sense. The fact is, we
need a billion-dollar sewage treatment plant to support a city, and to
support an entire planet... the cost, here, isn't much of a counterargument.

What IS a killer argument, is loss of glaciers and snowpack.

One possibility, that the Ganges might
run dry in summer, basically renders hundreds of millions of people homeless.

So, short of war, how do we propose to stop a deliberate emitter
of sulfurous sunblock, in a coming climate emergency?

The idea is out there. Like climate change, it can only grow.

Brazil, in the early days (1996?) gave access to source code
for auditing, and accepted signatures in the executables, on all their
'new' voting machines. No network, naturally;
without physical access, you couldn't hack them.
And, hacking would invalidate the signatures.

So far, the scheme has worked. There's a lot of noise claiming fraud,
but... good evidence says not.

It's an unconventional kind of waveguide, but at millimeter-wave frequencies it can only be a TEM (transverse electromagnetic)
waveguide, and the rectangular cross section suggests polarization specific.

Where did you get the idea that this was using waveguide properties? Waveguides are inherently rigid with, as you suggested,
very specific minimum radius bend ratios. If you follow the link Apple's page, TFA states:

Despite its slim size, it can carry a hefty load of data, since it sends signals over three different
parallel channels, separated by frequency.

This would also suggest that it isn't using any type of waveguide transmission since the cross section of a
waveguide is designed specifically for a single frequency and is hollow inside.

The physics of a waveguide allows for multiple frequencies, they just have to have good traveling-wave solutions
for the dimensions. It also allows the 'guide' to have either a fast core and slow guide (like a traditional pipe)
or a slow core and fast surround, like a piece of rope.

Seriously, early microwave researchers used a rope suspended with silk threads to channel microwaves.
This kind of flexible cable still can't make sharp bends, and it will attenuate over long distances,
but it's still a lot more private than WiFi.

What puzzles me, though, is how my PC is going to generate such
data volumes (or where it will put the data it receives). This looks like
a fiber-channel replacement, for big centralized data farms.

Think of chicken parts, you can get all legs, all wings, etc. in the stores,
but for quick frying, the shape of choice is that of the donut.

It just gives good contact with the oil, and uniform cooking.
Ideal shape, really, for nuggets.

So, look for the chicken-parts available in stores to be supplemented;
next to drumsticks, and thighs, and wings, there'll be... wheels.

Northern Scotland isn't on the equator, so an earth-axis-parallel flywheel will be a tilted spinner
(either that, or the precession of the gyroscope will endanger its moorings and crack the foundation).

And, spinning it up will change the length of the day slightly... unless you spin up several, in pairs, in opposite directions.

Have astronomers been brought in to discuss the side effects? And geologists, I suppose?
I'm envisioning a demonstration in favor of angular-momentum neutrality.