There is also the MRI intended to help kids understand what they will be going through.

Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.

Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)

Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.

Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.

It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.

The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.

The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.

Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.

Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).

Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:

Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]

My grandfather had Parkinson’s. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.

Same as all the crap that gets sold today. Some scammer, recognizing the inherent gullibility or natural cognitive biases of people invents a product or service or story, claims expertise and success, and gains some combination of wealth, power, and fame.

For example Gwyneth Paltrow makes bank by selling all kinds of crap on her Goop website.

Humans are easy to fool because our brains don’t work the way we think they do and other humans exploit that for their own gain. Some, like Penn and Teller, do it honestly for entertainment, others, like Sylvia Browne, do it dishonestly by claiming powers they don’t have.

I think of my username as being like a lock on the door. It’s not going to stop someone who is dedicated to fucking with me, but it keeps the opportunistic fuckery at bay.

I agree with everything you’ve said, but modern technologies aren’t the only issue. The fact is that many food crops are hybrids that don’t breed true, and it’s been like that for many decades. That is, you can save seeds, even legally, but within one or two generations the plants revert to form, losing their desired characteristics and “hybrid vigour”.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a GMO wheat. Yet saving seed at scale hasn’t been viable since at least the 1960s.

There was a recent post asking what the self-taught among us feel we are missing from our knowledge base. For me, it’s being able to calculate stuff like that for making decisions. I feel like I can spot an equivalence to the travelling salesman problem or to the halting problem a mile away, but anything more subtle is beyond me.

Of course, in this situation, I’d probably just see if I could find a sufficiently large precalculation and just pretend :)

I don’t think that the uniqueness of fingerprints is in doubt, but their analysis and use might not be up to snuff. I’ve read numerous articles over the last couple of decades that call into question at least the statistical underpinnings of what it means to declare a match.

But law enforcement in general seems to be filled with pseudoscience, from profiling and interview techniques to body language and lie detection.

I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it’s coming from NASA, doesn’t make it astronomy.

Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.

Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.

Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I’m not sure it’s really a great fit there.

Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.

Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I’m registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.

On the grounds that a big and valuable chunk of territory that is currently being shared shows signs of being unilaterally fenced off. I’m not suggesting that Canada has a better claim, but it’s important for procedures to be followed.

Edit: I wanted to get my wording right, so I went back to the article:

The legality of all this is a bit hazy, Treadwell explains in a post for the Wilson Center. To make the definition official, the US has to submit data and reports to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, the US has not ratified UNCLOS due to complex political disagreements (the agreement has been ratified by 168 states and the European Union).

This leaves some uncertainty around how the proposition will be accepted under international law.

I hope Canada at least pretends to push back.

I’m more interested in the magical appearance of four states in “southeast” Canada than yet another solar eclipse.

Did someone forget to vet the AI’s output?

My first thought was “wait, people still think it’s psychosomatic?” Then I read the article and realized that they were not referring to people in general, but to actual doctors!

It never fails to amaze – and annoy! – me how often simple curiosity and wide-ranging reading leaves me better informed than many actual professionals. It’s almost like they got their education and training, then stopped engaging.

Anyway, rant over. I’m glad there are people out there taking things seriously and I hope you continue to meet with success in your treatment.

I used to get occasional work helping farm kids pick rocks. We don’t seem to have built any fences in Saskatchewan, preferring instead to just pile them up or bury them.

Never underestimate what happens when thousands of individual people do one thing over and over again, rock by rock, step by step, day in and day out, year after year. Whether it’s building fences, depleting resources, or putting waste into the environment, we always manage to more collectively than we can imagine as individuals.

I was not worried about banks at all. Not even a bit. It just seemed too much to hope for that they couldn’t get their collective heads around my 25-year mortgage. That mortgage meant that I had negative net worth, so I was actually hoping they’d screw up. Yes, I knew they had paper copies kicking around, but paper gets lost with frightening frequency.

I was a freelance programmer at the time. My main focus was on making sure that none of my contracts left me on the hook for anything Y2K related that wasn’t explicitly contracted for.

Assuming a 16-hour day for activity, that’s just over a bird a minute. Given the flocking behaviour of many species, that might mean occasional “rainfalls” of dead and injured birds.

No, that’s not what I was thinking, but that sounds like a decent idea. Maybe a better idea than just simple labels representing the facing sphere.