cowboysauce

Uranium isn't the issue. A long half-life means that it's only mildly radioactive. Prior to being irradiated in a reactor, fuel rods can be manually handled safely. The majority of radiation being emitted currently is coming from fission products like Sr-90 and Cs-137 that have half-lives of decades.

> I was kinda wondering where they got the idea from :)

Parts of the country have been using roundabouts in highway interchanges for years. Western Colorado has a number of them.

This one is close to 20 years old: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B037'37.8%22N+106%C2...

Another one that is basically five roundabouts in a row: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B038'12.9%22N+106%C2...

I know of at least two others along that same stretch of highway.

> However, it is going to be hard to leave the PNW because I love hiking and backpacking.

I'd argue that the desert southwest is a great place for hiking though you obviously have to plan around the extreme temperatures. But the mountain ranges tend to be significantly cooler and a viable option in the summer. The big downside, more for backpacking, is that you either have to: carry all your water, stash water ahead of time, or refill at springs that may be unreliable.

Sure, ski towns have always been dependent on tourism. And the 5000 sq ft mountainside mansions have always been unaffordable for most people living there. But the difference is that there used to be affordable housing for the people who live and work there full time. Short-term rentals have massively changed the financial calculus.

> “There are a lot of cities asking themselves this question,” says Goodman. “Are we a city anymore or are we just Disneyland?”

This really resonates with me. I grew up in a ski town in Colorado. My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park. Something like 80% of the houses in the area are empty for most of the year and large numbers of workers either live in their cars, are packed like sardines into employee housing, or commute long distances. Development is inevitable, but the decline really picked up after the arrival of short-term rentals. Consequently, I refuse to use services like AirBnB when I travel anywhere.

> I would expect that this would potentially draw the ire of Google

Chromebooks are pretty open. See official documentation at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/dev... which directs to a third party site dedicated to installing alternative OSs and firmware.

Roughly 40% of the United States is public land and there are national parks larger than some European contries. Sure, it's not freedom to roam, but you still have access to significantly more public land living in the United States than you would living in the UK.

I'm curious, where are you seeing this? At least four people are dead and hundreds had their lives ruined in the aftermath. I'm struggling to think of a crime with a similar number of victims that has been posted here and people have been sympathetic towards the perpetrators. There was that Hans Reiser message that was posted recently and I saw a good number of comments saying that he was an unrepentant psychopath who deserves to be in jail. And he "only" killed one person. I see people calling for reform and rehabilitation for things like drug possession, but never for crimes of this magnitude.

Would they even notice it though? Normal bolides of similar energy happen fairly frequently (see https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fireball-and-bolide-reports for an example). And even if they did, would they interpret it as a hostile act when similar events happen naturally without ill effect? It would mean the "attacker" posses the technology to accelerate materials to appreciable fractions of c while simultaneously not knowing that the impacts wouldn't do any damage to the target.

Should we similarly be afraid of making radio broadcasts lest our intended recipients interpret our beaming of energy as a hostile act? A somewhat similar concept is actually mentioned in the novel Blindsight. You could even go full Dark Forest and say that we're a threat simply by existing all the while brazenly advertising our presence through the oxygen in the atmosphere.

There is an electrical variant of the effect, it just hasn't been well tested experimentally.

Right, but pairs of particles aren't relevant. The effect occurs for any particle that interacts electromagnetically. And the magnetic field is the curl of its potential.

The article's description of the Aharonov–Bohm effect seems kinda misleading to me. It's not that particles are being affected by a field that's not there, it's that the particles are affected by the electromagnetic potential, which can be non-zero even though the field is zero (the two are related through some simple equations).

> So apparently the AI found some shortcut for doing the actual computational work. That is also surprising as weather is a chaotic system. Shortcuts should not exist.

Why do you say that shortcuts should not exist? Even very basic statements like "falling pressure and increasing humidity indicate a storm is coming" are generally valid. I've done a little bit of storm-chasing and I'm able to point out areas that are likely to experience severe thunderstorms based on a few values (CAPE, dew point, wind shear, etc). I'm sure forecast meteorologists have even better skills. Are those not shortcuts?

No? I think it's rude to be excessively loud so I don't, especially not at night. I don't see this as really any different than "Does no one here cut in line?".

I think Hereditary would be a great movie if the ending were completely different. I was never sure exactly what was real and I really enjoyed that. Then that ending pops up like it was spliced from something else. I'm not sure if "jumping the shark" or "showed the monster" fits better.

This isn't new. The US has been regularly doing these kinds of tests since the 90s and two took place last year. I'd be surprised if this was a specific response to Russia instead of something that's been planned for months.

>In general, why do individuals and companies appear (to an outsider) to have so much influence in the USA to 'press charges'?

They don't. Individuals and companies cannot bring charges against someone. They can report a crime (like Comcast did in this case) and then the government can determine if they want to prosecute. Someone saying they want to press charges is just signaling that they are willing to cooperate with the prosecution. Likewise saying that you wont press charges is just signalling that you won't cooperate with the persecution. In either case they don't actually have to listen to you.

>since a large company like Comcast could churn out hundreds of vaguely plausible but socially inconsequential claims of fraud

Filing a false police report is a crime. If Comcast actually testified in court then it would be perjury. They'd also likely be subject to lawsuits from everyone they falsely accused once this was all discovered.

I mean sure. Cars, for example, are significantly more dangerous than airliners and people crash all the time. But if alien craft are as safe as cars then that just leads back to my original point that airliners are better at traveling safely through our atmosphere than physics-defying alien craft.

So instead of thousands of craft flying daily over the US, there are potentially millions commuting past Earth? And those crashes still happen despite an abundance of help nearby?

I'm asking if alien craft are a safer method of transport than air liners. Alternatively, if we replaced air liners with these craft, would fewer people die? If they are safer then the sky should be flooded with them to result in 12 crashes so far. This doesn't seem to be the case so there must instead be a smaller number of more dangerous craft to result in 12 crashes. So either the sky is flooded with invisible alien craft or their craft are a more dangerous method of travel than our air liners.

Commercial airlines apparently experience crashes at a rate of 6 per 100,000,000 flights. I wasn't able to find a figure from the testimony as to how many craft are claimed to have been recovered. The best I could find was an anonymous quote from a Vox article of 12+. Applying the commercial airline stat to 12 crashes over 80 years results in almost 7,000 alien flights per day (just over the US). There are 25,000 flights per day (again in the US). A ratio of alien:commercial flights of 1:4 is really hard to buy. The alternative is that these alien craft are incredibly more advanced and yet somehow worse at flying than human aircraft. To play devil's advocate, maybe the government is intentionally shooting them down. But how? With what? Human knock-offs of their own weapons?

> Do you use functions?

Unless you're using Haskell or something similar, mathematical functions and what most programming languages call "functions" are very different and are better referred to as procedures. Mathematical functions don't have any concept of some basic constructs like variables (state in general), I/O, or even sequential computation. Pure functional languages have to use things like monads to model procedures.

> Humans are overwhelmingly social creatures by nature and virtually every study of happiness shows a correlation to healthy relationships in your life.

Do these studies actually show that there aren't people who, for lack of a better word, are non-responders? Imagine if 95% of people require relationships to be happy and 5% don't. I would expect most studies to show the correlation exists, but it doesn't mean that 5% doesn't exist. What kind of upper bound do these studies provide here?

> Once you reconnect with nature, your immediate instinct is to reconnect with others.

I have the complete opposite experience. I spend as much of my vacation time as possible hiking, camping, and backpacking alone. I go to places where the landscape is so beautiful that it makes me weep; where seeing the unusual flora makes me feel like I'm home; where the night sky is like diamond dust on black velvet. These places don't make me want to reconnect with others. They make me want to build a cabin and get away from everybody else.

I'm skeptical of this idea in general especially with examples of people like John Muir. If reconnecting with natures gives you the immediate instinct to reconnect with others then why do people like him have to be coaxed away from it?

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00901

Granted, I'm not very familiar with the math behind things like compression and I skimmed a few sections, but this seems to be a criticism of the authors' methods and not the general idea. They show that there are other ways to produce these quantifications of complexity that are better than what's in the original paper. But these also show that certain biological materials score substantially higher than the abiotic samples.

Some of the criticisms also seem to be nit-picking, mainly the mention of beer scoring very high on these measures, as if it's a fault. That just means it's a measure of how biotic something is, not necessarily if it's alive. Beer requires the interaction of at least three species (human, yeast, and wheat) so why shouldn't it score highly?

> You could get a false positive from a pre-biotic but molecularly complex planet, such as Earth in the 100 million years before the origin of the first self-replicating genetic-information-containing entity.

That would still be incredibly useful. 100 million years is only 2% of the Earth's age, for comparison, so it's very unlikely that any given planet would be in this state. Even if it were, it's hard to imagine biologists would balk at a chance to study a bona fide pre-biotic environment.

It varies throughout the country. But for me it was:

* Calculus I: limits, derivatives, integrals

* Calculus II: More integration techniques (substitution, by parts, table), infinite series and convergence, basic numerical methods

* Calculus III: multi-variable calculus (partial derivatives, multiple integrals), vector calculus (gradient, divergence, curl, surface and line integrals)

ODEs were a class you could take after Calc II.

> The same goes for mass, what physicists call mass can be voltage for instance.

You’re probably thinking of how a proton has a mass of 938 MeV/c^2. This is still a mass and not a voltage. 1 eV (electronvolt) is the amount of kinetic energy that an electron would have after being accelerated though an electric potential of one volt. By the mass-energy equivalence 1 eV is equivalent to a mass of ~1.783x10^-36 kg and a proton has a mass of ~1.673x10^−27 kg.

>and is mindlessly progressing along so effectively that despite all of our technological capability we can barely contain it.

In theory we already have the technology to eliminate HIV. People taking PrEP have a >99% reduced chance to catch HIV. The drugs used to treat HIV can reduce viral levels in HIV+ people to the point that it's impossible for them to transmit it.

>Who is the "we" who wants to keep "in sync" with the Earth's rotation to such high precision?

The military is a big one. ICBMs still use celestial navigation to determine their position and adjust their trajectory in flight.