rladd

The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...).

Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.

I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.

What happens if two elderly people have to go up or down in a row? This seems to rely on one person alternately going up and then down.

Your sentence rendering is very impressive and lifelike. Great job!

One suggestion: pause a bit more after the end of paragraphs, particularly after long paragraphs. It can help comprehension.

It changed the meaning of a paragraph I tested it with.

What are you using for your internal wiki?

Toyota Prius and Prius Prime also charge their batteries during braking, but use the brake pedal to decellerate.

This seems safer to me and also easier to control: you press the brake and it brakes. If it can regen, it regens, if not, it uses the disks. If you hit the brakes hard and the regen won't be enough to slow you down, it will use disk to the extent it needs to (or just switch to disk entirely).

Coasting is also good: no reason to regen if what you really want to do is coast, and no reason to have to keep your foot on the accelerator in that case either.

Prius do regen slightly in coasting mode, but it's not very noticeable.

Me too. I want to see last year very often, last month not so much.

If this is now their typical performance, they've come a long long way in the last 6 months.

I was stuck behind Cruise cars twice in the same week that went 2/3 of the way into an intersection and stopped until the light turned red and sat there until I honked the horn and, presumably, the safety driver took over.

Not "dental floss" but specifically floss which contained PFASs. Other culprits were Teflon cookware and cardboard food packaging.

The dental floss results are hidden in the Supplementary Information document linked in the original Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-018-0109-y#MOESM1

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs413...

These products contained fluorine, a marker for PFASs, as determined by particle-induced γ-ray emission (PIGE) spectroscopy:

Colgate Total Dental Floss Mint

CVS Health SuperSlip Ease Between Waxed2

Oral-B Glide Pro-Health Mint

Oral-B Glide Pro-Health Original

Crest Glide Deep Clean Cool Mint Floss3

Signature Care Mint Waxed Comfort Floss2

These products were found not to contain any fluorine:

CVS Unwaxed

Desert Essence Tea Tree Oil Dental Tape

EcoDent Gentle Floss Premium Dental Floss with Essential Oils Mint Vegan Waxed

Johnson & Johnson Listerine Cool Mint Mint Floss

Johnson & Johnson Reach Clean Paste Icy Mint Woven Floss

Johnson & Johnson Reach Mint Waxed

Reach Mint Waxed

Reach Waxed Unflavored

Oral-B Complete Deep Clean Ultra Mint

Oral-B Satin Floss Mint

Rite-Aid Premium Waxed Mint Floss2

Tom's of Maine Naturally Waxed Antiplaque Flat Floss

Curtis Deutsch, a UW associate professor of oceanography and an author of the research, said if society continues to pump greenhouse gases at our current rate, “we have no reason to think it wouldn’t cause a similar type of extinction.”

Or maybe the majority of their advertising is local, so it makes sense to block non-local people if supporting them is an added expense and produces no additional revenue.

The fear of contracting something from equipment is one reason why I go to an eye doctor who uses contactless air-puff glaucoma diagnostic machines rather than the older style which touches the eye.

In my last several visits, nothing has touched my eye at all.

Actually, all examples of consciousness can be explained as if we're all automatons. There's nothing we do which isn't produced (so far as we know) by physical (and therefore mechanistic) functions of the brain and body.

"Consciousness" is something that we experience, but it's not required to explain anything at all that's observed.

How about iOS, particularly for X series phones which have the "bionic" ML co-processor with installable models?

Starts at 17:51

For many years, my stock answer to anyone who says that computers are "fast enough" or "more powerful than most people need" is that I will only be satisfied when I can create photorealistic movies by talking to my machine.

The session could go something like this:

Create a scene: London docks, around 1919, mid-afternoon. There are a few ships being offloaded, crates stacked around, trucks and horse carts transporting freight.

<scene is created based on historical photos, ML readings of period books, etc.>

OK make it grimer, more soot on everything. And make the season wintertime. Add more stevedores. Ship in the foreground is red, weathered, and flying a German flag.

<changes are made to the scene>

OK pull back and add a pub on the right side of the screen. Let's make it dusk. Sun is setting. Get some good light spill when the door of the pub is opened.

<scene updates>

Let's work on the pub's sign. It's called the Red Swan. Make a sign carved in the shape of a swan, paint it red. Smaller, and let the wood show through where some of the paint is weathered away. Hang it over the door.

<scene updates>

etc.

This should all become possible eventually, and probably a lot sooner than many people think.

If one watches the actual lecture, Kay says that his real title was altered by an "NIH low pass filter".

The actual title was "Is it too late to create a healthy future?"

It appears he was fired for saying basically:

"We shouldn't have any shows that use the term 'retarded' because it can be as painful for a developmentally disabled person to hear as the word 'nigger' is for a black person to hear"

As reported he used the "n-word" as an example of something really hurtful that shouldn't be said. Is that really worth a firing? Is it really wrong at all? What am I missing?

This NASA publication shows the plans in much more detail.

Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA, SP-413 https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Conte...

The space shuttle was only the first step in a very ambitious program that culminated with a spinning cylindrical space community housing 10,000 people and growing its own food.

There are detailed discussions about construction (using moon rocks), shielding, what plants and animals to use for farming, etc. etc.

Unless I'm missing it, his argument about why MWI is untenable in terms of physics is:

- If the universe splits with each measurement (or interaction), then every possible outcome does occur

- Therefore nothing could be predicted based on probabilities, and that proves MWI is wrong

This seems to have a few logical errors:

Just because everything that can happen does, in MWI, happen in at least one universe, that doesn't mean that the probability of each outcome is identical.

Probabilities still apply: higher probability outcomes mean that one is more likely to find one's self in a universe in which that outcome takes place.

In this way of describing things, it's still a very low (but non-zero!) probability that all the air in your room will move to the corner, leaving you to suffocate in a vacuum. But the way we state it would be, "it's a very low probability that you will find yourself in one of the universes in which this happens".

Unfortunately there isn't.

That looks streamlined. I thought the idea of the hyperloop was that it was low vacuum and the front of it was a giant fan to move the remaining air from front to back of the capsule to further reduce friction. Or was that only in the early design and it's been abandoned?

Ancestry has the better chip at the moment: https://snpedia.com/index.php/Testing

From a quick skim through their FAQ it wasn't clear that they are even encrypting the data on their servers, and I didn't notice any claim about users controlling access to their private information.

Here's one:

4 hours by car from San Francisco. It says you can't reach South Lake Tahoe, but Google Maps (and my experience) show that it's usually about 3 1/2 hours.

https://oalley.net/map/bd7

Even genuine goods sold by Amazon can be problematic. I bought a consumer-grade router sold by Amazon, and what arrived was an obsolete version that had not been produced for 4 years.

They did accept it back though.

Back in the day (around 1995) I used to go to parties that Larry Harvey and Marion (who called herself Maid Marion at the time) used to also go to.

I was told that the original burning man was an effigy of Larry's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend.

At the time you could even find this story online in a number of places. Mysteriously, it seems to have been purged from the web. But I still believe it to be true, based on who told me and when.