Oh that’s just great. Two similar place names like that, and they also happen to be relatively close to each other. I can see how that could cause some confusion.

Similarly, Kuhmo and Kuhmoinen (both in Finland) are about 446 km apart, but you can easily avoid the confusion as long as you know roughly which part of the country you’re talking about.

There’s also Helsingborg (town in Sweden) and Helsinfors (swedish name for the capital of Finland). What could go wrong.

OMG, that makes it so much worse. If someone tells you about a specific place, and you want to look it up later, you have absolutely zero chance of ever spelling it correctly. Good luck typing lester or woster in Wikipedia or Maps.

I can only think if Toron(t)o. Never really thought about other towns doing the same thing.

Lithosphere and mantle. Got it. 👍

relevant xkcd

Unicycles are clearly more dangerous than skis.

That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.

Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?

Meh, probably not.

Yep. That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass the filter unharmed. In our case, the discovery of fossil fuels and nuclear weapons may be those kinds of stages.

Imagine what happens if we pass this filter and become an intergalactic species. Maybe one day we’ll start tinkering with technology capable of destroying a star, galaxy or the entire universe. If we are smart enough to squeeze energy out of the very fabric of space, we might also be dumb enough to cause the entire universe to collapse or something like that.

It’s a proposed solution to the fermi paradox. The idea is that we don’t see aliens out there in the stars, because they all nuked themselves to oblivion at some stage. Maybe they never reached the stars, before they destroyed their home planet. Maybe they blew up their own star and didn’t reach another one in time. Maybe their entire galaxy got sucked into a home-made black hole.

Next try to calculate what it would actually mean to make that much water follow a path like that. My guess is, it’s going to get very spicy.

Having seen enough exceptions in biology, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found a multicellular bacterial species that violates everything we know about bacteria. Biology is completely wild, and it’s really hard to come up with a rule or a category that always works and nobody has any problems with it.

At school, I thought our understanding of chemistry was really good. Years later, I realized that complicated solutions aren’t covered by any of the equations we have. You’re can do fancy calculations, but you’re always stuck with simple solutions and standard conditions. In real life, you have to deal with super messy non-standard stuff all the time.

Top scientists end up developing semi-empirical models, or even particle simulations, and that’s the best we can do right now. Nobody fully trusts those predictions, so we’re still going to need lab experiments before making any big decisions.

The good news is that there’s still so much to discover.

If you’re in a city, bikes and public transportation are the answer. Rural areas are stuck with cars though. America seems to be a bit of an exception to this rule, because lots of things would need to change before any of this could potentially happen.

That’s just the media doing its thing. Information content is a byproduct of making money. Actually, educating the public isn’t strictly necessary, because you can also manipulate emotions to attract attention and clicks.

That’s true. If something doesn’t directly make money, it can still exist because of taxes or another arrangement like that.

So, the key is to run your business for loss. Wait, that’s called a charity, not a business. How is this thing supposed to work?

In the early days of laser development, it was seen as a solution seeking a problem. A few decades later, it actually turned out to be really handy, but it would have been tough to sell this idea to anyone before that. Imagine how hard it is to find funding for research that solves a problem that doesn’t exist.

What about the table of nuclides? IMO that’s the best way to list elements in a logically consistent manner. The trouble is, nature is a messy kraken that just won’t fit neatly into a shoe box. You can try to squeeze it in, but the lid won’t close because there are always a few tentacles sticking out.

Sounds to me that Meta defines privacy in a very particular way. You’re still going to give all of your data to Meta, but anything outside this transaction is in the realm of privacy where you can have rights and settings.

I recall watching a defcon speech given by someone who used to make malware. He opened the speech by apologizing and saying that he knows that he will burn in hell.