Imperialism is different than taking the land outright.

Agreed. But a threat can be the beginning of a negotiation. Historically, the US wants the appearance of sovereignty to remain - even democracy if possible - just keep the right people in power.

That didn’t save South America.

Seems like we -may- have had it worked out already. The major problem is: how do we rein in the people who want to do it their way and become kings?

When I was a young teem, a teacher put a slice of apple in a sealed container with a few fruit-flies. A week later, there were hundreds of fruit-flies. In another week the bottom of the container was covered with the bodies of fruit-flies. Quick, unforgettable lesson.

Turn the playback speed down to 0.75 and you won’t need to drink more coffee first.

Posts like this show that not everyone understands what science is, though that doesn’t stop them. Sometimes just having one downvote isn’t enough.

Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained…

Not so much. The stark contrast is the result of a set of stupid premises.

our sensory systems gather data at ∼1⁢0^9 bits/s.

Even In the ‘machine model’ of the brain this article appears to espouse … vastly simplistic as it is … the brain processes 10^9 bits of vision, audio, and kinetic clues which usually results in a limited but highly appropriate response … often in much less than a second … to gymnastic moves or crossing a busy street, driving a jet, performing on a violin, whatever. That response quickly arrives as the result of a model built on long experience of actual reality.

The authors fail to come up with -any- source (credible or not) for that ridiculous 10 bits/s number. Their model is so simplistic it isn’t even worth engaging with.

The Romans managed to figure out that lead was bad for you. That didn’t stop it from being used for the next 1500 years. Including in gasoline. And in paint.

https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historical-perspective.html

Up until recently, a lot of US plumbers used lead pipes in homes to bring drinking water to the faucet. Even if home lead plumbing is replaced, the pipes leading to the water meter may be lead.

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/protect-your-tap-quick-check-lead-0

First of all, the meagre ‘search’ in ‘Manage Bookmarks’ does not tell you where a ‘found’ bookmark IS, which makes it next to useless. (If ONLY it would tell you that in the list you see when you click the URL.)

Over the years (on DESKTOP, I can only guess the horrors on tinyscreen) I’ve developed a system of folders with generic names that I use to sort BMs as I add them. My 3 top categories - the only ones visible in the ‘Toolbar’ are OFTEN (frequently visited sites grouped by folder), RESOURCES (folders at the top are most-visited) and LOCAL (most-visited on top). I also use the ‘New bookmark order’ extension, which adds new bookmarks to THE TOP of whatever folder I put them in (easy to open and drag-into folder topic).

Works, but it’s hardly ideal, that’s for sure. Don’t think anyone at Moz has addressed this design in years.)

Practically speaking, probably not.

After many years of using FFox, I just tried a Zen install on Linux. It did not turn out as well as I hoped.

I did not have FFoxesr installed in the way the OS would have installed it (though it was still in the user folder). This meant that Zen did/could not see my bookmarks, extensions or passwords … and the options it offered didn’t work out. (It wanted an HTML bookmarks file … I had them saved as JSON … and a ‘CSV’ (??) passwords file … wherever that is … and it found no extensions folder.) So, for starters, years of customizations had to be manually restored.

But, fair shake, I did manually re-install bookmarks AND a few extensions that had saved databases (e.g. UBO, NoScript, Block site). (It ignored the sub-folders in the JSON bookmarks folders, dumping all bookmarks into the top-levels.) And I had to re-create all the settings. (Most of which exist in the .mozilla folder on Linux … easy to find.)

I played for an hour with what I put there (without a menu bar … or a tab bar, all URIs are shoved together -by name- in a sidebar … I did figure out how to see a bookmark bar). I could discern no -truly useful- advantages to it. None. That was not offset by some pretty cosmetics. So even if you do get all of your customizations past the one-size-fits-all install, for long-time FF users I see no substantial advantages to the Zen browser.

No cavalry … and no calvary either … is going to ride over the hilltop and save us. We can only keep healthy, keep learning and keep doing the best we can for each other. Yeah, it matters today. And it’s always today.

THANKS for alerting me to another source of XKCD madness!

All pets were at one time wildlife. Killing one to save it… wow.

One thing that seems to be missing from most Zen promotion is that Firefox has a huge collection of add-on options/extentions. Hard to beat of you’re reliant on several of them. Keeps me from even trying it.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was ‘wrong’ by less than an order of magnitude … compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What’s the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

Sabine is a very competent physicist. That’s why her viewpoint - right or wrong - is well worth hearing. The fact that the Nobel went to a computer scientist instead says a lot about the state-of-the-art.

Sabine knows her shit. May she coax some physicists into getting back into experimenting… and away from Big Science funding.

Here’s a picture of it while it’s still in the shop. https://inspenet.com/en/noticias/nasa-tests-solar-sail-in-solar-in-orbit/

Haven’t heard about the NASA design yet, but JAXA’s 2010 IKAROS used "Eighty blocks of LCD panels are embedded in the sail, whose reflectance can be adjusted for attitude contro ".