One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”

This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!

Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).

Wasn’t he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.

It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.

The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.

The soul of the recently deceased can be contained using high voltages. Care should, however, be taken with grounding, to avoid accidental soul transfer.

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren’t actually that bad.

The problem is, we can’t detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won’t recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.

“You (complete) pillock!” is an often used insult for someone who’s just done something idiotic or stupid.

I can definitely see dicksplash being used as an insult down the pub.

Fuckletoes is in a weird dead zone. It’s far too poncey for working class use, but far too crass for the toffs.

The rest I’ve heard used before.

Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.

A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn’t just luck out with the moon’s large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.

I don’t think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to “specialised generalists” would be a major hurdle.

Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.

And that’s why it’s currently a problem. There’s not enough buyers, and not enough capability to switch supply in and out.

Without the price incentives to build large scale storage, it hasn’t been done. The problem is that there is a delay between needing the storage, and it actually being built at scale.

All the fun, none of the long term responsibilities!

Interestingly, light can’t be frozen, it’s speed is constant for all observers. Instead it gets redshifted. The end result is effectively the same, since it ends up out of the visible spectrum.

Grids need to be carefully balanced. If the cost is approaching, or lower than 0 then that means the grid is actually in a critical state. A lot of generators cannot be switched off (or at least not quickly). If more power goes into the grid than is used, then it can destabilise the whole grid and cause a blackout.

The solution to the problem is actually 2 fold. We need more sinks, and a smarter grid.

More sinks is mostly in the form of storage. They buy power when it’s cheap, and sell it when the cost spikes. It also extends to other heavy uses. Traditionally, aluminium smelting helps a lot with this. It uses huge amounts of electricity, and and switch on and off rapidly.

We also need a smarter grid. We need homes that know what the grid needs. E.g. electric cars than can actually as local buffers, or air conditioning that times it’s draw to help balance the grid.

I’m a parent, and we made the conscious decision to become parents. That said, I can fully understand people who don’t want to have that responsibility. It can be exhausting and thankless, changing almost everything with your life, hobbies and habits.

On the other side of the coin, the depth of love you feel as a parent is impossible to describe. With that comes a set of incredible feelings, watching your children experience, learn and grow.

Basically, parenthood is almost completely thankless, but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

The key point is that LLMs don’t process information, as we see it. The knowledge they have is predigested, and embedded into the text they were trained on.

Don’t get me wrong, they are a big step towards a true AI, but they cannot do some things that seem fundamental to intelligence. The best analogy is that they are a lobotomized speech centre. They can put on a veneer of being intelligent and self aware, but it’s a veneer.

I personally suspect they will be a critical component to a future AI, but are a dead end path on their own.

Caucasian is the closest to “white”, and even that is fairly arbitrary.

In practice, it’s in group Vs out group behaviour. If you’re different, someone will take offence to that. The line of difference varies, but the effect is often the same.

Interestingly, “the left” could well be described as an in-group of out-groups. Those who are pushed out, in 1 way or another, gathered together for mutual support. Plus those who empathize with that position.

I have a relative who has an unfortunate condition that causes internal bleeding. They’ve had enough blood transfusions that their antibodies are completely haywire.

Multiple times, doctors have not listened to their protests, and given them O-. They turn an impressive shade of yellow (among other, more serious, issues).

Last I heard, there were 2 compatible donors known, 1 in a different country. Thankfully, you can store blood longer term. It’s just not cost efficient to do in bulk. They have their own little stockpile of blood at their local hospital (mostly self donated).

That method is still mostly recommended, though mostly for younger children/babies. The Heimlich maneuver is difficult to perform on a small body. You either over squeeze, and cause harm, or are too tentative, and so not helping.

With babies, you hold them lying on your forearm, facing downwards, and slap (open handed) hard. I’ve only seen it used once, but it worked perfectly then.