Brain size is a really misleading metric unless you're just discussing mammals. Mammals have very highly innervated bodies and spend a massive pile of brain power on mere housekeeping.

Non-synapsid animals don't do this, it's synapsid only, and probably diagnostic of them. Without that massive brain being wasted on trivial menialities, other animals can do more with less. This is why bees can do good pattern recognition, crows can solve puzzles, crocodiles can count, and dragonflies can accurately intercept almost anything that flies.

Quit sowing discord, comrade, it's transparent. You FSB lot have been doing that for years now, it's old.

Please quote directly where I said anything about the Russian military, Igor.

They're a bunch of useless conscripts and Siberian prisoners sent to fertilise the fields of Ukraine, Igor.

This is the AIM-9X which uses an imaging infrared focal plane array and compatibility with JHMCS equipped helmets. They can lock on to balloons, as balloons would be reflecting solar IR and, besides, the sensor is an imaging sensor not a hotspot detector.

Even if it was an older AIM-9J or even older, with the passive IR sensor you're thinking of, saying "Yeah but they didn't use the right missile" isn't the endorsement of the air force you think it is!

Imagine being the guy who managed to miss a virtually stationary $50 balloon with an AIM-9X.

The Russians will be falling over themselves laughing.

What's the word I'm thinking of... you deliberately lie, mislead, conceal, or distract from the truth for personal gain... begins with "F" I'm sure of it...

If the market ever moves away from iPhone, Apple is fucked. At this point, Apple's product line (top to bottom, left side) is iPhone, iPhone accessories, iPhone development kit, big iPhone, and iPhone Cloud.

It's very difficult to overheat an LED in an enclosed fixture. Typically the smallest fixture you're going to find would be designed with a 20-40 watt incandescent in mind. That is a lot of LED power! An ungodly powerful domestic floodlight is around 60 watts of LED.

Small LEDs, the kind which would fit in a very low-power restrictive fixture, would be running at less than five watts.

1. Allowing the act of escape at all is negligence. Dr. Frankenstein cannot argue that he was negligent before he was negligent, it makes no sense. He should instead argue that a reasonable person could not have foreseen the consequences of the monster escaping, thereby placing agency onto the monster itself. If your cat escapes and somehow sets into motion a chain of events resulting in an old lady being hit by a bus, you are not liable for that. The monster, being an unknown quality, could not be predicted in advance and a reasonable person would not assume it would turn murderous.
2. The monster is deeply philosophical and intelligent. This gives it its own agency. Given it is an intelligent being, it is the one which should be on trial. It should argue diminished responsibility, given the abuse it suffered in captivity. Frankenstein would do well to argue the monster's intelligence and education means it is a legal person of its own accord.
3. Frankenstein was clearly in possession of his faculties. He could argue he was in a manic state of bipolar II, but his best chances are to argue the monster was intelligent enough to know right from wrong. He may have created the weapon, but he did not use it.

You see this in "culture warriors" the world over. They knowingly weaken their cult, as a weak people are a frightened people, are a controlled people, but never weaken themselves.

I can't wait for Apple to invent Hybrid Crossfire.

No it wouldn't.

The use of the aggressive JBIG2 setting was not default. You had to change it yourself on the MFD's interface, where there was a warning saying that this setting could cause character substitution errors.

The phosphate mining peaked in the 1980s, the nation was rich enough from the proceeds of phosphate exports that there were no personal taxes, and still there are none. The people blamed migrants for their problems and forced the government to deport them, which it did. The migrants, seeing no reason to stay and every reason to leave, including a hostile native populace, often left of their own accord. The warnings of labour shortages went unheeded. One right-wing publication proudly proclaimed that "It just means there are lots of jobs for our people". This then caused an economic crash, as the jobs which migrant labour was doing, weren't done. There was a population crash. The last holdouts, migrants from Tuvalu and Kiribati, numbered 1,500 and left in 2006.

Today, Nauru's ecology is decimated, most native seabirds are extinct, the forest they lived in all cleared. 90% of the population is unemployed, and of the 10% which are employed, 95% of them are employed by the government. Private enterprise doesn't really exist. Most of Nauru's income comes from international deals, such as hosting one of Australia's refugee prison camps. The government lacks the income to be able to carry out its functions, its national bank is insolvent and it is reliant wholly on handouts from the United Nations and Australia.

Another Brexit Benefit(tm). We're no longer squandering cash on advancement and development which could be better used to give tax breaks to bankers.

Nah, everyone had 60,000 CDs they needed to digitise at the time.

It wasn't remotely related to the completely coincidental rise of peer to peer file sharing, which happened at exactly the same time.

Yes, and it can't not happen.

We know two things about writing:

1. Almost all (and some would argue a strong "all") fictional writing is rehashing ideas we've already had in genres already defined. Some of our stock characters go back to the ancient Sumerians. We change some names and some locations, maybe the precise details, but all a modern author does is put flesh on existing bones to create a new story. A good story is primarily how well an author can do this derivation.
2. We have AI models which can rate stories. For movies, they're almost as good as human critics (and agree with them), while for the written word they're not as good as human critics - but still closely agree with them.

Given the two precepts above, we aren't that far from an AI model able to generate long-form stories. AIs work, like humans do, on their knowledge, which is primarily what it was taught is the state of the art. At the moment, a home-PC ready AI (e.g. Stable Diffusion) is able to store approximately the same volume of knowledge about a given field that a human can.

With a ratings capability, this closes the loop, and the AI knows how to get better.

AIs are also capable of innovation humans are not as they can spot derivations and inferences at a much greater distance and use a larger data set at any one time: Your working memory is limited, an AI's isn't. If you try to think of an AI model as "just a dumb machine following its programming", you're deceiving yourself.

For example, with enough data an AI could reconstruct a "most likely artist" based on commentary and influence. If Artist A began a movement, influencing Artist B, C, D, while being commented on in the works of Author A and B, the AI can analyse that and create works which would be along Artist A's style. AIs are better at doing this than humans are. Way better. This can also be run backwards, to find what future author would be influenced by any given authors... Which is how AIs work today (for the most part)... and how humans work.

Today's AI models get worse the more you study then, they have the general idea, but don't understand finer concepts, like the Wright Flyer or the Model T. There's no reason that tomorrow's AI would be so limited.

It was kept around because it was how banks counted coinage you deposited. You'd have little plastic money bags (remember those?) with 1p/2p 5p/10p "NO MIXED COIN" written on them, the person at the desk (or Post Office) would just weigh it to save having to count it all out!

I remember my dad explaining to me in the 1980s that ones and twos didn't count as mixed coin after I'd separated them all out into different bags!

Another interesting thing about British coins is that they're designed to be weighed.

Any specific value in any mix of 1p and 2p will weigh the same, as will mixes of 5p and 10p, 20p and 50p.

The old £1 was half the weight of the old (and briefly used) £2, but today's £1 and £2 don't pair their weights to their value anymore.

The current 1p is also the lowest value British coin which has ever circulated, it being around 70% of the value of the 1/2p when it was withdrawn in 1984.

You don't seem to understand what current (or atrial fibrillation, but that's another topic) or current capacity is.

Current is pushed through a resistance by a voltage, at the most basic level. The resistance of unbroken dry human skin is 100 kohms. This does vary, but 100 k is a decent ballpark when working out safety. I've just measured the resistance across my body with two probes to get 1.2 mega-ohms, but we'll use 100 k.

Using the very simple equation I = V/R we get:

I = 12/100000 = 0.00012 A = 0.12 mA. = 120 uA

So no, they are not capable of lethal current (and "it's the current not the volts" is only true for AC or where the voltage changes rapidly, it gets far more complicated than that, to the point where you can put five amps through someone without harm). Your "capable of lethal current" is four orders of magnitude out. That's somewhat like saying a pencil is the same size as the moon.

A "100Ah" rating tells you the duration for which a current can be maintained, it is a measure of capacity, not capability. In our case, it could maintain that 120 microamps across your arms for a few years. You'd probably get very bored. A capacity rating doesn't tell you anything about how much current you can pull at any one time.

While you're technically (the best kind of) right on the terminal connection order, 12V is far too low to be much of an electrocution risk to unbroken skin.

Nice neat job, well documented and waaaaay cleaner than the 10S 9P/18P ebike battery I'm making.

But oxygen had a lot of fun as it was K2O

Like another commenter said, just changing the culprit a little,

"If anyone recalls, America at first just tried outright denying it, true to the regimes nature. After unmistakable radar and radio evidence surfaced afterwards, they caved in and said yeah that sucks man, oh well. Which was a surprise, as they'll typically just vehemently deny what's right in front of them."

The Roman Empire had a bureaucracy. Indeed, Diocletian reformed the bureaucracy by founding administrations in Mediolanum (Milan), Nicomedia (Izmit), Trier (Treves) and Antioch. These bureaucracies streamlined the running of a large empire, together with Diocletian's partitioning of that empire, which cut the cost of operating the empire.

"Yap, she could pass anything on the road, 'sept a gas stop"

The word was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the American National Puzzler's League, a crossword society. Members of the NPL campaigned for it to be included in popular dictionaries.

Oxford defines it as "an artificial word". The condition is actually just called "silicosis", which is a type of pneumoconiosis.