>Vladimir Putin's forces are training on the Yars missile system

Training is a good idea.

It would be a shame if an accident happened in downtown Moscow because those troops didn't know what they were doing.

Even worse would be if the country Russia is at war with managed to sabotage or detonate one of those near the Kremlin.

So many people world wide would shed a tear for the one or two innocents who are more damaged by Putin's removal than by his continuing in power.

There is some really cool engineering tricks involving a thing called a caisson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)

Basically it is a box to keep water out while they build the footings.

Build the box, pump water out, work in the relative dry while hoping pumps keep working and the box doesn't leak.

Another tool they used was driving pylons or piles deep into the ground. These could be put in place from barges or other floating platforms.

Another kind of bridge is like a rope bridge.

Send a small rope across with a projectile (or a person travelling the distance by boat and/or on foot) Use this rope to pull a larger rope across. Keep on bringing rope/cable across the gap until you have enough strength / support to build a bridge.

There are different types of bridges for different kinds of challenges.

Hi!

We don't actually have any way of knowing.

It feels like you are making one of the many variations of the gamblers fallacy.

Here is what we would need to know to predict odds.

• Number of bingo cards you hold.
• Total number of bingo cards distributed.

Any special cases for winning aside from simply first to get 5 in a row (that might skew the odd to encourage people to buy/play more cards).

If you held 10 out of 1000 cards in play your likelihood of getting any win condition first would be 10/1000 or 1%.

If you continued to play these odds 100 times, you would likely win once.

Past actions do not change the odds of future games.

Since "the house" usually gets a part of the take, this means your likelihood of losing is bigger than your chance of winning.

It is usually a cost vs. function problem.

Humans are generalists (good at many tasks) but when you are designing items for profit it is cheaper to design things for specific purposes.

Think of it this way,

It is easier to design a separate washing machine and separate baseball bat than to design a device that can do the purposes of both.

Thinking of "humanoid robots" like Data in StarTrek we usually think of . .

• human form (bipedal balance is hard, human like dexterity is hard)
• human speech (ChatGPT runs on insanely expensive hardware)
• Can pass the Turing test for AGI.

All of these are not yet possible

> There are so many ways this material could be used for cool things.

can anyone suggest some specifics?

I don't think we will be looking at heavy machinery (prohibitive cost of getting it up the gravity well) or many current technologies. It is also unlikely to have a huge manpower component.

More likely we will establish a small research station on the moon, with a great deal of automated manufacture (think 3D printing) using lunar materials.

Some of the mining we do will be excavation for underground habitation purposes. This activity will probably where we learn more about manipulating and processing lunar materials.

SO far, "we don't know what we don't know".

We have so much to learn, and will really only begin to figure stuff out when we get there and begin a lunar habitation.

That was a wonderful thing to read here.

>Because you would need so little Helium-3 to produce so much energy with fusion – theoretically, 200 tonnes could provide a year’s worth of global energy needs – there’s a compelling business case for mining it on the moon and bringing it back to use on Earth. Each tonne would be worth billions of dollars.

>Space mining is indeed the stuff of science non-fiction. It is strategic and necessary, and whoever figures out how to do it first will be rewarded. With the proper supports and policies, that could be Canada, and Canadian companies. It is ours to win, a generational opportunity for Canada and its citizens that would benefit life all around our planet.

If we get to the place of He3 fusion as commercially viable, it would be great to see Lunar mining become viable.

> would be a gorram miracle

when do we get a new season of Firefly

the ultimate solar panels will be when we get real efficiency up, and cost down.

I don't know what tech it will be, but we have a long way to go still.

This from world economic forum in 2019 - Here’s how we can use agriculture to fight climate change suggests a starting place for reading.

Another large scale kind of project we have data for is when we have made things like dams for power or flood control. The lakes created have big effects on climate.

This resource - takes the position that hydro dams are to be avoided (which I disagree with) but also raises questions that every project should consider. Someone at National Geographic also has the opinion that dams are bad but again it seems to me that dams give us another lever to adjust to reduce problems like flooding / agricultural water use / drought.

I want to take another approach here.

There are some changes we can make to geography that are cost effective.

Forestry and agriculture changes can make effective changes to microclimate.

If we plant trees alongside a river in an area that was formerly cropland along the river, we MAY reduce evaporation of the river water by giving it shade.

If we plant crops known for stabalizing soil, we may be able to reduce desertification in some instances.

The trick is to tailor your solution to fit your problem.

I live in an area where dykes were build to change tidal floodplains into agricultural areas. I'm sure it changed the microclimate over the last 300 years.

• The number of places where this can be helpful is low.

• Many places people want to change climate there is no cost effective solution.

• So many unintended consequences when you are changing places that have developed over thousands of years regarding ecology and plant and animal species. Do you really want to cause species to go extinct?

• cost effectiveness. - there are less expensive ways to approace the problem.

The study here is interesting, but not conclusive. - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31001155/

We tested this hypothesis in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment.

Specifically, we administered 1,000 mg acetaminophen or a placebo and measured effects on different measures of positive empathy while participants read scenarios about the uplifting experiences of other people.

Results showed that acetaminophen reduced personal pleasure and other-directed empathic feelings in response to these scenarios.

In contrast, effects on perceived positivity of the described experiences or perceived pleasure in scenario protagonists were not significant.

These findings suggest that (1) acetaminophen reduces affective reactivity to other people's positive experiences and (2) the experience of physical pain and positive empathy may have a more similar neurochemical basis than previously assumed.

There is a difference between being able to decrypt communication, and being able to disrupt communication.

the bar for success is so high.

The amount of R&D required is huge.

Just the secure communication encryption will be a nightmare.

Wikipedia has an interesting List of countries by past life expectancy that has data from 1950 to 2015 in five-year periods.

In the most recent they have (2010 to 2015) the list looks like this

• Hong Kong, Macau and Japan at 83 years
• Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Singapore, Australia, Iceland, at 82 years
• Israel, France, Sweden, Canada, Norway, and more at 81 years.

USA is surprisingly low (in 43rd place) at 78 years.

Now in 2021 USA is at 76 years, the lowest since 1996.

In terms of ethnicity and culture, USA and Canada are probably most alike.

Back in 1950-1955 the data had Canada and USA close in ranking at #11 and #13 respectively. Their life expectancy was similar at 69.05 and 68.71.

This list of 10 leading causes of death from the CDC shows an increase in the top 5 causes of death (heart, cancer, covid, injuries, stroke)

interesting data.

When these guys compromise hospitals, they need to be extradited and charged with attempted murder.

I would love to see them extradited it Iran or China or some other country that has "rapid justice"

If you want to be the leader in a new field, you have to actually lead. This is why it is difficult to do this. It hasn't actually been done before and there is no one to copy.

Here is some of what you need for a start:

• A decent battery that can work in the field with long battery life and low weight / danger / cumbersomeness.

• A decent headset that allows good situational awareness and field of view when off, and not too intrusive when on.

• Something that can be worn with a traditional helmet

• something that does not block hearing (but possibly does noise cancellation in noisy environments to improve communication)

• We hope it would communicate with not yet invented hardware (to give ammo counts like in a FPS game)

• we hope it will scan for 360 degree IR and 360 degree visible.

• we hope it would scan for RF signals like friendly communication AND to give directional info about unfriendly RF sources.

• we hope it can network with other field devices to share visual and other tactical data.

These are just basics that we might want, and we want it now, and we want it to be idiot proof. Then we want it in a package that is no more cumbersome than current communication tools.

The bar is really high.

It will take a lot of R&D to get there.

so AI is about like a high schooler at figuring what to write, but with a more expansive library of sources to cite / plagiarize.

Hi!

There are lots of issues.

It depends on what specific sweetener you are referring to, and what you mean by "bad for us" or "contribute to obesity"

• As far as bad for us - sucralose can be a trigger for migraines

The paper Body & brain: No-cal sodas can trick the brain: Sugar-free sweeteners may contribute to obesity risk has lots of details. I'll try to summarize

>saccharin and other sugar-free sweeteners — key weapons in the war on obesity — may paradoxically foster overeating.

This was not a big data study, only 24 subjects.

>One strong link to higher diet soda consumption was reduced activation of the caudate head, an area associated with the food motivation and reward system. Green and Murphy note that decreased activation of this brain region has also been linked to higher risk of obesity.

It finds a link (but not proven causality) that the area of the brain lit up (fMRI studies) in response to diet soda was the same area that is associated with obesity.

in earlier studies

> Swithers’ group showed that rats that always received a saccha- rin-sweetened yogurt learned to modu- late their food intake to account for the sweetener’s failure to deliver calories. But rats that alternately got saccharin- and sugar-sweetened yogurts got fat.

If you are curious about the research, Bisphenol-A, found in BPA plastics has been linked to obesity. Childhood exposure causes people to want more sweet foods.

wives and moms are protesting?

Send them to the front and the protest will be over.

> EU will lead the way in de-worming internet infrastructure with help from the US gov or not.

I was with you until this.

Greed is not a national problem, but a human problem

I'm sure all the legal actions against google and apple and microsoft will make these tech giants so happy to work with the EU for a price.

great book The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged book here.

In the English speaking world (my world) I see the UK as possibly the most class conscious.

As a Canadian from the middle class it is easy to see that we have more class mobility than my friends from USA or UK.

Australia may also have a higher class mobility.

It is not rocket science that people with all the advantages of education and money and family connections might have a social and economic boost that shows up in terms of wealth.