It’s a combination of factors. Language/cultural barriers are a big one. What is obviously sarcasm in your area of the world won’t necessarily make sense in another. Add in English as a second language, and it’s a crap shoot, even with an obvious joke.

The lack of tonal queues is also a problem. We communicate a lot via voice tone and body language. Without them, what is obvious to you can be read completely differently.

The last is the elephant in the room. Bigots dog whistling. I’ve seen too many “obviously sarcastic” jokes that are very much not sarcastic in a different group. When those people get called out, they fall back on “it’s just a joke”, the armour of arseholes the world over. By adding the /s preemptively, you rob them of cover to spread hate. It’s a variant of the nazi bar problem.

I was more referring to how they deal with the cream. They fully skim it out, then mix it back in to get the various types of milk. That processing is why you don’t need to shake supermarket milk to mix the cream back in before use. The oil droplets are FAR smaller, and it changes the mouth feel of the milt at the very least.

I’ve no proof, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t bother mixing the best parts of the cream back in. At least not in the ratios that came out originally.

They also mess with the milk in additional ways. I didn’t realise how bad it had gotten until I started getting milk delivered from a local dairy. It’s still pasteurised, but closer to natural. I dread to think how bad it must be for you yanks.

I can easily see someone trying “raw” milk and discovering it tastes amazing by comparison. The conclusion that raw is better is wrong, but understandable. The middle ground is where the sweet spot is, safe, but as natural tasting as it can reasonably be.

It gets extra fun if part tries to break away and elect a new spokesperson.

They also happen to be a (retired) nurse themselves. It’s uncommon, but not that uncommon. Most nurses would have seen it before. Its only for 5-10 seconds after waking up. Coming from a relatively skinny woman is quite a bit more unexpected. She also has unusually good aim.

I know someone who has had quite a few general anesthetics. They’ve taken to warning the nurses involved that they are a puncher. Several have not taken it seriously and ended up with some impressive bruises (including black eyes).

My wife has used “I need a man’s strength” before. I’ve also used “I think this needs a woman’s touch” after I’ve screwed something delicate up a few times.

I saw a talk from someone working in the field a few years back. The “fusion is only 10 years away” had a small proviso “if fully funded”. The actual funding was barely enough to keep the lights on.

That has now changed. It’s gotten close enough that private investment has decided it’s worth investing in. I believe the only really big problem left is the wall material. The neutron flux transmutes the elements making it up. This makes it difficult to maintain a hard vacuum, since the wall can start leaking and/or outgassing, forcing a shutdown to replace them. On a minor plus side, if you dope the walls with mercury, it transmutes to gold, in commercially viable amounts!

Fusion has several advantages over fission. The biggest is the impossibility of a meltdown. The very difficulty in balancing the reactor means that it shuts down fast and mostly clean. This would let them be placed far closer to population centers. They could provide a base load supply, in the way nuclear could/should have.

The bacteria don’t need to be identical.

Think of it like rolling a dice. Any given roll can only have a single number. However patterns can be detected by combining multiple rolls. E.g. a biased dice.

As for larger things. It’s possible, but the speed required goes up with mass, and not linearly. In theory a person could go through. They would be moving a significant fraction of the speed of light however. Catching them alive on the other side would be… difficult.

Only 1 bacteria ever arrives. It’s the probability wave that interferes with itself.

With the Young’s double slit experiment, if you fire a single photon, you get a single photon arriving. It looks just like how a cannon ball flies. It’s only when you let hundreds go (either collectively or individually) that the interference pattern appears.

The end pattern is the probability that the photon (or bacteria) arrives at any given point on the receiver screen.

Anything moving has an associated wavelength. If that wavelength is long enough, you can do the young’s double slip experiment on it.

It was a few years ago, so the details are hazy. A scientific team accelerated a particularly small and sturdy bacteria fast enough that their speed produced a viable wavelength. They then sent the stream through 2 slits. They then captured the bacteria in aerogel (I think) to slow them back down.

Most didn’t survive, but some both survived, and ended up somewhere they couldn’t without interfering with themselves. They successfully reproduced afterwards. The debris also followed the classic ripple pattern of the experiment.

Basically, there is nothing special about “life” when it comes to quantum mechanical effects, other than it’s on the big side.

They have also experimentally tested an equivalent experiment with bacteria. They survived a trip through the double slit experiment.

There doesn’t seem to be an issue with it, other than it’s difficult and impractical.

It’s not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.

If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that’s fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that’s fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won’t get the run away effect that happens currently.

A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.

It’s also worth noting that I’m also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.

Just an FYI, that goes all the way down the power chain. We tend to have less (instinctive) empathy for people below us. It’s not we actively want to do them harm, but that we just don’t think about them at all.

E.g. when did you last take proactive action to help the exploited workers harvesting chocolate? You likely never even thought about them.

The problem is that people like musk look down on us the same way. We get smashed by their indifference.

The best long term solution is a tax system aimed at “regression to the mean”. I.e. exceptional people can get rich. However rich, “average” people will regress back towards average income and savings. Conversely, an averagely capable poor person should easily climb back up to average income levels.

Basically change the graph from a hump to a bathtub shape.

I’ll give it a try!

I’ve wanted to try moving my navigation away from Google for a while now. Hopefully I can kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

How do you get it to work with maps? I can never seem to get it to appear as an option to select.

(I’ve wanted glados as my phone’s voice for years now)

Silicon’s conditions would make it difficult. It has far less inorganic precursor molecules to work from. It might work under cryogenic conditions, but that has a bunch of other problems.

The titanium one is new to me, and potentially interesting. My concern would be an abiogenic pathway. It might be able to form interesting molecules for life, but if they don’t appear naturally, then getting life started gets massively more difficult.

There’s also a hell of a lot of options with carbon based life. Earth life is VERY locked into a few variants with our base biochemistry. E.g. there’s no reason for particular RNA sequences to match particular Protein peptides. Yet it’s basically a universal thing. Even chirality is fixed, for no particular reason other than mixing causes issues.

I could potentially see a dual based life system working, effectively a more advanced version of how some creatures use metals to make shells etc, or how horns and hair grow. It could also provide a viable (though extremely convoluted) bootstrap process for titanium life, or something more exotic. Forcing life to change its core functionality however is apparently quite difficult, since no life on earth seems to have done so and survived to be detected. Rocky, in Project Hail Mary, would fall into this group (a carbon life core basically piloting a stone and metal mech).

What combinations are you thinking of?

Life on earth is based around Carbon chains. Carbon’s 4 bonds allows for a low of complex structures that would be hard/impossible for less bonds.

The only other viable option I know of is silicon. Unfortunately its chain equivalent has an extra reaction pathway with water. It would degrade rapidly if exposed to water, which is very common at the energies it would work at.

I’d be curious to look up any other viable options.

The uncanny valley is FAR stronger with moving things Vs inanimate ones. It’s likely modified from a revulsion of dead things, but seems to be distinct now.

Most diseases don’t show strongly enough to trigger it, most of the time. Historically, the exception has been leprosy. I’m honestly curious if it’s evolved to keep us clear of leppers specifically or not.

There are 2 parts at work. The focus reflex and the blink reflex. The window between them is the dangerous part. If the pulse is fast enough ( a few ms) then the eye can’t focus, and it’s fairly safe (unless you were already focused on the emitter). If the pulse is low enough power then the blink reflex kicks in and protects your eye.

Hitting a mosquito is a hard task, tracking one is even harder. It’s better to use an ultra short pulse, with a bit more power. You can also shift the frequency. If it’s an infrared laser then the eye won’t lock onto it, and will struggle to focus it dangerously.