What it says to people is basically that they have no responsibility and shouldn’t make any change.
There's always been a sort of false dichotomy about this. On the one hand there's this idea that climate change can be solved by individual consumer choices and personal responsibility. On the other there's the idea that the average person can continue on with their life exactly as before if we just fix things "behind the scenes".
IMO the reality is that climate change mitigation requires systemic top-down change, but that change is going to affect people's lives. In some ways for the better and some ways for the worse. The kind of "individual choices" we need people to make is to choose not to throw a hissy fit when their local government removes a car lane.
There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.
And like a lot of ancient mythology it can be really hard to relate to, given the vastly different cultural context that produced the text. That can be kinda entertaining in it's own way, but mostly it just means that you're not really going to understand the character motivations or themes of a story. Also sometimes the protagonist will do something horrifically immoral by today's standards without the text treating it as notable at all.
IMO all of the actually interesting parts (like Genesis) are all really short and you probably know them already from cultural osmosis.
Anyone interested in this concept should take a look at plan9. Everything is even more of a file there.
Taking a screenshot, for example, can be done with:
cat /dev/screen | topng > screenshot.png
That combined with the way that parent processes can alter their children's view of the filesystem namespace allows for extremely elegant abstractions. For example, every program just tries to write directly to screen or audio, but the desktop environment redirects their writes to the relevant servers. Which means that, in the absence of those servers, those same programs can run just fine and don't care whether they're being multiplexed or not. That also means that the plan9 userspace can be nested inside itself just using the normal mechanisms of how the OS works (that is, without a special tool like Docker).
In your opinion is there anything useful we can do with that part of the radio spectrum as those stations switch off, or are those frequencies going to be silent in the future? Will they be turned over to hobbyists maybe? (or would the power requirements be too high at those frequencies?)
Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.
I don't know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I've wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.
I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.
Chemicals like sodium lauryl sulfate and other fatty acids with organosulfate head groups, which are much more powerful surfactants than the fatty acid sodium salts you get by reacting lye with a fat (like vegetable oil). "Traditional" soaps like that also contain glycerol (formed when the lye cleaves the glycerol backbone off of a triglyceride), which acts as a humectant moisturizer.
Technically, at least in the US, chemicals like SLS aren't legally classified as soap, and must be called a detergent. Which is why so many products are called things like "body wash" and "body bar", and you wont find the word "soap" on their packaging.
My mom has trust issues with computing so deep she doesn’t even do any fucking software update.
IMO software vendors have created this attitude. Don't get me wrong, in an ideal world users would be much more technically literate, but given the behavior of the software industry this really should be the expected outcome.
Its similar to how popups on the web trained users to instantly close dialog boxes without reading them. Its not the fault of the individual person writing the CRUD app that uses a dialog box, but it is the fault of the system that collectively produced all of the things you see on the computer's screen.
Alchemists (correctly) observed that everything in the world was subject to disorder and decay as time progressed, but noted that gold seemed to be immune to this effect (since it is highly resistant to oxidation). Add into that the belief system that they were working with:
That everything in the world exists on a chain of being from the most corrupt at the bottom to the most noble on top (with god being most high).
That everything is really the same thing, and through physical processes changes its form, including up and down the chain.
And they belived that if they could figure out how to transmute a lesser metal into a more noble one then they could probably move other things up the chain of being as well. Which is why the Philospher's Stone was supposed to make people unaging and immortal, and cure all disease, in addition to transmuting lesser metals into gold. Alchemists like John of Rupescissa probably belived that creating the Stone would also bring the world closer to the divine in some way, and it was god's wish for mortals to do this.
How geologists reproduce