"Rich" is a relative term here. School teachers aren't going to retire onto their yacht and sail about the world at the age of 50, but they also have a reasonable income and a guaranteed job so long as they don't actually molest the students. Compared to the Times Rich List, they're poor. Compared to half the kids they teach -- particularly the ones this sort of measure is aimed at -- they're rich.

Which is why anyone even suggesting anything besides the wet market theory was ridiculed, we were told to clean all surfaces touched by someone with covid within 72 hours, told that masks did no good etc etc etc, right?

The numbers here are somewhat misleading because solar has such a low capacity factor. 50GW capacity probably equates to something like 10GW of average power output (ie about 10GWYr of output across a year - somewhere around five hours of peak output per day) though calculating the exact figure would require detailed knowledge of where it was all installed.

The problem is with slow chargers, which often plug into a standard 240V outlet. I charge my car using one. But I also have my whole system on RCDs (AFAICT this is the European name for what's being required?) and don't have a problem.

ABC paid $15 million in defamation damages for calling him a rapist but, hey, whatever.

Where has the author of this summary been for the last year? It's like Kamala Harris just ... never happened.

He also ... um ... didn't defeat Joe Biden, who pulled out several months before the election. I know journalistic standards are falling these days but this summary is just wild.

It's absolutely the sort of thing I'd buy ... for the right price. ReMarkable has had me interested for a long time, but it runs Android and doesn't have Play, so half the apps I would use it for (ie my book shelf in Play Books) won't work. A Debian-based tablet would be great. The comparable device seems to be the BOOX Go 10.3 - currently retailing for nearly $400, so I guess that's the price point they need to beat.

I'm not clear whether the relaunch includes an upgrade. 4GB RAM is pretty slim for a Linux system these days, even if it is one that can't play video. The 7-year-old 4-core Coretex-A55 at 1.8GHz is likewise probably serviceable but isn't going to set the world on fire.

That's fine for thermoplastics and it's fine so long as you don't care about eg what colour it is. Not all plastics respond to heat by melting (there are quite a wide variety of plastics that undergo polymerisation with heat, so heating them makes them more solid, not less), but the big problem of this kind of direct-use recycling is that it only works if you can first sort the plastic into all the different types and colours. There are only a middle-sized handful of basic plastic types, but there are a dizzying array of small variations for different purposes. If all you care about the material properties is that they can go through a 3D printer and make something that's solid enough when you overengineer it to a degree then that's fine; if you care about cutting every last penny from the cost of producing things and about making things that are "just right" then it's not going to cut it.

You also need to be able to effectively remove all the labels and any residue of foodstuffs etc. That's easy enough to do on a small scale for your household recycling but it's labour intensive; it's quite difficult to do very cheaply and at a large scale. The advantage of the "advanced recycling" process is that it involves a refining step that removes all the contaminants.

Well, compared to making plastic and then dumping it, and compared to pulling fuel out of the ground and burning it, this is actually an improvement - the carbon is used twice, once as a plastic and then again as a fuel. It's not exactly a circular economy though.

It all sounds like it went so well; it's "a partial failure during the final moments of landing," it's an "anomaly" causing "higher-than-expected landing altitude."

Then "You can watch the landing attempt *and explosion* here."

This is why I explained it in terms of very fundamental limits. An ant is unable to observe the earth at the sort of scale where nuclear weapons become comprehensible. We are able to observe the universe at the sort of scale where a magnetar becomes comprehensible. We are pretty certain that the speed of light is a fundamental limit. We know what effect extreme magnetic fields have on the nature of matter. This is not a "on no it's too big for us to think about" problem.

Because something that radiates a power level sufficient to wipe out life on the other side of the galaxy is necessarily so far away that it's not useful. Life would have to be at least thousands of light years away from it to survive, almost no matter what sort of shielding they have.

Of course, it's possible that faster-than-light travel is possible in some way we don't understand. As far as we can tell, it isn't.

So I know very little about organic chemistry, but semaglutide is the sexy drug that's hard to get at present. Wikipedia has the SMILES code for it and you can use a free guest account on chemhacktica so why not see what it suggests as precursors? Could we make Ozempic at home?

Unfortunately, it errors out. It can draw the molecule but all the tools that try to construct a pathway for synthesising it result in generic errors. No idea if that's because I got something wrong or the molecule is too complex for the tool or what.

I guess organic chemistry is actually nearly as hard as it looks.

For lead-acids, that depends very much on what the acid comes into contact with afterwards! If it lands in quantity on aluminium, for instance, the reaction releases large amounts of hydrogen and heat which can very much lead to combustion.