The entire reason we have a philosophy of science and peer-review and the null hypothesis, is this. Reality doesn't conform to your beliefs. If it did, people could wish shit into existence. Wish in one hand and shit in the other. Which fills up first?

Senses are fallible, too. Setup 3 buckets of water with cold, lukewarm, and hot water. Stick your hands in the cold and the hot water. Wait 5-10 minutes. Put both hands in the lukewarm water. Your hands will *NOT* report the same temperature. These people need to learn, not be lied to.

Additionally, the title is misleading. You don't lie to people when you want to express the truth. You tell them the truth. That they reject the truth indicates they lack critical thinking skills. Teach them.

I don't think lying to the gullible is a solution. Indeed, the article supports this: "Philosopher Byron Hyde and author of the study suggests that public trust could be improved not by sugarcoating reality, but by educating people to expect imperfection and understand how science actually works."

How is that proposing lying to the people who lack mental tools? The title is straight up misleading.

Teach them. Engage with them. Some might be incapable, but that does NOT support that they should be lied to. This is terrible reporting.

What's the storage *density*? I have the impression that grid scale batteries often use (relatively) low density storage, so they take up a lot of space. Lithium batteries are relatively high density (lots of storage/volume). Dense storage is, of course, part of what makes them so dangerous when they catch fire.

Perhaps it you wanted this to last through a blackout you'd need to give up your basement, rather than just part of it as with lithium batteries.

Unnh....there must be a reason Japan was researching whether uranium could profitably extracted from sea water. I believe that it was because decent ores for uranium were becoming scarce. (I used to know whether that was the reason they gave, but I can't certainly remember any longer....I think that was it though.)

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

AltaVista gave me more accurate results than Google ever has, much less recently. But you did need to use reasonable logic, and "near" was an important addition.

Google was easier to use. That was their sole advantage.

Have you followed-through and seen what Destin is charging for that knick-knack? Yes, it seems to be a nicely-designed grill brush. But it is a frelling grill brush. It doesn't need to be high-tech.

And it most certainly doesn't need to cost over $75 when a Chinesium version is $20.

The assertion is that it does more than that, that it allows to systems to be remotely disabled.
OTOH, I've read of precisely such a feature being requested by some who were fearful of AI, so it's not unbelievable (though it would clearly need more than one chip to accomplish this).

It's not really clear to me. It *could* be either way. But I *suspect* the Chinese are both being honest and grandstanding.

Thinking of the void as an analogy to a gas is misleading, that's why your supposition doesn't work.

The universe is expanding, everywhere, as far as we can tell. Without any evidence to the contrary (and a fair bit of evidence supporting it), the expansion is constant, everywhere, and is described by a value called, you guessed it, the Hubble Constant. Most recently, however, a handful of different measurements have suggested two disparate values for the Hubble Constant, resulting in what's known as the Hubble Tension ("tension" because the two values appear to be being measured correctly, but are not the same).

The idea in this paper, as far as I understand it, is that there are large-scale fluctuations in mass distribution, and we happen to be in a local minimum compared to the average across the universe, thus a local void. Since the Universe isn't filled with a gas under pressure (at least to first approximation), there isn't a grand rushing-in to fill that void. Rather the opposite: the relatively higher density elsewhere is pulling harder by its larger gravity than the mass in our local neighborhood, creating a local anomaly in the large-scale gravitational field, pulling us outward. This local anomaly appears as a local increase to the Hubble constant, adding on to the underlying Hubble expansion. We are, locally, expanding slightly faster than the Universal average.

This local effect might explain the two measurements for the Hubble Constant, one in our region of the Universe which is affected by the local paucity of mass, and one across greater expanses of the Universe where the lumpy distribution of mass is evened out by the law of large numbers.

That explanation depends on a degree of friction that I'm fairly sure you can't find signs of. Remember, we aren't talking about within a galaxy, or even within a galactic cluster, but rather *between* galactic clusters. I think it would also run into problems with requiring superluminal communication between the vortices.

Just about all cosmologists assume the basic principle is correct. It's demanded by General Relativity. But doing the calculations is pretty intractable, and depends on data measurements that are of uncertain accuracy. THAT's why these theories have never gotten anywhere.

These folks are claiming that now we have good enough data and good enough computers to reliably do the calculations. ... Well, most folks haven't even looked at the problem. And it's a change, so they're dubious. And being dubious is probably the correct stance, even though the theoretical basis is sound.

It's not *really* cherry picking, but what it shows is that people have ideas that fall in clusters, and they have a lot of difficulty thinking outside those clusters. The Hindu mythology is pretty much as described, but so loose and ungrounded that it's impossible to say if they were dealing with the same ideas. (The way to bet is "not really".)

I expect that AIs will come up with a cosmology that people can't understand, but which will match the same equations. This is based on some experimental tests that they've designed. The machines that they designed were basically unintelligible by humans, but when repeatedly simplified until they reached something a human could build, they worked. And the experimental results matched the same equations that people had been using.

Is the void they're talking about an intra-galactic void or an inter galactic-cluster void? I assumed the latter, in which case the Drake equation would be irrelevant. We *are* living in an intra-galactic void, but the measured density variation isn't enough to meaningfully distort time.