It doesn't stop cheating on homework with AI, but it does mean that at some point the information has to pass through the human's brain to get to the writing hand.

Corollary : handwritten application forms - against which your hand-written essays, papers, etc will be compared. So you need to get your handwriting reasonably stable several years before you apply.

OK - you've just broken your arm, or had it ripped off on the rugby field. That's OK, you should be able to get a medical release for that. Ditto if you don't actually have hands.

If that means that school kids have to start handwriting essay etc too, big deal.

Nonsense.

Current strategy is to encourage as much legal immigration as possible (about 10 times the current level of illegal immigration), and process the immigrants into SoylentCrete for building the nuclear plants (and a new palace for King BigEars the Second, whichever one survives the duel)

I don't know how much uranium and thorium they can mine in the UK

Oh, a geological question.

There are small deposits of uranium minerals in both the Lake District and Cornwall, but the net amount is somewhere between fuck-all and two-tenths of that.

I can't think of any reported uranium mineralisation at all from Scotland. There are pegmatite-y areas which were evaluated for various minerals in WW2 (and rocks are not renowned for getting up and wandering the landscape) but I don't recall a uranium report At the clearance level of the geologist walking the hills with a hammer in his hand, nobody would have conceived of it as being important for anything more than a source of yellowish dyes and pigments.

> I've had to use so many different layouts of keys (not even counting non-US keyboards), that touch typing wouldn't have helped me much.

Same here. I use a Mac for work and have more than one PC for leisure. All the keyboards are different. Plus I have some wireless keyboards I use occasionally. They're different again.

If I'd learnt to touch type on the first computer I ever programmed on it would have been particularly useless for the future (Sharp MZ-80K). Plus, try to touch type on a ZX81, I dare you.

In some distant galaxies, they have detected both a redshift from the light emitted by the galaxy (measuring specific emission lines, and the Lyman Alpha break in the galaxy's spectrum) but they also have absorption lines from the light passing through a gas cloud at lower redshift, with some absorption. This is quite commonly seen in lensed galaxies, where there is a lensing galaxy (or galaxy cluster) around half-way between us and the object of interest. This imposed features at two different redshifts on these galaxies light. Which is very hard to explain if you're trying to have your redshift from a physical motion in the rest frame rather than a cosmological redshift imposed on the universe.

This galaxy isn't one of those dual-shift galaxies - it only has one set of redshifted features in it's spectrum - but in the 1950s and 1960s respectable hard core astronomers tried to make the case you're making. They failed, and kept on failing until they accepted the reality of cosmological redshifts, or they retired.

Penzias and Wilson's observation of the cosmic microwave background in about 1963 (Nobeled a few years later) pretty much killed that line of argument at about the time I was concentrating on potty-training. If you want to resurrect it, feel free to dig up papers from the time and do some new observations that will bolster the argument that failed in half a century ago.

You're going to go all Address Resolution Protocol on us now, aren't you? (This is a bad pun! If you know, you know, and if you don't know, you'll have fun finding out.)

Why?

You're never going to see even a small fraction of a single million years. By the time a million years has passed, no one will remember Einstein, or Newton names (though their maths would probably have survived, in the machines). Plato will probably have disappeared into distant history along with every author from Home to Stephen King. Most cities that you have heard of will have sunk into the mud they are (mostly) built on. The Atlantic will be a few hours sailing wider, and the number of comets making close approaches to Earth will be almost exactly the same as 65 million years ago.

Fireman Montag endorses this message.

Ha ha - that's the oldest actual letter in existence, isn't it? Some Assyrian dude complaining in cuneiform about a shipment of copper.

It's not impossible to have formed lead (Pb) this early - but it is challenging.

AIUI, the preferred locus of origin for the heavier elements (say, 3 iron-mass nuclei upwards) has shifted to NS-NS and/ or NS-BH mergers - where nuclei can get absolutely hammered with neutrons (as also happens in supernovæ) but without the newly formed (and relatively unstable) nuclei having to then plough their way through dozens of solar masses of H/He envelope before getting to see the outside universe - and indeed, for the outside universe (us) to see the nuclei.

But to do that you have to have a generation of stars form, evolve to boom-time, form neutron stars (or an NS and a BH, then find each other, and inspiral ; do the big crash-boom-bang, and spray out the lead (whichever nuclei you're interested in) - which then needs to get sufficiently excited so that we can see it's absorption (or emission) lines. Which is a lot to happen in 434 million years (what I'm getting for the age of the universe at red shift 14.44). It takes time for that neutral hydrogen to cool down from all that recombining (well, combining, really) of electrons and protons to for the CMB - which was the Cosmic Incandescent-hot Background when it formed.

Somehow you've got to get from a relatively homogenous universe (parts per million density variations at the CMB) to one where there are things which are LRD (Little Red Dot) galaxies and things which are visibly not LRDs. And that's got to fit into those few hundred million years along with all the star evolving, NS-NS inspiralling gubbins too. Thats' barely as much time as vertebrates have had jaws!

Up to 6 penalty points, up to unlimited fine, potential loss of your license for several years, after which you have to re-pass the current driving test. If there are multiple offences in the same event (e.g. "causing death by dangerous driving" in addition to DCA) you can get a lot more.

The exact sentencing guidelines have changed every so often, but the law has been essentially the same since the 1950s. When the problem was people trying to read the newspaper while driving and changing gear with a crash gearbox (a.k.a. "double-declutching").

Did humans suddenly gain several more quanta of concurrent attention focus in the last 30 years?

Over 90% of drivers cha handle stick. Less than 10% are the gimps and cripples who go for the retard-license for automatics only.

Humans being the same everywhere on average, it's the same in America, right?

Some of the resins used to make (glass-fibre reinforced) plastic circuit boards are pretty nasty chemicals if they don't react, or if they get cooked. So if it's one of those graphics cards with a human-carrying drone worth of cooling fans, you probably do want to wash your hands after handling it.

Oh, they do. Problem being that tends to be exclusively what they are doing (until they look at their phone, of course) when they should also be looking where everybody else in the immediate vicinity is going. You're lucky if they even bother looking where they've been.

Oh, and the third prospect for evolution of a recurrent nova system : the donor star gets a sudden dose of stellar hiccoughs - say, it swallows a gas giant, and does a sudden big release of gas, which piles up fast enough on the recipient to make it go Boom. Essentially, at random.

But it's unlikely that a donor star would be precisely stable in it's mass loss rate - it is drinking at the Last Hydrogen Saloon, has already left the Main Sequence, and is evolving rapidly (in stellar terms) ; so what it throws off onto the recipient is likely to be changing, even if (by human terms) slowly changing.

When the recipient star (the originally more massive of the pair, now the smaller in mass, and a white dwarf) goes through it's red giant phase, that is likely to shed some mass onto the star which would become the donor, changing it's evolutionary path. How long would it take for the donor star to settle down after that episode of late middle-age spread?

A 4th option - which I don't recall having seen discussed because it violates Occam's razor : if you have your recurrent nova pair orbiting away, occasionally having a little-bang, but they are actually in a wide triple - that's not an inherently implausible stellar system. Hell, our neighbours (Alpha Centaurus A and B, plus Proxima Centaurus) are just such a triple. And if A and B were merrily cycling away, doing their recurrent nova thing with no obvious trend towards SN-Ia fireworks. Until star C (Proxima - alike) comes barrelling back in for it's quarter-million year fly by. Now, that could certainly stir things up - particularly if it were a close pass.

And a wide triple like that wouldn't leave that much of a mark in the subsequent supernova remnant, would it? Not like the multiple star shenanigans going on in Eta Carinae/ the Homunculus nebula.

Never heard of "SCTV", and from that description, I wouldn't bother to watch it. Who cares what celebrities do to each other/ have done unto them?

There is a lot of research into recurrent novae, of which T CrB is the closest (known) and therefore the brightest (known). Fortunately there are some with considerably shorter cycles than T CrB, allowing a better view into their behaviour. Whether they blow off 99% of their accumulation each cycle, or 99.9%, or if the amount blown off is significantly variable, I think are all still on the table. (If you follow the subject more closely than I do - is this right? How tight are the bounds on between-cycle variability?) Is it possible that the trigger is sufficiently variable that each cycle is, effectively, a random variable which might result in a Type Ia SN, or just a recurrence? That would make life "interesting" for astrophysically-aware near-neighbours, say a Sirius-distance away. Hell, if they survive the first Boom, they'll be "astrophysically-aware" for the rest of their lives! With a major aversion to sudden bright lights.

The idea that recurrent novae keep recurring, with a trend of increasing mass accumulation (because of a brightening/ expanding trend in the secondary star) is a hypothesis for how SN-Ia happen, but it's a hypothesis that needs testing. Hence, the queue of observatories with DDT programmes lined up to wring every last meaningful photon they can get out of T CrB. By the time the news gets there (5028 or thereabouts), the poor bloody star will have grounds to become camera shy. Talk about paparazzi and their intrusive big-lens cameras.