Right, well if that's the problem you are trying to solve then the right approach is probably better education because changing a map projection is going to do nothing to help these people overcome their ignorance. However, I think you are vastly overstating things since Canada is the second largest country on the planet by area and, being northerly, the mercator projection makes it look even bigger. Despite this I doubt many non-Canadians would rank Canada in the top 5 most important countries, and possibly not even in the top 10.

Perhaps, but what are the odds of that happening? Just asking for a friend.

We already know that the root cause is DNA damage/corruption. This happens naturally either from local, naturally occurring radioactivity or from cosmic rays: one muon passes through every cubic centimetre of your body every second, as well as from naturally occurring viruses.

For viruses not only has western medicine listened but it has developed a vaccine for HPV which is the leading cause of cervical cancer. This is now administered to girls in school, at least here in Canada. As for natural radiation and cosmic rays good luck with avoiding those: the only way to reduce the cosmic ray flux would be to live a few kilometres underground but that is likely to increase your exposure to natural radiation.

However, even if you did somehow manage to avoid all radiation living kilometres underground in a "magic" shielded cell basic entropy will get you in the end: it is not possible to make copies of anything forever without errors creeping in. It's a consequence of the basic laws of thermodynamics, the same laws that make life possible so there is no way to avoid that. Indeed, the only real way to avoid cancer is to die from something else first.

That's my point. The common ground we have between the myriad different cultures and languages on this planet is the objective reality that we all share whether we like it or not. Hence, if you are going to come up with a common map projection then we have to base that decision on objective reality and logical reason because if we start trying to decide based on subjective and irrational cultural "feelings" then we are never, ever going to agree.

Only an uneducated fool would base their opinion on how important a country or continent is based on its size on a map projection. While I agree there are probably such fools out there the solution to this problem is better education, not trying a different map projection.

Yes it does but the quote from the article is "The current size of the map of Africa is wrong," which is objectively and factually wrong: the size of Africa is basically correct, it is the other continents away from the equator that are wrong.

Yes it is different to the old cable bundles because with the old channels you could only watch what they were showing. Hence, to be sure that you had something to watch you needed to subscribe to multiple channels and they gradually showed you what you wanted spread over months or years.

Streaming services are different because once you subscribe you have access to everything they have. We generatlly subscribe to 1-2 services watch everything we want over a period of several months to a year and then switch to a different service and get a whole new library to watch. By the time we have cycled back to the original streaming service a couple of years have passed and they have new content and it has been a while since we watched the old too. You can't do that with cable channels because you do not control what they show.

Absolutely true but the truly stupid thing here is that, because Africa is on the equator, it's one of the continents that is least distorted by the mercator projection. Not only that but the default is to centre of the Greenwich meridian which puts Africa at the centre of the map. I'm finding it really hard to understand why using a map projection which distorts Africa the least and centres the entire map on it can be interpreted as "marginalising" Africa and making them feel less valued, indeed if anything it makes it look like the map makers cared more about Africa than anywhere else.

Actually I was thinking more of the Black Mirror epsiode where a medical AI implant replaces some critical brain functions after an accident and the poor woman starts speaking ads. It also shows the problem with adding ads to ChatGPT - how will anyone know whether the output was a true response from the AI or sponsored content from an advertizer?

For things like that I completely agree. Similarly the new bamboo spoons and forks are just as good as the plastic ones they replaced, if not better and stronger. However, try using a wooden knife or a paper straw and you'll see that there are limits. What I'd like to see is a more sensible approach where we replace the obvious things with non-plastic alternatives and work on finding solutions for the rest. However, in today's world it seems that either you have to support replacing everything immediately or nothing at all - the art of compromise seems to be lost.

While you can interpret the headline as saying that a new type of supernova has been detected as a black hole - since a black hole is a supernova remnant - this would be the pre-cursor supernova to the one actually observed and would have be a "regular" supernova, not a new type. However, since this supernova remnant (the Black Hole) did cause a star to explode this interpretation is still close to correct.

The other possible, and correct, interpretation is that a new type of supernova has been detected by the observation of a black hole causing a star to explode. There is no interpretation that is consistent with the act of detecting causing the explosion so no quantum interpretation is needed and even the alternative interpretation is technically not far from correct.

Possible, but I suspect that the effect will be quite small since it is X% times the reduction in life from under inflation. If also means that there is no longevity advantage at all for people who do maintain their tyres and I suspect that these are also the people who would be most likely to spend more money on new tyre technology. Indeed, I suspect this may be part of the problem: airless-tyres offer the most benefit to those least likely to care enough to spend more money on them.

...to welcome our AI-elected overlords?

I'm having a lot of trouble seeing where AI can be useful in an electoral system. The key feature of an election is that an average member of the public must be able to know that it was fair so they can accept the result. This means it not only has to be fair but also seen to be fair. AI algorithms are usually completely opaque even to experts in the field and their fairness depends entirely on their training which again is not something a member of the public can readily determine was fair.

Will they last longer? Everytime I have replaced tyres it has been because the tread became too worn, not because they got a puncture. Why will an uninflated tyre's tread last longer?

Are you factoring in the far greater rate of high-speed lead pollution found in US cities compared to their western counterparts? Lead is a known carcinogen and highly toxic as well.

Actually I do not see how this is great for similar reasons: it relies entirely one someone saying that a video is fake because it did not have some coded light pattern. How do we know that this person is telling the truth? If a genuine, but embarassing, video was filmed under normal lights they could simply claim that it was fake because it lacked the special light pattern.

This method lets the creator of the video know whether or not it has been manipulated but since they were there they should know that already. It does nothing to help a random member of the public know because it relies on the truthfulness of the video creator.