Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.

Give it a little more time. B-b

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.

So current AI training procedures - which amount to "read all the internet you can" - fall for astroturf campaigns. Why am I not surprised?

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.

It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.

For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.

is it just me, or does that sound like a sexy place?

I hear chines live-food-animal markets are called that because they typically sell seafood (fish, lobsters, etc.) which are kept alive in big water tanks.

Traffic is horribly non linear.

So is fluid dynamics.

It's also very complicated and counter-intuitive, to the point that even experts had to resort to models in wind tunnels and scaling laws, until supercomputers and their algorithms could model it down to submicroscopic levels and handle the details of the positive-feedback transitions.

By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause. "Just keeping away," he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.

Some driving techniques make traffic behave like fluids: Compressible gasses (Car ahead of you slows - you slow some but progressively more as you get closer, Car beside you jogs left two feet, you jog one foot. etc.) Liquids (cars close up and hold constant distance) Crystals (at a traffic light or full stop, cars close up into a tight ordered array.) Condensation (similar near-constant spacing but not so ordered and flows (more easily), Chrystallization, Melting, Sublimation, Evaporation (when the obstruction clears and the first cars can speed up, then later ones, ...), laminar (smooth) flow, turbulent flow, shock waves, ...

Spacing out lets you behave more like a gas - or the first of the liquid behind a bubble - rather than a liquid or solid. When a sudden speed reduction throws a shock wave at you at several times the traffic speed, you can let the gas compress or the cavitation bubble shrink, diffusing the shock wave into an acoustic wave and avoding a collision with the car ahead. It also lets you even out the flow, remaining laminar rather than starting an eddy and going turbulent.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are ... indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditions ...

If that works out, then we can look into what additional driving tactics could be enabled by an infrastructure that brings in information that is NOT available by local observation, presenting it to the driver in a way that does not cause more problems by distraction that it solves. That would let drivers get some of the advantages of self-driving car network communication, too.

Maybe self-driving cars can be trained to be cooperative, which would probably result in better driving.

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are simple enough to be easily understood, indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditons, work when only some people use them, and can be shown to be good for success of the person using them.

Then we could just teach them and gain some of the benefits via voluntary actions driven by enlightened self-interest.

(Sort of like teaching Objectivism to prison inmates - practically the only thing, short of certain real religious conversions - that reduces recidivism, by giving him a recipe for going straight and showing what's in it for the convict if he uses it after release..)

... this suggests any galaxy (with a central black hole will also have a few hypervelocity stars flying around ... spiral arm or star /star cluster /cloud formation ...

And if so, this should have been going on since galaxies with central black holes were a thing - which is quite early. What might this mean for more recent inter- and galactic architecture?

Perhaps galaxies are just the accretion disks of big black holes.

(In any case, this suggests any galaxy (with a central black hole will also have a few hypervelocity stars flying around in elliptical orbits from near the center to somewhere much farther out, or on hyperbolas off to bombard the neighborhood.

Nasty traffic problem.

I wonder if this is related to spiral arm or star /star cluster /cloud formation, creates some (currently mysterious) stellar event when one hits another star, or grows the star into a new thingie or big black hole as it scresms through the local background gas and dust and collects a lot of it.

Make that:

(Sort of like using sunrise for 6 AM rather than local solar noon for 12 PM for your personal sleep schedule, but leaving the clocks set to solar noon as 12 PM.)

Though originally proposed by Ben Franklin, ...

Actually, Ben just suggested that Frenchmen save on candles and lighting oil by getting up earlier in the summer, not that they screw around with their clocks.

(Sort of like using sunrise for 6 AM rather than local solar noon for 12 PM.)