- jansanI did not know that this was a hobby for adults and I find it interesting that the one kid's toy if the other person's collectible. When I was in primary school in the late 70s we used to buy lots of 1/72 scale soldiers on second hand markets and had buckets full of them. Great battles were fought, and we lost lots of them, because we often played in the garden and we apparently were really good at camouflaging those tiny soldiers. For us they were just consumables, but it seems that we had the same Airfix soldiers that collectors buy today.
- This probably depends a lot on how close you are to the equator. Here in Germany output of solar in winter is negligible, and if there is no wind, which can happen for several consecutive weeks, we need a backup. No utilities company will build a fossil power plant that will be used only a few weeks per year, so our government will have to step in to make sure this happens.
On top of this you have very high costs for an increasingly complex grid, which needs to be built and then maintained. Prices will never again be as low as in the fossil/nuclear era.
- A question to native English speakers: Do you really say "Walkmans", not "Walkmen"?
- That is correct, but OTOH there was a 7.3 foreshock two days before the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake.
So the only thing we can say for sure is that it is still extremely difficult to predict earthquakes.
- We should not forget, that in most countries people who were unvaccinated came under severe social pressure. They often lost their jobs or got banned from social circles. You were basically rendered an outcast by not being vaccinated. So taking the vaccine did not only affect your immune system, but also gave you a higher social status. And there are plenty of studies that show that a lower social status significantly impacts mortality, with lower status linked to higher death rates. This may explain the lower all cause mortality among vaccinated people.
- Looks like this time they first considered that they screwed up themselves, unlike the last time when they were fighting a phantom attack for a while until they realized that it was their own fault.
- I think we are not even close to using the potential of current LLMs. Even if capabilities of LLMs would not improve, we will see better performance on the software and hardware side. It is no longer a question of "if", but of "when" there will be a Babelfish like device available. And this is only one obvious application, I am 100% sure that people are still finding useful new applications of AI every day.
However, there is a real risk that AI stocks will crash and pull the entire market down, just like it happened in 2000 with the dotcom bubble. But did we see an internet or dotcom winter after 2000? No, everybody kept using the Internet, Windows, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and all the other "useless crap". Only the stock market froze over for a few years and previously overhyped companies had a hard time, but given the exaggeration before 2000 this was not really a surprise.
What will happen is that the hype train will stop or slow down, and people will no longer get thousands, millions, billions, or trillions in funding just because they slap "AI" to their otherwise worthless project. Whoever is currently working on such a project should enjoy the time while it lasts - and rest assured that it will not last forever.
- > Zhdanova suspected that the melanin of these fungi was acting as a shield against ionising radiation.
Wouldn't that be very easy to measure? My guts tell me that using the melanin as a shield against gamma radiation has a negligible effect, if any at all.
- You are correct, they are probably just called Casio Game Watch like the Casio GC-7, GS-12 or GD-8.
- Casio should release one of their "game and watch" products again, or create a new one based on the old models. Production cost cannot be higher than that of a normal watch, and a lot of people would love to own one.
I am always disappointed when I see products like their pac man watches that just have a print on it without any game related functionality. This has damaged the brand a lot already, and tbh, after many years being a hard core Casio fanboy I have moved on. But one more gaming watch...
- Or they will laugh at us trying to harness the sun in regions far from the equator, requiring a full fallback fossile infrastructure for winter time, while having a few moderns nuclear reactors would be more reliable and cost effective. Time will tell.