If you’ve ever wondered what The Big Onion wants you to think and do, here’s your chance to find out.

When I’m docking my space ship in 3rd person view I really wish I had a better idea of how close I really am. A 2D display just doesn’t do a good job no matter how many pixels and fps I have. It’s not a 3 k€ problem, but a problem nonetheless.

As opposed to the practices of which company?

Giving only a few years of support is not a great practice, but that’s the world we live in. If we had fully open source phones, then the community could provide the updates for much longer, but there’s still a pretty long way to go in that regard.

Yes. It’s fakeception all the way.

After all, there are fake doctors, so why not fake patients too? There’s also fake medicine, so all of it should work out perfectly.

No internal organs either! Looks like they were all scooped out, as if this dino was being prepared for mummification.

There’s also a clear fracture line in the chest. My guess is that’s where the chest pain was coming from.

That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.

Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?

Meh, probably not.

Yep. That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass the filter unharmed. In our case, the discovery of fossil fuels and nuclear weapons may be those kinds of stages.

Imagine what happens if we pass this filter and become an intergalactic species. Maybe one day we’ll start tinkering with technology capable of destroying a star, galaxy or the entire universe. If we are smart enough to squeeze energy out of the very fabric of space, we might also be dumb enough to cause the entire universe to collapse or something like that.

It’s a proposed solution to the fermi paradox. The idea is that we don’t see aliens out there in the stars, because they all nuked themselves to oblivion at some stage. Maybe they never reached the stars, before they destroyed their home planet. Maybe they blew up their own star and didn’t reach another one in time. Maybe their entire galaxy got sucked into a home-made black hole.

Having seen enough exceptions in biology, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found a multicellular bacterial species that violates everything we know about bacteria. Biology is completely wild, and it’s really hard to come up with a rule or a category that always works and nobody has any problems with it.

A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.

Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.

The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.

Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.

Just remove the battery entirely while you’re at it. The whole thing becomes lighter and slimmer, which should boost sales.

Big fan of Japanese tits. I’ve seen some, great tits as well.

Many people seem to have a problem with teaching religion at school, but saluting the flag and reciting the pledge of allegiance are apparently perfectly fine.

Just the cost of doing business. Probably totally worth it in the long run.

Making money, by attracting attention is the primary goal. Spreading falsehood is just “business as usual”. Informing the public is a byproduct of the core business.

So, if I use espresso cups or even dollhouse cups, I can easily hit that optimal cup number with a very small amount of coffee. 😁

Here’s the interesting bit.

“The association between coffee consumption and all-cause mortality was U-shaped; coffee intake seemed optimal at 3–5 cups/d with the lowest risk at 4 cups/d (HR: 0.68, 95% CI: 0.53, 0.88). Our results suggest that coffee consumption may be associated with a lower risk of CRC recurrence and all-cause mortality.”

Well, what exactly counts as a cup then?

“Coffee consumption in cups/d was then calculated by multiplying the frequency of consumption per day by the number of cups that were consumed. We further accounted for the differences in the sizes of cups by multiplying coffee in cups/d by 1 (for cup) or 1.5 (for mug).“

I guess the traditional 100 ml cups and the common 200 ml cups are all just cups, whereas 300 ml mug is clearly a mug. Who knows really, when the data is all self reported. I guess my 400 ml/d consumption should be roughly optimal.

Many problems have early warning signs. Just train the model to notice those signs.

At least in many industrial applications, the vibration of an electric motor or an axle is a good measurement. Also, the temperature of a ball bearing can tell you a lot. That’s just the basics though, because you can also train the model to look at fancier details.