I hope some OEM (especially those opposed to google) picks up and develops mainline linux like Pine Phone.

Huawei is being forced to do it. But like Android, their HarmonyOS is not 100% open-source. There’s also KaiOS, which some Nokia and Alcatel, and all Jio, devices use.

even Dalvik and the android runtime itself is an inefficient relic of 10+ years ago when mobile devices had at most 2gb of ram and a tiny low power ARM processor.

Both the ones I mentioned are designed to be more memory efficient. KaiOS in particular is aimed primarily at feature phones and entry-level smartphones.

I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species.

Most people are going to take photos of the leaves, stem or at best the outside of the flowers. These are rarely conserved within families. You’ll need the arrangement of the four floral whorls to name a family and expect any degree of accuracy. And that’s assuming your plant is an angiosperm.

Moment of silence for those who thought environmental science doesn’t have maths. (No money is true though.)

Ethiopia already banned petrol cars earlier this year.

Voids, one might say.

Oh, those are the scientists. And yes, they’re the heroes of this study!

Should’ve gone with CoNan smh.

That’s like saying you can build a nuclear bomb by smashing pieces of uranium together. Technically true, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

The year is 2040. The nuclear powers of the world have just signed a treaty to halt all new nuke production. Across the world, people celebrate in the streets.

cuts to gloomy office

Except Dr Newtron, CEO of Newtron Industries, the world’s best manufacturer of nuclear weapons. But as he paces his office and shouts at his secretarie, the phone rings.

‘Yes?’

The voice on the other side is icy calm. ‘You appear to be in a bit of a problem’, it observes.

‘Did you call me to state the obvious?’ the doctor barks into the mouthpiece. ‘I did not become Doctor Newtron by suffering fools, you know’.

‘No, I called to offer you a way out’. The voice is unperturbed.

‘Speak.’ The doctor’s voice changes in an instant. He did not become Doctor Newtron by being a fool either.

‘Have you heard of TrickTock?’ (The voice is that of a woman.)

The doctor is silent. He is not one to admit ignorance. But the voice seems encouraging, understanding, even. ‘Tis a silly place. It is like PlaceBook, but for children’.

‘Ah’, the doctor agrees, ‘but what does it have to do with saving my business?’

‘Everything’, the voice replies.

Meet nuclear physicist Dr Newtron and influencer Zea Mayes as they try to sell the public on the idea of nuclear war. Only on Nuke, releasing this sixth of August!

Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.

Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)

The research was paid for by someone. It is not unheard of for a company to offer a grant under the condition that they get the results, say, six months before the rest of the world.

If I remember correctly, cricket fields don’t have a fixed size. Also football is popular enough that people will understand what ‘x football fields’ is. But mostly we use square kilometres, hectares and so on.

Apes are Old World monkeys.

If all scientific knowledge were to suddenly disappear and we were to start from square one, it would all reappear exactly like it is.

Three competing theories of evolution arose, independently, in our world - one from British and European scientists studying the tropics, another from Russian and US scientists studying Siberia and northern North America, and a third by a Japanese scientist studying statistics and genetics. While the current consensus in evolutionary biology is that all three are true (at different timescales), the vast majority of people (and even other scientists) only know the first. This is partly because Darwin got there first, and partly because a lot of powerful people benefit from spreading social Darwinist woo.

Ironically, in a post-apocalyptic world, the powers that be would probably support the symbiotic theory, with Darwinism frowned upon as selfish individualism.

however the process of science will ensure that the truth comes to light eventually.

As Keynes said, in the long term we are all dead. Science is probably the best tool we currently have to find the truth (assuming there is a truth), but it is always important to remember that it is produced by humans, funded by interests and (mostly, though this is changing) published by for-profit journals. When reading a paper, always read the conflict of interest and funding details, and hope the authors are being honest.

But Taiwan to Polynesia is upcurrent, while South America to Polynesia is downcurrent. How would you go thousands of kilometers against the current without modern technology?

If I remember correctly, the Polynesians went there from South America, not the other way around.

Isn’t it a Rammstein song?

Indian here. Tigers are not household pets, as keeping them is illegal. Hell, keeping a body part of a dead tiger requires a permit, and is only allowed under very rare circumstances. Tigers have better protections under Indian law than humans.

Current economies are basically dependent on a growing population to support the elderly and retired members of the population.

This applies only when labour is in short supply. Japan and Germany have heavily automated their industry for this reason, and China seems to be on this track.

Apart from the labour shortage, a gradually declining population is a good thing. The earth can only give us so many resources, and unless we reduce our numbers - particularly among the rich - we are headed towards extinction.

A gradual decline in population is a good thing, so they probably don’t want to overshoot too much. Also maybe the minorities pushed for keeping some restrictions.