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Today I encountered an x-ray machine exhibiting boredom and possible suicidal ideation. Halfway through a clinical exposure, it decided it had had enough and switched off. Rebooted, it cut off even earlier each time. Clearly fed up with studying human anatomy. Next week I'll pack a dead rat in my toolbox and see if a change of subject might perk it up a bit.Very droll.
So here's a good question:Perhaps that is the key, the irrationality of the conscious beings. What precisely is pretty and what is repulsive about a certain form. What sort of psychological reaction does the obvious creature exhibit to its own sentience?
"Who's a pretty boy, then?"
That should sort out the self-aware parrot from the dumb chipset.
Mmmmmmmm. How about the sentience of bacteria.It's highly likely ai has surpassed some animal life forms in consciousness. I doubt very much the average insect has a cognitive function beyond robotic.Back in the 1970s
It looks like it could be a foot print, but it could easily be an erosion effect, so a lot more data is needed. Where was the rock found? What kind of stone is it? What was the age of the strata it was found?The rock was found on Chesil bank some years ago, to me it appears to have flint like qualities. As the bank is an accumulation I could not tell you the strata it had come from. As you will undoubtedly be aware it is the jurassic Coast. I would be interested to learn how erosion could cause the shape.
Thanks Colin, sometimes I think my humour goes unappreciated😀…plus there appears to be an 'L' under neath the middle toe, so it must be a left foot.Ha ha
It's a big carbon sink though Evan for the populace, just like Canada. I would think both countries are fairly neutral.Quote from: PetrochemicalsI should think Australia is not far from being carbon neutral?...just like CanadaAustralia is one of the highest CO2 emitters in the Western world (per capita), at 17 tons per capita per year
- Behind Canada at 18.6
- But more than USA at 15.5 tones
This is due to:
- Base load is mostly burning coal
- One of the largest states (Victoria) uses brown coal, which is saturated with water; the water must be driven off before you can get it to burn - very inefficient!
- Political backlash against nuclear power over many years (even though Australia exports a lot of uranium ore)
- A carbon tax implemented in 2011 was quickly reversed by a change of government
- It is a fairly flat and dry country, so not much hydro power
- Far from plate boundaries, so not much geothermal power
- Neglected transmission infrastructure, so it is hard to feed in renewables
- The fossil fuel industry has a lot of money from exports, which funds their vigorous campaign to keep burning fossil fuels locally.
- NIMBY: Even if most people want clean power, everyone says "Not In My Back Yard"!
See: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
answer is Yes.To produce enough solar panels to generate the electricity for the uks current usage would require somewhere in the region of 1 billion tonnes of co2, for all our usage that figure is at 10 billion .
Ref: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=84600.0
IMG_20220629_065130.jpg (519.3 kB . 1636x1612 - viewed 219 times)
Indeed, it may all come down to quarantine. European invaders just wanted to get on the land, with all their agues and poxes, but the port authorities insisted than anyone travelling east across the Atlantic should have a clean bill of health before disembarking.At very least then the invader and colonists should have been blighted in a similar fashion to the native populations, but as mentioned previously, cortez did not suffer in a similar fashion to montezuma.
Whilst we are diverting towards money it is worth noting that the permitted price of mains electricity in the UK is linked to the current wholesale price of gas, not the actual cost of generating electricity.Many solar producers are producing their highest amounts, yet the feed in tarrifs are around 2.5p a kwh. I have a feeling strip mining coal is about as cheap as you will get elsewhere. The carbon cost though and the environmental costs are great.
Right now, 80% of demand is being met by non-gas generation, so wind, solar and nuclear generators are profiting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Red/green color blindness?
Apparently one contributor to the problem has been the Green party; looking for excess purity, they refused to fund gas-fired generators to be backup supply.I should think Australia is not far from being carbon neutral? Its a big place just like Canada, but has few people. In the current economic situation coal is a fantastic fallback.
- I thought most people realized that gas is going to be an important bridging power source as we reduce coal consumption, but we still need to meet peak-hour demand.
So are ebola survivors not immune? Survivors as you put it have been known to pass on disease months or years later.Quote from: Petrochemicals(disease) spread through carriers who where immuneI think there are 2 different ideas mixed up there:
- People who are immune have overcome the disease, and will not spread the disease
- Carriers are people who have not overcome the disease, but in lingers on in a chronic condition. They can certainly spread the disease.
For example, the adult sailors who initially explored a new land did not carry smallpox, because it was endemic in Europe, and they were all immune.
- However, later settlers took babies (who were not immune), and smallpox could circulate on a ship among the non-immune children, carrying smallpox to new countries.
- This caused a problem when doctors wanted to carry a milder version of smallpox to the Americas, for use in "variolation" (a precursor to vaccination). So they drafted young orphans who had never suffered smallpox, and transferred smallpox from one to the next, in a chain stretching across the Atlantic.
- Later, bottles of dried smallpox blister were carried to North America, and used to infect blankets, which were given to the native Americans. One soldier who had seen this done in North America later came to the new colony in Australia - followed by an outbreak of smallpox among Australian aborigines.
Everyone talks about cost, they never talk about the profit. If you install solar panels you're virtually guaranteed to save money, they typically pay for themselves in 5-10 years. The best angles to place them in the UK are usually about 30-40 degrees to the horizontal, facing south east and/or south west. That gives you electricity in the mornings and evenings when you need it (mainly in spring, summer and autumn). The solar electricity costs about 6p/kWh, and it saves you spending ~27p/kWh on electricity.
The European plagues should have occoured larger on, but they did not and cortez should not have has such an easy time of it.Quote from: PetrochemicalsI say again why did the Americas not spread diseases to Europe, were they disease free?I think it is partly due to which group had the ocean-going ships.
- Europeans had the ships, and crossed the ocean from Europe to the Americas. They took various European endemic diseases with them (to which they were immune), and deposited them in a land which had no immunity.
- If Pre-Columbian Americans had crossed the Atlantic to Europe, carrying their endemic diseases, they may have managed to spread American diseases in Europe (if they weren't sunk by cannons first).
In fact, Columbus did take some Caribbean native back to Europe, but he would have taken the good-looking ones, not the sick and diseased.
- And they would have been quarantined and checked by doctors before they were paraded before the King of Spain.
