Biology isn’t that simple. A person can have one fewer sex chromosome, monosomy, one extra, trisomy, and many extra, polysomy. In fact it’s starting to show that a significant minority of people have trisomy 47 (the name for having one extra sex chromosome) but live perfectly normal lives because those extra genes are suppressed. You could have an extra x chromosome and never know it, does that exclude you from being a man or a woman? Which brings up the topic of gene expression and epigenetics which is even more complicated. If you’re looking at science to give you a certainty about sex and gender you’re in for a long search.

…How old do you think millennials are? The oldest millennials are at least 20 years away from retirement.

I was thinking Sabotage. Turn that scene from Star Trek Beyond into a reality.

It definitely creeps up every once in a while on my Windows computer. It’s really not a common occurrence and only happens when I’m doing something that’s not recommended.

If you wanted to take a second crack at it, it is easier than ever to learn how to use Linux. The one thing I have found ChatGPT useful for is guiding me through setting up a new program or daemon or to explain to me what that super cryptic error message means. ChatGPT is not perfect and requires whoever is using it to sanity check the result it gives, but more often than not I find I walk away with a better understanding of what I was doing.

Just a bit of history, in WWII the Allies didn’t know for certain that the Holocaust had occurred. Remember that it was the 1940s, information could travel quickly but only so much. It wasn’t as easy for them back then to pickup the metaphorical ‘signal’ of the Holocaust happening to the ‘noise’ the rest of the war was making. So while there were rumors of mass executions of Jewish people as early as the summer of 1941, it’s often said that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until winter 1945. Now when the Allies went from ignorant, to suspicious, to all but certain but with doubts and finally to certain without a doubt has been debated for decades and will probably be debated until the sun expands and swallows the earth whole. There was definitely a lot of hateful rhetoric being spouted about Jewish people in the 1930s that maybe should have been stopped before it nearly took over Europe, but looking back at history we have the advantage of hindsight.

This reminds me of Overwatch so much. I usually played healer and it was all too common to watch the tanks and DPS being great at doing their own jobs, but terrible at doing them together. Then it’s just a feed machine until the game is over.

Plus the worst thing that can happen is the webpage crashes, just hit reload and you’re back baby! It’s the safest environment to fuck around with code. A person would have to go out of their way to actually make a problem, maybe some random kid too. They get into everything.

How difficult asbestos remediation can be depends a lot on the situation. Regardless of the situation people working near or on asbestos require respirators, bunny suits, many vacuums, and more to handle asbestos safely. Not the best conditions to work in but definitely not the worst.

Where the work is being done says a lot about how difficult it’ll be. As an example take a single detached house, asbestos remediation wouldn’t be too difficult. The residents can leave the home so there’s less concern about inadvertently exposing the public. It gets a lot more difficult when the work is being done in say a train terminal for example. The terminal cannot be closed for a month so work must be done alongside the public. Now a whole system needs to be put it place. It becomes a lot easier to just leave the asbestos alone, as long as it’s not turned into a dust it’s not dangerous.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there’s an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

Also, some people just suck at writing.

Asbestos definitely causes inflammation when tissues are exposed to it, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone lick asbestos. One exposure wouldn’t do much. That said I’m pretty sure the act of picking asbestos up and bringing it to your face and breathing it in would be the most dangerous part of that.

Perhaps not the UN, but I agree that I am uncomfortable with Elon Musk at the helm. I’d prefer to see an international non-profit take control. Even just a regular boring board of directors, at least then it would be the devil that we know.

Yeah I’m going to agree with you on this one. It blows my mind that as a species we have changed the night sky. When I was a child seeing a satellite dart across the sky was exciting because it was as rare as a shooting star. Now I look up and see a satellite every few minutes. That said, there have been a few times recently that Star Link was the only method of communication I’ve had in remote areas. It has been very helpful. I think as poorly of Musk as much as the next person but I can at least recognize the ingenuity SpaceX and Star Link.

Well that was a wild ride of a comment.

I can’t find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It’s a small comfort.

Star Trek Voyager

I don’t know enough to answer that, sorry.

So scientists are not entirely certain about the heat death of the universe. The heat death is the most reasonable prediction given what we know but there could be a force acting across the universe that may very slowly reverse the expansion of the universe that we have yet to discover and cause a big crunch over a ridiculously large amount of time. The fact is predictions that far in the future aren’t really very useful.

While there can definitely be some legitimate discussion and ambiguity over which culture/country gets to inherit Mayan artifacts, for example, saying that the British, for example, should inherit it is a very weak argument. It’s not like the entirety of an extinct societies people just dropped dead. Some survived and after some time rebuilt new societies. Using Mayan artifacts as an example, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras have a better claim to them then the British. It’s not propaganda or useless to say that items of cultural heritage should be returned.

So how about this what about-ism, if you live in the United States, the British took cultural artifacts from your lands too and aren’t giving them back right this moment. Where did you think all those native American artifacts in British museums came from? They didn’t make them and it’s not like North America was spared from British plundering. Might be nice to get that stuff back.

There is no moral grounds for stealing cultural artifacts. Even if it means the culture that rightfully possesses it wants to destroy it. That choice is entirely that cultures decision to make. Even if we disagree. It’s one thing to clutch your own pearls but so much worse to do that to someone else’s.