A friend had a radio isotope cancer treatment. He also built a geiger counter (for his own amusement). It was quite scary how much he set the thing off getting close to it!

Instructions were to not sleep in the same bed as anyone else for 2 nights, and limit closeness to people or pets for the same period.

The uses of “ACHOO syndrome”!

Aka the photic sneeze reflex.

Apparently not everyone has this reflex.

The other option is a “barbeque roll” a favourite of sci-fi starships, from authors who have done some homework.

You’re basically trying to balance half way up a waterfall.

Dating isn’t about fitting in with the 95% of people that don’t match your vibe. It’s about finding the 5% that do.

Wear your weirdness proudly, it left fellow weirdos find you!

In its defence, that assumed it was properly funded. Its actual funding was very limited.

I believe most of the critical problems have been solved. The only major one left is keeping the reactor walls stable. They have a tendency to transmute, which causes multiple problems.

I can think about ideas without either visualisations or inner monologue. My inner monologue is mainly for mapping ideas to a “transmittable” state. I also have to force visualisations.

The best description I can give is multiple interacting “data streams”. E.g. a cat won’t be an image of a cat, it would be a mapping vaguely akin to how a computer game tracks things, a collection of data on pose, limb length, join angles etc. It doesn’t use actual numbers. It’s akin to how you know the angle of your elbow, without knowing the angle in degrees.

My inner monologue’s main use mapping from this internal data blob into something that I can explain to others.

You can easily cross calculate between various, inertial frames of reference. The problem is that earth isn’t sitting still in an inertial frame. We spin around the sun, and we orbit the center of our galaxy. We also get nudged about by the pull of other stars.

Tracking a time jump (or technically a time-space jump) would be easy, if you just wanted to be within the solar system. With measurements the earth-moon gap would not be too hard. Hitting a surface exactly would be another story. Miss by a meter and your cut in half by a wall or floor.

I thought that only applied to steam keys?

You can sell your game for whatever you want elsewhere, but if you want them to be able to install via steam, you can’t undercut steam itself.

Men in sheds is now fairly international. It’s primarily aimed is at retired or disadvantaged men. Most are not gender limiting however. They often do a lot of community outreach stuff too.

For younger demographics, makerspaces (aka hackspaces or hackerspaces) fill a similar role. You don’t need to go in with any particular knowledge, just an attitude of making new friends.

Also, don’t be afraid to use groups as jumping off points. Often members will be involved in other activities that might suit you better.

Where do you think those willing to go further often meet and connect? How do they know that a large group will have their backs?

Look at the Irish troubles for inspiration. The IRA would have not gotten anywhere alone. The protests, marches, and civil disobedience show support to both them and the British government. The political arm could then use that support to push for real changes.

I just want a film to get it right. I want the hero to realise he needs to fold out his amazing hand based on instincts and skill.

Peaceful protests have an implicit threat. We are peaceful so far. If it is ineffective, some elements might go aggressive.

A good example is the Irish troubles. The protests often started out peacefully. They could explode into civil unrest very easily however. Also, they are backed by the actions of the IRA. If the UK government tried to crush them, the IRA would have struck back HARD. They also moderated their own attack level. They didn’t want to drive people away from the political and protest wings, but make sure the UK government felt it. E.g. by calling in attacks before detonation. Thereby limiting civilian casualties, while maximising economic damage. They were more than capable of getting nasty however.

Very rarely, if ever.

The only time it is justifiable is if it’s either pre-agreed or if there is a threat to the child.

If there is reason to think they are being groomed, or used in some way, then yes. E.g. a room search after getting information that they are holding drugs for a dealer. They should be treated like a police search. Only done when there is real reason, rather than just fishing.

If it’s pre-agreed that a device isn’t private, then the rules change slightly. A younger child’s phone or computer should be subject to respectful monitoring. It should also be part of an open and equitable discussion on boundaries and rules. Even here, the goal should be to protect the child from dangers, not to snoop on what they are chatting with friends about beyond that.

Privacy, is an important thing for children. It needs to be provided with guard rails initially, but should be respected as best you can.

I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.

The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn’t touch anything of his with a 40’ pole.

In the words of Dr house “people lie”. They should take the woman’s word on things like this. However, it just takes being burnt once or twice, to not trust the answer from anyone else.

There’s a fun chess game on steam this comic keeps reminding me of.

5D Chess, with multiverse time travel

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/

It basically allows for moves similar to this. It also creates coherent rules for jumping timelines, or time travel. It’s quite elegant how they come out, in a “my brain is melting out my ear” kind of way!

That image will stick in the mind of every school boy (and possibly girl) who sees it. That’s a win for the textbook.

There’s a lot more to teaching than just good explanations. I do enjoy trying to explain complex science in more understandable ways however.

As for struggling, we all do at times, pushing through is how we get better. Also science is a little like a spider web. If you look closely, at just a few strands, they don’t make obvious sense. It’s only when you build up a broader picture that it becomes obvious and easy. Building that picture, unfortunately, requires pushing through the “what the hell, I can’t make sense of this!” stage.

It would be a mix of relative rates and the exact energy.

If you pick an area of “empty” space where you expect very little dark matter, you will get a baseline reading. When you aim at an area expected to be dense in dark matter, you will expect to get a higher reading. E.g. 10 counts a day, Vs 100 per day. This is basically how radiation detection works on earth, so the maths is well studied.

The other thing is energy levels. 2 electrons hitting have a distinct energy. It will vary upwards slightly, due to kinetic energy, but not that much. We also know the annihilation energy of other forms of matter, from earth experiments. A reading distinct from anything normal would be a good signature of an unknown type of matter annihilating.

There are also extra complications from things like red shift, but those can be measured in other ways, and corrected for.

The order of theory and discovery also helps. “Finding X that happens to support Y” is a lot weaker than “Predicting X from theory Y, then going and finding it”. If you run 1 million experiments, a 1 in a million result is quite likely by pure fluke. A 1 in a million result from a single, focused experiment is a lot more powerful.

In a short summary. Something is wrong with the spin of galaxies. There is more mass than we can account for, and it’s distributed wrong.

Either the laws of gravity are slightly wrong, or there is something out there with mass, but no interaction with other matters (light particularly).

More recent, more detailed studies have shown that the error is not consistent. Therefore either the laws of physics vary from galaxy to galaxy (very unlikely) or it’s something physical, rather than a law error.

That leaves dark matter, sometimes called W.I.M.Ps (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). They don’t seem to interact with electromagnetism at all, and even any strong or weak force interaction is minimal. It only interacts gravitationally.

We know the interactions at minimal due to gravity mapping. It seems to form a cloud around galaxies, rather than collapsing in. To collapse in, they must interact to exchange momentum. If they only interact by gravity, that collapse will be extremely slow.

That is most of what we can be fairly sure of. There’s a lot of speculation around this, and we might be barking up the wrong tree completely. However dark matter via WIMPs seems to be the most consistent with the evidence right now.

Edit to add.

This experiment seems quite ingenious. It assumes that WIMPs have a mix of both matter and antimatter. Ever so often a matter/antimatter pair get close enough to annihilate. This creates a pair of gamma photons. The existence of these would help back the existence of physical WIMPs. The energy would also tell us something of their mass (photon energy = mass energy + momentum energy). That will help narrow down where to look in our particle accelerator data.