I would err towards teaching aids. Though they likely gained some ceremonial usage from that. Almost all are likely lost to time. We only see the odd exceptions put in difficult to reach places.
I personally like the idea that it was a teacher desperately practicing, in the back of the cave, where no one would likely see it.
10m is deep enough to have to consider the bends (decompression sickness). That’s definitely into diving rules territory.
The particular risk is it cutting off, due to the battery dying, forcing a rapid ascent.
It’s the shift from compulsory education to elective. You’re now in school because you want to be, not because you have to be. The attitude of teachers changes a lot.
In my school, it also shifted from a school uniform to “business”. It felt like an epic transformation.
“What’s big brown and sticky?”
“A big stick”
“What’s brown, and hurts if it falls on you from a tree?”
“A piano”
It’s worth noting that combining the relativistic correction factor into mass is actually quite problematic. It’s a vector (directional), while mass is scalar(directionless). You suddenly need to ask what direction your mass is. Furthermore, a hypothetical person on the ship will still measure their inertial mass as normal.
As it stands, it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed to light, but you can get arbitrarily close to it, with a finite amount (huge, but finite).
It’s a combination of factors. Language/cultural barriers are a big one. What is obviously sarcasm in your area of the world won’t necessarily make sense in another. Add in English as a second language, and it’s a crap shoot, even with an obvious joke.
The lack of tonal queues is also a problem. We communicate a lot via voice tone and body language. Without them, what is obvious to you can be read completely differently.
The last is the elephant in the room. Bigots dog whistling. I’ve seen too many “obviously sarcastic” jokes that are very much not sarcastic in a different group. When those people get called out, they fall back on “it’s just a joke”, the armour of arseholes the world over. By adding the /s preemptively, you rob them of cover to spread hate. It’s a variant of the nazi bar problem.
I was more referring to how they deal with the cream. They fully skim it out, then mix it back in to get the various types of milk. That processing is why you don’t need to shake supermarket milk to mix the cream back in before use. The oil droplets are FAR smaller, and it changes the mouth feel of the milt at the very least.
I’ve no proof, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t bother mixing the best parts of the cream back in. At least not in the ratios that came out originally.
They also mess with the milk in additional ways. I didn’t realise how bad it had gotten until I started getting milk delivered from a local dairy. It’s still pasteurised, but closer to natural. I dread to think how bad it must be for you yanks.
I can easily see someone trying “raw” milk and discovering it tastes amazing by comparison. The conclusion that raw is better is wrong, but understandable. The middle ground is where the sweet spot is, safe, but as natural tasting as it can reasonably be.
It gets extra fun if part tries to break away and elect a new spokesperson.
They also happen to be a (retired) nurse themselves. It’s uncommon, but not that uncommon. Most nurses would have seen it before. Its only for 5-10 seconds after waking up. Coming from a relatively skinny woman is quite a bit more unexpected. She also has unusually good aim.
I know someone who has had quite a few general anesthetics. They’ve taken to warning the nurses involved that they are a puncher. Several have not taken it seriously and ended up with some impressive bruises (including black eyes).
I saw a talk from someone working in the field a few years back. The “fusion is only 10 years away” had a small proviso “if fully funded”. The actual funding was barely enough to keep the lights on.
That has now changed. It’s gotten close enough that private investment has decided it’s worth investing in. I believe the only really big problem left is the wall material. The neutron flux transmutes the elements making it up. This makes it difficult to maintain a hard vacuum, since the wall can start leaking and/or outgassing, forcing a shutdown to replace them. On a minor plus side, if you dope the walls with mercury, it transmutes to gold, in commercially viable amounts!
Fusion has several advantages over fission. The biggest is the impossibility of a meltdown. The very difficulty in balancing the reactor means that it shuts down fast and mostly clean. This would let them be placed far closer to population centers. They could provide a base load supply, in the way nuclear could/should have.
Given it’s designed to protect us from some SERIOUSLY fucked up shit… (E.g. a leopard jumps on our back intend on eating you)
Half the time it’s just playing what if games with the most fucked up inputs. If you’re ever in a similar situation, that “training” will come in VERY useful.
The bacteria don’t need to be identical.
Think of it like rolling a dice. Any given roll can only have a single number. However patterns can be detected by combining multiple rolls. E.g. a biased dice.
As for larger things. It’s possible, but the speed required goes up with mass, and not linearly. In theory a person could go through. They would be moving a significant fraction of the speed of light however. Catching them alive on the other side would be… difficult.
Not far off. It’s the brain in training mode.
Only 1 bacteria ever arrives. It’s the probability wave that interferes with itself.
With the Young’s double slit experiment, if you fire a single photon, you get a single photon arriving. It looks just like how a cannon ball flies. It’s only when you let hundreds go (either collectively or individually) that the interference pattern appears.
The end pattern is the probability that the photon (or bacteria) arrives at any given point on the receiver screen.
Anything moving has an associated wavelength. If that wavelength is long enough, you can do the young’s double slip experiment on it.
It was a few years ago, so the details are hazy. A scientific team accelerated a particularly small and sturdy bacteria fast enough that their speed produced a viable wavelength. They then sent the stream through 2 slits. They then captured the bacteria in aerogel (I think) to slow them back down.
Most didn’t survive, but some both survived, and ended up somewhere they couldn’t without interfering with themselves. They successfully reproduced afterwards. The debris also followed the classic ripple pattern of the experiment.
Basically, there is nothing special about “life” when it comes to quantum mechanical effects, other than it’s on the big side.
They have also experimentally tested an equivalent experiment with bacteria. They survived a trip through the double slit experiment.
There doesn’t seem to be an issue with it, other than it’s difficult and impractical.
It’s not perfect, but no system is. The goal is to keep a level of equibility, while also allowing the good to benefit from their own efforts.
If the rich invest in their children, and make them exceptional, that’s fine. Trying to get parents not to do that goes against extremely strong instincts. The goal is to make climbing the wall harder, not impossible. If the child buckles down and takes advantage that’s fine. If they slack off and coast, they will coast back towards the mean income level. They won’t get the run away effect that happens currently.
A lot more can be done at the bottom. Giving poorer children the education and support facilities needed to reach their potential would make a huge difference, for a relatively small investment from society.
It’s also worth noting that I’m also an advocate for UBI. There should be a floor on how poor people can be. As a society, we can afford to support that.
The better variant is a button that takes $1 from 100,000 people and gives it to you.
It seems so much nicer, and on its own, it’s not particularly harmful. However, when 1000s of people start hammering it, then it suddenly makes a huge difference. Particularly to those to whom a $ is a significant amount of money.