StringJunky

It's Lethal Dose 50 - The amount it takes to kill half a population.

The numbers are in trace amounts.

There is no significant nutrients in fallen leaves for use by plants. The trees consumed them all before dumping them.

...and 4K.

That's pure 'slippery slope' fallacy.

Except where such measures are clinically justifiable in certain circumstances, like immune deficiency and operating theatres, trying to separate oneself from the universe of 'everyday' ubiquitous microorganisms is a fool's errand, I think. Why try to remove, beyond a cosmetic level, stuff that we have evolved to live with. I blame advertising, propagating anxiety to maintain hygiene-related markets.

That's called 'chatoyance'. You see it also in certain types of wood that has been finished to a high polish.

I don't know where you live, my experience is very much to the contrary: what you see is what you get.

The regulars here actually like the scientific method and it's implied rigor. The members also police crap as much as the mods. It's not perfect and there is some lattitude for people to express amateur speculations, compared to, say, Physics Forms because ultimately it is an amateur forum. You just have to weather the periods when there seems to be a lot of rubbish, One can filter out the forums that tend to produce the irritating stuff. Keep your eyes on the wheat and ignore the chaff. I think universities have a lower standard of entry in the UK now, to fill the seats because it's not free. They also have national league tables to compete in for applications and thus income. These all lower the bar imo.

I read somewhere that certain elements, like the power unit, are replaceable, in the event that such technology may be available in a few decades. I think it's planned service life is 40 years iirc.

Yes, I'll go with those. The sudden part is where I implied jokingly 'magic'... it just seems to appear.

Looks like TheVat misinterpreted Studiot's post.

Yes, it's in the BIOS.

You can get the OS off the MS site when you need it. The license no. is embedded in the pc and will be read during installation.

Found an interesting view in Nature: Defining emergence in physics. It notes the disparity between the biological and physics views on the subject. It seems that a physics definition needs infinities to comply, according to them, whereas biology needs a very large but finite number. The authors propose this as a working physics definition: https://www.nature.com/articles/npjquantmats201624

Novel, in this context, means something completely different/new arises from a relationship that cannot be predicted from the parts... not to to do with chronological age.

The conditions necessary seem to be: irreducible, unpredictable and novel. It is a 'useful' descriptor for those phenomena that match that criteria, otherwise, what other word(s) shall we use?

I dunno, this concept is a work in progress for me. Just musing: could entropy have something to do with your examples not being emergent?

You can't reverse engineer an emergent phenomenon and, conversely, you can't predict the outcome of an emergent phenomenon from its component parts. Ultimately, emergence has a strong unpredictable element about it.

If you use photons to observe some particle, may they not change said particle's energy?

Or take a long walk on a short pier....

A spoonful of sugar.

I found this but way over my head. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/284/why-should-the-james-webb-space-telescope-stay-in-the-unstable-l2 The maths seems to be here, as mentioned at the end of the first link: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/286642/why-are-the-lagrangian-points-l-1-l-2-l-3-unstable

@Janus might know.

I thought iOS users basically avoided adverts because they paid for much of the stuff... silly me. That's not advertising, that's spamming.