MigL

Sorry CharonY. I didn't mean to start the slide of your OP into the gutter ...

I don't find chickadees 'sexy' at all. ( what're you, a weirdo ? ) 😄 😄

Versatile ? Don't you mean frustrating ?

I guess Socrates and Einstein were right ... "The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know" -Socrates "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know" -Einstein

Thank you for that @KJW . I figure, if I'm going to get news on upcoming semiconductor technologies, I may as well enjoy watching the presenter.

Both are linguistic tools to convey ideas. So let's examine the ideas they attempt to convey. The word 'fact' indicates to your listener that they can independently verify what you have stated, and they will find agreement. The word 'truth' is usually stated as 'my truth' or 'I believe to be true', indicating a personal belief, which might not be verified by other's. No offense, Eise, but there is nothing Philosophical about it; the two terms, much like a hammer and a screwdriver, are defined by their intended purposes. ( although people do use hammers to drive in screws, and screwdriver handles to bash things )

I cannot make any recommendations as the field, and literature, are mostly beyond my level, but you've made me curious. Is this, in any way, related to the non-linearity of the EFEs, and the fact that they are extremely difficult to solve, usually employing linear approximations, which restrict their validity to a limited range of input values, and omit some other interesting results ?

Did you still have any faith in your Government ?

I understand that. Isn't this mechanism, then, equivalent to 'eyeglasses' and 'hearing aids' for humans with bad eyesight or hearing loss ? Or the equivalent of heated/air conditioned dwellings, for humans, as a response to environmental temperature changes. In effect, 'nature' has evolved, in certain species, the ability to ignore, or work around, certain environmental forcings, just as we have learned to do with 'tools'. How does this fit in with the premise of the OP ?

Processors are already putting up to 300 Billion transistors on a single die ( NVidia Rubin GPU ). The biggest issue at these scales is electron migration ( e- going places you don't want them to go ) through mechanisms like tunneling, and the only current solution is massive redundancy, and error correction, making a lot of those transistors un-useable for the actual task. I think the next big change to keep Moore's Law going, has to be a materials change and/or power consumption reduction to enable massively vertical transistor manufacturing as a bonus, if you watch this video, Anastasi has to be the hottest chip design engineer, with a sexy accent that I can't quite place.

So, even though they can 'edit' their RNA and protein structures to quickly adapt to changing environments, these structures are not 'written' to their DNA, and therefore not inheritable traits. Got it. But how would such a capability have evolved ? And, if an octopus can use the RNA alteration mechanism to adapt to its environment, would that not make a lot, or some, of regular selection/adaptation to environmental forcings ( as experienced by other species ) redundant ? IOW, have cephalopods stopped adapting to their environment through evolution, because they can actively do it 'on the fly' with this mechanism ? ( sorry about all the questions, but this thread made me realize hoe little I actually know about evolution )

Maybe @CharonY , or anyone else who has an educated opinion, can help me out with this related issue. I recently read where octopusses ( octopii ? ) are able to edit their RNA to a much greater extent than any other species. This would mean they are able to select what genetic traits ( much more so than any other species ) they pass on to their offspring. This would seem to make them an active factor in their evolution, as opposed to the rest of us animals, who are passive in our evolutionary trajectory. I'm not even sure how such a trait would have developed, or what its implications are.

No. A simplistic, but accurate, description of relativity.

That's for sure. Trying to 'reproduce' when you have a bad case of gas ( from eating beans ) can be embarrassing, kills the mood, and causes failure 😄 .

I don't think you're using the term 'natural selection' the way an evolutionary scientist would, and that may be leading to the confusion. The 'environmental forcings' that humans are naturally selected for, are vastly different than those of wild animals. We can regulate temperature of our environment, change our food supply, etc., but we have social forcings, economic forcings, etc. which most animals don't have. As @CharonY tried to explain, comparison of the mechanisms for the two isn't really possible. As another monkey wrench into the works, consider that humans are 'evolving' to outlive our reproductive age. This is likely due to the economic forcing I mentioned, and we are not having enough children to replace the population. I think @TheVat previously mentioned this, but eventually, in most advanced societies, the population will consist of a non-reproductive population due to its age. That goes against the purpose of 'natural selection', reproducing, does it not ? Maybe the mechanism of evolution doesn't like what we're doing, and is trying to kill us off.

Kevin Costner did in Waterworld. (big flop so not too many saw it, but I liked it )

Countries like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, where the birth rate is not affected by economics and immigration is low, will be in trouble in less than 100 years.

And you can't count. Just about everyone has...

Erno Goldfinger was an architect who lived next door to Ian Fleming; Auric Goldfinger was the Bond villain. Personally I prefer Blofeld, or Blowhard, for D Trump.

Are you sure it wasn't the Lead in the water pipes ?

So many labels; I don't know what I am anymore. Seems to me no one is strictly introvert or strictly extrovert, so naturally someone had to coin a term for varying combinations of the two, because we don't have enough labels. ( no disrespect to your views intended, Tony ) ( and I refuse to call anyone who's flown a sailplane old )

There is a vast difference between the possibility of interstellar travel, and the advantages/reasoning for interstellar travel. We are all in agreement that at our current level of technology we can barely do interplanetary probing/travel, but that doesn't discount the possibility of doing so in the future, however, even if technology does advance to the point where we can, the reasons and advantages to interstellar travel may never be worth it. This assumes, of course, that advanced alien civilizations, if they exist, reason, and have value scales, similar to ours.

of course. They are, arguably, just as needed for grasping stone, and bone, tools/weapons, as they are for texting on your phone.

The alligators are in the White House; and they don't take visitors unless you come with Billions, or donate a luxury Boeing 747 to the head Croc, D Trump.

It sure would be nice if you had gigantic Electromagnetic scoops that gather the interstellar gas/dust in your way, and use it as ejected mass, once energized by a matter-antimatter reactor, to generate forward thrust. Something like a Bussard ramjet ...