It was tried, quite extensively, early on in the reprap movement. No-one managed to get it working reliably. The issue is that the pellets don’t feed consistently enough. This means the flow is inconsistent. This massively messes with the quality of the print.

There are theoretical ways to compensate. Unfortunately, most result in a huge jump in complexity and weight on the head. Neither is a good thing.

Basically. The benefits aren’t generally with the costs, outside of a few, very niche areas. It’s also now easier to source filament most places, compared to pellets. So even that isn’t a game changer.

Spiders don’t have to eat their mate. The female just tends to be hungry, after mating. The male is snack sized, right there, and of no further use.

Apparently, when trying to breen endangered spiders, they make sure the female is well fed prior. It gives the male a chance to make a quiet getaway.

Apparently, sandstone takes FAR less time to form than most people think. Apparently, some sandstone deposits have been found with roman artefacts inside. They were normal sand at the time and turned to sandstone since then.

Basically, it would take far less time than you would think to form sandstone on Mars. It’s still proof of liquid water, but the lower end of the time estimate can be FAR shorter than you first think.

You could detect decoherence in the system, that doesn’t indicate a human observer, however.

That process is, however, used to protect cryptographic keys, transfered between banks. A hostile observer collapses the state early. The observer gets the key instead of the 2nd bank, which is extremely conspicuous to both banks.

We can observe the end result. E.g. observing the screen only, and you get wavelike behaviour. When you also observe the slit, the wavelike behaviour disappears, and it seems particle like.

Both end in an observation, 1 has an extra observation.

Depends on how you are observing it photons impart energy and momentum. The true, detailed explanation is a lot more convoluted, it’s all wave interactions, in the complex plane. However, digesting that into something a layman can follow is difficult.

The main point I was trying to get across is that there is no such thing as an independent, external measurement. Your measurement systems minimum interaction is no longer negligible. How that is done varies, but it always changes the target and becomes part of the equations.

We know how it works, we just don’t yet understand what is going on under the hood.

In short, quantum effects can be very obvious with small systems. The effects generally get averaged out over larger systems. A measurement inherently entangled your small system with a much larger system diluting the effect.

The blind spot is that we don’t know what a quantum state IS. We know the maths behind it, but not the underlying physics model. It’s likely to fall out when we unify quantum mechanics with general relativity, but we’ve been chipping at that for over 70 years now, with limited success.

Observer here doesn’t mean the same as the layman meaning. It’s anything that interacts with the system while it’s developing.

Interestingly, it actually can be used for a presence detector, at least in a sense. You can use it to transfer cryptographic information. If no-one is listening in, about half your sent numbers are wrong, but you can agree on what ones. However, if someone is listening in, all your data gets randomised.

They actually now use this system to transfer information between banks. They send a random stream of 0s and 1s over a fibre optic cable. They then send (semi publicly) which bits made it properly. If someone spliced into the fibre, they would get the encryption data, but the target bank would not! They know instantly that something is wrong.

For those confused, it’s worth noting the difference between observed as a layman concept and as a quantum mechanical one.

In QM, to observed is to couple the observer to the “system” being observed. Think of it like “observing” your neighbour, over a fence using a BB gun. When you hit flesh, you know where your neighbour is. Unfortunately, the system has now been fundamentally changed. In a classical system, you could turn down the power, until your neighbour doesn’t notice the hits. Unfortunately, QM imposes fundamental limits on your measurements (heisenburg and his uncertainty principal). In order to observe your neighbour accurately, you need to hit them hard enough that the will also feel it and react differently.

QM behaves in a similar way. Initially, the system is just a single particle, and is not very restrained. This allows it to behave in a very wave like manner. When you observe it, the system now includes the whole observation system, as this coupling propagates, more and more atoms etc get linked. The various restraints cause an effect called decoherence. The system behaves ever more like a classical physical system.

In short, a quantum mechanical “observer” is less sneaky watching, and more hosing down with a machine gun and watching the ricochets.

Theories can be a stepping stone to other theories. Until we explore those chains, we don’t know if there is anything useful at the end.

E.g. initially, lasers were a solution looking for a problem. An interesting quirk possible due to some interesting bit of physics.

Maths explores idea spaces. Much of that is purely of interest to other mathematicians. However, it sometimes intersects with areas of interest to other scientists, at which point it becomes extremely useful.

I tend to prefer pass phrases, they are a lot easier to type and speak, if required. Mine regularly blow past 20 characters.

As for salting, that only defends against rainbow table attacks. The salt needs to be stored along with the hash. That is find for most accounts, but once you’re in banking territory, that’s a bad bet.

You also can’t assume you have no vulnerabilities. If someone gets your database, you can’t defend against brute force attacks.

Lastly, if you are doing passwords properly, you shouldn’t care much about length. There are a few dos attacks to worry about, but a 512 char limit will stop those, and not limit any sane password.

There are several major hurdles, and no particularly strong evolutionary drive to overcome them.

The first is breathing. Fish “breath” water. Shifting to air takes a huge reconfiguration. It also compromises their ability to process water.

The second is power. “Flying” fish are actually gliders. They build up momentum in the water before launching themselves into the air. They don’t actually have the ability to flap and maintain their flight. Developing the muscles for this would likely compromise their swi.ing slightly. That would be a far bigger issue, compared to a bit of extra gliding.

A flying fish’s goal is to break contact with an underwater hunter, before reentering the water. A steerable glide is more than enough of this. There is simply no pressure to advance it further.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

The soul of the recently deceased can be contained using high voltages. Care should, however, be taken with grounding, to avoid accidental soul transfer.

“You (complete) pillock!” is an often used insult for someone who’s just done something idiotic or stupid.

I can definitely see dicksplash being used as an insult down the pub.

Fuckletoes is in a weird dead zone. It’s far too poncey for working class use, but far too crass for the toffs.

The rest I’ve heard used before.

I have a relative who has an unfortunate condition that causes internal bleeding. They’ve had enough blood transfusions that their antibodies are completely haywire.

Multiple times, doctors have not listened to their protests, and given them O-. They turn an impressive shade of yellow (among other, more serious, issues).

Last I heard, there were 2 compatible donors known, 1 in a different country. Thankfully, you can store blood longer term. It’s just not cost efficient to do in bulk. They have their own little stockpile of blood at their local hospital (mostly self donated).

That method is still mostly recommended, though mostly for younger children/babies. The Heimlich maneuver is difficult to perform on a small body. You either over squeeze, and cause harm, or are too tentative, and so not helping.

With babies, you hold them lying on your forearm, facing downwards, and slap (open handed) hard. I’ve only seen it used once, but it worked perfectly then.

The best bet is to let your local aviation authority know. They are generally the ones with the actual powers, as well as the knowledge to apply them.

At least in the UK, the laws cover anything that leaves the ground under an open sky. There are exceptions for RC toys and drones, but they have limits. One of the limits is you cannot fly within a certain distance of anyone or anything not under your control.

Basically, most places require your permission to fly over, or near to your land. If they are overflying, they are breaking the rules.

It’s worth noting, depending on the size of the system, it can be difficult to judge distances. The ones I work with are large. We regularly have officials insisting we are massively out of our flight area. GPS logs show that it was well within the entire time.