tarsierscripter

The story is an allegory about the evils of colonialism, told from the perspective of the colonized (in progress). HG Wells is on the record about that.

The common cold thing is a direct reference to what happened to European explorers when they first encountered syphilis in North America.

HG Wells' politics are plain as day in his stories. He was a pacifist and social Darwinist. The defeat of the Martians by the common cold (after the failure of military action) is 100% on point for him.

Sure, though it’s quite hard to stay active after one has had heart disease.

Many of the studies that associate lifestyles with health outcomes have this issue with the causative arrow: disease tends not to enable activity.

I have had 2 uncles (one passed, one in advanced stage) diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. It’s a cruel disease that affects both the mind and the motor functions, making it difficult to walk or stand up straight. It caused my uncle a lot of pain when he couldn’t hold his head up straight, his shoulders and neck scrunched up and hunched forward all the time.

It’s also very trying for family and caregivers, as the person regresses until they’re as helpless as an infant trapped in an adult body.

The print button doesn't persist across all sections of the ribbon, the Copilot button does. They decided people weren't using Copilot enough so they carved out a permanent place for it on the window. If the print button started elbowing other UI elements off the screen to occupy more and more prominent places then you could absolutely bet users would complain.

The last time Microsoft went all-in on an annoying UI element like this? Clippy. How'd that go?

Or in other words: the bulk of the work is already automated! The conditions have been set up and the reactants are doing the work of reacting. There’s nothing for the experimenter to do but wait.

The reaction can’t be sped up, its rate is wholly constrained by the nature of the compounds involved and the physical parameters of the experiment, which may be very narrow to avoid unwanted products or even thermal runaway which could cause a total failure of the experiment or even a dangerous release of poisonous or explosive materials.

Even with automated experiments, the wet chemistry is slow. The kind of answer you might calculate in a second for a math problem could take many hours for the chemical reaction to occur.

Biology grad students can spend 40+ hours per week in the lab, on top of all their course work. It's not so bad though, since there's plenty of time to grade papers or work on your thesis while waiting for reactions to occur.

All the data is encrypted and the key is held inside the secure enclave within the CPU. If the CPU fails then the data is unrecoverable.

The effect is a denial of service. Service is denied because the server is overloaded. The intent is at best callous indifference and at worst is copyright infringement.

It’s comparable to broadcasting radio interference as a side effect of some industrial process. If a company were to do that they’d be slapped down hard by the FCC. The unfortunate reality we live in is that we have no equivalent regulation on the internet. Thus the situation has become a tragedy of the commons: small websites suffer denial of service due to unsustainable and unwanted bot traffic.

The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.

Yes, the whole concept of an inn is to have a rest stop along a trade route. Well-trafficked routes would have inns spaced extremely regularly so that even travellers on foot could rest and eat (and drink) at least once per day.

Coffee has very similar processing to chocolate, can produce similar flavours with the right amount of roasting, but is not even close to the same thing due to the dramatically different fat content (both quantity and type of fat).

There’s a reason chocolate that has other plant fats blended into it is considered a highly inferior product to chocolate containing only cocoa butter, cocoa solids, sugar, and (optionally) milk. Cocoa butter’s melting temperature is just right for producing the intense, mouth-coating sensation of a good chocolate. Not to mention that cocoa butter carries much of the aroma compounds we love from chocolate.

How'd you manage to write a 20 page paper in class?

Sure, if you want to carry 2 phones.