Benj1B

Repeating what some have already said here:

• PBS SpaceTime is outstanding, and manages to ride the line between informative and accessible very well. Some episodes especially around heavy math/quantum mechanics are impenetrable for me but all the space stuff is great, the scripts are very well written, production value is top notch.
• Dr Becky provides amazing content mostly geared around recent research and theories - especially with the James Webb Space Telescope being a year old now there's some amazing insights coming out that she does a great job explaining. A bit less "pseudo lecture" than SpaceTime but still highly informative
• StarTalk (Neil Degrasse Tyson) is great, but in a different way. It's less formal and very much more like a podcast than a lecture or report as the prior two are.
• Sabine Hossenfelder delivers a periodic "science without the gobbledegook" show that covers all areas but generally has a focus on physics and astrophysics. She's semi-famous for not tolerating nonsense while also considering a sizeable portion of contemporary physics research to be nonsense. I think she's hilarious in a parchment-dry German kind of way, and her content goes arguably deeper than the other channels listed here in terms of subject matter - I usually leave her videos thinking about things in a different way.
• SmarterEveryDay is a general science/learning channel but really piqued my interest with a recent video about talking to NASA:

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=NrURYGlLii4Dbi1_

The host has a background in aerospace engineering and missile test flights - so its about as close to rocket science as you can get! He knows his stuff and has a lot more practical, engineering related videos - kind of makes you think about how to operationalise the more cerebral ideas of the other channels.

Hope you enjoy some or all of the suggestions here and from other commenters

We lost our first good boy to this. One moment he was happy sprawled out on the floor, next howling in agony and dragging himself by his forelegs. Nothing the vet could do, described it as basically a major stroke for a cat. Just one of those freak things.

Thanks for this suggestion, never seen these guys before but they're incredibly talented and very enjoyable to watch

We truly live in the stupidest timeline.

I'm both impressed and concerned at the level of detail you supplied here, but...thank you? For some of the context

The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.

Definitely seems AGI related. Has to do with acing mathematical problems - I can see why a generative AI model that can learn, solve, and then extrapolate mathematical formulae could be a big breakthrough.

For those who don't follow cricket closely, there are a few significant rule variations for women's cricket - namely a smaller/lighter cricket ball and reduced field\boundary dimensions.

There are also implicit limits in the upper end of cricket performance- Elyse Perry holds the record for the fastest womens cricket ball bowled ag 130.5 kph, while Shoaib Akhtar holds the overall record at 161.3 kph. There's an interesting article here that goes into more detail on the precise physical characteristics that influence bowling, where they define male fasf bowling at >122.9kph and female fast bowling at >97.8, a 30% ish difference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35259727/

This is all to say that there are very clear and established differences between men and women's cricket in the interest of safety and fairness already baked into the laws of the game. If you accept that male puberty leads to a disproportionate advantage in bone density/muscle mass vs cis women, then this decision is sensible. The exact numbers are hard to quantify, skill and natural technique plays a huge part in cricket, but on the bell curve of something like pace bowling the risk of a trans woman significantly outperforming cis women is undeniable.

I mean if it is its clever - put a bunch of made up products out there to gauge interest without needing to invest any capital, then actualy make the products that garner the most attention. Makes way more sense than trying to manufacture and market things from scratch

I saw one suggestion which was to so away with male and female competitions, and instead have "open" and "restricted" comps. Open would be available to anyone, male or female, while you could set up as many restricted comps as you needed for the particular sport or activity with whatever rules make sense. So the 100m sprint might have Open, Restricted - Testosterone, and Restricted - Height - with whatever T level or height in centimetres decided by the relevant authority. Whereas something like weightlifting might have Restricted - Weight as it's own class. The idea being any gender can compete provided provided meet the restrictions in place to make an interesting/fair competition within that bracket.

The context is important here - Australia had a continuous indigenous population for over 60,000 years before white settlement. White Australia never had an agreement with indigenous peoples at large, and through relentless expansion of colonies, spreading diseases like smallpox, introducing alcohol and drugs, forcibly abducting and schooling children, heavy incarceration and a slew of other typical British colonial shit ended up leaving them disenfranchised, alienated, and excluded. Indigenous Australians prior to colonisation had a deep affinity with the land and tended it like custodians, but because they didn't build towns or farm like Europeans, they were just swept aside without ever really being acknowledged or addressed.

The Voice was asked for as a product of the Uluru Statement of the Heart - not long, worth a read- https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/

It was really first and foremost about having an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, the settlers cocked things up and that it'd better to fix things together. It's not asking for anything "more" or extra, it's about correctly telling history and reframing our national dialogue to be coming from a place of partnership, instead of colonialism, so we could fix some of the very real issues modern Australians face as a result of hundreds of years of callous racism. It was a chance for white Australia and government to really listen and maybe find better ways of doing things.

But now instead we get to try to explain to our kids why 60% of the country don't think representation or inclusion matters while indigenous Australians will continue to struggle without a government that can listen to them.

Theres a lot of research going into carbon sequestration through soil and plant technologies - basically accelerating what would happen naturally by a few orders of magnitude.

Rapidly filling artifical peat bogs (through things like algae/weeds that are genetically modified to absorb more CO2) would allow for semi-permanent carbon capture as long as no one digs it up again. Similar projects with seaweed are under research as well.

Personally I think anything to do with carbon capture is a bandaid at best, and failing massive global cooperation and societal change, we're going to end up needing to geoengineer our way out of the problem. Things that block or impede solar heat absorption to cool the planet - atmospheric aerosols, artificial cloud generation, solar shades out in a lagrange point, basically manipulating conditions to influence how much energy is going into the system. There's a nonzero chance we fuck it all up but as we hurtle through temperature records and tipping points, the idea of net zero emissions actually having an impact in our lifetimes seems more and more unlikely. There's too much inertia in the system.

I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it's a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.

I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.