Maybe hundreds of years from now we can synthesize nutrients without involving any living cells. At that point, it could be seen as unethical to enslave, murder and eat billions of microbial cells. For the time being, our life still depends on other living things, so better get comfortable with having mixed feelings about survival.

Cyclical universe confirmed! No further questions.

Yeah, but what if you had deathstar levels of power at your disposal? It’s not going to be merely laser ablation at that point, now is it?could you really blow up the whole moon, just like Alderaan?

But it is still unpopular, so it belongs right here, now doesn’t it? Being right or wrong isn’t in the definition, so either way is fine.

If it’s wrong, there’s probably a good reason why it’s unpopular. If it’s true, we can have a very interesting discussion.

You know what they say: “fake it till you make it”

I can imagine how these workers would constantly monitor the temperature of the fire and add more coal when necessary.

I wonder how a (software) daemon would fit in. It would just take care of various background stuff and nobody would notice it until something goes wrong.

I’m ignorant. Tell me what’s the problem with rust? I thought iron oxide is a fairly stable compound.

Unfortunately, human rights violations aren’t rare in that area. In fact, that’s been the standard practice in KSA and UAE for decades.

Maybe one day plastic processing plants could use larvae to eat the waste. We’re already using microbes in this way, so why not extend the same idea to larger creatures.

Fair enough. We’re going to assume it’s completely safe until proven otherwise. Vulcanologists can tell you that the viscosity can be pretty high, so there could be a choking hazard though. Further study would be needed to determine the exact nature of potential hazards.

Be careful though. If you keep on digging deeper and deeper, you’ll find magma. That’s not a bad deal either, because you can use that heat to run a geothermal power plant.

So much that people have started making DIY stuff out of them.

Also, there’s the actual Chad, which is bigger than Texas.

Wait what… Are you saying that Ireland didn’t have a bottle returning system before? What happened to all the bottles and cans before that? Did you just throw all of that in the trash?

At least that follows some mathematical logic. Mohs scale of hardness is pretty close to pT scale in that sense, but there’s no mathematics or logic involved. It’s just a list of standard materials that define specific points on the scale. When you compare the results with a more logical scale, it looks neatly non-linar at first glance, but the closer you look, the less sense it makes. It’s just a list of exceptions to whatever rule you may have had in mind.

Doesn’t mean it’s a useless scale. You can totally use it for qualitative assessment of hardness, but steer clear of it when numbers and decimals actually matter.

It’s only fair to give credit when credit is due. Doesn’t mean I like that unit, but I can see where they’re coming from.

You could totally make an extra cursed temperature scale. Randall proposed the °X scale, but maybe we can do better than that. That was pretty cursed because it defines three points based on statistics observed on of Earth and uses linear interpolation to connect the dots.

I propose an extra cursed system that uses completely fictional values. Let’s take -π as the melting point of unicorns and +GrahamsNumber as the peak temperature in the core of the hypothetical planet Vulcan. Between the two points you can fit any seventh degree polynomial you like in order to get the values that fit your needs. On Wednesdays you can use a sine wave too.

I think it’s about time we switched to using seconds as the universal time unit. I really hate the messy base 60 conversions we inherited from the Babylonians. Also, month is such a broken unit, and it just makes many calculations unnecessarily complicated.

In the Middle East, the winters are brutally cold and the locals suffer. Tourists from colder regions come there to enjoy their winter vacation in December or January, because it’s paradoxically quite warm. They only pack their normal spring clothes because it isn’t really that cold in their opinion. You know, a thin coat, maybe a thin summer beanie. You’ll probably be ok without any mittens. Also, you can wear normal shoes which is nice.

Extreme weather gear is considered just normal winter clothes in some parts of the world.