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The thread about wire black corals' chirality is done, but here is another picture I took back then:

It's certainly pie-in-the-sky at the moment, there's no doubt about that. In the future though, (a long time in the future) it will surely be a more practical proposition. Mining the Moon or asteroids would be the only practical way that it could happen, and that's probably at least a hundred years away. Probably two hundred. You would think that whether it's via nuclear, or via renewables with energy storage, the global emissions of CO2 will be under control by then, so whatever the climate is doing, I can't imagine that space reflectors on that scale will ever be worth the effort and investment needed. For a tiny fraction of what it would cost, you could cut out all CO2 emissions worldwide with a mix of nuclear and renewables. Cars and trucks are going to be electric fairly soon anyway.

Something else to factor in is the age/maturity/dependency of the student. In the early grades, a child is very much influenced by parental and societal behaviours and expectation. They may simply want to please a demanding parent, or they may have great pressure exerted on them to perform to an adult's standard. These habits may then become ingrained, unless some other very strong influence turns them in another direction. In some cultures, parental expectation and control is all but absolute throughout a young person's life, until they become self-supporting. In some cultures, competition for ranking, prizes, places in the respected institutions of higher learning, prestigious professional firms or hospitals is so intense that a weaker student may resort to desperate measures - simply because the price of failure, or even just quitting, is too high. Some students commit suicide. Some act out, act up, get arrested, get expelled - anything to get that achivement-monkey off their back. Some cheat and get away with it and go on to become extremely successful business tycoons. That seems like nothing more than laziness to me. * Obviously, I started the above a long time before posting it. Duties elsewhere intervened.

Started to get runny nose and loads of sneezing and light headed on Wednesday. Tested positive on Thursday morning and have been isolated since. Symptoms started to disappear yesterday, and have now all but gone...feeling pretty good while still isolating until Thursday morning. 2 astra zeneca shots, plus Moderna booster were my defence. I am also 77 years old. ps: no confirmation as yet as to what variant I had. A symptom I did forget to mention, was a loss of appetite, although taste OK.

The students I teach are predominately pre-med, and the stakes are high. They are all paying a lot to be there, need straight A's to get into competitive medical programs. and not all of them are straight A students. Some students will go to extraordinary lengths to try and get that A, including harassing/stalking their professors, cheating, trying to find loopholes in university policies, etc and so on. My take is this: a) I'm there to teach the course, not police the academic misconduct policy. Some students will cheat in my course and get away with it - but I'm not going to run sting operations and deliberately try and catch cheaters, because ultimately it's a waste of my energy which could be spent on better quality teaching and pedagogy. b) If I do catch a cheater (which happens at least once a semester), I don't screw around. You fail and get formally reported for a academic misconduct. I block your email/phone number. You appeal to the dean if you don't like it. I don't give warnings (aside from in the syllabus) "just this one time" or other half measures. If I catch you it's extraordinarily likely this ain't your first rodeo. I trusted you, and you treated me like an idiot - you wrecked your GPA/lost your scholarship/ruined your graduation plans, not me. c) I don't take it personally or get upset about it. I get that this is a deeply flawed system, and the motivations to cheat. I also get that my upper division elective is just not that important in the long run, and I won't get worked up being the integrity gatekeeper of the academic world. I give my students the benefit of the doubt, and try to get on with being the best instructor I can.

I think civilizations got into trouble when knowledge was seen purely as a commodity, something to foster "productivity" in cold calculations of investment and return. An amoral capitalist approach does not really reckon with the natural curiosity and love of connecting with others and the mystery of the larger world that is the real driver of learning. We seek to understand our world, and other people, and what we should do in our lives - education systems that don't focus on this will always become petri dishes of cynical calculation. People will plagiarize when they are no longer able to love knowledge as a vibrant human activity with intrinsic value outside of a marketplace.

I am not sure if I proposed an atom bomb explosion as an emergent phenomenon back along but the echange at 'critical mass' is such a change. (Just fancied a change from my arch as a conversation subject)

Ah, Google “The space between the biceps and triceps forms two grooves (medial and lateral bicipital grooves)” https://www.kenhub.com/en/library/anatomy/biceps-brachii-muscle

I read somewhere that certain elements, like the power unit, are replaceable, in the event that such technology may be available in a few decades. I think it's planned service life is 40 years iirc.

Well, this is what we assume (of course with good reason) would happen - but how can we show this? Good point. Ok, but who is to say that “fundamental” necessarily has to be absolute and global? My thoughts were that ‘fundamental’ might be scale-dependent, so that laws can form a hierarchy, wherein each set of laws is fundamental on that level. So basically fundamental to me would mean irreducible. In that picture, nature would come about as a set of strata, ie a multi-level hierarchy of laws, each one of which being irreducible. Each lower level would then form a boundary condition of the next higher level, but does not uniquely determine it. This is not a claim - I don’t necessarily believe that nature is like this. I am simply speculating out loud, to see what implications emergence might have.

Thanks, I did go back and take note of where the mutual misunderstood parts were. Oddly flattering that anyone would think my writing would be worthy of the SEP. Anyway, I see the snark was unintended, so I'm sorry for misunderstanding. Carry on.

Thank you. I also realise another characteristic of emergence I haven't mentioned. If you some bricks, you can build some sort of structure, even if just a pile. But unless you have enough bricks you cannot build an arch. In other words, the emergent phenomenon only emerges when all the necessary precursors are in place. The change from no emergence to emergent is sudden. This is consistent with the link to Catastrophe theory I referred to earlier in the thread.

I haven't used it for a while but Redo-Backup is free (open source project) and works really well. https://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/ You make a byte by byte copy of the entire or part of the hard drive or chosen partition onto other media such as DVD/USBstick/Hard drive (spare) etc. Then the backup software copies the other way when needed and handles wiping and repartitioning you hard drive automatically. Unfortunately it won't do servers.

Quite a star(t)ling sight! I'm sure Uri Geller is envious.