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TBH, when I first saw this topic I didn't pay much attention. I don't use it and I'm not in the USA so a ban wouldn't make any difference to me. I assume I'm not the only one But the subject also got flagged by the IT security people at work so I was paid to look at it They posted a link to this https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/27/china_crisis_is_a_tiktoking/ and the problem isn't really Tiktok it's scarier than that. The article is worth a read.

Many thanks lol

Britons.

Well put. Pareidolia also bedeviled all those Mars pics that poured in back in the 90s, when the Mars Global Surveyor was snapping away. While it revealed the Viking I pic of the Face (from the 70s) as just another mesa, it set off a whole new round of "hey, that looks like...." Mars has been the pareidolia capital of the solar system since Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell.

The pictures are sufficiently grainy for paredolia to set in... and aliens.

Yes, I'm quite sure. The spacetime metric outside a non-rotating spherically symmetric body is the Schwarzschild one. Not inside, though. The first object would have a bigger part of its trajectory inside the Earth than the second one. So, their trajectories would go through different spacetime metrics.

I see Loeb has another recent paper speculating that Oumuamua could be a fragment of a disintegrated Dyson sphere. One that had had a reflective interior, so that a broken piece would function as a light-sail. Basically, a Dyson tile fell past us. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acc10d Again, this could be split to an Oumuamua thread. Not exhausted yet. 😀 I like anomalies. In many areas of inquiry, they can introduce new paths of research, point to problems in data collection, suggest hypotheses outside a standard set of models. In SETI, for example, it would only take one anomaly potentially to be world-shaking.

Hardly. Ports are located on these flooded coasts, and a lot of people. These areas that would be “opened up” have little infrastructure, which would have to be built up, and so are hardly a replacement.

Since that is NewsGuard's mission, I hope they have done similar investigations of Faux News et al. Rather than banning all these miscreant companies, however, I think laws should be passed that impose severe penalties for fake news, laws that can't be loopholed by claiming "it's just entertainment!" Lie about news events, pay a huge fine or even do jail time. No white collar crime wrist-slaps. For Tucker Carlson, I can happily envision public flogging, perhaps combined with vultures arriving each day to chew on his liver.

At the moment, the world is buying billions of lottery tickets, without even knowing if there is a prize. It's ludicrous the way people have taken to an unproven hypothesis, just following some very well meaning but biased climate models, produced by people who are so dedicated to a cause that no dissent or contrary evidence is allowed. But it's not all bad news. Renewable energy tech can't be a bad thing, if it keeps the price of gas and oil down, and reduces the reliance on a few energy-rich exporters. And fossil fuels will of course get scarcer in the future, so it's not a bad thing to be ready for when that happens. My problem with it all is the notion the world seems to have, that if CO2 is reduced, all will be well. Ignoring the real problem of overpopulation of the planet, which IS real, and if people stopped ignoring it and did something, they could make a REAL difference for far less money than is being spent on CO2 mitigation.