Ken Fabian

Not an American here but energy matters everywhere and the best available advice on climate change says it really has to be low emissions energy. Any discussion of energy subsidies should not pass over and ignore the climate and other externalised consequences and the de facto subsidy that having no accountability for them provides to emissions intensive energy and industries. The impossibility of accurately accounting for how much that 'subsidy' adds to future costs should not be excuse to assume those costs are zero. A shift to EV's over oil for transport is worthwhile in ways that ICE being cheaper right now aren't. My own view re energy 'independence' is that the value of national self reliance without trade is greatly overrated; economies can and do benefit more from what they can produce out of what is inexpensive to import and paying the bills with that greater productivity and export trade than by insisting all their industries use more expensive local resources and impeding their growth. No successful developed nation, not even exceptionally resource rich USA has gotten that way by being isolationist. That said, having a lot of RE that is not subject to the cycles of fossil fuel global pricing and price volatility (and the greedy profiteering from energy crises) as well as having factories making what that takes is undoubtedly economically beneficial as well as necessary to regain climate stability. .

@Sensei Thank you, the sudo dmesg -w command fixed it first go. I was reluctant to enter Terminal (named Konsole in this case) because what is being done is incomprehensible to me, but I was at the point of abandoning it completely, so nothing to lose. But I am making a copy of that instruction where I can get to it easily, just in case the problem recurs. FWIW the usb sticks I tried were fat32 and one external drive shows as vfat (I though it was fat32?) but the other (2TB) external drive was NTFS. I will avoid the NTFS. I might keep going with the dual boot version and see how well it goes. (But I only gave Linux the minimum partition space, just to try it with minimum impact on Windows.) I will hold off for now on a standalone install on a different HDD; have to be a different distro, given the results with the Ubuntu-studio downloads I tried.

Not a usb device but every usb device... except the wireless mouse, that has a usb dongle (I just realised), so maybe just storage devices. And SD cards don't show/mount either. Haven't checked the cdr/dvd drive. I suppose if usb devices worked I might still use the dual boot version - but I would not trust it. Haven't checked every usb file but the ones I looked at seemed fine (on sticks and external hard drives, on Windows of course - can't access them on Linux to see). I had noticed ubuntu did not like the NTFS formatted external drive - it would not allow copying of files to that drive although I could open and read the document files on it. Was not so long after that I noticed I couldn't access any usb devices.

Mine would have been a variant of that distro. I can still use it dual-boot - just unable to use usb (where I like to keep backups of email addresses, important documents, browser settings etc).

Naive of me to expect the installation package to come up with a "hardware not compatible" notice if hardware was not compatible? I know from painful past experience that Windows (Win7 I think it was) can go through the whole installation process and - only at the very end, an hour or two later - give a notice like that. Would've been helpful for it to have checked compatibility at the start, before directing me the wrong way down a one way street. @CharonY my needs are basic and I had been given the impression those could be provided reliably with Linux. I think the working reliably without resort to Terminal text commands for fixes part is an essential requirement for me - without an ongoing need to use Terminal any attempt to learn is not going to stick. Whilst Win10 hasn't been perfect mostly it has worked reliably - an occasional boot into safe mode when icons on start bar go missing has been the worst of it. My post is more rant than call for help, but thanks for all the offers of help. I probably will try Linux again, but not any time soon. I need to get over it first.

Hi @joigus . I use a HP laptop that was upgraded to fresh install of Win10 before i bought it 'refurbished'. By the sticker on it, it originally ran Win7. Ubuntu ran okay as dual boot, until losing the ability to mount USB (and SD) along the way - which worked fine, until it didn't. I wondered if I was supposed to have pre-formatted the new HDD somehow - I just assumed (always risky to assume) that the install process could cope, even do it better with a new, untouched HDD and assumed it would make the appropriate partitions (boot partition?) after I used the 'erase disk and install' option. Without an OS I don't have a ready means to format. Give myself a bit of time to get over the frustrations and I might try again, with a different version, but I don't enjoy the tinkering, which for me is only for problem fixing, out of necessity - the better it runs the less tinkering I would expect to face, which, ideally, won't be enough to gain lasting knowledge or skill with Linux Terminal/Konsole. My uses are quite basic - the choice of ubuntu-studio was for the audio software (I play a bit of guitar and sing a bit - preferably not where people can hear me!) - but mostly just for browsing, emails and occasional documents and picture printing.

Thanks @studiot Actually the Dual Boot with Windows did work okay... once I found how to bring up the OS choice screen( holding down the 'shift' key). Until it stopped recognising any usb drives the ubuntu OS worked okay as dual boot. Then I got a new hdd and installed just Linux on it, starting with 'erase disk and install ubuntu', so no conflicts with Win10. After three install attempts with it, with two different downloads, I just get "no bootdevice" and "install operating system". I suppose someone will have a fix, no doubt with incomprehensible Terminal text commands, or I could try a different distro and hope I'm lucky, but I feel like I've wasted too much time and effort already. I have switched the hdd back to the one with the dual boot drive and am back to using the Win10, not the Linux.

After a discussion with someone who uses Linux, who assured me it will do all the things I would want as well as Windows will I gave Ubuntu-studio a try. And nothing has gone right. tl:dr - Am I just unlucky or is this the usual for Linux? Do people ever use it and find it is essentially trouble free? The longer version - I did a dual boot setup with my Win10 which seemed to install okay only to discover no "choose OS" option would come up at startup and looked to me like I couldn't start Windows at all, just Linux - not an encouraging start. After going to a help site I found out I could boot to Windows so long as I held the 'shift' key down at startup - a fix of sorts. Annoying but it worked. Mostly Ubuntu did do what it should, well enough that I got a spare HDD and in preparation I tried to make copies of things like address book, email and browser settings, current documents etc only to find Ubuntu had stopped recognising any usb devices, for no reason; I know I didn't do anything to mess it up. Looking for help with that... which led to a variety of 'open Terminal and do x and y and z (incomprehensible gobbledygook)' options. Do I really need to learn all that command line stuff to use Linux? I'd been assured I wouldn't need it. (If I tried to learn that stuff would I use it often enough to remember any of it later? The plan was that I wouldn't... at least not if Linux worked like it should, without throwing up problems that only commands in a Terminal can fix.) Should have quit then I suppose, but I can be stubborn and I persisted. I copied the files from Windows to the usb, then did the new Linux install on the swapped HDD... and it appeared to be up and running, with no more installing going on but there was no notification it was complete. There was an icon "install ubuntu studio" onscreen - was I supposed to click on that? Who knows. Not me. Without doing so it turned out I couldn't even get it to shut down (without the hold down the power button long enough option), so I clicked the ' 'install ubuntu' option (seemed to do exactly the same installation process, all over again, but asking me if I wanted to dual boot with the first installation! No thanks. Got through to a restart and 'remove installation media' that time, like it had actually finished installing. It shut down itself... only to not start again - no bootdevice found, install an operating system. FFS. Then I redid it all over from a fresh download, to be sure. And sure enough it still wouldn't work. FFS doubled.

For all the popularity of the "butterfly wings can lead to cyclones" meme, it actually takes warm ocean surface temperatures and low pressure weather systems. As swansont points out, it requires an energy input, ie heat in ocean water and pressure differences within the atmosphere (which arise largely from differences in sea surface temperatures). You won't get perpetual motion machines out of micro-fans. You won't get them at all - they just don't work.

Our AC is "split cycle" rather than the window fitted variety but I would suppose, like our system, some of the latter can do heating as well as cooling. The heating is not from conversion of electricity to heat, but from drawing heat from outside air with a fluid at lower temperature, then releasing that heat inside at a higher temperature. The trick (as I understand it) is to have a fluid that is liquid with a boiling temperature/condensation temperature that is higher than the outside temperature but lower than the desired inside temperature - compression causes it to condense and it gives off heat, then outside it is warm enough (despite being "cold") to boil, absorbing heat. The heat absorbed outside is converted to higher temperature heat inside. (The reverse of what AC does). The amount of heat transferred from outside to inside can be several times the electricity used by the compressor and the fans. Different working fluids and the pressures they work at make heat pumps possible that work in outdoor temperatures well below freezing.

@npts2020 Chinese governance and policy was never all the same under Mao - Mao's policies changed a lot - and yes, Mao was still around for the Nixon visit and by then sought to make China less isolationist, but China was still a long way from being the industrialised, trading nation it is now. Most of that happened post-Mao.

@studiot Just my crude attempt to give "unlikely" some perspective. Planets are very large. Hundreds of millions of years are a very long time. Chemical compounds are very small and there are vast quantities of them. In practice I fully expect there were large volumes with not much (but not zero) relevant chemistry is happening, literally cold - and yet those still got lightning (that Miller-Urey tries to simulate). Those "coldspots" could be important, as well as "hotspots" as places where more complex or vigorous chemical reactions occur - I seem to recall something about abiogenesis and water turning to ice and in the process concentrating the chemicals that were within it; being subjected to freezing/melting might conceivably play a part. And what flows from the hotspots into the large oceans may be subjected to different conditions that are themselves critical. The big oceans may be crucial simply for carrying and dispersing partway precursors from tropics to icy polar regions and past other hotspots. We know that some asteroids are rich in many of biochemistry's building blocks (Bennu samples have a lot). In shallow water a meteor impact zone would be especially rich in them. Such meteors can have and almost certainly will have impacted around hydrothermal vent systems - making an even hotter hotspot. Not everywhere is the same - geological processes concentrate as well as erodes and dissipates minerals. My point is that with such a large and chemically varied planet the odds of conditions within so much water turning out to be just right are not small, even if the places critical chemistry occurs may be - will be - smaller than the whole.

Not quite that, but I did try to get some perspective on how many opportunities there might be for chance chemistry (within a mixture of lifeless "organic" chemicals that includes many essential biochemical components, pre-made) to come up with life. 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of liquid water (on Earth ie one planet) = 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ml About 1,000,000 bacteria per ml live in sea water, so if the chemical precursors for those are present in primordial sea water we get enough to make... = 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria's worth. Give it 500 million years of chemical reactions that happen at much faster than 1 per second per ml rates I'll be very conservative and say only 1 reaction per second... (actually thousands to millions?) = 15,750,000,000,000,000 seconds x 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bacteria's worth = 20,475,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 opportunities for random chemistry + selection make the appropriate complex chemistry for earliest ‘simple’ life. Now this isn't intended to be definitive by any means - add a few zeros for faster than 1 reaction per ml per second or subtract a few zeros for not everywhere having the conditions if that makes you happier. It doesn't require randomly making a bacteria, which is a highly evolved life-form, just much simpler precursors. It is just an attempt to see how "very unlikely" fits with extremely large numbers of opportunities for "unlikely" to happen. To me 20,475,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 opportunities looks so likely as to be effectively inevitable.

@npts2020 China is not being run the way it was during Mao's time; it is far less isolationist. I don't think there has been any serious dangers of famine in China for a long time now; for one thing they have become major international traders who can afford to and do import food. But they have modernised agriculture and also export agricultural commodities.

Does China count as centrally planned? Does allowing and encouraging "free market" commercial activity and competition with strong direction from government count as planned? Clearly China's government supports innovation - companies like battery maker CATL have 10's of thousands of employees devoted to R&D. In the science journals the proliferation of publications from Chinese scientists is clear. Hard to count China as evidence that central planning is counterproductive - their standards of living have greatly improved, vast numbers have been lifted out of dire poverty. A lot of anti-China sentiment and policy is based on fear that China prosperity can support large and well equipped armed forces as well as commercially outcompete the "free" world. If central planning were so innately counterproductive those fears would not be so strong. I think China as military enemy becomes more likely by seeking to suppress their economic growth - and by undoing what institutions of international law and international planning have been doing. Like with every nation and economy I'm inclined to see ethical and law abiding versus ruthless and corrupt as more crucial to sustained economic success than planned and regulated versus unplanned and unregulated. China has serious corruption problems yet their leadership does demand some level of competence as well as loyalty in their appointments. Corrupt regimes often do not and often appoint incompetent (and corrupt) people to positions of authority. Some people get very rich like that, but not so often oversee and promote more comprehensive economic development. I think when it comes to critical economy wide infrastructure that supports economic growth having no overarching planning and regulation is damaging; few nations got roads and railways and electricity grids or provided universal education without it. Those that have the least such planning don't stand out as economic powerhouses. Seems like it is in a healthy balance between planned and competitive that the most benefit emerges.

@HawkII That was my thinking, off the top of my head. Thinking about it more, I think I was wrong and rotation speed isn't such a limiting factor. For all I know someone is working on making thin sheets of micro-fans. Mary Poppins umbrellas come to mind as an application.

Nay. Miniaturizing the fans and having lots of them seems like choosing a difficult solution to an easy problem. Small fans need very fast rotation to achieve a fast enough blade speed relative to still air. At microscopic size the rotation speeds must be extreme to move much air. I have noticed the cooling fan of my previous laptop was very quiet, but the one I use now is much noisier. I don't know what makes them different apart from build quality but "low noise" fans are available, as well as other kinds of cooling

If you sift through every religious origin of universe story, (with imperfect translation), you might find some that appear to share things in common with modern cosmology. That is not the same as them having actual understanding, superior insight or prescience. It seems to me more like evidence of the capabilities of human brains to dream and imagine such a wide variety of things that aren't real that occasionally they can imagine something that turns out close to right. Without the observational evidence preferably with supporting measurement it seems like there is no way to know whether you have imagined something correctly or not. Observation and accurate measurements puts boundaries on imagination in the pursuit of understanding - and excludes imaginary forces and explanations where there is no observation or evidence.

US Department of Agriculture has been instructed to not mention climate change on it's websites. EPA, NOAA and NASA next? A group of coal power plant operators have asked Trump's administration for regulations around coal ash disposal (the world's no.2 biggest problem waste by quantity after CO2) be lifted and look likely to get groundwater contamination monitoring eliminated. I don't know to what extent state based regulation can be overruled by federal. With a compliant Supreme Court, will that be much more than would ordinarily be expected? I have long seen corruption as the bane of civilisation and the independent rule of law, making even the manageable unmanageable, the readily fixable unfixable and constraining innovation and true wealth creation in favour of zero-sum wealth redistribution; it inevitably prefers the dirty official that can be blackmailed over the clean ones that cannot. I had thought we had made a lot of progress in reducing institutional corruption and to say what I am witnessing is dismaying is understatement. Not that intimidation doesn't work with the honest and I don't think Trump has forgotten his pledge of investigation and prosecution of his political opponents. Then there has been the unfortunate message in pardoning the insurrectionist rioters - that violence on his behalf will have Trump's Presidential protection. Very dangerous times for the USA - and for the world at large. And then there is Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama - none of them enemies of the USA... not yet.

Yes, it does appear like abiogenesis got a head start with a wide range of precursor chemicals. Meteorite impact sites, perhaps in shallow water, where such materials would be concentrated could be significant to abiogenesis chemistry. Enough meteorites over enough time (and Earth has had both) means some will impact near hydrothermal vents and other places with "rare and unusual" conditions - over a whole planet and given hundreds of millions of years, not so much rare and unusual as extremely likely.

Yes, and the receptors in retinas are like that too, even before the visual cortex gets involved - or other brain processes fill in details expected to be there, predicted to be there, not necessarily out of what the optic nerve transmitted. Kinda remarkable such biological systems work so similarly between individuals and can deliver such high levels of discrimination.

When I look at a rainbow I see a progression of colours between inside and outside edges, not distinct bands of seven separate, distinct colours. Naming them red, orange, yellow, green etc is convenient and give an idea of where on the spectrum but even I routinely give names to more than seven. Teal for example - and that word is still for a range of colours, not one unique colour. Any trained artist - or paint supplier - will have a whole lot more colour names than seven - they can get quite creative with the names.

That it was traditional for the dominant majority to be casually insulting to minorities doesn't mean the loss of those traditions will make America worse*, nor preserving them lead to renewed greatness. Honky cracker boys (fun terms?) find those terms fun and funny and having it pointed out that those disparaged by them find them demeaning and offensive... is offensive. Seems like the ability to press those buttons and mobilise voters on such issues got the USA Donald Trump over the line for President. (Or, as an Australian, make Australia, that has similar traditions, worse by calling them out for their offensiveness to minorities and discouraging their use.)

Weighing the conveniences against the inconveniences my mobile phone is hands down a winner. Not that there aren't annoyances and frustrations - took me 15 minutes and starting over again twice to work through to a particular purchase recently. If it worked better it would've taken under 2 minutes. But compared to phoning around shops to check availability, compared to driving to shops and... finding it isn't in stock? Clothing I probably prefer to go in person and try things for fit, but that is rarely an urgent, important purchase. My phone - is about 1/5th the cost of a landline phone to use (Aldi have phone sims and plans here really cheap). Just that is enough to be worth using. But there is more... The call log tracks calls and unanswered calls. I can make video phone calls. I can message, pass videos and pictures around easily. Email. It is a pocket watch of extreme accuracy, that handles time zone changes easily. Countdown timer, stopwatch, alarm clock. A calendar with reminder service. I can take quite decent (or indecent) pictures with it - and edit them. I can make videos with it. It has a calculator that also does unit conversions. A sound recorder. A guitar tuner. A metronome. I can do banking and could use it in place of bank cards - tap and go for small transactions. It plays my music - through ear buds or feeding into our (vintage) "stereo". I can look up all kinds of information, watch tv or movies or stream music or use the 64G of micro-SD and have my whole music collection available. I can read books and get new titles easily. It can be (and often is) our internet connection, sometimes faster than the satellite service. Not used so often that I ever have to add more data. (Unused data allowance accumulates). But there is more... Yes, i can find myself wasting time scrolling around - or read stuff on it in a waiting room - but that is time I have more of because so many things can be done so quickly and easily using it.

The time of year when it is warmest (S. Hemisphere) or coldest (N. Hemisphere) is about a month after the solstice - because there is some lag time between maximum and minimum sunlight and local temperatures topping or bottoming out. The specific timing is down to historical choices and traditions.