NaibofTabr

The biggest difference (from a fire perspective) is that firefighters can’t just throw water on an electric car in an emergency. Fires are less common for electric cars, but dealing with them when they are on fire is a lot more difficult (metal fires are nasty). There are some specialty suppressants that can be used, but they aren’t widely available - they’re expensive compared to water, you can’t just get them out of a city water hookup, and it’s difficult for a firetruck to carry them in high volume. Common practice is to just let an electric car fire burn itself out.

This battery design sounds like it won’t self-ignite from overheating, which is good. But… crashes would be a concern. If the car were overheating or on fire (upholstery, gasoline splash from an ICE vehicle, lubricant oil, etc) it would be difficult to deal with safely. Sodium and water is… kind of spectacular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4aVueFmOHo

Safety concerns.

There’s a lot of regulation around the way that household circuit breakers are installed. Those regulations have been developed over decades of problems caused by electrical wiring. A lot of people died to produce things like the NEC. The rules are literally written in blood and fire.

Plugging an independent power source into an outlet to distribute to the rest of the home wiring bypasses a lot of the safety. It means there’s a live power circuit that is not controlled by the local breaker panel, or the building’s main circuit breaker, or anywhere beyond the device itself.

Among other things, this creates a hazard for firefighters. It means they can’t reliably cut off the electricity for a burning building, so they have to be more careful when entering the building (because there may be exposed live wires) and they may have a harder time putting the fire out if electric sparks keep reigniting it.

Capstan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_(nautical)

The bars are removed from the head and lying on the deck around it.

Removing the bars is for safety once it has been turned and the line it holds is under tension. If the locking mechanism slips and the line starts running out, the capstan head would be spinning very fast and the bars would be a hazard. The bars have been left out on the deck (rather than stowed away) so that the capstan can be used again quickly if needed. Probably in this case the capstan is being used to tension the lines holding the bridge.

Why do those things cause cancer? Why do some smokers not die of cancer? The reason it’s so vague is because we don’t actually know what causes cancer.

Ah, I see the misunderstanding now.

Just because a natural process contains some inherent randomness does not mean that we do not know how it works. Knowing exactly how a thing occurs does not make the action of that thing deterministic. Just because it is unpredictable on an individual scale does not mean it is mysterious, or beyond our understanding.

Some people exposed to a carcinogen will develop cancerous cells. Some will not. Some of their immune systems will remove the cancer cells before they cause problems. Some will not. Some will develop tumors from those cells. Some of those cells will die and get filtered out by the kidneys or liver before they reproduce and form tumors. Some of those tumors will grow enough to be lethal. Some will become benign before they cause significant health problems.

The outcome depends on many factors like age, health, exercise, diet, exposure, genetic background, etc. There are more variables than we can possibly track for any given person. Even if we could get all of that information, we are ultimately talking about the interactions of certain molecules with proteins in cells - meaning that quantum effects are relevant, so there is some probability involved.

We know what is associated with cancer, but not what causes it.

We know what causes cancer. Genetic mutations during cell reproduction cause cancer. We don’t know every possible thing that can provoke genetic mutations (that would require infinite knowledge), nor do we know if a specific individual will develop cancer in response to a specific carcinogen. The outcome is probabilistic.

Again, just because there is some inherent randomness does not mean that we don’t understand how it works. Understanding something does not make it deterministic.

I’m not convinced that there ever can be a real alternative to YouTube. Sure there are other video delivery platforms on the Internet, but nothing with the depth and breadth of content. We’re talking about more than 20 years of video uploads - it’s a historical archive. In the same vein, there is no alternative to AtomFilms, because most of the content that was there is now inaccessible.

We know many causes of cancer. We don’t know every possible thing that might provoke cell mutations. We know that it’s not any one specific thing.

We don’t know what causes cancer. It’s the oncogenic paradox.

Hmm, this is not really true though…

We know that cancer is caused by genetic mutations during cell replication, resulting in malformed cells which behave abnormally. If these cells then replicate successfully they can produce tumors. We know that this can happen with basically any cell type, though some animals have very low cancer rates.

Mechanically, we know that a lot of different sources can provoke genetic mutations in cells. We have identified many, many such influences (radiation, various chemicals, viruses, etc). Asbestos fibers can interfere with chromosomes mechanically during mitosis:

There is experimental evidence that very slim fibers (<60 nm, <0.06 μm in breadth) tangle destructively with chromosomes (being of comparable size). This is likely to cause the sort of mitosis disruption expected in cancer.

We know many causes of cancer. We don’t know every possible thing that might provoke cell mutations. We know that it’s not any one specific thing.

We also know that cellular mutation is part of the evolutionary process. It might not be possible to “cure cancer” in the sense of preventing cellular mutations, as this may be a built-in function of what we are as a species. Preventing mutation might also not be a good long-term strategy for the survival of the species.

Ah, did you look at the second link?

It is somewhat more difficult to understand the “chromosome tangling hypothesis.” We recently found that asbestos fibers including crocidolite are actively taken up by several different kinds of cultured cells. Furthermore, those fibers enter both the cytoplasm and the nucleus. In this situation, asbestos fibers may tangle with chromosomes when cells divide. Whether there is a specificity of tangling for any chromosomal region is the next question to be addressed.

Which comes with this image:

Granted there isn’t a lot of experimental evidence for this (that I can find, anyway), but it makes sense that tiny little silicate needles that get absorbed by the nucleus interfere with the chromosomes both mechanically and chemically.

I also found this:

A normal (A) and an abnormal (B) anaphase from asbestos-treated Syrian hamster embryo cells. Note the asbestos fibers (arrows), some of which appear to be associated with displaced chromosomes (arrowheads) in the abnormal anaphase. Reproduced from Hesterberg and Barrett (42) with permission.

Asbestos fibers are observed in the mitotic cells and appear, in some cases, to interact directly with the chromosomes. From these studies we propose that the physical interaction of asbestos fibers with the chromosomes or structural proteins of the spindle apparatus causes missegregation of chromosomes during mitosis, resulting in aneuploidy.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-normal-A-and-an-abnormal-B-anaphase-from-asbestos-treated-Syrian-hamster-embryo_fig1_20488222

Basically, breathing in any kind of particulates is bad for you, and very fine particles (like smoke/vapor) can pass through cell walls and interact with your proteins resulting in transcription errors during cellular reproduction. For instance, asbestos fibers can tangle with and damage chromosomes [2]. The more often you do it, and the more volume you expose your lung tissue to, the higher the odds that something will go catastrophically wrong.

I suspect the timing of this has a lot to do with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal regarding copyright for AI-generated visual art, which effectively upholds the Copyright Office’s determination that copyright only applies to human-created works.

If Disney (or any other prospective customer) can’t claim copyright over anything a generative model might produce, then it has no commercial value.

Bringing back highly communicable diseases like measles might have something to do with it.

…in mice

No no, see the GNU GPL is copyleft:

The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

So if (stressing the if) output from an AI that was trained on GPL code is considered a derivative work, then it must also be licensed as GNU GPL. That makes it open source, but not unlicensed.

GNU GPL is intentionally insidious this way, it prevents corporate profiteering from GPL projects because any derivative work must use the same license.

The question is whether a court decision would uphold that AI generated code based on GPL code training counts as a derivative work. This decision regarding generated art seems like it might set a precedent for that.

Heh, this would be fantastic and I think technically in line with the GNU GPL - all code produced from GPL code must also be licensed as GPL. Therefore the output of any model that trained on any GPL code would also be GPL.

Open source all the things!

But what about the microchips?

Was it typical for triremes to have sheet metal plating along the keel? It seems like that would have been very costly at the time.

This is basically eBay.

gotta have your vitamins

iron, zinc, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, carbon, saltpeter…

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