There’s a lot more to teaching than just good explanations. I do enjoy trying to explain complex science in more understandable ways however.

As for struggling, we all do at times, pushing through is how we get better. Also science is a little like a spider web. If you look closely, at just a few strands, they don’t make obvious sense. It’s only when you build up a broader picture that it becomes obvious and easy. Building that picture, unfortunately, requires pushing through the “what the hell, I can’t make sense of this!” stage.

It would be a mix of relative rates and the exact energy.

If you pick an area of “empty” space where you expect very little dark matter, you will get a baseline reading. When you aim at an area expected to be dense in dark matter, you will expect to get a higher reading. E.g. 10 counts a day, Vs 100 per day. This is basically how radiation detection works on earth, so the maths is well studied.

The other thing is energy levels. 2 electrons hitting have a distinct energy. It will vary upwards slightly, due to kinetic energy, but not that much. We also know the annihilation energy of other forms of matter, from earth experiments. A reading distinct from anything normal would be a good signature of an unknown type of matter annihilating.

There are also extra complications from things like red shift, but those can be measured in other ways, and corrected for.

The order of theory and discovery also helps. “Finding X that happens to support Y” is a lot weaker than “Predicting X from theory Y, then going and finding it”. If you run 1 million experiments, a 1 in a million result is quite likely by pure fluke. A 1 in a million result from a single, focused experiment is a lot more powerful.

In a short summary. Something is wrong with the spin of galaxies. There is more mass than we can account for, and it’s distributed wrong.

Either the laws of gravity are slightly wrong, or there is something out there with mass, but no interaction with other matters (light particularly).

More recent, more detailed studies have shown that the error is not consistent. Therefore either the laws of physics vary from galaxy to galaxy (very unlikely) or it’s something physical, rather than a law error.

That leaves dark matter, sometimes called W.I.M.Ps (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). They don’t seem to interact with electromagnetism at all, and even any strong or weak force interaction is minimal. It only interacts gravitationally.

We know the interactions at minimal due to gravity mapping. It seems to form a cloud around galaxies, rather than collapsing in. To collapse in, they must interact to exchange momentum. If they only interact by gravity, that collapse will be extremely slow.

That is most of what we can be fairly sure of. There’s a lot of speculation around this, and we might be barking up the wrong tree completely. However dark matter via WIMPs seems to be the most consistent with the evidence right now.

Edit to add.

This experiment seems quite ingenious. It assumes that WIMPs have a mix of both matter and antimatter. Ever so often a matter/antimatter pair get close enough to annihilate. This creates a pair of gamma photons. The existence of these would help back the existence of physical WIMPs. The energy would also tell us something of their mass (photon energy = mass energy + momentum energy). That will help narrow down where to look in our particle accelerator data.

Adopting a rescue dog has various home checks and interviews and welfare checks. Leaving hospital with a baby: “Do you have a car seat for them?”, “Yes…”, “You’re all good to go then!”, “…”

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

The same reason a dam owner panics over a finger sized leak. A hole becomes a crack, a crack a breach, and a breach can collapse the whole dam.

It might also be a single dev who pushed for it. With only a 1-3% market share, the company is unlikely to push resources at it. That 1 dev getting any working version out is a win in many ways.

Also, most Linux users are a lot better trained at reporting bugs. Most of the time, this is a good thing, letting them get fixed in FOSS development setups. Unfortunately, in gaming, it ends up making Linux look a buggy mess. When 60% of your big reports come from 0.5% of your users, companies can panic. Even if the same bugs exist in windows, just no one bothers to report them.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

First off, have you got HA up and running yet? That should be your initial focus.

There are 3 main options.

• Old laptop

The cheapest option, but only if you have a spare. It doesn’t need that much grunt. You definitely want to check how much power it draws however. It’ll be on 24/7 and the cost of that can mount up.

• Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer)

This is a good “play around” option. It’s one of the cheapest choices as well. Unfortunately, Pis can become a bit unstable down the line.

• NUC, or other mini PC. The small mini PCs are my preferred recommendation. They are powerful enough to do more complex tasks, but power efficient enough to not be problematic. They are also a lot more reliable than the SBCs.

As for other hardware. Z wave is the best, but also more costly. ZigBee is cheaper, and still very functional. WiFi does the job, but needs a bit more planning. I personally use a mix of ZigBee and WiFi.

If you’re buying WiFi hardware, I would try and focus on esp based options (ESP8266, ESP8285, or ESP32). You can replace the firmware in these, with either Tasmota, or ESPhome. I personally use sonoff and/or athom hardware, but there are plenty of other options.

This might help finding appropriate hardware.

https://templates.blakadder.com/

https://youtu.be/T2PdyxMtiYM&t=2m30s

The question is, would the 2nd head be an independent personality, trapped inside the horse, or an extension of the outer horse’s senses?

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.

In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.

On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.

Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.

On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.

It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.

As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.

A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.

Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.

Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.

Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.

A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).

That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.

What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.

One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.

My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.

No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.

A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.

It’s more the power that can be applied. Most people capable of getting a pedal bike up to those speeds also know how to read the road for safety. Even then, bikes can basically disintegrate in a (initially) minor accident.

A powered bike is capable of destroying itself if misused.

It depends how deep they are. I run into a depressing number that have just been caught up in the misinformation storm. Getting them to stop and think often helps recalibrate their thinking.

It doesn’t help much on those that are deep enough their ego is heavily involved.

As a late diagnosed aspie, I fully get that. I also know that vaccines save a lot of lives, including fellow autistics.

The phrasing is also fun to derail the brains of people complaining about vaccines. It can bypass their mental defences and makes them think for a moment. It doesn’t work on the hard core, but the casual idiots are easier to deprogram.

Vaccines do increase autism numbers.

Most childhood vaccines are administered before symptoms of autism generally appear. A lot of children owed their lives to vaccines, and so got to develop autism, rather than dying.

Mine has a loft conversion, with a proper floor. The insulation sits between the roof and the ceiling. So…no.