Yeah! A lot of times, hanging around with people you share things in common with leads to friendships. In friendships you might discover a few more things in common. No worries … if it’s fun and the chemistry is good, the rest will follow.

There are multiple kinds of ‘smart’. The following section in Wiki breaks them down into IQ, emotional, social, and moral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Human

Historically, a lot of ‘high IQ’ people didn’t necessarily ‘fit in’ to society. See the story of William James Sidis … ‘He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was claimed by family members to have an IQ between 250 and 300’.

Also historically, people smart enough to see that a lot of the world is about shuckin’ and jivin’ and not giving a crap? may not be not interested in playing the game. Some find other interests and don’t see the point in ‘accomplishing’ things that will mostly be forgotten. Ramanujan had a HUGE talent for math ONLY, unrecognized until he wrote a professor halfway around the world.

We were all born without a manual. There are ways to enjoy life on your own terms.

There are different kinds of smart. A person can be quick and creative at something (math, mechanics, music, marketing …), and less so at everything else.

If the something is -complicated-, then a lot of learning is needed, and a good qualified teacher will help you sort out what is really important to know. Chess is complicated, and you need to learn basic strategies of how to move and not get eaten alive. There are some books that can help with that. But a human teacher can get you there a lot faster. If you’re really motivated but you’re not remembering enough? it may not be your ‘something’ !

No cavalry … and no calvary either … is going to ride over the hilltop and save us. We can only keep healthy, keep learning and keep doing the best we can for each other. Yeah, it matters today. And it’s always today.

GEOLOGY can be intriguing when much of it is set outdoors (in videos, no bug bites, no poison ivy) and being explained by a professor at a small college with a great love of the topic and a talent and desire to share it with a large audience. Yes, I’m talking Nick on the Rocks himself. Danger:He’s often accompanied by other interesting geologists. It might be catching.

https://www.youtube.com/@GeologyNick/videos

If you’re new to the topic or have children, then Nick also does short (under 10-minute) shows that are shown on PBS, which you’ll find here:

https://www.pbs.org/show/nick-rocks/

Oh, I’m thinking about 20 minutes in line outside a small community center, back when I lived in North Dakota (pop of whole state about 600,000). As a lifelong nomad, it was the only state I lived where I actually attended a Democratic party caucus. It was an enjoyable excursion into a behind-the-scenes election process that most will never venture into. Best part was, I escaped without being signed up for anything more!

THANKS for alerting me to another source of XKCD madness!

All pets were at one time wildlife. Killing one to save it… wow.

Some way of grouping Communities other than by name (not very useful). E.G. search on ‘Climate’ and you don’t get the name of one of the busiest communities.

In other words, group them a step up the taxonomy. Create 10 or 15 groups (sci/tech, history, music, culture, media, nature, issues, locations…), see what mods have to say about that list. (Could do worse than the Wikipedia taxonomy.)

Seems like a lot of people need to know that these things **can ** -bite- you. We recently went to a restaurant that used one to direct you to an online menu. We asked for on-paper menus instead… If this is going to be service industry, it better get smarter about it.

“How QR codes work and what makes them dangerous – a computer scientist explains” https://theconversation.com/how-qr-codes-work-and-what-makes-them-dangerous-a-computer-scientist-explains-177217

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2021/qr-codes.html

Have a look at Gorbachev. A big loss, that.

It can be hard to find the right community to post a link in. Figuring out the rules and knowing who’s reading them (and sometimes what they’re really about) might cause someone to give up. (Especially when people complain about ‘this isn’t the place for that’ without stating the better alternative.)

Bill Gates, except when Ballmer was there.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was ‘wrong’ by less than an order of magnitude … compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What’s the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

I’d bet that ‘lemmings’ wouldn’t work.

Sabine is a very competent physicist. That’s why her viewpoint - right or wrong - is well worth hearing. The fact that the Nobel went to a computer scientist instead says a lot about the state-of-the-art.

Sabine knows her shit. May she coax some physicists into getting back into experimenting… and away from Big Science funding.

Leave the poor things alone. They already don’t kill each other all of the time.

If we are realistic enough to put the fight against further global warming on a wartime basis, then we can operate things on a wartime basis. Which means planning things so that everything is focussed on winning the war. For example gasoline rationing would encourage people to plan their use of gasoline for maximum efficiency. It means people can get only as much as they can justify.

Rationing was used in the US during WW2. To see what that meant, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States