Don't worry, that sort of holier than thou -attitude keeps us dumb people away efficiently.

Pardon the late reply, but I would say the major thing here is that the gun requires minimal mental control over your body to execute a murder successfully. There's no time to hesitate once the decision to kill (=pull the trigger) has been made. All it takes is for the gun to be pointed in the right direction and a quick twitch of finger. With a machete, knife or an axe, one has to execute full physical assault. That takes concentration and effort and there are many more variables that can go wrong. Dynamite? Kind of, but still requires dedication to carry out the murder as long as the fuse is burning.

So that's the thing with guns in my opinion. All it takes is one signal from the brain, a twitch of finger and the target has a bullet in them. The murderer might regret the decision immediately afterwards, but with guns the result is already final.

On the topic of climate change we could also consider the locality of the food ingredients (although I guess there are plenty of arguments in favour of either local or global). When I wrote dull, I didn't necessary mean bland, but rather the poor diversity in ingredients in my local ecosystem.

What's with the preparation if I may ask? I have a strong dislike for the meat industry, however I'm not particularly interested on giving up my meat. Perhaps if I lived in India or Thailand I would go full vegetarian because the food is awesome and diverse. The food ingredients where I live are rather dull even with meat on the menu so going vegetarian doesn't sound particularly thrilling. Anyway, as a solution of sorts I quite recently did my hunter's examination and am looking forward to reduce industrial meat from the menu.

I would dare imagine that reducing the amount of bicyclers has been a favourable strategy to many countries and cities for quite a few decades. Cities were never designed to accommodate bicycles in large numbers - in a common setup we have the road for cars that move on wheels and we have the road for people that zigzag on their feet. Cyclists are disliked by both cars and pedestrians. Even I dislike cyclists when I'm walking or driving. The average cyclist in my city

- doesn't know it's not OK to cycle on a footpath

- doesn't know it's not OK to cycle on driveway if there is a bicycle path

- doesn't know there is a difference between zebra crossing (only for pedestrians) and bicycle path crossing

- doesn't know right of way laws regarding bicycles and intersections (well, neither does the average car driver..)

- doesn't consider what is a safe cycling speed

- this list would just go on and on

From this perspective, passing a law that both improves cycling safety and reduces prevalence of cycling can be seen as favourable, no? Ending up with a situation like Copenhagen needs that the laws, infrastructure and culture are favourable for cycling. IMO demanding removal of helmet laws "because Copenhagen" is like people of Tonga demanding their government to achieve a moon landing "because USA". Eh, that's a terrible analogy.

I don't really care about the helmet law personally. I use a helmet if I'm planning to cycle fast or use a bicycle that I suspect might suffer a catastrophic failure while cycling. The law here requires the use of helmet, but there are no criminal penalties for breaking the said law.

While we are on the topic of bicycle safety if there's one thing that's really important it's proper bicycle lights during twilight, dark, or just generally poor weather. Improve your visibility!

The first thing I did after seeing this link was checking the certificate. It's issued by SwissSign which is a welcome surprise. It's almost rare these days to encounter a certificate that is issued by a company that is not based or owned by another company in the US.

It gives a nice contrast thinking the world is currently consuming 20 million metric tons of coal (source) and 0.0139 km^3 of crude oil every day (87 356 000 barrels per day, source).

That's 5500 olympic sized swimming pools of crude oil every day.. I'm not sure what is the mean density of coal but guessing 800 kg/m^3 that's 25 million cubic meters, which in turn is roughly equal to 10000 olympic swimming pools or 10 Great Pyramid of Gizas

Every day. With an increasing pace.

It's getting a bit late, I can reply tomorrow in greater detail if you want, unless someone else comes up with a detailed answer before that. But the the general gist is that the carbon cycle of plants is.. well.. a cycle. Most of the CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis of plants is eventually returned to the atmosphere. As plants die the organic matter they produced will decompose - aerobic decomposing/digestion produces CO2 and anaerobic produces mainly methane. And methane eventually reacts with oxygen to form CO2 and water.

Some amount of carbon gets deposited in the soil permanently (eventually forming things like coal and oil), but that's a relatively minor part of the carbon cycle on land.

However by increasing the total amount of living plant biomass you do decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Then all we gotta do is take all those plants and shove them deep underground so that the carbon is removed from the active cycle.. reverse mining, heh.

And somehow this article popped up.. my brain is melting: Tesla's Elon Musk: cheap car battery tougher than Mars.

And just in case your question was serious the battery in the original question is presumably the 60 kWh battery that powers Tesla cars. Musk recently mentioned about his goal to reduce the cost to $5000 (at least some time ago they were $10000 apiece).

I checked it for fun. Just roughly estimating:

If ignoring power consumption, scrypt-based coins (Litecoin, Dogecoin) are currently about 40-50 times more profitable for GPU mining than SHA-256 (Bitocin) based. CPU mining is ~125 times more profitable in favour of scrypt.

I don't mind GIMP on linux. I imagine the biggest gripe for most new GIMP users was the floating window layout. With the version 2.8 came the single window mode which makes it so much more suitable for the typical user. Have you tried that?

Climate change is not synonymous with global warming, mind you. The latter is certainly anthropogenic while the former has existed billions of years before humans did.

Anyway, my point was that it feels like there is some anthropogenic (pun was intended) entity that is making great efforts trying to keep the students uneducated on the matter.

They say past is not an indicator of the future but so far bitcoin bubbles have held up pretty well with trends.

Even the news trends are complete repeats of previous bubbles. It's like watching a roller coaster where people who are going downhill think they're going to crash and burn and people going uphill think they're immortal.

It has stabilized ten times (pulled that number out of my hat) before, the odds are in favour its going to stabilize again. And once/if it does, it's ready to go for the next bubble. Of course, it can't keep going on like this forever, can it..? :-)

I find that the amazing thing here is not the quick learning by students upon providing the oversimplified background (that's somewhat expected if the exam material is 400 words long) but the complete lack of initial understanding. Smells purposefully anthropogenic to me.

Those x-axis tick labels freak me out. I started editing them with GIMP on Windows but it crashed. Hnggh.

I think I have a bad habit of getting distracted from the actual content.