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’ !

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!

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.)

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.)

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.

I specially liked the part where he collected $50k by clueing the affected companies.

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

Sugar daddies …

Up to about the 1980s, the popular magazines used to frequently run cartoons with ragged-looking people holding up ‘It’s the END OF THE WORLD!!!’ signs. Guess they ran out of variants on that joke. But Doomsday Prophets have been around for centuries (some made big money from it) … and yet … here we all are.

We humans like to scare ourselves, but observation seems to show that it’s not a big worry. Will it all end, sure, some day. When? NOBODY KNOWS. Carpe diem, my friend … seize the day. And go ahead and make plans and execute them. Save your worry time for the little things that are inevitable.

Here’s a picture of it while it’s still in the shop. https://inspenet.com/en/noticias/nasa-tests-solar-sail-in-solar-in-orbit/

Yeh, she was outstanding. That ‘poor little deer’ scene in that Brooklyn accent alone.

Yep, it’s really a lot of fun. A little hard on some parts of both southern culture and NY culture, but just enough to make it even funnier. Not just Pesci as a lawyer and all the lawyer jokes; making a judge out of Fred Gwynne so he could make all those facial expressions he’d perfected was a casting winner. So was Marisa Tomei. And the characters that played witnesses … to this day when I’m saying ‘I guess’ it always comes out with that drawl. Every scene in the film was comical first, and never let up. Masterpiece.

Other’n a couple others named? My Cousin Vinny.

(Some quotes to help my arguement: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104952/quotes/ )