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You don't have to force kids to learn. They're naturally curious and inquisitive. If schools were actually teaching kids useful things, they'd want to go there, not to get away. You do have to force kids to sit in a classroom and be indoctrinated. None of them want to do that. Either way...

It was never meant to be. In most Western countries, the government school system is based on the Prussian system whose main goal was to produce large numbers of compliant drones for the factories and military, and a smaller number of less-dumbed-down managers and officers to tell those drones...

You have to get rid of the bombs somehow. Safer to have the robots do a 'controlled explosion' than have humans do it. Thought I'd guess all it would really have taken in Who Screenwriter World was a quick sonic after getting the robots to empty the boxes. As for the episode, it was OK. This...

If I remember correctly, the book and script were started at the same time based on the same original story, but diverged as movie production progressed and the script was rewritten. If the book had been a novelization, it wouldn't have been set at Saturn rather than Jupiter.

Pretty, but boring. And, as others have said, there was no chemistry between the actors, so the whole romance thing fell flat. Probably says a lot that I saw the movie about three months ago and can barely remember anything about it other than that.

Looks like another mechanism where DNA editing can cause harmful mutations or just not work at all has been found and can now be fixed: Researchers discover mechanism disrupting CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing

I believe you're correct. However, there was an article a few days ago about researchers genetically-modifying sperms, so it can always be done outside the body.

I installed Windows 3.11 in a VM on my laptop a couple of years back. Was not at all easy to get it browsing the Web: I think I had to download some ancient version of Mozilla in the end.

We had smart meters installed in a bunch of houses here. Then the smart meters started catching fire and burning the houses down. So they took them all out again. I'm guessing the CO2 and other pollutants produced by the houses that burned down were far, far worse than any possible saving that...

Why do you think the 1% are going to pay for the other 99% of us to sit around doing nothing all day? The only way I ever see UBI happening is if the people who receive it agree to be sterilized, thereby ensuring the population of UBI-recipients shrinks to zero over a generation or two. But an...

I's only 'efficient' if you ignore the cost of the land and energy. You could be using that land and light for more useful things than growing grass. Even it it's merely letting the land revert to wilderness so it will support a larger variety of wildlife than just sheep. And good luck doing...

Everywhere is heading for societal collapse. Everything we were raised to believe is going away in the next fifty years, and much of it in the next twenty. We're living through the end of the industrial era, and politicians continue to push industrial-era policies like high birthrates and mass...

That's rather like mitigating the problem of having AIDS by getting cancer. Politicians trying to mitigate falling birthrates by importing millions of incompatible foreigners has proven to be a much greater problem than falling birthrates. Especially when most of the jobs they expect those...

It is an interesting question as to whether r-selected populations are poor and backward because they don't invest in the future, or whether poor and backward societies result in an r-selected population because it's hard to invest in the future in those societies. Either way, the West has been...

Bingo. With hindsight, the post-WWII years have been a huge eugenics experiment to see what happens when you take money from the k-selected population so they can't afford to have kids, and give it to the r-selected population so they have even more kids. I'd say it hasn't exactly been a great...

Yes. I'm actually amazed by how low the viewer numbers can be and still hit the top 10. But I probably shouldn't be: I haven't watched broadcast TV in at least five years, except on a few occasions when visiting friends who still have it (which is where I saw the few episodes of the new Who...

Nature usually finds inefficient ways of doing things. Witness the human eye, which has the nerves in front of the retina, rather than behind. No human camera designer would put the wires in front of the CCD, because it would be insane.

Yeah, I was writing about vat-grown cannibal restaurants in 2006. I'm sure I wasn't the first. Back more on topic, so long as it provides the appropriate nutrition when eaten, vat-grown meat seems like a great idea. Animals are an incredibly inefficient way to create meat, requiring vast...

So does this mean that the value of a kilogram will depend on the strength of gravity wherever you're measuring it? Or is everyone going to have to know the exact gravitational acceleration wherever they make the measurement, and apply a fudge factor to compensate for variations?

Stared on Fallout 4 VR: I never played the flat version of the game, so this is a new one for me. It's... shall we say?... not very well optimized for VR, but it's still playable. Most of the issues are with trying to stuff the number of controls the game requires onto a handful of buttons and...