Colossus: the Forbin Project.

No I copy and paste blocks of text. Sometimes the first iteration is...not quite what I want it to be, so there is an 'answer again' option and that often gives a better result a second time.

I'm not 100% clear in my mind yet whether I am using ChatGPT to paraphrase a news article, or to plagiarize it. For my purposes the vocabulary and grammar of most native-English news stories is too advanced for ESL learners, so ChatGPT helps me to do something faster that I normally do anyway.

I have been using it to re-draft and paraphrase news articles I find on the Internet to prepare lessons for English classes. After I ask it to paraphrase an article, I look at the result and 'paraphrase the paraphrase', so to speak.

I've noticed two benefits:

• It speeds up my lesson preparation time by automating a task I used to do entirely myself.

• Since I started using it for this purpose, I've noticed that my own paraphrasing skills are getting better and faster. So in addition to the benefit of automating a work task, I've also benefitted in an improvement in my own personal writing and editing skills.

I aways love doing the math on these things.

An asteroid 50 meters across has some small risk of hitting the Earth. The closest it will ever approach is 1.8 million kilometers.

That's the equivalent of a 2.5 cm bullet passing you at a distance of 900 kilometers.

So that's like you're standing in Times Square in New York, and the closest the bullet ever gets to you is just south of Raleigh, North Carolina.

LOL! Good point I never thought of that.

>Imagine the implications for things like space travel if you could siphon power off a few stars and power an absurdly large thruster, without the weight penalty of carrying all of the fuel.

Oh, it means much more than that. Again this depends on whether or not I've understood the article correctly. But if it does become possible to extract energy, from a vacuum, where said energy originally comes from "somewhere else", i.e., somewhere else in the same universe...then fuel itself becomes obsolete.

If you could convert said extracted energy into electricity or hot gases, you could have:

• Electric road vehicles that never need replacement batteries or charging.

• Aircraft and jet engines that never need fuel.

• Virtually unlimited supplies of electricity for residential, commercial and industrial purposes. Including 3-d printing.

• Virtually unlimited supplies of high-voltage, high temperature arc furnaces to safely incinerate regular garbage and many kinds of hazardous organic waste.

Yup.

Talk about a game changer.

Scale, my man, scale! Imagine if we could pull energy directly from the Sun to use on Earth. It would take longer than the lifespan of the solar system for human needs to draw enough energy from the Sun to have even a 0.1 percent impact on the energy level of the Sun.

I read this article on the topic two weeks ago. If I have understood it correctly, it involves extracting energy, from a vacuum, where said energy originally comes from "somewhere else", i.e., somewhere else in the same universe.

If I have understood it correctly, the implications are astounding. It may one day be possible to build machines, batteries or vehicles that are essentially 'self-powered'. The machine extracts energy from the vacuum that originally comes from somewhere else in the universe. Said extraction may cause 'difficulties' in the place of origin of the energy...but if the origin is a star, a galaxy, etc., it's difficult to see how extracting the equivalent of the sum total of all human mechanical activity could significantly affect the state of a galaxy or even a single star. In practice, it could mean access to essentially unlimited (for human purposes) volumes of energy, forever.

I didn't know that, thanks!

>“The Zem electric car is also home to bi-directional charging that can be used to charge other items as well. Zem will look like an external battery to your home, providing green energy when needed,” TU/ecomotive has stated.

I can see this being very useful in my home country, Canada. On the east coast the frequency of hurricanes, ice storms and other events causing power outages is increasing. Portable generators have always been popular but many people are buying portable battery packs so they can at least boil some water and make tea or soup while waiting for the power to come back on.

I hope that this kind of bi-directional charging becomes standard for all vehicles in the future; it could be very helpful and lifesaving in the case of emergency situations in natural disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, etc.

For those of us old enough to remember it, the 1968 Dugway Sheep Incident had a significant impact on public consciousness and pop culture in the late 1960s. It happened at the height of the Vietnam War when there was rising public doubt in the US on what the Pentagon was doing and what it was spending money on.

The Dugway Sheep Incident may have been the basis for The Andromeda Strain, a 1969 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton that made it to the 1969 New York Times Best Seller list. In the novel, a team of scientists at a secret underground government laboratory investigate the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in Arizona. Images of dead people in the 1971 movie were/are reminiscent of fields of dead sheep from the Dugway incident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o9Iwtp0xcg

In 1971, Charlton Heston stared in a post-apocalyptic science-fiction film called The Omega Man, later remade into I Am Legend. In the 1971 film, a Sino-Soviet border conflict escalates into full-scale war in which biological warfare destroys most of the human race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av_1t7LLRFk

So then presumably the fungus that eats and destroys the anti zombie fungus fungus would be the "anti-anti-zombie-fungus-fungus fungus"?

So here's a question, guys.

Would you date somebody whose last name was 'Mankiller'? :)

You mean..."Mosquitos are more attracted to people who drink beer"?