I don’t think that the uniqueness of fingerprints is in doubt, but their analysis and use might not be up to snuff. I’ve read numerous articles over the last couple of decades that call into question at least the statistical underpinnings of what it means to declare a match.

But law enforcement in general seems to be filled with pseudoscience, from profiling and interview techniques to body language and lie detection.

When we moved from the city to the middle of nowhere, our commute went from 8 km to 22 km each way. It still took about 20 minutes. But “rush hour” was the occasional herd of deer or elk instead of a bunch of drivers who were either too aggressive or too passive. A “traffic jam” was one vehicle, ours, waiting for a piece of farm equipment to move out of the way a few times a year instead of the weekly transformation from roadway to parking lot.

Even when I switched over to driving school bus, I could count on one hand the number of other vehicles I interacted with each week.

It’s impossible to express how much that improved our mental states.

Current forecast for my location in southern Saskatchewan is 11°C (52F) for a high. About 6 weeks ago, we got a proper start to winter with a few cm of snow (maybe 1.5 in) and thought was given to plugging in the block heater. That was it.

Since then, temperatures have been a bit below freezing overnight and a bit over freezing during the day, with quite a few days like today, where it’s way above freezing. Any sloughs and dugouts that had started freezing over are now pretty much ice free. The last few days have been nice enough for people to put their boats in to go fishing.

We heat with a pellet stove. So far, our pellet consumption is about 50% of last year’s, about 30% of our worst year, and about 35% of our 15 year average.

And apart from a “cooler” day tomorrow with a small chance of snow, there is no end in sight. Even assuming that we get back to something normal by Xmas, it could be February before it’s safe to go ice fishing.

You’ve had a couple of pretty good responses. I would add that the very fact that you can ask that question demonstrates a failure of the education system and the fundamental problem of depending on business ideals to manage society.

In the first case, a proper education would have included, at all grade levels, examples and discussion of the various purely intellectual pursuits that ultimately proved critical to some technological advance that improved quality of life.

In the second case, the naive “businessification” of society means that any pursuit that doesn’t make clear at the outset what practical (ie profitable) goal is being pursued is dismissed as folly unworthy of funding and support and education. (See my point above.)

I find it interesting that our current definition of the inch is based on an industrial standard that had been in use for decades. And that that standard was, in effect, created by one man.

tldr: Carl Edvard Johansson was a Swedish manufacturer of gauge blocks who built his one-inch blocks by ignoring the differences between the UK standard inch and the US standard inch. Those standards were only a few millionths of an “inch” (pick one!) apart anyway, so throwing away most of the decimal places must have seemed like a good idea.

This is what word problems are.

Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.

But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.

Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)

And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.

Just leave it as water, then drop small pellets of lithium in as necessary. Sodium works, too, and is more abundant/available than lithium, but maybe tougher to control safely. (The rest of that group is just too reactive, unless you can find a way to use the exothermic reaction for something other than an uncontrolled fire or even explosion.)

Mostly kidding, but only because I can’t imagine smarter people than I haven’t ruled it out for very good reasons. And while I’m on the topic, running a condenser on the exhaust will capture the water vapour, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.

Hmmm. I’ve seen a few references to Toyota supposedly having a prototype system for generating hydrogen from water on board cars. I’ve dismissed that as just the latest water powered flavour of the month. You don’t suppose…

That’s not what I got from the article. They seemed to be talking specifically about chemicals have absorbed from what they’ve been in contact with.

I’ll give it a crack.

As others have hinted at, it’s mostly about noise. The author puts noise in quotes when referring to those qualities of sound (and lyrics?) that are normally considered noise but are exploited for aesthetic purposes.

Thus, extreme volume and heavy distortion might normally be undesirable noise when trying to faithfully reproduce a sound, they are exploited by rock music in general and, in their extreme forms, by heavy metal in particular.

A metaphorical or all-inclusive understanding of noise can be applied to the various other aspects of music (rhythm, repetition, tempo, key changes, and even lyrics). The more of these aspects are affected (the more “noisy”), the “heavier” the result.

This was not addressed in the paper, but I think that the noise has to be introduced during the creation or performance of the music. If you play back a recording in ways that distort the signal or sound, you are probably getting noise, not “noise”.

As long as nobody is using drinking water for irrigation, the output does pretty closely match the input.

But my point was that we can treat that water for use and reuse. That way, the desalination is kept to a minimum.

It’s not quite that simple. After extracting water, matching salinity would require extracting salt or adding water. It’s not that there aren’t sources of water that can be used for salinity matching, including the output of sewage treatment, the reality is that it probably makes more sense to treat that water than to desalinate in the first place.

Extracting the salts might be a source of valuable minerals and metals, but there is still no free lunch.

As far as I know, we still would be putting stuff back that doesn’t make a good match for what we took. That means depending on the natural environment for dilution and “treatment”. That has been an ongoing problem for humanity. We’re very good at exceeding the capacity of the environment to cope with our wastes.

I completely understand the comment about perpetual motion machines, but tend to think that it’s more of a scale management problem than a strict prohibition.

The impossibility of perpetual motion is not a reason to shut down research into methods of making power production and power consumption more efficient.

Are you saying that dealing with the waste brine is impossible in any way, shape, or form and that this is a reason to not pursue desalination research?

I used to be municipal water treatment plant operator (Level 2). I’m well aware that treatment waste is something that must be dealt with in any plant that does more than just disinfection.

I already admitted to not being up on the state of the art, but I was under the impression that there are potentially viable methods of dealing with waste brine in environmentally sustainable ways. Perhaps not at a scale that allows literally every human to use desalination for all needs, but that there are cases where desalination is a good solution.

My curiosity has been piqued. I will, of course, start looking for resources on waste brine management, but any pointers you have will be much appreciated.

One of the challenging issues with a complex problem is that the problem is not solved until the whole thing is solved.

One of the nice things about a complex problem is that you don’t have to solve the whole thing at once in order to make progress toward a complete solution.

I don’t know the state of the art on dealing with waste brine. If that is already deemed insoluble above a certain scale, then we better not invest in anything that exceeds that scale. On the other hand, if research into handling waste brine in sustainable ways is ongoing and making progress, then why not continue attacking the extraction problem?