I find as I get older and my vision is not what it once was, I need bigger screens with good contrast but don't care so much about resolution. I think it was on the show Corner Gas where they were talking about how big a screen you should get and concluded the size in inches should match your age. That made me laugh but I have to confess now there may be some truth in that…

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Take solar, for example. On the one hand, you could argue that if your primary goal is to generate heat, you might as well use a solar thermal plant with lots of focusing mirrors over photovoltaics. The conversion to electricity first would inevitably be far less efficient.

On the other hand, if you've got your PV plants for electricity already but they are overproducing at times, there is the question of what to do with the excess power, and using it to run heat pumps may actually be a pretty efficient application at the point?

I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there's a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.

But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like "Wow, did they just break hello world?" It's a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.

The cash I have on hand comes exclusively from playing pub gigs in a band. That is still very much a cash-driven economy where I am. When I accumulate enough, I usually wind up spending it on music gear, so I don't think this hobby of mine is major wealth-builder. But while many businesses are moving away from cash, it seems music stores are used to people like me and still allow fairly hefty cash transactions.

The other day I was settling my tab at the pub and the guy hands me a machine. I say, I'll pay by cash thanks. He says really?!? Dude, you literally just handed me cash for the gig tonight. Oh yeah…

I've come to collect the ren…ah shit!

This seems to come up with some regularity.

The U.S. says the measures are necessary to protect its lumber industry, because Canadian forests are mostly on public land, where buyers pay “stumpage fees” to provincial governments for the right to log.

Could someone explain the situation in the States? Was there some big land grab by private interests, or is there still plenty of public land but it's all either logged out or protected at this point? Or some other complication?

Ok, I am interested in anyone with specific knowledge on this topic indicating whether the first order mental image I have of battery tech is correct?

The way I understand it is that the highest energy density batteries are your non-rechargeable lithium cells like watch batteries. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells have perhaps half the capacity due to the fact that they need to add measures that prevent these dendrites, as mentioned in the article, from forming. So the Holy Grail here is to develop a rechargeable technology that prevents the dendrite problem without sacrificing capacity so that you can get the best of both worlds? And that is what they are working on here with the solid state design. Am I close to the mark?

I've been reading up on this a bit. Apparently, the Vulcan Centaur is the ULA's new rocket which replaces Russian RD-180 engines with BE-4s they sourced from Blue Origin. Blue Origin themselves are working on their New Glenn rocket which will use these engines. It's interesting that the ULA (United Launch Alliance: Boeing and Lockheed's rocket company) got to try them out first.

It's also interesting that they are powered by methane. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first successful launch of a methane rocket? SpaceX's Starship also uses methane engines. Apparently, they have a number of advantages over the more traditional kerosene. For example, they don't leave any residue that can gunk up the works and affect reusability. I am not an expert on any of this, however, so feel free to correct me.

Zero-emission vehicles - which include battery electric, plug-in and hydrogen models - must represent 20 per cent of all new car sales in 2026, 60 per cent in 2030 and 100 per cent in 2035, the source said on condition of anonymity.

So "plug-in" would be PHEVs I'm assuming?

I am long since past my teen years, but as an avid traditional cyclist who is now an ebike enthusiast, here are a few points off the top of my head:

• ebikes are consistently faster. It is easier to plan your day around ebike trips, since they take about the same amount of time every day. With a regular bike, your trip could be twice as long today because yesterday's tail wind has been replaced by a stiff head wind.
• Issues involving extreme heat and poor air quality (in my experience, these often go hand-in-hand) have less impact on ebiking.
• Terrain not being an impediment gives you more options. There may be some path you'd never have contemplated before since it is hilly or goes down into a deep ravine you will eventually have to slog your way out of, and so you'd wind up taking busy city streets instead with the danger that entails.
• ebikes do give you exercise. You can usually control the amount of pedal assist or even turn it off for a real workout. When off, you will get more exercise than with a traditional bike since ebikes are heavier. But you can do this exercise wherever it is safest to do so and go electric when you need to move with traffic.
• If your city has a main corridor for cycling in terms of say an off-road paved trail to downtown, but you'd have to go out of your way to an extent to reach it, you will be more likely to do so on an ebike. It is just not as much of bother to seek out the better and safer routes.

If you follow the history of the Mac, it went through a number of major architecture transitions from 680x0 -> PowerPC -> Intel -> ARM. Each time, Apple supplied a decent emulator to support applications during the transition.

From a developer perspective, these were huge upheavals that came with a lot of drama but also offered some opportunities. The latter came from the fact that the bar was in some way set higher on the new platform and you could count on any code you compiled for it supporting certain base features. Every PowerPC, for example, had hardware floating-point. Before that, some CPUs did, some didn't. The Intel transition happened at the time when dual core had become standard and SIMD had become serviceable (with SSE2). The ARM transition has set the bar at 64-bit architecture for every CPU (since Apple had earlier dumped 32-bit on the iPhone side).

Windows/Intel has developed in a more evolutionary than revolutionary manner, which is easy to see if you look, for example, at all the legacy cruft in the Intel ISA. It's a sad sight. Supporting all that makes instruction decoding a nightmare. In theory, Intel/AMD could reinvent a new sleeker ISA if they could get Microsoft to commit to supplying a performant emulator for the old one? But I'm not holding my breath.

Last time I was at the family doctor, I mentioned that my usual body temperature when not feeling sick clocks in well below 37°C and whether that means 37 would represent a low-grade fever in my case?

She replied that 37 is an average based on observations from like a century ago when it was common for the average person to be carrying around some minor infection, and so in 1st world countries where that's no longer the case, temperatures have gone down.

It may be, then, that in the developing world, people tend to be at least slightly sick from all the pathogens around them but think of it as just everyday life and don't pay it any heed? But I honestly don't know.