Too bad there isn't some simple process to purify water, I mean really simple, like boiling-water and condensing-steam simple...
Pop quiz: what do you get when you boil perchlorates? Answer, in case you didn't know: hydrochloric acid vapours. And that's just the start of problems you're going to have.
And it's not just perchlorates in there. There's arsenic, hexavalent chromium, you name it. At one NASA conference, there was a glacier expert who suggested just this - going to an ice deposit on Mars, digging some up, melting it, letting the sediment settle out, and drinking it. A water recycling expert who had worked on the ISS water recycling system almost threw a fit. She said, get us a sample of that water and 15 years later we can give you a space rated water cleaning system for Mars.
Oh, and it's not actually "ice", it's permafrost - 20-50% rock. Digging through permafrost is difficult even on Earth, with equipment optimized for Earth conditions for over a century. Slow and very high maintenance; permafrost acts like concrete, with water playing the role of cement as a binder. And in case you didn't know, we don't exactly have a bunch of nuclear powered Martian backhoes sitting around. The closest we've come to "digging" on another world is a tiny slow robotic scoop for loose materials. The closest we've come to "drilling" is tiny little abrasion bores. The closest we've come to melting is.... nothing, we haven't.
NASA's looked at a wide range of different methods for getting water on Mars, many of them involving extracting from ice, including digging, drilling, melting, etc. Their conclusion is that this is important and we need to be working on it, but the TRL is almost nothing. There's a lot of problems that you just wouldn't think of. For example, as soon as you dig off the overburden, the ice underneath starts sublimating. If you leave it overnight, you'll come back to fresh overburden on the top.
The group has a web-browser plug-in that is supposed to highlight sources of Russian propaganda online, but a number of observers on Twitter noted that this blacklist of sites includes several legitimate left-wing sites such as CounterPunch and Truth Out.
I ended up blacklisting both of those sites on my Google News feed when they basically became indistinguishable from RT and Sputnik. These days they extensively source from Russian propaganda outlets, as well as using a lot of writers who also write for Russian propaganda outlets. The group's site explicitly states that they're not just listing sources, but also websites with a history of repeating Russian propaganda outlets and talking points.
Just looking at the front page of CounterPunch right now, to pick an example, I see this writing stuff like "In Ukraine, where the neoconservatives around Clinton and Nuland funded and brought about the overthrow of the elected government right on Russia’s borders, provoking a fast and unequivocal response by President Vladimir Putin (part of whose navy was always stationed in an important base in the Crimea), it is common (fictional) knowledge in the Euro-Media that the entire war there is about “Russian aggression”..."
Of course, that's mild compared to a lot of what I've seen. Some of which contains quotes almost verbatim from Sputnik and RT articles. This particular case here is just talking points.
Never seen that sketch before. The guy doesn't sound or look at all Icelandic;) That guy sounds German. And there is Icelandic honey, although beekeeping is still a sort of fringe hobby here, it's very difficult because of the long (albeit mild) winters and cool summers. But the number of people taking part grows every year.
1) The lawsuit was over Icesave, not over the failure of the three banks.
2) Icesave was a savings program created by Landsbankinn backed by a private fund as the primary insurer.
3) The secondary insurer was the government of the respective area that the customers were from - Iceland was the secondary insurer in Iceland, the UK government in the UK, and the Dutch government in the Netherlands.
4) When the market crashed, the private fund went bankrupt. This passed insurance responsibility to the secondary insurers.
5) Iceland paid Icelanders, as the secondary insurer for the Icelandic market, up to the insured limit. They later passed a bill paying out the full value of the accounts to Icelandic customers.
6) The UK and Dutch governments, however, tried to shirk their responsibilities as the secondary insurers in their respective markets, and instead tried to blackmail Iceland into insuring it for them. A great deal of pressure was put on Iceland on a wide variety of fronts, ranging from EU negotiations to emergency loans to fisheries.
7) The then-government commenced negotiations and came up with a bill to pay the majority of the UK and Netherlands' responsibilities, to try to be able to put it behind them and get the economy back on track. Our president rejected it, which put it to referendum. The public overwhelmingly rejected it.
8) The next government used the failure to try to negotiate a better deal and got one for reduced, but still extremely painful covering of the UK and Netherlands' liabilities. Again it was vetoed, and again the public rejected it, although not by as large of a margin.
9) The UK and Netherlands decided that this wasn't going anywhere, so took us to the EFTA court.
10) The EFTA court reviewed the case, and found in our favour on all counts. The UK and Netherlands did bear responsibility as the secondary insurers and not Iceland. As is standard, all of the costs of all of the litigation additionally fell on them.
If I was starting a supermarket I wouldn't call it "Bunch of fishermen who started a bank and stole everybody's money, the fucking cunts.
Funny, I'd call it "UK Government who tried to back out of their responsibilities as the secondary insurer after the primary insurer went bankrupt, and instead tried to blackmail a much smaller, weaker country into paying your insurance obligations for you that they were never responsible for, then ultimately sued and lost in court, confirming the very simple account insurance structure laid out literally one click away from the front page of the Icesave account information page."
And funny to hear someone talking about fishermen, the UK, and stealing, given that you spent years stealing our fish (and overfishing them to boot) and we had to drive you out of our waters three times. In case it's confusing: This is Iceland. This is the UK. Learn the difference, and stick to depleting your own stocks, takk.
Common misconception. You cannot just declare someone to be a diplomat in a foreign country - the foreign country has to approve your request for diplomatic credentials.
Extradition isn't that simple. There's a lot of constraints to extradition cases - for example, dual criminality (what the person is charged with has to be a crime in both countries).
I don't know the procedure in Norway, but I assume it's similar to the Swedish one.
1) A request for extradition is received. 2) The court takes up the case. 3) In the proceedings, a (nonbinding) opinion from the government is sought. 4) The court rules, on their own about the case. 5) If the court blocks the extradition, the person may not be extradited. 6) If the court approves the extradition, the government may still block the extradition. 7) If both the court and government approve, then the person must be extradited.
The courts cannot rule on a request that they have not received, and the government is not allowed to usurp the courts by making pledges on a case that the court hasn't yet ruled on.
Snowden really should get used to the fact that he's not going anywhere until his case gets resolved.
That has been done - see the IPCC reports. Error bars and huge numbers of references included. People like you just choose to refuse to believe it.
Furthermore, nobody is talking about "spending trillions and massively expanding the size of government". The estimated annualized cost of "adaptation" (aka, doing nothing) is estimated at between 0,2 to 2% GDP for the first 2C, while the cost of prevention is 0,04 to 0,14% GDP - not counting the side benefits of doing the latter. Multiple regression models indicate an economic optimum with a peak around 500ppm, which still involves "major efforts" at reduction - again, assuming no side benefits. No health cost reductions, no leading to paths that reduce costs below the starting point, no spin-off inventions, etc. And historically, it's been changes in technological paradigms that lead to technological (and economic) revolutions that extend far beyond the technical field for which they were originally developed.
Do you honestly think that this is an appropriate foundation for a view on a scientific topic that makes you feel qualified to override the view of actual experts in the field? Seem? Feels? Suspect? Venture a guess?
Look, I'm going to take you at face value here and try to explain this simply: you don't "guess" at measurements of light absorption based on how something "feels". You measure it. Soda-lime glass (aka, window glass) is very transparent in the visible spectrum, poorly in near-IR, and virtually opaque to thermal IR. CO2, likewise, is almost entirely transparent to visible light, but strongly absorbs in various parts of the IR spectrum. The reason that sunlight feels warm through glass is because a large portion of the sun's energy is in the form of visible light - and indoors you don't have as significant heat loss mechanisms (convective or radiative) as outdoors.
Now, note on the above graph that there are other atmospheric absorbers. Indeed, the most potent IR absorber in Earth's atmosphere is not carbon dioxide but water vapour. However, water rapidly cycles into and out of the atmosphere; it is thus a feedback mechanism, not a forcing mechanism. You could remove every last bit of water vapour from Earth's atmosphere, and two weeks later the vast majority of it would be back. And vice versa for overloading it. To force climate you need gases which do not cycle rapidly out of the system. CO2 and methane are the most prominent of these.
Now, it's true that the "greenhouse" analogy has limited benefit because you're dealing with different scenarios, and you're correct to suspect that a key difference is convection. Planets like Earth lose heat virtually exclusively to radiation. As mentioned, Earth would be far cooler if not for the so-called "greenhouse effect" - if I recall correctly, Earth's equilibrium temperature is 255K - that is, the temperature that you calculate if you consider only Earth's albedo (reflectiveness), emissivity and the incoming sunlight, balancing the rate of blackbody radiation with incoming energy. And a key thing to note when discussing this is that what we really care about is the temperature at the surface - a planetary greenhouse effect actually lowers the temperature in the upper stratosphere.
Radiative heat transfer is a balance between heat received and heat given off. A planet without an atmosphere, at night, exchanges radiation with the cosmic microwave background, which means "essentially zero radiation returns". The more IR-absorptive of an atmosphere present, however, the more it starts exchanging with the atmosphere, and at an increasingly low altitude. So you're not just giving up IR, but also getting it back. This raises the temperature; this increases up to the point where the outbound and inbound radiation rates are equal; that forms your new equilibrium.
In a physical greenhouse, this effect occurs as well, but in most scenarios it's dominated by convection losses. However, there are better "gardening analogies" - the most notable being IR-blocking floating row covers. Such floating row covers are often used to extend the length of time before a field succumbs to frost; they do not block convection, but rather radiative exchange. Many night frosts occur on clear nights, when the ambient t
At the time of Einstein, it was well understood that something was wrong with Newtonian physics. Light was measured to move at a finite fixed speed, yet this speed didn't change relative to the relative velocities of the sender and receiver. Different reference frames for the same beam of light didn't match up. An explanation had to be found. It was one of the great problems of physics of the day.
Indeed. The NHTSA would never approve of a situation where commands transmitted by smartphone or other data link override commands physically given from hardware inside the vehicle.
It would make for a funny zero-day situation, where someone simultaneously steals every net-connected Tesla in the US, orders them to drive to a friend's house, and then shuts down all external communication with the vehicles;) Every last road for dozens of kilometers would be clogged up as the route finding system tries to find ways to get there that aren't already jammed up.
Just a random unrelated thought: 10-20 years from now, autopilot and the like are going to be beloved by insurgent groups. One of today's preferred insurgent tactics is the VBIED, where they armour a truck up like a tank (at least from the front), load it with several tonnes of explosives, and drive it straight into enemy formations. They're very effective, even if just a small fraction of them make it through. Some groups in Syria are now experimenting with remote VBIEDs, using RF or wire communications to control the vehicle without the need to sacrifice a driver. But with autopilot? Just punch in the destination, disable / fake the driver sensors, and off it goes.
You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.
Higher temperatures do indeed lead to a greater total increase in precipitation, but it's not necessarily a good thing, for a number of reasons.
1) Monsoon belts move further north; precipitation amounts tend to polarize between seasons. 2) Snowpack accumulates less (fewer below-freezing days offsetting the more intense snow events) and melts sooner. It's snowpack that modulates many important river flows, and thus off-season water supplies. 3) Higher evaporation rates dessicate soil and plants faster. 4) Precipitation doesn't tend to come in more frequent rain events, but rather more intense rain events. Which are often damaging in their own right.
A warm world means more overall precipitation, and more flood events, but also more drought events. That said, there's a very strong spatial component; not all parts of the world change evenly.
Do you still use hand-sized bales of hay over there? Here in Iceland at least all hay production I've ever encountered is fully automated and makes these huge wrapped bales that you have to use trucks to haul around.
Part of the problem with algae farming for food is the same as for fuel: infrastructure costs. Crops, you just plant them in soil. Algae farms require tanks. 100% perfectly enclosed and monitored tanks if you want them to remain that perfectly engineered single-species type that gives you your optimal food production.
Algae also has a lot of water to drive off. Getting rid of water is a big expense even for crops that aren't grown literally swimming around in it. For example, field corn.
I don't know, I watched a neighbor help birth a lamb. It wasn't so much "comforting" as it was "grabbing and pulling".
It'd be neat to see if drones start taking more of a role in roundups as they get cheaper and flight times longer. The annual sheep roundups here are big events involving tons of people going through the mountains looking for sheep, then surrounding them and driving them back. On the other hand, I don't think people would want it to become too automated; they're big community events, an annual tradition. I doubt anyone would object to the use of drones to find sheep, but outsourcing the roundup to them entirely might be a step too far.
Slashdot Mirror
The Phoenix lander would beg to disagree with you.
This "ice" is still 20-50% rock. You still do.
This has been another "Debbie Downer Talks about Mars"
Pop quiz: what do you get when you boil perchlorates? Answer, in case you didn't know: hydrochloric acid vapours. And that's just the start of problems you're going to have.
And it's not just perchlorates in there. There's arsenic, hexavalent chromium, you name it. At one NASA conference, there was a glacier expert who suggested just this - going to an ice deposit on Mars, digging some up, melting it, letting the sediment settle out, and drinking it. A water recycling expert who had worked on the ISS water recycling system almost threw a fit. She said, get us a sample of that water and 15 years later we can give you a space rated water cleaning system for Mars.
Oh, and it's not actually "ice", it's permafrost - 20-50% rock. Digging through permafrost is difficult even on Earth, with equipment optimized for Earth conditions for over a century. Slow and very high maintenance; permafrost acts like concrete, with water playing the role of cement as a binder. And in case you didn't know, we don't exactly have a bunch of nuclear powered Martian backhoes sitting around. The closest we've come to "digging" on another world is a tiny slow robotic scoop for loose materials. The closest we've come to "drilling" is tiny little abrasion bores. The closest we've come to melting is.... nothing, we haven't.
NASA's looked at a wide range of different methods for getting water on Mars, many of them involving extracting from ice, including digging, drilling, melting, etc. Their conclusion is that this is important and we need to be working on it, but the TRL is almost nothing. There's a lot of problems that you just wouldn't think of. For example, as soon as you dig off the overburden, the ice underneath starts sublimating. If you leave it overnight, you'll come back to fresh overburden on the top.
Some of their criticisms are fair. However:
I ended up blacklisting both of those sites on my Google News feed when they basically became indistinguishable from RT and Sputnik. These days they extensively source from Russian propaganda outlets, as well as using a lot of writers who also write for Russian propaganda outlets. The group's site explicitly states that they're not just listing sources, but also websites with a history of repeating Russian propaganda outlets and talking points.
Just looking at the front page of CounterPunch right now, to pick an example, I see this writing stuff like "In Ukraine, where the neoconservatives around Clinton and Nuland funded and brought about the overthrow of the elected government right on Russia’s borders, provoking a fast and unequivocal response by President Vladimir Putin (part of whose navy was always stationed in an important base in the Crimea), it is common (fictional) knowledge in the Euro-Media that the entire war there is about “Russian aggression”..."
Of course, that's mild compared to a lot of what I've seen. Some of which contains quotes almost verbatim from Sputnik and RT articles. This particular case here is just talking points.
Never seen that sketch before. The guy doesn't sound or look at all Icelandic ;) That guy sounds German. And there is Icelandic honey, although beekeeping is still a sort of fringe hobby here, it's very difficult because of the long (albeit mild) winters and cool summers. But the number of people taking part grows every year.
Try again.
1) The lawsuit was over Icesave, not over the failure of the three banks.
2) Icesave was a savings program created by Landsbankinn backed by a private fund as the primary insurer.
3) The secondary insurer was the government of the respective area that the customers were from - Iceland was the secondary insurer in Iceland, the UK government in the UK, and the Dutch government in the Netherlands.
4) When the market crashed, the private fund went bankrupt. This passed insurance responsibility to the secondary insurers.
5) Iceland paid Icelanders, as the secondary insurer for the Icelandic market, up to the insured limit. They later passed a bill paying out the full value of the accounts to Icelandic customers.
6) The UK and Dutch governments, however, tried to shirk their responsibilities as the secondary insurers in their respective markets, and instead tried to blackmail Iceland into insuring it for them. A great deal of pressure was put on Iceland on a wide variety of fronts, ranging from EU negotiations to emergency loans to fisheries.
7) The then-government commenced negotiations and came up with a bill to pay the majority of the UK and Netherlands' responsibilities, to try to be able to put it behind them and get the economy back on track. Our president rejected it, which put it to referendum. The public overwhelmingly rejected it.
8) The next government used the failure to try to negotiate a better deal and got one for reduced, but still extremely painful covering of the UK and Netherlands' liabilities. Again it was vetoed, and again the public rejected it, although not by as large of a margin.
9) The UK and Netherlands decided that this wasn't going anywhere, so took us to the EFTA court.
10) The EFTA court reviewed the case, and found in our favour on all counts. The UK and Netherlands did bear responsibility as the secondary insurers and not Iceland. As is standard, all of the costs of all of the litigation additionally fell on them.
Not familiar with an "Alaska", but there is a "Grænland" (Greenland) :)
Funny, I'd call it "UK Government who tried to back out of their responsibilities as the secondary insurer after the primary insurer went bankrupt, and instead tried to blackmail a much smaller, weaker country into paying your insurance obligations for you that they were never responsible for, then ultimately sued and lost in court, confirming the very simple account insurance structure laid out literally one click away from the front page of the Icesave account information page."
And funny to hear someone talking about fishermen, the UK, and stealing, given that you spent years stealing our fish (and overfishing them to boot) and we had to drive you out of our waters three times. In case it's confusing: This is Iceland. This is the UK. Learn the difference, and stick to depleting your own stocks, takk.
It renders Í just fine. Thorn, however, doesn't work :P
Common misconception. You cannot just declare someone to be a diplomat in a foreign country - the foreign country has to approve your request for diplomatic credentials.
Extradition isn't that simple. There's a lot of constraints to extradition cases - for example, dual criminality (what the person is charged with has to be a crime in both countries).
I don't know the procedure in Norway, but I assume it's similar to the Swedish one.
1) A request for extradition is received.
2) The court takes up the case.
3) In the proceedings, a (nonbinding) opinion from the government is sought.
4) The court rules, on their own about the case.
5) If the court blocks the extradition, the person may not be extradited.
6) If the court approves the extradition, the government may still block the extradition.
7) If both the court and government approve, then the person must be extradited.
The courts cannot rule on a request that they have not received, and the government is not allowed to usurp the courts by making pledges on a case that the court hasn't yet ruled on.
Snowden really should get used to the fact that he's not going anywhere until his case gets resolved.
That has been done - see the IPCC reports. Error bars and huge numbers of references included. People like you just choose to refuse to believe it.
Furthermore, nobody is talking about "spending trillions and massively expanding the size of government". The estimated annualized cost of "adaptation" (aka, doing nothing) is estimated at between 0,2 to 2% GDP for the first 2C, while the cost of prevention is 0,04 to 0,14% GDP - not counting the side benefits of doing the latter. Multiple regression models indicate an economic optimum with a peak around 500ppm, which still involves "major efforts" at reduction - again, assuming no side benefits. No health cost reductions, no leading to paths that reduce costs below the starting point, no spin-off inventions, etc. And historically, it's been changes in technological paradigms that lead to technological (and economic) revolutions that extend far beyond the technical field for which they were originally developed.
Do you honestly think that this is an appropriate foundation for a view on a scientific topic that makes you feel qualified to override the view of actual experts in the field? Seem? Feels? Suspect? Venture a guess?
Look, I'm going to take you at face value here and try to explain this simply: you don't "guess" at measurements of light absorption based on how something "feels". You measure it. Soda-lime glass (aka, window glass) is very transparent in the visible spectrum, poorly in near-IR, and virtually opaque to thermal IR. CO2, likewise, is almost entirely transparent to visible light, but strongly absorbs in various parts of the IR spectrum. The reason that sunlight feels warm through glass is because a large portion of the sun's energy is in the form of visible light - and indoors you don't have as significant heat loss mechanisms (convective or radiative) as outdoors.
Now, note on the above graph that there are other atmospheric absorbers. Indeed, the most potent IR absorber in Earth's atmosphere is not carbon dioxide but water vapour. However, water rapidly cycles into and out of the atmosphere; it is thus a feedback mechanism, not a forcing mechanism. You could remove every last bit of water vapour from Earth's atmosphere, and two weeks later the vast majority of it would be back. And vice versa for overloading it. To force climate you need gases which do not cycle rapidly out of the system. CO2 and methane are the most prominent of these.
Now, it's true that the "greenhouse" analogy has limited benefit because you're dealing with different scenarios, and you're correct to suspect that a key difference is convection. Planets like Earth lose heat virtually exclusively to radiation. As mentioned, Earth would be far cooler if not for the so-called "greenhouse effect" - if I recall correctly, Earth's equilibrium temperature is 255K - that is, the temperature that you calculate if you consider only Earth's albedo (reflectiveness), emissivity and the incoming sunlight, balancing the rate of blackbody radiation with incoming energy. And a key thing to note when discussing this is that what we really care about is the temperature at the surface - a planetary greenhouse effect actually lowers the temperature in the upper stratosphere.
Radiative heat transfer is a balance between heat received and heat given off. A planet without an atmosphere, at night, exchanges radiation with the cosmic microwave background, which means "essentially zero radiation returns". The more IR-absorptive of an atmosphere present, however, the more it starts exchanging with the atmosphere, and at an increasingly low altitude. So you're not just giving up IR, but also getting it back. This raises the temperature; this increases up to the point where the outbound and inbound radiation rates are equal; that forms your new equilibrium.
In a physical greenhouse, this effect occurs as well, but in most scenarios it's dominated by convection losses. However, there are better "gardening analogies" - the most notable being IR-blocking floating row covers. Such floating row covers are often used to extend the length of time before a field succumbs to frost; they do not block convection, but rather radiative exchange. Many night frosts occur on clear nights, when the ambient t
At the time of Einstein, it was well understood that something was wrong with Newtonian physics. Light was measured to move at a finite fixed speed, yet this speed didn't change relative to the relative velocities of the sender and receiver. Different reference frames for the same beam of light didn't match up. An explanation had to be found. It was one of the great problems of physics of the day.
Yeah, if only there was a way to test materials for what wavelengths of light they absorb.
Too bad such a technology has never been invented.
Let's say it all together: the problem is not that the Earth is warming, it's how fast the Earth is warming.
A new PETM is not a desirable situation. Yes, Earth has done this experiment before.
Given that it was coined by a Nazi (Richard Spencer) as a term to whitewash himself, yes.
Indeed. The NHTSA would never approve of a situation where commands transmitted by smartphone or other data link override commands physically given from hardware inside the vehicle.
That would be a nice reply if I had actually told anyone that they're not supposed to eat meat.
What does "supposed to eat" even mean?
It would make for a funny zero-day situation, where someone simultaneously steals every net-connected Tesla in the US, orders them to drive to a friend's house, and then shuts down all external communication with the vehicles ;) Every last road for dozens of kilometers would be clogged up as the route finding system tries to find ways to get there that aren't already jammed up.
Just a random unrelated thought: 10-20 years from now, autopilot and the like are going to be beloved by insurgent groups. One of today's preferred insurgent tactics is the VBIED, where they armour a truck up like a tank (at least from the front), load it with several tonnes of explosives, and drive it straight into enemy formations. They're very effective, even if just a small fraction of them make it through. Some groups in Syria are now experimenting with remote VBIEDs, using RF or wire communications to control the vehicle without the need to sacrifice a driver. But with autopilot? Just punch in the destination, disable / fake the driver sensors, and off it goes.
The Indian subcontinent begs to differ.
You tend to crave certain meat dishes because your body has learned to associate them with feelings of fullness and having its nutritional needs met. When a person goes vegetarian, the cravings continue... for a couple weeks. Then they disappear, as your body learns to associate other dishes with the same thing.
This is from personal experience.
Higher temperatures do indeed lead to a greater total increase in precipitation, but it's not necessarily a good thing, for a number of reasons.
1) Monsoon belts move further north; precipitation amounts tend to polarize between seasons.
2) Snowpack accumulates less (fewer below-freezing days offsetting the more intense snow events) and melts sooner. It's snowpack that modulates many important river flows, and thus off-season water supplies.
3) Higher evaporation rates dessicate soil and plants faster.
4) Precipitation doesn't tend to come in more frequent rain events, but rather more intense rain events. Which are often damaging in their own right.
A warm world means more overall precipitation, and more flood events, but also more drought events. That said, there's a very strong spatial component; not all parts of the world change evenly.
Do you still use hand-sized bales of hay over there? Here in Iceland at least all hay production I've ever encountered is fully automated and makes these huge wrapped bales that you have to use trucks to haul around.
Part of the problem with algae farming for food is the same as for fuel: infrastructure costs. Crops, you just plant them in soil. Algae farms require tanks. 100% perfectly enclosed and monitored tanks if you want them to remain that perfectly engineered single-species type that gives you your optimal food production.
Algae also has a lot of water to drive off. Getting rid of water is a big expense even for crops that aren't grown literally swimming around in it. For example, field corn.
I don't know, I watched a neighbor help birth a lamb. It wasn't so much "comforting" as it was "grabbing and pulling".
It'd be neat to see if drones start taking more of a role in roundups as they get cheaper and flight times longer. The annual sheep roundups here are big events involving tons of people going through the mountains looking for sheep, then surrounding them and driving them back. On the other hand, I don't think people would want it to become too automated; they're big community events, an annual tradition. I doubt anyone would object to the use of drones to find sheep, but outsourcing the roundup to them entirely might be a step too far.