I’m more familiar with how Starlink compares to existing publicly-available satellite internet options. Here are some brief points:
- data throughput orders of magnitude higher,
- the ability to use smaller and more portable antennas (e.g. ~100 Mbps with something the size of a textbook, currently ~2 Mbps and soon ~10s Mbps with your normal mobile phone),
- order of magnitude lower latency compared to GSO satellites.
Other constellations like Iridium dedicate large portions to use by government(s?), too, but simply do not have the throughput or total bandwidth that Starlink does. Your speeds there, on the expensive business plans that offer it, are measured in the low Kbps.
The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.
Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.
He is far more than just a narrator. His 77-year career created and defined the wildlife/nature documentary as a genre, beginning at a time when television was so new that it really was just him and a few individuals making all the decisions. In his youth, he was given some cash and sent to travel the world in a 2-3 man team, off-grid for months, in the “Zoo Quest” series - the first time anyone had really seen animals, in the wild, on television.
Switching to a desk job, he went on to use his position in the BBC to green-light then-pioneering documentaries like “Civilisation” and “The Ascent of Man” (and still travelled occasionally for anthropological and nature documentaries, that he also green-lit) that remain a huge influence on all documentaries today.
Then in 1979, “Life on Earth” created an entirely new format of nature documentary that has only seen iterative change in the almost-50-years since. The rest, as they say, is history. He’s been heavily involved in the production of so many documentaries in the decades since, only reducing his role as he got older. Even in his 90s most of the series he narrates have short on-location sequences with him.
It’s safe to say that he, perhaps more than anyone else, created the “nature documentary” - both in experimenting with the format, and in green-lighting shows - and therefore shares a huge amount of responsibility for the many positive second order effects. Certainly in the UK, I would argue that a significant amount of public awareness of climate change comes from BBC documentaries. As attested to by others in this thread, generations of scientists and conservationists pursued their professions in part because they were inspired by him (and I can throw my own hat in the ring for this). It was also spoken about, at his 100th birthday concert, what an outsized influence his documentaries had on increased worldwide awareness of plastics pollution and the recent UN treaty beginning to address it.
His voice, really, is secondary to all that.
(I would highly recommend reading his “Adventures of a Young Naturalist” and “Journeys to the Other Side of the World” books for anyone with an interest in this sort of thing. They’re combined volumes of books he wrote back in the 1950s and 60s about his Zoo Quest expeditions - both a wondrous first-person view of the travels and interactions with wildlife, but also a fascinating teleportation back in time into a world where air travel and television were brand new, and all of these remote communities were near-untouched compared to today).
I disagree with the claim that a greater proportion of people go hungry, and more are homeless, today than at any point in recent western history. These have broadly been on a downwards trend over the last century.
Of course many do struggle, and that should not be dismissed by pointing to the past. But it nonetheless strikes me as naive to believe that people today are hungrier than at any point in recent history - the obesity crisis, and its lack of discrimination between social classes, should at least in part demonstrate this.
In my opinion, such exaggerations mostly serve to discredit and distract from legitimate complaints about the cost of living today.
> Imagine you take a conspiracy influencer and actually put them in the spacecraft with the astronauts so they could see the whole thing with their own eyes and wouldn't be able to deny it. They return to earth to tell their followers that it's all real. Do you think everyone will be convinced, or would they say he's now in on the conspiracy and find a new person to lead the conspiracy theory?
"The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon. The larger flat Earth community has largely rejected the results and accused the participants, including the flat Earthers, of having faked the expedition and of being part of a larger conspiracy to promote the spherical Earth model."
> However, they just change their original message, maybe to remove a typo, change the date or add a friendly note. Then the three letter agency does a glorified 'diff' and they are subsequently in on the chat.
Your entire comment is filled with false claims and figures.
In 2025-26 there are an estimated 39.1 million people paying income tax - 56.0% of the population [1]. Of course, in the last census, 20.7% of the population were children [2]. About 3.1% of the population are UK students in University education [3], and about 18.6% of the population are retired [4]. I've also missed all the 18-year-olds in their final year of school, which is roughly 1.1 million or 1.6% of the population [5]. About 8.8 million, or 12.6%, are pensioners who pay income tax that I have double counted, usually due to private pensions and other sources of income [6].
Totally these numbers gives a rough estimate that suggest only about 12.6% of working age people do not pay income tax. This is in line with the government's own statistics putting those claiming Universal Credit at 10.6% of the population [7], or those economically inactive at 12.9% [8]. This is wildly different to your implication that 61% of people are too lazy to work.
Unemployment, which is roughly defined as those out of work who are actively looking for work, is at 5.2% [9], which it is worth noting is slightly below the EU and Euro area average of 5.9% and 6.2% respectively [10]. Direct comparisons are difficult to make, but it is certainly indicative of the UK falling within what is considered a healthy range.
Furthermore, take-home pay on a £100,000 salary is £68,561 [11], giving an effective income tax of 31.4% - far below your claim of 71%. True, there is the so-called "£100k tax trap" which gradually reduces your tax-free allowance above this salary. But this still gives just a 37.6% tax on £125,000, or 41.1% on £200,000. You may consider these to be high, but they are far, far below your claim of 71% income tax.
This depends entirely on how you hold your phone in your hand. For some positions, someone would need a 5” thumb to reach the corner. You can’t make such sweeping statements for something with such variation.
You are wrong, this same story was not reported more than ten years ago. The article is not a report of a man being arrested, tried, and sentenced (doubtless the extent of reporting in local news when it happened). This article is about the wider background of one story, of many, from a behind-the-scenes documentary that has been filmed over the last five years and just released.
Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?
Are you suggesting that the BBC, the world service arm of a British public broadcaster (that is editorially independent from the state and even the wider BBC), began spending five years filming a documentary across the US, Portugal, Brazil, and Russia, just so that they could secretly support a US government agency half a decade before it became embroiled in controversy?
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
This will let you download all of your photos that already exist on iCloud Photos.
Going forward, you’d want to set up some other way to sync photos you take from your phone to your other devices. I can personally recommend Synology Photos for simplicity[1], or Immich[2] for an open-source (and in my opinion, slightly better) alternative you can run on any hardware, if you’d like to set up an always-on NAS. These are “Apple Photos” or “Google Photos” equivalents that you host yourself.
Alternatively, something like Syncthing[3] is a dead-simple way to sync your photos to various other devices as and when they are online, if you’d prefer to manage your photos in an ordinary file manager.
I’d be remiss not to mention that, for any solution where you move off the cloud to a central storage location of your own, you really must make backups to keep your photos safe. The 3-2-1 rule is a standard recommendation.
The s-, i-, and r-processes do however follow the same mechanism at the most fundamental level, even if it results in wildly different production paths. I think the author was simplifying for an audience unfamiliar with the details, for whom this distinction is less important.
(And I say that despite my own work and usual eagerness to tell people all about it!)
I believe it’s quite common for people to marvel at the vastness of the universe. For that reason, people might like the tangible link that they feel to the rest of the universe when they think of this - it’s amazing to think of how small we are in it, but also amazing to think of where “we” came from.
The front page of the BBC right now, at the very top, is a large photo of protests in Iran. The headline reports that hospitals are overwhelmed by the regime cracking down on protestors.
The article focuses on first-hand accounts from medics inside Iran, describing the crackdown and casualties. It also contains statements from the Iranian opposition, the UN, US and French presidents and British PM, all critical of Khamenei, with just two mentions of the regime’s official statements.
Also, I just switched to the BBC News TV broadcast. The Iran protests are the lead story: a special report with a focus on the protestors, showing videos shared by them.
University exams being marked by hand, by someone experienced enough to work outside a rigid marking scheme, has been the standard for hundreds of years and has proven scalable enough. If there are so many students that academics can’t keep up, there are likely too many students to maintain a high standard of education anyway.