There are different kinds of smart. A person can be quick and creative at something (math, mechanics, music, marketing …), and less so at everything else.

If the something is -complicated-, then a lot of learning is needed, and a good qualified teacher will help you sort out what is really important to know. Chess is complicated, and you need to learn basic strategies of how to move and not get eaten alive. There are some books that can help with that. But a human teacher can get you there a lot faster. If you’re really motivated but you’re not remembering enough? it may not be your ‘something’ !

Practically speaking, probably not.

After many years of using FFox, I just tried a Zen install on Linux. It did not turn out as well as I hoped.

I did not have FFoxesr installed in the way the OS would have installed it (though it was still in the user folder). This meant that Zen did/could not see my bookmarks, extensions or passwords … and the options it offered didn’t work out. (It wanted an HTML bookmarks file … I had them saved as JSON … and a ‘CSV’ (??) passwords file … wherever that is … and it found no extensions folder.) So, for starters, years of customizations had to be manually restored.

But, fair shake, I did manually re-install bookmarks AND a few extensions that had saved databases (e.g. UBO, NoScript, Block site). (It ignored the sub-folders in the JSON bookmarks folders, dumping all bookmarks into the top-levels.) And I had to re-create all the settings. (Most of which exist in the .mozilla folder on Linux … easy to find.)

I played for an hour with what I put there (without a menu bar … or a tab bar, all URIs are shoved together -by name- in a sidebar … I did figure out how to see a bookmark bar). I could discern no -truly useful- advantages to it. None. That was not offset by some pretty cosmetics. So even if you do get all of your customizations past the one-size-fits-all install, for long-time FF users I see no substantial advantages to the Zen browser.

No cavalry … and no calvary either … is going to ride over the hilltop and save us. We can only keep healthy, keep learning and keep doing the best we can for each other. Yeah, it matters today. And it’s always today.

GEOLOGY can be intriguing when much of it is set outdoors (in videos, no bug bites, no poison ivy) and being explained by a professor at a small college with a great love of the topic and a talent and desire to share it with a large audience. Yes, I’m talking Nick on the Rocks himself. Danger:He’s often accompanied by other interesting geologists. It might be catching.

https://www.youtube.com/@GeologyNick/videos

If you’re new to the topic or have children, then Nick also does short (under 10-minute) shows that are shown on PBS, which you’ll find here:

https://www.pbs.org/show/nick-rocks/

Oh, I’m thinking about 20 minutes in line outside a small community center, back when I lived in North Dakota (pop of whole state about 600,000). As a lifelong nomad, it was the only state I lived where I actually attended a Democratic party caucus. It was an enjoyable excursion into a behind-the-scenes election process that most will never venture into. Best part was, I escaped without being signed up for anything more!

THANKS for alerting me to another source of XKCD madness!

All pets were at one time wildlife. Killing one to save it… wow.

Some way of grouping Communities other than by name (not very useful). E.G. search on ‘Climate’ and you don’t get the name of one of the busiest communities.

In other words, group them a step up the taxonomy. Create 10 or 15 groups (sci/tech, history, music, culture, media, nature, issues, locations…), see what mods have to say about that list. (Could do worse than the Wikipedia taxonomy.)

One thing that seems to be missing from most Zen promotion is that Firefox has a huge collection of add-on options/extentions. Hard to beat of you’re reliant on several of them. Keeps me from even trying it.

Seems like a lot of people need to know that these things **can ** -bite- you. We recently went to a restaurant that used one to direct you to an online menu. We asked for on-paper menus instead… If this is going to be service industry, it better get smarter about it.

“How QR codes work and what makes them dangerous – a computer scientist explains” https://theconversation.com/how-qr-codes-work-and-what-makes-them-dangerous-a-computer-scientist-explains-177217

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2021/qr-codes.html

It’s gross, fraudulent as three-card monte, and … as with many corporate tricksters … there needs to be a law with prison terms.

Have a look at Gorbachev. A big loss, that.

It can be hard to find the right community to post a link in. Figuring out the rules and knowing who’s reading them (and sometimes what they’re really about) might cause someone to give up. (Especially when people complain about ‘this isn’t the place for that’ without stating the better alternative.)

Bill Gates, except when Ballmer was there.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was ‘wrong’ by less than an order of magnitude … compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What’s the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

I’ll give Chap1 a shot. PKD can be a headscratcher.

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

Similar to my path, sounds like. Started when I noticed how much the acceptance of physics theories depended on POV. Already questioning Western religion/philosophy wholesale, Watts got me started looking at multiple Asian POVs, that brought me back to Jung, Gurdjieff, Polanyi and Bohm. There was no cure for any of that, so back to restart with slightly less naive realism. I am, whether or not I think, therefore.

"Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well. " — Philip K. Dick

I’d bet that ‘lemmings’ wouldn’t work.