Importance, take Greece for example temples to the Greek Gods fell into disuse when Greek Orthodox Church became the main religion and therefore that church wanted the money from worshippers to build its own places of worship and would discourage belief in what went before. This allowed older religions structures to fall into disrepair (much like the in the uk when monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII) helped to highlight they were failed institutions.

However it’s worth noting that in Italy and Greece there is evidence in history that earthquakes led to much of the initial damage leading to the buildings being unsafe and too expensive to repair and from there the time weather and deconstruction did the rest. obviously really tall structures still standing are much harder to steal stone from than the bits that have collapsed which is why some bits still stand and some bits are gone completely. We must remember though that some of what we see today in the colosseum is due to reconstruction works done over the last hundred years.

Buildings like the colosseum in Rome once damaged simply fell out of use because they had no further use, they were to big to take down and it was easier to let them decay. The once flooded and abandoned parts of New Orleans or the car factories in Detroit are chilling reminders that abandonment is something that even happens today.

All of these examples and places like the great pyramids are structures that fell out of use and much of their decay following their abandonment was because local people used them as sources of building materials almost like a quarry only the stones were already cut and piled up.

Remember with many of these old buildings disuse allowed soil/sand to build up and structures slowly being lost under the ground and out of sight. much of the ancient Roman architecture we see in Rome today was only “rediscovered” through excavation in the 18th/19th centuries.

At that age I never really read a newspaper, that was something old people did.

That’s not what I’m saying, just that was the message put out by the government in the uk at thee time, the education system was giving the same advice to students at the time. At that point nobody knew any of the data you describe and the advice from authorities was simply don’t have sex without a condom. A lot has changed in 40 years knowledge is very different today. 👍🏻

The “Hype” over HIV and its prevalence in the news of the 80’s was simply that it was newly detected, spreading expediently, had no treatment and nobody knew the scale of how big the “underlying threat” was already hidden in society.

So governments especially in the UK embarked on unprecedented awareness campaigns to slow the advance of the disease through education. Part of that education campaign was to get across the deadliness of the disease before it became a “pandemic”. The problem was nobody knew how long people had been infected before they became sick, and died. With awareness of the disease and more importantly a test for its presence, therapies could be developed, like most illnesses if detected early prognosis is normally better. It’s worth remembering it was the immunodeficiency that enabled other diseases to kill those with HIV.

These education campaigns have been effective at slowing the growth of the disease in the UK population and there have been treatments developed that prolong the lives of many sufferers. So public education and press interest in the disease has waned as it has become part of everyday medicine. Estimates are 0.2% of the population in the uk are affected but that’s still a a massive 100,000 people estimated but is one of the lowest rates in the world and outside the top 100. But it’s worth remembering in the early days of the illness it was only when people got really sick were they even aware that they may have it which is one of the reasons why it was so deadly, by the time they were diagnosed it was often too late to do anything.

What was of concern is how many “well” people had HIV undetected in the population and where that number was able to grow in places like Africa it went out of control. Some places in Africa run at excess of 20% of the population being affected and bigger countries like South Africa have a lower % infected about 12% but that’s still more than 70,000 people dying each year. The deadliness of this disease should not be underestimated even today. It’s just in many countries the rate of infection has been well contained and is less in the news.

Friend of mine was in a cycle accident at speed was in a “trauma” coma for about six weeks is alive but suffered some brain damage, the brain is very plastic though and was able to re-learn some skills lost from the trauma.

I think the time before it’s likely they won’t ever awaken is very much dependent on the type of injury. The level of brain activity can be monitored in more detail these days and the amount of “activity” and whether it is increasing or decreasing plays a big part.

Binatone black and white 8 games in one all really just versions of pong with a paddle in sexy seventies orange.

Would that indicate a large population crash in “pre-history” caused by HIV? Leaving only those with the CCR5 mutation to repopulate? That would indicate that HIV has been around for a very long time and have big historical implications.

There are so many things that can alter the answer to your question…. Some places have much more variability in their weather patterns… to the degree that the same month one year may be 5 rain days and another year it’s 20 rain days, the average of rain days will be the number of rain days each year averaged over a period of time (maybe 10 years) so in this example the average might be 12 rain days but it may be as many as 20 days during several years when a particular weather pattern is prevalent.

Things that alter the local weather pattern are things like altitude of the place and height of surrounding mountains, major high altitude air currents like the jet stream, proximity to the coast and sea temperature, proximity to seawater currents like the Gulf Stream, low level winds like the trade winds, ares of desert, proximity or not to the equator and position within a large landmass all create local pockets of weather patterns that are unique often to a very small geographic area. So where you are the answers may be very different compared to where I am.

Some places are even “high or low” air pressure generators that begin to propagate patterns of weather in different ways as the wind direction changes. So if winds are easterly it’s pattern “A” if winds are westerly it’s pattern “B” if winds are very low then pattern “C” becomes more likely.

A weatherman will probably tell you, you are far less likely to see the average number of rain days or the average temperature occur because the average is just that the number calculated mathematically. Now that may be a good average because there is never much variation or a bad average calculated from two extremes… normally weathermen know that in some places it will regularly be very high or very low, the average itself May happen very very rarely.

It’s about safety and cost when it comes to data storage… yes shorter wavelength emission/reading systems are possible but are they necessary. At the moment we are yet to have a video encoding system that needs a disc bigger than 128GB for a movie. Chances are by the time we do it will be streamed via the internet and a physical disc will be redundant.

But who knows what future tv formats will need for storage, when I was a kid a 240line VHS tape was astounding now 1080 lines is considered old technology.

Link to Wikipedia picture of the dot spacings on blue Ray discs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#/media/File:Comparison_CD_DVD_HDDVD_BD.svg

I think the track density is actually more limited by the reading method than the stamping method.

The laser focus is the limiting factor, had to move from a low frequency red laser for a normal CD, to a high frequency blue laser (it’s actually violet) to get the data capacity higher for blue Ray. I believe “multi layer reading” is already being exploited for 4K use on a 5” disc which takes advantage of even finer stamping methods.

I think 25gb is the standard single layer capacity and the current disks in use are dual layer at 50gb… this is expected to rise with XL disk players/writers where the capacity is stretched to 128GB using 4 layers on a single disc using even finer laser targeting/focussing methods.

An eye is a light sensitive structure that generally requires a brain to process the signals. This is because the eye is generally used as a way of finding food or evading predators.

A plant doesn’t move so it can’t evade predators and only needs to know which direction the sun is coming from so an eye would be an expensive organ to develop and own. However a plant can “see/sense” which way the sun is coming from and adjust itself in that direction or “curl up at night” so in a some form a plant must be able to “see light” even though it doesn’t have an organ we would recognise as an eye.