>we don't even know what it actually is let alone how it works

That's the core issue. Until you define what conciousness actually IS (and by "define" I mean in scientific terms that could in principle be used to make testable predictions, not in untestable philosophical generalities and ambiguities), it's redundant to attempt an explanation; you're just playing with words and hoping that nobody notices. Personally, I feel it's strongly connected to (in a complex organism may even be equivalent to) a complexity of brain function that allows it to observe and consider what and how it is "thinking" - to include at an adequate level its own "thought processes" as input data, in other words. That seems to me to be pretty much where the existence of a sense of "self" has to start. But that's just my two penn'orth.

("Brain", "organism" etc. here being simple shorthand - I'm quite comfortable with the prospect of, say, a non-organic mechanism having conciousness. Again - until you define what that IS, you most definitely can't exclude possibilities based on what feels suspiciously like pure anthropomorphic prejudice. Oh - and given the number of rather capable AIs suddenly out there - we could probably do with something approaching a definiton quite urgently. Just saying...)

(I have a similar definitional issue with "free will". Define it (in purely scientific, non-"spiritual" terms) - show me what it might actually mean scientifically for a mechanism or organism to have "free will" - and we can start talking sensibly about it.)

It was more like 7ft; the last couple of feet were already underground.

Dice don't have a memory. They absolutely don't care what has happened already. Every time you roll one, you're starting from scratch, simple as that.

The thing is - from the perspective of the unverse as it is now, the Big Bang happened everywhere all at once. You are right where it happened - but then, so is absolutely everything else as well. And all of it was packed incredibly close together* at the time. There's no "expanding ring of light" - the light started from everywhere, heading off in all possible directions, and is still going, just moving between places that were all close together at the time. Some of the light started off in your living room, and is still heading outward; but plenty of light from other places is reaching us from every direction as well.

2D analogy. Imagine the surface of a balloon. It's an incredibly small balloon when it's not inflated, but it's also incredibly stretchy. Suddenly, it starts growing - and as it does, thanks to the marvels of thought experiments, as each point of the surface starts to stretch, lots of sparkly light goes shooting off from that point in all directions along the surface. But the whole balloon is stretching, so the light is coming from everywhere, going everywhere. A couple of hours later (or maybe 14 billion years) the balloon is still getting bigger, and its whole surface is still chock full of sparkly light heading in every direction. There's no "expanding ring" - the light started out everywhere, heading everywhere.

Put back in the context of the universe, that's what we see - the Cosmic Microwave Background. Light from all over the place, that just happens to be passing here right now.

*"Incredibly close together" is as far back as we can go. There's a point where everything is so close together that our current models of the way the universe works simply break down. What happens before that is, basically, currently unknowable.

Brilliant!

Do it again...

Yes. But we're OK until they learn to hunt.

(Fun fact. If you work handling pineapples for too long, it will temporarily destroy your fingerprints.)

There's an old saying that something is "neither fish, fowl nor good red meat" (not really one thing or another). My understanding is that, at one time, fish wasn't considered "meat", basically. So the imprecation not to eat meat didn't extend to fish.

(For what it's worth, in my usage of the words as I grew up with them at least, the two words still mean different things in common parlance.)

Just to point out that no act is, technically, illegal until a court or equivalent finds that it was. Up to that point, however dubious its source, income is simply income. And, yes, the state wants its cut.

Nope. Old fallacy based on old window glass usually being thicker at the bottom. But the way it was made at the time, it was always likely to be thicker at one end than the other* - and if your glass is like that (and expensive!) you're obviously going to put the heavier end at the bottom. Not least, there's less risk of it overtoppling and breaking while you're installing it. There's Roman glass around from over 2000 years ago; it's just the same shape as when it was made.

*(Basically, early window glass was made by spinning a blob of molten glass into a disc with centrifugal force. Which means that it gets thinner towards the edges. Then you'd cut the sheet up into panes. If you've ever seen old doors or windows with a rough, circular pattern of thickness on them - that's the cheapest bit, from the middle. Google "crown glass".)

Because the maths is consistent, so it's interesting to mathematicians to explore it. And like so many "purely academic" things in maths, it turns out that it's no such thing; it has practical applications in things such electronics.

Rainbows happen when light from the sun behind you hits water droplets in front of you, and gets bent back towards you. The places where the light of each wavelength gets bent by the right amount to reach your eyes are in a circle around the line from the sun through your head. So what you see is however much of a circle as the landscape around you allows - usually about half a circle. And different colours get bent by different lines amounts, so the colours get smeared out into circles of different widths.

It's possible to see a full circular rainbow under the right conditions (say, from a plane or high-enough ground); there are photos out there. Google it.

Simple rules can produce remarkably complex results, basically.

Many fish, for example, have a pressure sensing organ along their sides called a Lateral Line. If the fish next to them changes direction, they feel it, and can echo it. So if one fish in a school spooks, say, or spots a really tasty-looking piece of food, and decides to change direction, the ones near it feel the change and echo it to avoid collision, and others move to avoid them, and so on. Within a fraction of a second the whole school has echoed it.

Army ants are another excellent example. they have very few brain cell, yet they can join together to form bridges to span quite wide gaps using only very simple rules. If they hit a gap, they slow/stop; and as long as other ants are walking over them, they freeze in place. So basically the first ants to hit a gap stop, other ants clamber over them and stop a little further out, and together they become the units of a bridge that others cross. And once the gap is crossed, they effectively reverse the process, climb out of the gap and tag on at the end. It looks like incredibly complex behaviour, yet invidual ants have almost no instructions to follow.

As opposed to "parallax second"?

(I'd say more, but I have a deliver to go do on the Kessel run.)

According to Danny La Rue's character in the (budget but surprisingly good) film "Our Miss Fred" (US "Operation Fred") - explaining to a straight-laced, rather naive school headmistress, it's about tennis. Enabling the cast to get away with a car full of teenage girls singing the chorus: Balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls, balls; balls, balls, balls, balls balls"...

There are also big differences in what relative processing power you expect of a computer. As other people have said, the changes in tech that led to the microchip increased by an incredible factor the amount of computing power that can be packed into a given volume - but it's still also true that, to a degree, that the more you have, the more you find uses for - and also that the more you want, the bigger it gets. Some computers are still the size of a room.

IBM, for example, still produces mainframe computers for commercial use that have WAY more concurrent processing power than anything you're likely to have on your desk; the current latest one, the z16, is the size of one or more large filing cupboards. As for supercomputers - the current record holder, the [Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)), apparently occupies 680m^2 (7,300ft^2 ).

Not even Wensleydale...