@johncarlosbaez in spoken English you'd try to distinguish the two by changing the the way the words are stressed within the sentence, so maybe it's just our writing system that's not up to the job.

In Japanese there's a word similar to 'oneself' that applies to the topic of the sentence, so in the spoken language you'd end up with:

That woman saw herself's dog.
あの女の人は自分の犬を見た。

vs

That woman saw another woman's dog.
あの女の人は他の女の人の犬を見た。

(E&OE, I'm still not very good at the language)

@johncarlosbaez that is a press release about the continuation of a partnership that started in 2021.

Toyota's annual announcement of solid state battery cars in the next year or two is now a decade old running joke. A 2027/8 new tech EV delivery would require them to be running a prototype on the road this year, which would require low volume battery production today.

My suspicion is that "next year electric cars will be much better" is intended to deter people from buying an EV *this* year.

@johncarlosbaez Toyota have been saying this since 2012, while putting most of their R&D effort into ICE with a little bit in hydrogen.

Luckily plenty of other companies are putting significant effort into better battery technology.

The Japanese auto industry as a whole is in serious trouble, they've lost their major market, China, to high tech new market entrant, China, and are 15 years behind the market leader (also China) in BEV development.

@johncarlosbaez most of his books are pretty good, if you like sci fi with a political/economics theme.

Unfortunately it's so long since I've read his stuff (20-30 years...) I can't remember which book was which.

@johncarlosbaez a little while ago I read an article saying that neutron star collisions produced heavy elements via iron + the r-process, and I get why more neutrons would make this easier.

What I couldn't find out was why this has to be the case. There's not enough iron on the neutron star so it must come from the breakup of the bulk... Is it neutron capture all the way up from single protons, or from larger nuclei, in which case why just iron and not other nuclei?

@johncarlosbaez @joncounts think you may be out by a factor of 1000 there.

I think even the mass of just all the stars is 40 billion 🔆