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And once again, the US leaves its seat at the leadership table like this is a real estate deal gone bad. To me, this is a showcase of Trump's biggest faults. It shows his hypocrisy in using fake news to promote his agenda while blaming others for it, his ignorance about foreign policy, his petty need to destroy everything Obama built, and his insistence on making snap decisions emotionally without considering counsel or context in order to gaslight everyone into thinking he knows what he's doing.

Some Novels speak in a voice that is specific to their era and or following. I wouldn't expect an 18yr old (Generation Z) christian conservative to enjoy James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" for example. Many classic Novels are commentaries on society. Over time challenges change as do styles and language which make the underlining commentaries more difficult to relate with. If written in 2018 Capt Ahab (Moby Dick) may have been a special ops soldier looking to kill the world's top terrorist in a bid to end all terrorism only to realize terror exists in the mind and has consumed his life. If written today perhaps the Great White Whale would be a Great Big Border Wall. I think most books which are considered classics have been labelled such for the way they metaphorically represent social strife.

Another crackpot. If you cannot find any valid science to support your claim, perhaps you should reconsider it? In the meantime, how about answering some questions: 1) Please show that your idea reproduces the observed orbital velocities in galaxy clusters and galaxies. (Note: your reply needs to be quantitative: using mathematics to show the values predicted by your idea and comparing those with the observed data. Not just more claims.) 2) Please show quantitatively (using mathematics) that the gas around galaxies has the right density to cause the lensing predicted by GR. 3) Please explain why there is no dispersion if this is caused by refraction. 4) Please explain how gravitational lensing is caused by dark matter even in the absence of galaxies or any visible matter. 5) Please explain quantitatively (using mathematics) how the observed large structure of the universe forms in the absence of dark matter. If you cannot answer questions like this, then this thread is pointless (ie. you are not doing science) and we can ask the mods to close it.

The Bible

Hey guys..... In some recent conversations here, I made an offhand remark about how I thought a classic well-known novel mentioned in a post was hugely Overrated. Just my two cents, of course. But it started a bit of an exchange on the topic of Overrated books. I've always found this subject to be hugely entertaining and providing for some spirited discussions in the past. So how about it? What allegedly classic Novels do you feel got way too much kudos or acclaim? What Novels come to mind for you when you hear the term Overrated? Allow me to throw in first...... The Great Gatsby.....F Scott Fitzgerald 100 Years of Solitude.... Gabriel Marquez Garcia The Scarlet Letter Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...... Robert Pirsig. (I'm not sure this was a novel...in fact I don't think it was. But so profound was my utter dismay upon reading it...being a lifelong motorcycle devotee...and given the absurd amount of accolades it received over decades...I just have to list it. Confederacy of Dunces.... John Kennedy O'Toole Angela's Ashes Moby Dick.... Herman Melville Your turn. Thanks.

I think a good salesman establishes a great relationship maximizing total yield rather than short-term benefit. A fantastic salesman can eke out a tad more for him/herself while still making you believe that it was to your benefit. Having a reputation as being ruthless does not really help in either scenario. That only works if you have something that you can leverage. And that seems to be the totality of Trump's playbook.

As we know from our own memories, attempts at regime change cause more problems than they solve. I would like see the rest of the signatories ameliorate US sanctions by filling in any trade gaps that they create, so that the sanctions don't have so much effect on Iran. I consider this deal as a matter of our collective honour and Trump has broken it.

Are you aware of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_disinfection

Nothing there suggests it is “only approximately constant” or that it varies with direction. (But it does change over time)

For whom the bell tolls. Does it get any better after the first 50 pages? Completely stilted up to then.

Not really. The time dilation becomes infinite at the event horizon for an observer at infinity. For the person falling in to the black hole, nothing special happens. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/fall_in.html The photon is not a valid frame of reference so this can't really be applied. Spacetime inside the event horizon is not unlike space-time outside. The fact that the radial direction becomes time probably wouldn't make any difference to our perception - although that explain why you will never see anything falling in ahead of you: because it is in your future. Space & time are inseparable so the question doesn't really have an answer.

I think there's a distinction to be made between activities that are science, and activities that include science (i.e. can be done in a scientific way) History is not science, but one may apply science to it to draw conclusions.

Low quality bots they are, inSe. Their feeble processor makes them unable to process bullsh**. I always had a strange feeling about these two. Making assertions based on observational evidence is so 20th century.

I'm thinking that CharonY has that covered. Fine, argue it with me... Gee you are correct, Bender, show me a toaster that seeks out a source of bread and you might have a point. I'd like to see those answers you are speaking of, should you assume the content of the minds of everyone here?

In the real world "pigs" (analogy from book) were uneducated people mostly.. the first generation of peasants who learned how to read any text.. If it would be sophisticated cleaver (clever?) satire, nobody would hear about book, nobody would understand it, except intellectual community.. Message has to be understandable by receiver (adjusted to current level of knowledge) to be useful..

Animal Farm - George Orwell. I thought it was trite and predictable. Cheap caricature rather then cleaver satire. This book is the closest anything has come to that cliche of "changed my life". But it certainly changed my attitude and approach to a lot of things.

That does not happen. Aging cells do stop proliferating, but cell proliferation does not stop with age of the organism (if we exclude very small ones, where cellular aging overlaps with organismal aging). There are shifts in which cells proliferate to some degree, though. Sometimes an organisms dies because the wrong cells aggressively proliferate (i.e. they get cancer). More importantly, throughout life, different cell lines continue to proliferate, whereas others are terminal. Some organs (such as pancreas) rely on constant renewal. We die very well before that point.

https://phys.org/news/2018-05-ancient-scientists-climate-deep.html Earth's orbital changes have influenced climate, life forms for at least 215 million years May 7, 2018, Columbia University Scientists drilling deep into ancient rocks in the Arizona desert say they have documented a gradual shift in Earth's orbit that repeats regularly every 405,000 years, playing a role in natural climate swings. Astrophysicists have long hypothesized that the cycle exists based on calculations of celestial mechanics, but the authors of the new research have found the first verifiable physical evidence. They showed that the cycle has been stable for hundreds of millions of years, from before the rise of dinosaurs, and is still active today. The research may have implications not only for climate studies, but our understanding of the evolution of life on Earth, and the evolution of the Solar System. It appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-ancient-scientists-climate-deep.html#jCp the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/05/01/1800891115 Empirical evidence for stability of the 405-kiloyear Jupiter–Venus eccentricity cycle over hundreds of millions of years: Abstract The Newark–Hartford astrochronostratigraphic polarity timescale (APTS) was developed using a theoretically constant 405-kiloyear eccentricity cycle linked to gravitational interactions with Jupiter–Venus as a tuning target and provides a major timing calibration for about 30 million years of Late Triassic and earliest Jurassic time. While the 405-ky cycle is both unimodal and the most metronomic of the major orbital cycles thought to pace Earth’s climate in numerical solutions, there has been little empirical confirmation of that behavior, especially back before the limits of orbital solutions at about 50 million years before present. Moreover, the APTS is anchored only at its younger end by U–Pb zircon dates at 201.6 million years before present and could even be missing a number of 405-ky cycles. To test the validity of the dangling APTS and orbital periodicities, we recovered a diagnostic magnetic polarity sequence in the volcaniclastic-bearing Chinle Formation in a scientific drill core from Petrified Forest National Park (Arizona) that provides an unambiguous correlation to the APTS. New high precision U–Pb detrital zircon dates from the core are indistinguishable from ages predicted by the APTS back to 215 million years before present. The agreement shows that the APTS is continuous and supports a stable 405-kiloyear cycle well beyond theoretical solutions. The validated Newark–Hartford APTS can be used as a robust framework to help differentiate provinciality from global temporal patterns in the ecological rise of early dinosaurs in the Late Triassic, amongst other problems.

Your post conjures up a cool imaginative scenario. And I love your title...it sounds like a Phillip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel. LOL or a neat rock band name. As for the actual logistics of doing such a swim on this Saturnian moon...ya gotta remember it'd be a chilly one, with an ambient temp of a brisk -300 degrees F. Brrr! Your lost conjures up a cool imaginative scenario. And I love your title...it sounds like a Phillip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut novel. LOL or a neat rock band name. As for the actual logistics of doing such a swim on this Jovian moon...ya gotta remember it'd be a chilly one, with an ambient temp of a brisk -300 degrees F. Brrr! Oh...a quick addendum...fwiw I predict that we will one day discover Titans seas to be the only place in our solar system that harbors..pardon the pun...life more complex than the single celled microbial level..which is all but assuredly indigenous to Mars ice sheets. VB

Lift increases directly with air density and surface area of the lift surface. You need 1/10 the lift, and are getting 60% more lift due to air pressure, so, you'd need ~ 0.065 the surface area. If a typical hang glider has a surface area of ~170 ft^2, you'd need ~ 11 sq ft for the same lift. However, greater air density also means greater drag and lift also relies on air velocity squared, so you'd need a steeper descent angle to maintain airspeed and lift. This, in turn, would reduce your glide distance.

Would we have to replace our fluid with methane to float the same as we do in water?

422.64 g/l for liquid methane, so ~ 42% that of water.

As far as I can tell, the "sea" on Titan is largely methane and that's probably not dense enough to swim in either. And it would be cold. It would still be an interesting place for a holiday.

But if you have a winged suit on Titan you may be able to run leap and glide for some distance through the dense Titan atmosphere? Or leap off a mountain and glide a long distance.

The surface gravity doesn't factor in. You may weigh only 1/10 as much as you do on Earth, but so does the atmosphere. to be buoyant, you would have to displace a mass of atmosphere at least equal to your own mass. The pressure is ~60% greater than that on the Earth. Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, like our own. Our atmosphere has a density of ~1.25 g/liter at sea level. A 60% increase of pressure would equal a 60% increase in density to ~2 g/ liter. The human body is has roughly the same density as water at 1000g/liter. So a space-suited individual on Titan would not come even close to displacing an mass of Titan's atmosphere equal to his weight, and would not be buoyant by any significant amount.

There are lots of other things that we can't see for a variety of reasons. We can't see dark matter, neutrinos, the bodies in the Oort Cloud, stars inside the Horse Head Nebula, and on and on. Does that mean all those things don't exist? BTW, there is a project to image the black hole at the centre of our galaxy: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/global-telescope-may-finally-see-event-horizon-our-galaxys-giant-black-hole

Everyone has life long goals/dreams, but many of us don’t achieve them (we procrastinate, and follow inefficient routes). One of the sources that block us from reaching our goals is the way we train up our emotional state. Why do our brains have emotions? To start explaining from zero… DNA is a molecule which contains the ingredients to manufacture our bodies. The competitiveness of the environment pressured this molecule to evolve in a certain way, so that it could engineer a human. The brain is the organ which coordinates how the other parts of the body behave. The framework of the brain is designed by information within DNA. This framework allows us to analyze our surroundings, evaluate the state of our bodies, and decide what to do. Emotional state is a “soup” of feelings, which results from this evaluating mechanism, it unconsciously compares the states of the environment and our body to the ideal state. Emotions play a big role in what we do, for example, we tend to choose certain pleasuring things and run away from suffering ones. Why do we get addicted? Pleasure is triggered when we receive certain stimulus (from environment, or from our bodies) that match up certain conditions on the brain. These conditions depend on how the brain neurons are wired up. By receiving these stimulus, we believe that the actions we just did are worth it. So, if we make these pleasuring actions, our neurons that triggered it are reinforced in such a way, so that it’s more likely that the pleasuring actions will repeat themselves again. This systematic reinforcement is from where the addictions come from. Emotions and the current society The pleasuring mechanism makes totally sense on primitives states of society, but now society has grown so much, and our DNA couldn’t keep up with it. Cultures and educational systems have been trying to gives us certain pleasures that are triggered by following certain motives (ex: studying certain disciplines/having morals). They are still really inefficient in educating people to control primitive pleasures that are not useful anymore for the whole society. Actually, most of our primitive pleasures are hacked by new technology and drugs, and could lead to destructive behavior (just like a virus hacks DNA processes and kills cells). How to achieve Long term Goals? A long term goal is accomplished by ignoring most of instant gratification pleasures and gaining the ability to enjoy the method that is being used to achieve the goal. Otherwise, if we do a certain random action and be pleasured by it, we suffer from a snowball effect, what may result in for example, staying locked in our rooms eating chocolates the whole day, or playing addictive games (i was there), or having kids when we don’t want to, or being in a comfortable bath forever and dying by hyper-hydration (ahah joke). Instant gratification could make us believe that some path is better than the other, making us slow to achieve life long-term ambitions. So, the best way to act is by making commitments to ourselves which follow our values and goals, and accomplish them no matter what it takes, and by avoidingrandom pleasures. We will gain the power to decide our own destiny. If you know any methodology/tricks to control emotions and help people guide themselves in a better way (and stop procrastination), let me know!

None of this had to do with Aliens. These events predated the WOW! signal (which actually stood for War of World's) which required Mandelbrot's equations used to correct AC electrical currents in the US cable grid to recieve. In the Philadelphia experiment navy vessels sent out one of Tesla's puppies west on a cross country trek, that's what's in that photograph. Inside it would have been particles entangled with those on the navy vessels. It sent out completely next level ESP encrypted signals and flew indefinitely via gravitoelectromagnetism (faaday cage) with zero energy requirements. Please; traits keep being selected if it wasn't beneficial for survival? Finally, for 200,000 years humans still aren't making civilizations, then in the last 10,000 years they suddenly pop up - going from a nomadic behavior to a hive-like behavior. In a world not influenced by information panspermia, there should be as many species on one world that evolve with the capacity of culture & civilization as there are species of insects here on earth. Instead, here, there's only one species that evolved for culture & organized civilization, for a Type III trying to propagate indirectly via remote access to galaxies beyond where they can go, they'd only need one species capable of building a society to evolve in that entire galaxy, makes sense to me. They'd probably propagate through a linear string of galaxies. Like a trillion galaxies beyond Segue 1, but because of how far away those galaxies are, we only see evidence of a Type III occurring as far back as 75 million years ago inside Segue 1. Beyond Segue 1, the galaxies that their ships hit before that are so far away that their light paints a picture of the galaxy before the aliens got there. However, say they we are seeing the oldest evidence we can see of them in Segue 1, the first solar system there to achieve Type II status would have marked their arrival at Segue 1, which would have been millions of years before that galaxy became the Type III civ we see evidence of because it takes millions of years to replicate across even a dwarf galaxy when your nano-probes are limited by relativistic time dilation (c). So that adds millions of years to the 75 millions year old photo of Segue 1 as a Type III civ, giving the nano-probes sent from there to Tabby's Star @ about 20% of the speed of light enough time for Tabby's star to hit Type II status while humans were still ruled by Julius Caesar. Before their probes had time to even get to Segue 1, their information panspermia was fast at work building the first single-celled organisms here on earth, as the fraction of planets capable of seeding the evolution of intelligent life are negligibly infinitesimal. It's quicker, but you can't always do it because planets like this are one in a googol, so that's why there'd be nano-probes targeting a trail of galaxies behind us stemming from an origin point that probably preceeds our cosmic microwave background considering how rarely life naturally evolves into a civilization. Segue 1 might be spheroidal because they were dragging its stars into its galactic core. If you can turn an entire galaxy into a giant hot dense quasar around its central SMBH you might have a shot of moving it in the same way you'd move the stars (although moving the SMBH of a quasar of that size would require a galactic Shkadov Thruster of such size that in order to build it you'd need to star lift 1,000 suns. Our reality could be one of infinite simulations run by matrioshka brains to find the real universe as it is for interstellar spook action signalling (because in this theory it is possible to tell how observing one particle will effect all entangled particles between, say, a star system in Andromeda & earth's). Which our satellites might pick up as intelligible transmissions that use Unified Field Oscillations. We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation. What the WOW! (AKA war of worlds) signal implies is that we are in the middle of an intergalactic conversation, and if we don't beat the clock in scientifically understanding this type of sub-nano quantum controlled information technology before the self replicating von neumann nanites from Tabby's star get here in 4,000 years or so, than we're done, our remotely guided evolution deemed an inefficient waste of time by the collective.

Flying saucers being of extraterrestrial origin is most definitely a hoax. But the true hoaxes are quantum mechanics/m theory (any theory that convolutes the reality of available scientific solutions primarily in our understanding of particle physics) catholicism, and scarcity (fabricated in order to maintain the age-old khazite socioeconomic structure). We're setting ourselves up to lose TWOW out of some outdated naval mentality based sense of humanocentricism. Thinking we can resist the technological singularity whilst defending our way of life from those civilizations who have allowed themselves to be assimilated. Those of satisfactory socioeconomic status can neg me. I probably don't share their luxuries.