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I hated that at the time, iirc. Nice slimy, strawman pivot from "higher moral plain (sic)" to "lies about jobs". It's the whole "I'm going to grope and disrespect you and then I'm going to claim I'm only human after all" attitude that makes this kind of male behavior sustainable. I'm not asking for perfection (another strawman from the perspective). I'm asking that our male leaders don't get a pass on toxic, gender-based behavior. I'm fairly sick of the crappy point of view that boys will be boys. It's men who can't handle the power of the office and are abusing much more than that.

@Peterkin I'm guessing you're understanding of "forward and backward" is, forward = good and backward = bad; my point is one leads to the other and the most productive part of the political pendulums swing is in the change of direction. George Orwell had a lot to say on the subject, as did most religion's. It doesn't matter where we learn the lesson, just that we're open to be taught.

Yes, this is basically the problem, along with his clarification "By the phrase "exotic matter" I mean matter that has negative energy and therefore anti-gravitates, i.e. repels." First of all, the Casimir force is attractive, not repulsive. The plates get pushed together. It also has nothing to do with gravity - the derivation of the force relies on the electric and magnetic field boundary conditions applied to the conducting plates; it's purely an electromagnetic phenomenon. You eliminate photon standing wave modes (of one polarization) because the field needs to go to zero at the boundary. The QM solution says for the vacuum, each state has an energy of hv, so there are fewer photon modes inside the plates than outside. The energy density imbalance means there is a pressure that pushes them together. In short, if the plates are a micron apart, then no photon states of 2 microns or longer can exist in between the plates (plus more that wouldn't form standing waves) but they do exist outside the plates. There's no gravity involved, and no matter identified with it, AFAICT. Maybe his point is that if the Casimir force exists maybe there's something like this for gravity, but still, the Casimir force isn't tied to exotic matter and it's attractive and it relies on there being boundary conditions for E and B fields that AFAIK don't exist for gravity, so it would be a really weak analogue for the kind of exotic matter you need for wormholes to become stable

Climate scientists are concerned with deviations in the average global temperature, but what does an average temperature mean from a thermodynamic perspective? Temperature is inherently a local measurement of molecular kinetic energy, and therefore an average temperature across a large region seems to have little meaning in a thermodynamic context. At best we could try to demonstrate that global average temperature is a predictive metric for some other variable of interest, but the burden of proof would be on us. I could calculate a weighted average by volume temperature of my car by measuring the dimensions of various devices and parts in the vehicle along with their temperature and then taking their sum weighted by their proportion of the car's total volume. For example perhaps the air in the cabin is measured to be 25 °C, the air underneath the hood measured to be 50 °C, the temperature of the oil is 200 °C, etc. After taking all of the appropriate temperature and volume measurements I might calculate that the average temperature of the car is 100 °C. But what does that tell us? Is that a useful metric? Now assume that I told you that the average temperature of the car increased to 101 °C. Should you be concerned? Well your first question might be where did the temperature increase, and when/why did it increase. If I told you the air in the cabin increased in temperature to 40 °C you would be correct to be alarmed, since that temperature would be uncomfortable or perhaps outright dangerous to the occupants. However if I told you that the temperature of the oil increased to 250 °C you may then ask when did the temperature of the oil increase? If I told you it increased when you put your foot down of the throttle for a period of time then you would not be alarmed at all since it makes complete sense for the temperature of the oil to increase when the engine is throttled. We can see here that the average temperature of the car contains little useful information. From this metaphor we can see that an increase in average temperature weighted by area/volume is not necessarily useful, and that we need more information to understand what is really going on. Has there been any research in this area?