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We instituted a version of a safe zone in my household when my children were too young to drink. Coming home drunk was a violation of our rules, but if my kids were out with the car and under the influence, they could call home for a ride, 24 hours a day, with zero retribution for drinking. I was willing to accept law breaking and rule breaking if it meant saving them from harm. I suspect people who aren't willing to accept safe zones for drug use among strangers will usually feel differently if it is a loved one whose life is at risk.

Wow! ... bastards. Ukrainian intercept about that:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/11/business/salton-sea-lithium-extraction/index.html Superheated brine provides easily extractable lithium to help the production of batteries for the many electric cars we need to meet future goals of carbon neutrality. The sea is a geologically interesting location, where two crustal plates grind past each other. So you get both geothermal energy (one of the world's largest geothermal fields) and future electric cars....from one puddle of hot brine. Beautiful.

In some other report I read that gas orbits the BH in minutes, much shorter than the observation time used to create this image. In any case, I understand that what we see is not the accretion disk, but its image distorted by the BH. E.g. the source of the bright spots maybe behind the BH and we see it three times as its light is lensed by the BH.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world got a look Thursday at the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, with astronomers calling it a “gentle giant” on a near-starvation diet. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets chaotically bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from the international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Previous efforts had found the black hole in the center of our galaxy too jumpy to get a good picture. https://apnews.com/article/black-hole-milky-way-image-e482ee7b773b1053bcb296bbd9abea16

Diffraction effects from the support structure inside the telescope https://www.universetoday.com/155062/wondering-about-the-6-rays-coming-out-of-jwsts-test-image-heres-why-they-happen/ https://www.quora.com/What-will-the-diffraction-spikes-on-stars-imaged-by-the-James-Webb-Space-Telescope-look-like#

Interesting. It seems to have quite a lot in common with the Dead Sea. Though I'm not sure whether there are geothermal springs there. What I also found interesting was to read that much of the world's lithium for batteries comes from a spodumene mine in Australia. Spodumene, apparently, is an igneous pyroxene mineral with formula LiAl(SiO3)2, (i.e. 2 silicate tetrahedra with one shared edge). Other sources - or potential sources - are brines in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. So at least the world is not currently dependent on China or Russia for it. Furthermore it occurred to me that perhaps it could be a good mineral money-spinner for Australia, which might help some of their (numerous) dinosaur politicians to get their heads round the need to stop extracting coal. But more diversified sources would certainly seem prudent, given the difficulty in replacing Li in battery technology. Li seems unique in this role. I imagine this will be due to the small size of the Li+ ion (only the 1s shell is filled) allowing it to form intercalated compounds with carbon, CoO2 etc, reversibly.

Yes - this is in fact a fundamental symmetry of nature, called unitarity. Colloquially speaking, information should be conserved when a system evolves, at least in principle. There is of course a precise mathematical definition for this, but for now you get the idea. For example, if you burn a book, the information contained therein becomes inaccessible for all practical purposes; however, if you somehow knew everything there is to know about the final state of the burning, ie all details of every single ash particle left behind etc, then in principle it would be possible to reconstruct the original book, so the information has been preserved, albeit in different form. Unitarity is very important particularly in quantum mechanics. Crucially, the black hole information paradox would be an example where unitarity is violated - this is why it is so problematic, and requires resolution. No, ordinary physical processes should be unitary, ie information only changes its “form” and “location”, so to speak. In the BHIP, information enters the event horizon. Quantum field theory combined with GR tells us that the event horizon carries entropy and radiates; this Hawking radiation is perfect black body radiation and thus carries no usable information. At the same time, the BH shrinks and eventually evaporates completely, leaving no remnant other than its Hawking radiation. The final state of BH evolution is thus simply a black body radiation field that contains no relevant physical information - meaning it is impossible to reconstruct whatever information entered the event horizon previously, based on what’s left of the original BH. The information is lost, not just for practical purposes, but also in principle - a violation of unitarity. As a side note - in practice (as opposed to in principle) determinism does not imply predictability. For example, a GR 3-body problem is fully deterministic, but in general only predictable for limited amounts of time (Lyapunov time), due to chaotic dynamics.

"Until May 12 rolls around, we won't know with any certainty what exactly it is that the NSF is going to announce." The US National Science Foundation Has 'Groundbreaking' News About The Milky Way (slashgear.com)

OK, accepted. Government laws and prohibitions are necessary for any society to succeed and beneficial. I would have though that was obvious, but of course sometimes people are just blinkered. Let me count the ways...traffic laws and prohibitions, DUI, compulsory super, compulsory health levies etc etc etc. As usual you are playing games and being condescending. The statement stands. The only unworkable societies are the one's you pretentiously push, over a few threads, as amply shown. Except you twist the meanings to suit your own agenda. I fully understand the dangers of excess alcohol drinking and the need for education. You also despite your pretense, should understand the acceptance of alcohol being a social necessity in all forms of life.

To my --totally untrained in interpreting astrophysical data-- eyes, I would say accidental changes in density in the accretion disc are to be expected. From the video talk that @Genady linked to, the experts make more of an issue of the way in which those gradients move --than of the fact that they're there at all--, if I understood correctly. The more mathematical-physicist type that talks there --Ziri Younsi-- states that all observations agree with Einstein's version of GR impressively well. The 'groundbreaking' part of it is more due to the achievement than to any big surprises, I think.

"Getting to this image wasn't an easy journey," Özel said. "It took several years to refine the image and confirm what he had." That was a huge step for science history.

I had the impression dimreepr did not intend that exaggeration to be taken literally, but rather as an ad absurdum argument in response to Beecee.

Thanks. Merging suggested:

Or less useful, if GLONASS is being jammed or spoofed

That would assume that every drug addict became one through his own her own free, informed, uncoerced adult choice.

Based on the historical precedent Putin established with Klimovo last month, this sounds like Russia has once again targeted their own people and are blaming it on Ukraine. Most people around the world think that's pretty sick.

I would have thought it obvious that this was not my point. Rather, some percent of crimes arise from drug trade and drug need, and these would decrease. No one is suggesting we have government promote, say, meth -- just that decriminalizing some end user activity, and providing clinical safe settings with a safe (nonadulterated) product would have a net effect of lowering violence, overdoses, poisonings, jailhouse abuse of vulnerable persons, and barriers to treatment. Many users have mental health issues and would be less likely to use, and use in a dangerous way, if they had secure and nonjudgmental venues where options were there for them. Seattle, at last report, is doing well with this approach. Which I find extremely unsurprising.

Yep. Goes back to Marbury v Madison, 1803. SCt decisions have the force of law, and may strike down laws that violate the Constitution. One of our most important checks in the "checks and balances" system.

I fail to see how this is the middle-ground. At best, it is inconsistent. We know that alcohol does great harm and we gave up on banning due to combination of cultural reasons, law enforcement challenges (including criminalizing large swathes of the population) and the realization that drug addiction are more effectively treated by health intervention rather than by legal enforcement. The opioid crisis which was not limited to the "fringes" of society anymore but also affected "good suburban" folks, further reinforced these findings. But for some reasons, we should just accept alcohol (which, again results in more deaths than any other drugs, education or not) because society accepts it? That sounds like circular logic, really.

No, the values are normalized, otherwise they would not make sense. Also, it is more of a rank score. They used multiple factors, such as mortality, dependence, impairment of cognitive functioning, etc. and the idea was to create scores that reflect their relative relationship to each other. I.e. a drug with double the mortality would receive double the score on that metric. For some, data are more lacking than others and also are shifting. Depending on what you look out for, cannabis has been shifting up and down over the years and depending on cohorts, for example. Long-term data are going to be quite interesting in that regard. That being said, certain harms could increase once the use increases. However, that is not always the case. For example, legalization of cannabis did increase hospitalizations in certain regions, but it was not an universal effect and the trend stabilized within a relatively short time frame. Conversely, if alcohol was not such an accepted social drug, harms, especially those to others, would be massively mitigated. These types of rankings are therefore somewhat tricky, but almost every way folks look at it, it is clear that the top spot belongs to alcohol by a fair margin.

I'm seeing speculation that Russia may declare war on May 9th, so it can mobilize its reserves. That will go down like a lead balloon with the Russian public