Leaderboard

An elderly lady has just finished discussing the arrangements for her late husband's funeral, and the director of the mortuary asks her if there's anything else they can do to honor the dearly departed, anything at all. She tells him, "Well, I hate to mention it. I chose that black suit because it was the most expensive one he had, but blue was really his color. I first met him in a blue suit, and he wore blue when we married. If you could buy him a really nice blue suit to be buried in, I'd appreciate it greatly. I know that's over and above what we discussed, so take this." She hands him a blank check and he tells her he'll do his best. The next day the viewing starts and the elderly lady is very pleased to see her husband in a very stylish blue suit. She thanks the funeral director and compliments his choice. He assures her it was his pleasure, and then returns the blank check. The lady objects, saying, "But that's a really nice suit! Aren't you going out of pocket for it?" "Madam, by a complete coincidence, another woman wanted her deceased husband buried in a black suit instead of a blue one. One of my assistants remarked on how both men were about the same size, so it was the easiest thing in the world to just switch their heads!"

Skydivers with fireworks? Here are some example videos: Link goes to Formation Skydiving (FS), Germany; to the part in the video where skydivers split: https://youtu.be/ph70Z40cB5o?t=271 Link goes to a video with several camera angles of skydivers utilising pyrotechnics: https://youtu.be/smuNiP9xc8w Google hint: "night skydiving pyrotechnics"

A leading cause of habitat destruction (e.g. coral reefs, temperate zone forests, etc.) is warming, caused by CO2 rise. And the carbon rise is caused by a vast array of human activities that also cause collateral damage in addition to changing the atmosphere. When we extract carbon for fuel, boreal forests are razed, mountains are flattened, groundwater contaminated, seashores ruined by spills, and on and on. So, no, it's not a small part.

Questions are awesome! Questions spark great discussions where everybody gets to learn something. Bring 'em on, and welcome!

Yes, I think so. I'm actually running into reproducibility problems (😡), maybe getting tired, I don't know. But it did work with an eraser, so I doubt it's air near the finger being heated. We'll see what the OP says. I seem to develop some kind of double vision when I blur my eyes, so there's a second image of the letter that shows "through" the sliver of one of the images of the object in front of it that sticks out past the other image. Sometimes the letter is skewed, sometimes it's not. It also seems to work with printed text on paper (although that's trickier because of shadows), so I guess it's not related to the phone screen.

Does it happen if you replace the finger with say a pencil, a chopstick, etc.?

It is easy to find examples of processes that involve evolution of states, but no “movement” of any kind. Consider muons - they are elementary particles with a mean lifetime on the order of \(10^{-6}s\). As being elementary, they have no internal structure or “moving parts” of any kind; there’s nothing there that “moves” or even “changes” at all during their lifetime. And yet, they decay after a statistically well defined amount of time. So here you have got an example of an interval of time without “movement”; it’s an evolution of states without motion of constituent parts.

The other problem is that, even if the environment of the planet is only slightly different than that of the home world, evolution will take its very own cause as soon as you got it going - so after a sufficiently long time, you’ll end up with something that doesn’t resemble your home world very much.

Often these arguments are just a poor excuse not to do anything. E.g. the thought that any reduction of emissions is meaningless, as China is producing so much. Often sprinkled with bigoted sentiments (we are not the problem, those folks are). Thereby we are repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot in an effort to sit an on an issue up until we are forced to do something. Seems to the modus operandi for a lot of population-wide issues, including the pandemic, for example.

It is noticeable and very well quantifiable in GPS, for example.

Yes, I've noticed some of what you had to say on the topic...

Eight, Eight, Eight, I have Eight in the room. Any advance on Eight ? Do I hear nine ? ? It's only a handful of countries that are driving population expansion. Many other cultures have shrinking populations without any sort of compulsion. Just make birth control free and available to all, but especially to the countries with expanding populations. Of course, new inventions in birth control methods would make a big difference. The forecasts are that population growth will eventually end, so the experts think it will happen naturally in the end and top out around 11 billion, and then start dropping. There are plenty of ways to try to accelerate that process.

I am not startled the China virus. This is nothing new to me. Bill Gates, who is very passionate about world depopulation, spoke clearly to a large audience in 2013 about the coming killer virus. He knew about COVID-19 then and the aftermath of vaccines and boosters. By the way, I am not a fan of Bill Gates, George Soros and other billionaires who are selfishly thinking about reducing population for their own sick and perverted pleasure.