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A gorilla in the zoo is reading a bible and On the Origin of Species. One says he is his brother's keeper, the other says he is his keeper's brother.

With the Supreme court deciding that checks and balances don't work unless you can avoid checks and balances... Can Biden just... take care of TFG now? But you know... officially? A blacked out CIA hit with the presidential seal on the heavily redacted documents should count right? National security and whatnot. Also do we all know where this is going now? Once the lower courts rerule and defines the difference between an official and a private act, Trumps legal team is just gonna cry foul on that one too and demand the Supreme court delivers it's own definitions and rulings on that also, after it sits in the damn docket until it has at least an inch or so of dust on the damn thing and it requires a professional museum level document restoration treatment. Honestly if this Hitleruesque slow coup the Republicans are encouraging doesn't go their way and they lose, the democrats when next in majority will stack that court and rebalance it ASAP. They should really quit while they are ahead. Personally, I'm of the opinion that their has to be some recognition within the highest offices of all the branches of government of the strict need for term limits on the basis that incredible power corrupts incredibly well. Presidents, speakers, SCJs, two terms. No more than that. Enough is enough, it's true of the presidency and at this point a logical move applied in one way, inconsistently applied in the same way again for the same scenario, is madness. It's like watching a toddler put the square peg into the square hole one time and then failing to do it again for weeks. Like come on? You had this?! What the hell happened? Seriously though, why was it never implemented before once they implemented term limits for presidents? Seems like just a half complete job.

I think that is fairly anecdotal. In my field of work, and especially in the lab, I do see that on average women are better requiring focussed tasks (but of course there is a bit level of self-selection in terms of interest). To my knowledge, there are studies looking at task-switching and I think there is no clear evidence for differences. It might depend on task or there might be cultural factors and so on. That is very true and I see much in that especially among older colleagues (who likely had to fight very hard for their positions). Indeed. Acquiescing to a diminishing assumed centre (and defining it is pretty difficult to begin with) is likely not feasible. It is the reality that the less and less is found in the centre now and I will note that many of the sane GOP folks are very far away policy-wise. They are not center politically, they just happen to mostly acknowledge that there is an reality. Catering to that is supremely difficult and almost certainly a losing ticket.

Who is proposing a unity ticket? The same chuckleheads who were rooting for a contested convention? You might lose voters on the left for any you gain on the right. If you want an energized left, which is what’s happening right now, you can’t throw cold water on them with a “unity” choice.

I see your point. My take is that specialist vs generalist occurs in a direction with respect to the evolutionary tree, while a taxon vs another taxon occurs along a different direction. What I mean is any specialist in a given taxon has a cousin that is a generalist. It stands to reason that the more species there are, the more likely it is that a genetically-close generalist is there to fill the gap. There is no doubt that diversity is bound to take a blow any time a catastrophic event happens. Swarms of specialists will fall, and along with them relatively closely interdependent sub-niches. Conceivably, it's the generalist cousins that remain there to plant the seeds of the future biodiversity.

That, too, is fair. I just bristled a little at the male stereotype, "most men have a better grasp of the big picture than most men do." Calling us men relatively oafish is not really better than calling women ditzy or moody. It's a trendy thing to do, I hear it a lot, but it is not contributing to the mental health of young people to hear these kinds of stereotypes. If we simply go by the criterion of fresh perspective, then inevitably more women and POC will pour into our political chambers. Why does the software now take away the text window I'm writing in when I open another folder? This has been going on for a few months and it's annoying AF. I open a new window and recover my text, but why should that be necessary when it wasn't before?

Reported

OTTO Apes don't read philosophy. WANDA Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

Yes, but see how dangerously close to a tautology we get? The default condition is whatever can sustain biota that will keep that condition. It's like the puddle suggested by @studiot. That was a brilliant analogy btw. Yes, I think this has to do with biodiversity being very low back during those eons --see last point by @StringJunky. Higher biodiversity will conceivable smooth out these patterns of variations. That's probably why we see those sharp banded-iron formations corresponding to the GOE. It's been speculated (but very plausibly so) that they must correspond to pulses of massive death of aerobic/anaerobic organisms and their re-births. It's like the oscillating pattern of daisy world, but with generations of aerobic/anaerobic prokaryotes playing the role of the black/white daisies, and oxygen abundance in the interstices of their bacterial mats (rather than the atmosphere) playing the role of the albedo. Well, perhaps the oversimplified way I've come to look at it. I agree with this. In fact, I've thought for some time that we usually focus too much on particular episodes just because of the particularly dramatic footprint they left behind, but the reason why we divide at all Earth time into these periods is because towards the end of each one of them, something had to give (biologically speaking) under one kind of stress or another, be it biological, cosmic, or geologically driven, or all of them together.

One thought that occurred to me later about this finding is that the world is badly in need of more efficient electrolysis methods, for green hydrogen production. Research into what is going on here might just yield new insights into options for catalysts. But it's still a mystery where the energy for this comes from. One would expect any potential difference between areas on the nodules to have become discharged long ago, given the whole thing is immersed in seawater. Something doesn't stack up here. I think we need to see the findings replicated. I wonder if they will discover there is some organism living in these nodules that is responsible, or something. I'm a bit sceptical about the battery idea.

Dear Algebra please stop asking us to find your X. She is not coming back and don't ask Y !

Just a small point. Sickle cell disease is the unfortunate result of inheriting an abnormal B-globin gene from each parent. Having a single sickle cell gene (as in the case of Mrs Seth) confers significant malaria resistance without the symptoms of sickle cell disease, but it does make one a carrier, which is routinely uncovered in blood tests. It's significantly less of a problem now than it used to be.

Kelly himself can go one better. He can say he’s met our Swansont!

I think the default condition comprises a moderately stable environment populated by a biota optimally adapted to thrive in those specific environmental conditions. If a genetic or behavioural change occurs in one species such that it starts to significantly alter the conditions in which it thrives, then that seems to be a recipe for evolutionary suicide does it not? As presented, this is a relatively straightforward, self-sustaining mechanism that provides the basics of Gaia without appealing to evolutionary foresight (or new age spiritualism). But... The empirical background came predominantly from the studies of modern (at least, pre-industrial) ecosystems. These in turn have been shaped by a global climate that from the close of the last glaciation 10 kya has until very recently been unusually stable by geological standards. It may well be atypical. We should also point out that it was initialised ~3.5 bya with the development of photosynthesis and advanced gradually raising free oxygen levels from ~1 ppm to ~2% by ~1.9 bya, with the GOE proper occurring over the final half billion years or so of that period. Obviously, we have a fairly coarse-grained perspective on such distant times, and there may well have been a series of lethal pulses in O2 concentration as each stage in the sequence of oxygen reducing buffers reached saturation point in turn. However, the picture we see is one of sustained hostility to life for one third of the planet's existence. This was not an overnight catastrophe like the Chixulub impact. For an immense period of time, this was situation normal (afu). GOE is not an isolated example: plants had another good go at wiping us out when they conquered the land in the Devonian and sent atmospheric O2 levels shooting up to ~30%; the advent of sea floor burrowing destroyed the highly productive seabed bacterial mats of earlier times. I'd make the case that such stability we observe is never more than transitory - the seeds of revolution are always ready in the wings. Indeed, imho they need to be in order to periodically begin anew. It's very tempting to write these off as 'special cases' when they threaten such such a seductive idea as Gaia. But nature is, as someone once said, red in tooth and claw. We idealise and anthropomorphise it at our peril.

In exactly what way is n(CO2 + H2S + O2 + H2O) = (CH2O)n + n(H2SO4) intermediate between n(H2O + CO2) = n(CH2O) + n( O2) and Catabolism

Time to trot out the parable of the puddle ?

I'm unsure why that makes us "funny".

I think it's a bit daft for the GOP and SC majority to show their devious hand before the election and actually winning.