Edwina Lee

So weird, the outer ring of clouds are moving in opposite direction from the spin of hurricane Florence! https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics/videos/2108675522728834/?notif_id=1536784927931282&notif_t=live_video

Here is my thinking of how it might work. Small particles & air molecules move on average at the velocity of the wind. Hence, any photons bounced off an air molecule would exhibit the Doppler effect, and so would photons reflected from a particle. (Now, I do not know the physics of light, but I get the idea that photons have no mass, and so does not affect the velocity of molecules and particles.) So, velocity can in theory be deduced from measuring the Doppler effect of photons coming back. But how far away? (Here again, I do not know the physics of light, but I get the idea that light reflection, and light re-admission are instantaneous.. So, if the time at which a laser fired, perhaps one photon at a time can be measured, and the time of the corresponding photon can be measured, then the distance can be calculated. Or perhaps, the laser fires a range of UV frequency photon short bursts, then there is no need to go all the way down to one photon at a time. But I bet the technologies which made these possible are very advanced indeed. Or perhaps not given the many properties of light & materials.

So the liquid nitrogen is used as an energy source to power the refrigerator (i.e. a heat pump), thus making the reservoir of cold more efficient.

The Aeolus satellite will measure wind velocities of earth's atmosphere from space using ultra-violet laser light. But how does the physics work? This is what the article said about it:- Aeolus will fire an ultraviolet laser through the atmosphere and measure the return signal using a large telescope The light beam gets scattered back off air molecules and small particles moving in the wind at different altitudes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45100090

I need hard wearing gloves that are resistant to harsh laundry chemicals such as Oxy stain remover, washing powers etc. Is Nitrile coated gloves suitable for example? Or what about PVC?

I just got this. Is this accurate? How should we check this information? [Original journal ref. at bottom of article.] 2015-11-12 Massive northeast Greenland glacier is rapidly meltinghttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151112150438.htm No hard timescale in this article, but it appears that one massive glacier has broken off already, and its melt will raise oceans by 18". Clearly, such a melt will be in the open Atlantic Ocean, and so in the next decade or so. IPCC's worst projection is 3 metres by 2100, & at best 1 metre. IPCC's Global Mean Sea Level Rise https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/unfccc/cop19/3_gregory13sbsta.pdf Original glacier article: 2015-11 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/11/11/science.aac7111

Well, the data is assumed to be real, hence not woolly. It isn't sufficient and precise enough to be conclusive, but we can make guesses. But defining altruistic behaviour in terms of another fuzzily defined concept - fitness - isn't making it any less fuzzy.

Applying Occam's razor would be to consider the closeness of humans to bears from an evolutionary & genetics perspective, that they are indeed very similar to humans. Clearly, proof of certainty is not at all easy, just as it is not easy for most other psychological phenomena. If indeed, proof of anything psychological. To form a wholesome perspective of nature, one must consider closeness in evolutionary terms. Altruism is quite a woolly concept, and that in itself makes it difficult to proof whether an action is altruistic. How does one proof that an action is altruistic when altruism is not defined? <<"Swans like to wet their food before they eat it. It's not feeding the fish (if you look close, you can tell the fish are trying to snatch the bread and the swans aren't dropping it for them).">> Some swans would drive the fishes out of the way, and these swans don't. The behaviour is similar to humans tolerating other species, like throw crums for dogs & cats. A swan specialist site gave this reply - http://www.stanley-park-swans.com/cgi-bin/ask/index.pl?read=7215

And people find cheaper and cheaper ways of harvesting solar power too! Here's a very recent example of another cheaper way of making solar panels:- 2014-06-26 Making more efficient solar cells with Magnesium Chloride obtained from sea water http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28017935

I don't know what formal conventions zoological sciences adopt in publications of animal behaviour. It seems to me that Occam's Razor is used too liberally to mean that the minimum assumption of human like qualities should be used to interpret animal behaviour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor If I have my own way, I would propose several plausible hypothesis to explain animal behaviour. The concept of altruism began in philosophical thinking, but the explanation ought to be rooted in evolutionary biology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism Taboo is very much a cultural development. Say, somebody in a group is sensitive about something, then any association of a particular matter may upset them, then this behaviour would drive people to avoid talking about it. Hence a taboo is born. The extent of taboo building is thus dependent on how groups in society deal with taboos - social history.

There are so many roque sources of information on the internet as it is. The only reason the existing internet is useful is because there are recognised authorities of information which existed before the internet existed. They asserted their existence and their truths, which allow us to distinguish good information from doggy ones. Outernet is good? Extremely unlikely.

I love this starting point. In law, blame is a convention so as to settle disputes. It solves the problem if the authority of the law is accepted by both claimant and defendant. This is not so. In a determinate universe, everything was determined at its beginning. So all that subsequently happened was predetermined by the laws of physics. So the way towards a future that is worth living is for both sides to work towards peace and stop the blame game.

The specification of Phi is indeterminate because F(n) was not assigned a value for the 1st value of n. If F(n1) is -ve, then every subsequent term would have alternating sign. If F(n1) is +ve, then every subsequent term would have +ve sign. It is also untrue that Lim n-> ∞ F(n) -> 0. In fact, | Lim n-> ∞ F(n) -> ∞. The original question as I understand asks if the limit of such sequences can be calculated without brut calculation. Well, my answer is it depends on each sequence. In this sequence, we deduced what the limit value is by deduction without brut calculation. Can all sequences be deduced? I don't think so.

What do you know, someone has already tried quite recently! 2014-08-21 Lady Al Qaeda has just been sentenced to an 86 years jail term for pening the Ebola bomb among other things for the US http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2731164/ISIS-offered-swap-Foley-Lady-Al-Qaeda-Terrorists-wanted-return-MIT-graduate-jailed-U-S-planning-mass-casualty-strike-dirty-bomb-ebola-chemical-weapon-spared-children.html

As far as I can observe, some of my neighbours' cats are very skillful & cautious predators. They won't attack anything novel strict away. They take a lot of time observing, then testing and badly wounding before they go in for the kill. Without actually going into training the cat, scientists recommend that pet owners should do more. Attaching a collar bell to cats is effective. So is keeping pets more indoors, and feeding them sufficiently. 2013-01-29 Cats kill billions of animals in the US http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21236690

This is an extremely far fetched hypothesis about the ducks' thinking and feelings. It is much simpler to postulate that the ducks formed a bond with the fishes without speculating on how the ducks think or feel. The nature of that bond is to a certain extent altruistic.

Looks like the bear understood that the bird was drowning, so it took so much trouble to rescue it. More than that, the bird pecked the bear after being hulled out of the water, & the bear clearly got hurt, but it did not react with aggression. So it also looks as if the bear was expecting the bird to defend itself. To me, that looks like empathy towards the bird, and it took action that has no direct benefit to itself. That surely is altruistic behaviour. Also, notice the bear's food source. Vegetarian! A vegetarian bear? Is this natural?

Is it true that some domestic cats do not attack big birds? Can some cats be trained to attack rats & mice but not birds? Here is a video of a sea gull taking the cat's dinner for your amusement:-

Many thanks to you, Molecule.

I got this advertisement, or rather this advert. got me in Facebook This website is selling colour blind correction glasses. It has a links to white papers, news channels, Discovery channel. Why and how does it work, and how would you go about checking this? http://o2amp.com/

I think it does not need a genius to figure out how to wipe out all humans with viruses. As such, humans are already at risk of someone doing just that. As for natural evolution, a disease agent has to evolve the ability to infect as well as to kill to accomplish that task. It has got to be able to infect everyone universally like the common cold, which already has that ability. To kill off the entire human species, it needs to survive quite a long time to get itself infecting, but without invoking a deadly immune response from the human. Only at some later time would it become virulent. Such diseases already exist. I understand that STIs (sexual transmitted diseases) usually has no external symptoms. If the virulence is evolved quickly to kill level, then it could be the end of humans. One just hopes it won't happen.