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sethoflagos

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Everything posted by sethoflagos

  1. Just to correct some erroneous assumptions made above, the following quotation from Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth is worth reading The distinction between voiced and unvoiced 'th' has never been made in English by its representation as 'th', thorn or eth. They are simply alternates for the same pair of sounds. It's a common misunderstanding. In principle, you can go through a Beowulf manuscript swapping all the thorns for eths and vice versa, and still claim with some justification that you'd not introduced any spelling mistakes. Whether the sound is voiced or unvoiced is governed by a) common contemporary usage (always) and b) the adjacent vowel sounds (usually). Not by its orthography.
  2. I've not looked at this for quite a few years, but for sure, in Britain the UKAEA and Defence industries were active in the field and that stuff rarely makes it into the public domain. You could try looking at what CERN have on this.
  3. In the late '80s I had a spell of losing a bunch of expensive processor cards in a paper mill control room I'd put together. I had my own 'clean' mains transformer, robust 5 kVA voltage conditioners, all the recommended kit. Then one night, first the underground 5 MW 33 kV supply incomer blew up the road followed shortly after by the 10 MW incomer. After they got fixed, no more fried processor units. With that voltage level involved, no surge arrestor on earth is going to be fast enough to catch any spikes that leak through into the low voltage distribution. There seems to be a trend these days to lump EMP protection in with general exposure to high intensity ionising radiation, with components design to resist these challenges going under the umbrella of 'radiation hardened'.
  4. Yes. The machinery of state needs to keep running.
  5. Only Parliament is dissolved, not the Government. Government Ministers etc remain in place though they are no longer MPs.
  6. Apparently I could have added 'morningness' to the assistance given by Neanderthals to climate adaptation: Published last week: Archaic Introgression Shaped Human Circadian Traits ... with a fair amount of interest. Neanderthal DNA May Help Explain Why Some People Are Early Risers
  7. That looks like an awful lot of Dakotas.
  8. My usage of the term is clear enough. You don't get to redefine it. Asking loaded questions ('have you stopped beating your wife?' being an infamous example) is not a mark of wisdom. It is a mark of petty spitefulness. As is having a dig at my age.
  9. Take viscosity as an example. We can picture two molecules within a streamline, one with slightly less momentum than the average for that streamline a little ahead of one with slightly more. Clearly at some point there will be a collision. If both molecules are identical and have spherically symmetric electrical fields, we can come up with some simple distribution of momentum scattering angle and quantify the transfer of momentum into adjacent streamlines. The mass interchange between flowlines generates some incremental changes in density, the momentum interchange generates some incremental changes in pressure. The streamlines will undergo nett local acceleration/deceleration accordingly generating further collisions. That's about as far as I ever took my perusal of the emergence of viscosity phenomena at the molecular level. I guess I could incrementally improve my model of molecular velocity distridution within the flowstream, integrating over all flowstreams and imposing whatever constraint (eg no-slip pipe wall boundary, steady state etc) seemed appropriate until the overall velocity and pressure profiles stabilised. Eventually, I'd come up with some number for pipe wall shear stress which is the usual parameter of interest to my colleagues in piping and mechanical sections. Or I could just make use of Newton's cunning postulate that shear stress seemed to be directly proportional to shear rate for many fluids of interest. It saves an awful amount of time.
  10. A clue can be found be looking at where introgressive Neanderthal alleles are found in the modern human genome. They are strongly represented in areas associated with climate adaptation (skin and hair type) and immune response, areas that would be particularly useful for a newly migrating population to acquire from a sitting population that had adapted to that environment over a long period. They are to all intents and purposes absent from large areas (known as 'Neanderthal deserts') where our post split ancestors, underwent significant genetic change such as in FOXP2 (language development etc) and the X chromosome - the areas that make us most distinctly, who we are. The distribution therefore seems to be based not on how many times introgression occurred, but on whether that introgression was beneficial or not. The % DNA contribution doesn't therefore correlate with the number of Neanderthals in our family tree, but merely indicates that there was at least one.
  11. Because those who put their personal integrity on a pedestal and refuse to just 'act the part' once in a while tend to run into issues both at home and at work. Are you 7?
  12. Clarion call of the single and unemployed. Been there. Moved on.
  13. You seem to be saying that spacetime and a complex 4-D spinor space are the same thing. To me, any object in a complex space does not have an energy content though its projection in real (non-complex) spacetime will. So they aren't the same thing,,, or are they?
  14. Okay... so I've arbitrarily picked something. Could such a space be: ... or not.
  15. If you're moving onto eigenstates of Hamiltonians again then you're losing me. How does this invalidate my point 1), in easy steps.
  16. This is consistent with what I posted I think, though you have made it more general in application. In the sense that any arbitrary vector can be expressed as the sum of 3 vectors in your coordinate system of choice? Or are you making some deeper point that I'm missing?
  17. Nothing is a strong word. @iNow's comment is not to be dismissed lightly: There is considerable evidence of the cerebrocerebellum playing an executive role in the planning of motor actions. It may be far from the whole picture, but it certainly appears to be apart of it.
  18. Specifically, it links the midbrain and pons to the cerebral cortex. These conditions are specifically linked to ARAS. My money is on an emergence from the sum of all activity in the cerebral cortex with ARAS acting as a kind of switchboard/fusebox. The Fat Controller must have an office very nearby I think. As an engineer, that's where I'd put him.
  19. That's fine. I have no difficulty in seeing the issues with my later inferences. Which is why I asked in the first place. So in a sense, you've been asking me to defend a position after I've announced that I've got my own problems with it. But I'd be quite interested to know where the train of thought actually went astray. If indeed it did.
  20. Check the y-axis: it is radiant heat flux to space. Why would anyone not expect this to be a flat line close to the corresponding value of insolation and independent of CO2 concentration? There are reasons: eg temporary accumulation of heat in the system while it's temperature increased to a new equilibrium level, for instance? If so then the shape of the flux to space curve is dependent on some assumed temperature gradient that quantified that accumulation rate, otherwise the flux to space would be ill-defined. It is an issue of context framing. The graph, accurate or otherwise, provides an answer to a question that wasn't asked. We are not interested in the value of the nett flux to space - that is already known with some accuracy. Rather we are interested in the rate of temperature rise for the anticipated changes in CO2 concentration: a figure the presentation implicitly assumes, and in doing so, denies its sensitivity to the variable in question. Deliberately dishonest. So no surprise there.
  21. Neither does religion, Though Sartre has a pretty good stab at it imho. "You are who you make yourself to be".
  22. Not the foggiest. Hence points 1) to 5) of my earlier post that you seem to have no interest in.
  23. By no means do I have any particular expertise in this area. However some years ago I went through a spell of being subject to occasional bouts of sudden neurally mediated syncope: temporary blackouts, a bit like someone hitting the reset button without warning. The way it was explained to me at the time was that I was experiencing (or rather, not experiencing) a temporary glitch in my ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), also known as the extrathalamic control modulatory system or simply the reticular activating system (RAS). Any partial loss of ARAS functionality tends to produce a corresponding reduction in degree of consciousness ranging from attentional dysregulation to sleep pattern issues through to deep coma. Brainstem features upstream of this structure were broadly sufficient to maintain life without consciousness. Therefore ARAS provided the gateway to all aspects of consciousness in areas of the brain downstream of it. I do hope I got this right, as it provides some sound constraints on the physical location of consciousness, and the degree of consciousness that may be experienced by other species. Lab experiments in this area seem to involve cats quite frequently.
  24. We break the superposition by 'observing' and see a neutron?

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