exchemist

Agreed. It seems impossible to draw firm conclusions from attempting to correlate the presumed style of government with military success or long term stability. But what does seem to be the case is that territorial expansion reliant on a single autocrat often does not create a stable entity.

That empire, built up by Cyrus from 550BC seems to have lasted about 200 years. It was ruled by a succession of kings. It notably failed to retain Greece (cf. battle of Salamis, in which the Persians were defeated by democratic Athens) - and was eventually taken over by Alexander the Great.

Oh yes, this is because he knows he's radioactive, so distancing himself from Poilievre will help the latter's chances.

I can feel my individual spinal vertebrae and I have been able to feel those of my wife and, before that, girlfriends, e.g. when giving them a back massage. This is normal. If you are concerned, get a friend or relative to have a look and see if they agree it looks normal. If you, or they, still have concerns, then as others have said, get your doctor or physio to examine you.

OK thanks. I can see that a blue shift increases the energy of the light as received, so if they are measuring "brightness" by energy flux (which will be the case with a bolometric measurement) then a blue shifted galaxy will be "brighter" than a red shifted one of equal magnitude. Like you, I'd be tempted to discount relativistic beaming as the relative velocities of the galaxies must be <<c. But what I still can't follow is why the direction of rotation of the observed galaxy has an effect. I'd have though the side advancing towards us would be blue shifted and the side retreating would be red shifted, and this effect would be simply swapped round symmetrically if the direction of rotation were reversed.

What do you mean by Eastern despotisms dominating the world? At what period in history was this? As for the progression you mention, I think you omit one very important feature. Autocratic empires tend to be short-lived and break apart fairly rapidly. This happened with the Mongol Empire and the Carolingian Empire for instance. Often they are held together by the force of personality of one man and when he goes, disorder follows. (By the way Nazi Germany was a catastrophic failure to build an empire, being destroyed in a mere handful of years.) The Roman Empire endured for several centuries but that grew under the Republic, which was not an autocratic system. The Roman Empire certainly continued under the emperors, but by then it was mostly a matter of maintenance rather than expansion. So that seems to me to show the stability of a system that does not depend on the personality of one man. I do not pretend to be a historian, but it seems to me the more long lived political systems have tended to be hereditary monarchies (i.e. with respected rules for the succession of leadership) which had modest territorial ambitions, avoiding overreach. Often these have had some form of popular representation, to keep rule of the monarch to some degree aligned with the feelings of the populace.

They refer to the Doppler effect, which is what has thrown me. How can that brighten anything? And how would it be affected by the direction of rotation of the observed galaxy, as opposed to relative motion of the whole thing towards or away from us? Here's the paper: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798?login=false. I've only skimmed it as yet, admittedly, but could not immediately see an explanation.

Yes, I have in fact tried to be constructive, laying out what I would tentatively suggest by way of reform in an earlier post. Glad to see you take on board the point about money in politics. However I still feel you need to address my point about how a coherent programme for government could be created without political parties. To me that is an almost insuperable difficulty - subject to what further ideas about that you may have. I also really do feel quite strongly that single issue politics is childish and by no means to be encouraged.

I continue to struggle to see how this would work. You would have candidates forbidden to organise themselves into political parties. How then would a coherent programme for government be developed, given, as I pointed out, that this involves trade-offs, prioritisation and funding decisions on the various single issues involved? You say that voters, on the other hand, would be allowed (actually you could not prevent them, in a free society) to form parties, but only on the basis of single issues. How would you stop them combining issues, on the basis of the priorities and trade-offs they would like to see enacted? Surely the relative importance voters attach to various issues is a big part of political opinion. Forcing politics into a set of single issues would just be a further infantilisation of politics. It is the often hard choices between the various single issues, where ideals meet practical reality, where you need mature judgement. The electorate should in my opinion be encouraged to confront this, not to live in a silly bubble of things they would like without regard to the consequences. It seems to me that how the voters organise themselves must be left to them, if we want to live in a free society. What you can control, without impinging on the freedom of citizens, is the effect of disproportionately powerful actors in society, such as wealthy individuals, corporations and unions, who currently buy influence over political parties. You can do that by strictly limiting financial donations and mandating that they must all be published with donors identified. This is done in most democracies, but not, apparently in the USA, perhaps with predictable results. The amount of money spent in US politics is absolutely insane, to any outsider. Regarding the elected representatives, if you want them to enter government with a plan for governing, you must allow them to meet and agree beforehand proposals for the trade-offs, prioritisation and funding that I have mentioned. Without that you would have months of paralysed, impotent government while a programme was thrashed out among hundreds of individual representatives, all with different opinions! If you look at the coalitions that are often formed between 2 or more parties in European countries, the negotiations involved take long enough. Between individual representatives, forbidden to form parties with a pre-agreed programme, it would be ten times harder. If you permit them to pre-agree a plan, you already have a political party, it seems to me.

Why would galaxies rotating in the opposite direction to ours seem brighter? I can see the Doppler effect would make one side red-shifted and the other blue-shifted. But I'd have thought our own motion, either towards or away from the galaxy, would simply make the galaxy look a bit more blue or red shifted overall and the rotation of the galaxy would not affect overall brightness.

That's not Bordeaux Mixture. The key ingredient in Bx Mixture is copper, in the form of copper sulphate. As far as I know it is a fungicide. I have not heard of it being used as an insecticide. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/bordeaux-mixture

Not workable in my view. A number of considerations: - the only practical form of government is representative government, in which individuals are elected to make decisions on behalf of the electors. Because of "Events, Dear Boy" it is not practical to elect people to enact only the specific issues apparent at the time of the election. - government needs an integrated programme for governing. You can't separate individual issues because you will always need to resolve conflicts between issues that pull in different directions, prioritise those that are chosen, and determine what gets funded. - there will always tend to be a coalescence of views among the electors on groups of issues. You can't force people to keep them separate. So parties will inevitably form, whether official or not. I agree recent events certainly show the need for constitutional reform, but I would suggest a different approach. The following are top of the head suggestions that may not withstand scrutiny but for whatever they are worth I'll list them: - Cut back the power of the presidency and reinforce that of Congress. In particular, Congress should be required to approve hiring and firing decisions for the heads of government departments on the basis of written reasons that can be challenged in court by those affected. This would help de-politicise the civil service and rebuild trust in its impartiality. - introduce strict limits on political financing, both of presidential and Congressional candidates. This would reduce the power of wealthy organisations and individuals to distort the process and would make it easier for new political parties to form and win seats, breaking the duopoly. - reform the process for appointing judges. They should not be elected, nor appointed by the Executive, but chosen from the pool of experienced advocates, by an independent appointments commission containing a mix of senior judges and outsiders representing the community (so that it does not become incestuous).

Indeed. And I don’t want to lose a teenager’s interest in science due to any perceived conflict with the religion in which they have been brought up.

Yeah I just get a bit worried with some young people because there is this damaging idea around that religion and science are in conflict. It was all started by an American academic at the turn of the previous century called Andrew Dickson White who developed the so-called "conflict thesis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis. It is a discredited idea but is nonetheless quite widespread in popular culture. Religion has generally been supportive of science, about the only historical exception being the Galileo affair. Anyway, as you mentioned God I became anxious that you should never feel you have to make a choice between the two, that's all. 🙂

What you feel is your spine, not your spinal cord. Your spine, being bone, is pretty tough and the spinal cord is inside and well protected by it. No need to worry. All is as it should be.

Not a chance, not least because Trump is rapidly turning the USA into a dictatorship like Putin's. Secondly I do not know where you get this badly garbled story about "leftists" saying democracy is not the rule of the majority but the protection of minorities. What "leftists" are these? It is the case that well crafted democracies elect governments according to the will of the majority, or as close to that as they can get under their electoral system, but that they also have the a separate institution, independent of the government, responsible for applying the law. It is the legal system that has the duty to protect individuals from what would otherwise be mob rule. We are all members of minorities of one kind or another and the law exists in part to uphold our rights as individuals, regardless of popular opinion. The elected legislators make the law of course. But then the application of the law must be fair and logical, for all citizens equally, which is why it has to be independent of government. It sounds as if you have got hold of a mangled description of this basic principle and attributed it, absurdly, to "leftists" when it is embedded in the constitutional arrangements of every mature democracy, not least that of the USA. One of the most pernicious developments of Trump's government has been the threat to undermine this principle and make law enforcement an arm of the executive, doing the bidding of the president. This of course is how Putin rules. If he doesn't like what you say about him you get arrested, may be sent to Siberia - or may even fall out of a high window or get your underpants poisoned with novichok. Trump is already claiming that news organisations whose reporting he dislikes are "illegal". (What was that about "free speech" again?) And his agents have just ignored a court order not to ship prisoners overseas by misusing the Enemy Aliens Act. The rule of law is under threat in the USA now.

Yes I gathered that. What I mean is what I said about God working through natural processes, rather than overruling them by supernatural power. Evolution is a classic example. What you wrote about God “making a giraffe tall enough” rather suggested some sort of intervention, rather than allowing evolution to take its natural course. Such a belief would be incompatible with the scientific evidence. OK as a bible story for children perhaps, but no good once you start learning about fossils, dinosaurs etc. Whereas what I called the “adult” mainstream Christian view would be that God works through evolution following the laws of nature, which can perhaps be seen as His laws. I’m not sure what you understand by what everyone else says about God and science. It seems to me different people say very different things about that. What I have described as a mainstream view would not be shared, for instance, by creationists in the US Bible Belt, who are forced to think science is all wrong because they insist on taking every word of the Old Testament literally.

Hmm, it is not good science to say simply that "God made" individual creatures the way they are, as that does not provide a natural explanation of how they came to be the way they are. Science is all about accounting for what we observe in nature in terms of natural processes, not supernatural intervention. A religious believer is of course free to believe God created nature and upholds its processes via the laws of nature. But science shows us it is the operation of these laws that has led to the forms of life we observe today via evolution, which is one of the best supported theories in science. Invoking supernatural intervention as an explanation is in fact a science stopper, as it discourages the search for natural mechanisms. We just say "God did it", case closed, and go on none the wiser than medieval people who thought earthquakes, or plagues, were "acts of God" with no natural explanation. So by all means continue with your religious belief, but you should start moving on to a more adult, educated version of it that accommodates science. That is what the mainstream Christian denominations have done. If you don't, you will find yourself forced to make an unnecessary choice between science and religion, which risks leaving you intellectually impoverished.

Agree entirely with the analysis of you both. It's fundamentally social media that is doing the damage, (i) by enabling the views of any schmuck, however ignorant, to be aired across the globe, (ii) by deliberately amplifying, via algorithms, the most extreme and provocative of these and (iii) by targeting them to audiences the algorithm has identified as already receptive. The evil genius of modern populists like Trump has been to realise this early and use it. The basic problem those of us who believe in liberal democracy face is that we are "centrist dads". In other words we are too moderate to be algorithm-catching. A couple of years ago my son gave me a mug inscribed "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that." I took it as a compliment, coming as it did from young man of 20, but to algorithm-driven social media that kind of sentiment is not going to get redistributed to millions. We are people who communicate - and therefore think - in paragraphs, not 140 characters. The best mode of pushback my be via a countercultural movement. Americans, being such indvidualists, are very good at that. cf. Vietnam War era. We need music, art, publications and above all humour, to take the piss out of Trump, Vance, Musk and co. They have to become seen as deeply uncool. London is doing its bit against Musk, with a pirate poster campaign with joke ads on the Underground and at bus stops for the swasticar ("Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 secs"), a spoof fragrance with a swastika on the bottle called "Elon's Musk", picturing his underarm as he makes the Nazi salute with the strapline "parfum 1939" with"pour wankers" underneath, and so on. If the USA had a parliamentary system, one would look to the Leader of the Opposition to play a central role in formally opposing what is going on and getting key figures in the party to give interviews and speeches with a coordinated series of messages designed to build up support from the electorate. But the Democrat party seems leaderless and totally uncoordinated at the moment. What's become of the Lincoln Project these days?

I find the whole idea suggestive of a predatory attitude towards women and consequently distasteful. And it is not a scientific exercise, as it is purely speculative and the resulting estimate would provide no insight into the science of sex or sociology, as far as I can see.

Are we not already spending a few billion on it though? We have several US projects, several in Europe, several in China and I think the Japanese may also be active.

To be honest I find this post a bit creepy, especially the revelation that this has fascinated you for 3 years. Obviously trying to do an actual statistical survey would be highly objectionable, and I can't see you have any sound basis for making an extrapolated calculation. I also don't think such a calculation, if it could be done, would offer much by way of worthwhile insight. The whole exercise seems to have a faint whiff of, well, incel about it. But I do note the remark you attribute to Franz Ferdinand (do you mean the Archduke whose assassination precipitated WW1, or someone else?) does not specify the sex of the "people". Maybe he was including the likelihood of +ve responses from gay men in his statistics. Are you still fascinated now 😁?

Enormous sums of money have been and are being spent on fusion research. But we are still decades away from a practical power-generating reactor. I doubt that throwing even more money at the problems would be good value, compared to other things we could use it for to accelerate the green transition.

Yes indeed. The Democrat party really should have put the brakes on to stop getting too far from Mr and Mrs Average. They seemed rather undisciplined, from my perspective across the Atlantic. They have some great people, e.g. Buttigieg, this Senator Schiff guy and so on, but no coordination and no party discipline.

Yes, that would be intelligent. And Chinese culture knows all about the importance of “face”, so this could indeed be part of a strategy for playing an angry buffoon like Trump.