exchemist

But words “are” not more words. What they are is labels for objects, actions, ideas etc. that allow us to share our experience and thought with others. While all, or almost all, words are serious, certain combinations of them can be silly.

Hahaha. “Pubg Name Generator” is something of a giveaway.😀

Grimm J & Grimm W : Rapunzel .

Yes. We also need to keep aware of low quality, predatory or pay-to-publish journals, like those published by SCIRP for example. These are a new disease that has spread to an alarming degree among science publications. Caveat lector indeed.

Don't tell me, the road PQ goes over a bridge, at a place called Wheatstone. 😀

This is explored in Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity which I read as a teenager and was much impressed by. His solution was small, compact beings.

I’ve certainly read that if a certain distance is not maintained, one vehicle braking will cause the one behind to brake more sharply, due to human reaction time, and several vehicles back you have them resorting to a full emergency stop in order to prevent collision. So the braking wave is progressively compressed, eventually into what amounts to a shock wave. But I’d like to see a summary of the effect referred to in the OP, as I’m still not clear what we are discussing.

Well you refer to an "effect" but without describing it. Just describe what the effect is on which you are building your hypothesis. (One of the forum rules is people should be able to follow a discussion without being sent off-site to other links. So a précis of what the MIT link says should do the trick.)

This sounds a bit like the kinetic theory explanation for why the viscosity of gases increases with temperature.🙂

There seems to be a link between sleep and rate of beard growth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3442272/ I’m not sure whether this might indicate any link to stress though.

Well, yes and no. It may be a formal fallacy in philosophical argument, but in day to day life reliance on authority is something we all practice, much of the time, in order to get on with our lives without challenging every bloody thing from first principles all the time. Anyone who takes articles published in Nature, or on the BBC, as likely to be sound is relying on authority, viz. the reputation of a well-regarded source. Whenever we learn a theory in science we rely on authority, in the form of the books or the lecturers we follow. We take things on trust, from recognised authorities. We have no choice.

One thing to bear in mind is that light only started travelling through dark space from the surface of last scattering, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, by which time a great deal of expansion had already occurred.

Yes, you have anticipated my reaction too. "Society at large" comprises a mix of the views and attitudes of all the many groupings that people belong to, religious adherence being one. But, of all of them, the grouping that most overtly propounds a view of what constitutes moral values and behaviour is probably religious affiliation.

I'm sure there is a lot of truth in this idea of shame. I'd be intrigued to know where the author thinks the concept came from, from an anthropological, or evolutionary, point of view. Shame does seem to inform a far amount of the thinking in the more fundamentalist branches of the Abrahamic religions. But I'm not sure how much of a role it plays in, say, Buddhism or Hinduism. Does the author claim it is fundamental to all religions or just to those most widespread in "western" cultures ? It's also worth pointing out out that even in the Abrahamic faiths, shame plays a fairly subservient role nowadays. In Christianity the concept of sin remains central, but I'm not convinced that sin has a one to one correspondence with shame. Does the author talk about the concept of sin, or would that be too theologically specific to one faith?

The solid tissues of your body are flexible, apart from the bones. So your body cannot prevent the ambient pressure from compressing it. However, since most of your body is made of liquids, mainly water-based, and as liquids are virtually incompressible, what happens is the compression does not deform your body when the pressure goes up. However all the fluids in your body become pressurised, to the same pressure as the ambient environment. The exception to all this is the body cavity of the lungs, which is filled with gases. These most definitely do reduce a lot in volume when the pressure goes up. So if you were not given compressed air to breathe, your lungs would be collapsed by the water pressure and you would asphyxiate. The pressure regulator in SCUBA gear adjusts the pressure of air you are fed from the cylinder so that it is equal to the pressure of the environment, i.e the water pressure at whatever depth you are. This is also the pressure of all the fluids in your body. So your blood is at the same pressure as the water and so is the nitrogen in the air you are breathing. At higher pressure your blood dissolves more nitrogen than at atmospheric pressure and if you ascend too fast from great depth it does not have time to come gradually out of solution and be breathe out through the lungs. So you can get bubbles - and then you have a bent diver on your hands.

I'm an outside observer on this, being in the UK, but it seems to me the basic problem with the US health system is that it is what is called a "broken market". The consumer has no leverage over the supplier and thus it is not a suitable subject for market competition to deliver an efficient outcome. As I understand it, most people in the US get health cover as part of their employment remuneration. The employer pays a charge to an insurer, who adds a mark-up to the charges it receives from the medical providers. So the end consumer of health treatment is 3 steps away from the provider and has no market power. Nobody in the chain has either the incentive, or the purchasing power, to shop around and drive down costs to keep the providers honest. In theory the insurer might have such an incentive, but in practice it is easier just to accept the charges, pass them on to the employers, with a mark-up, and get out on the golf course. In most other countries there is central purchasing of health provision by the government, by means of large and valuable contracts, professionally negotiated, and hard bargains can be driven. But that involves a role for "government" - which is anathema to all the American rightwingers, brought up on the myth of individualism and Ayn Rand.

There's a bit more information here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/aug/new-measurement-particle-wobble-hints-new-physics Seems it all revolves (haha) around the g-factor for muons, which, by making them precess in a magnetic field, has been found to be 0.2ppm (!) stronger than predicted by the Standard Model. So a technical tour de force in terms of measurement and a very tiny difference, which nevertheless is said to be statistically significant, at the 5σ level. This is a replication of earlier results, but with more data behind it.

I don't think it is floundering particularly. As @iNow observes, risk pooling is the basis of a number of collective systems in societies. National Insurance was the original basis of the UK's welfare state, cast in its present form by Attlee's government, which was of a distinctly socialist persuasion. (It's hard to think now that even road transport was nationalised by that government.). I think there's a productive discussion to be had about the way socialist ideas can be, or have been, adapted over the years, bearing in mind some of the excesses of corporate capitalism that we have seen in the last decade or two.

OK, maybe I've got it: are you referring to the Early Twentieth Century Warming (ETCW)? Is that what you are concerned about? There's a paper here on it: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.522. This seems to attribute 40-50% of the change to human-induced effects and the rest to a succession of other climatic events. But indeed it looks as if this is still not fully understood and that research on it continues. From what I have been able to find so far, the CO2 concentration in 1950 seems to have been 311ppm, versus 300 in 1900 and 285 in 1850. I think I read somewhere that early CO2 increases may have been offset by cooling due to aerosols and soot in the early industrial revolution. So there seems to have been a slow increase going on throughout the c.19th and into the very early c.20th, but possibly with no apparent effect. What I'm unclear about at the moment is whether the greenhouse effect is expected to be linear in CO2 concentration or not.

Yes that's fair. And in fact I think that sometimes happens, in cases where a risk was not reasonably foreseeable by the company that made the product.

It seems fair though that the polluter should pay to clean up his own mess, does it not? I'd be averse to a system whereby private enterprise can pollute with impunity and the taxpayer has to pay for the clean-up. One wants the incentive not to pollute to be with the enterprises that may be contemplating polluting activities. If they know they may be held liable, they will do their due diligence on pollution hazards before they start their operations. That is more or less how it works today, imperfect thought it is.

Nobody claims the difference in temperature between the dates you mention did not happen. Nor does anyone claim that particular difference in temperature was 100% attributable to a man-made greenhouse effect.

True. (Our use of fossil fuel and consequent dependence on it today is the perfect example of that.) But that's why we need mechanisms that learn from experience and apply corrective action. Markets generally won't do that, or not until so much damage has been done that sales are lost from angry consumers. One needs regulation, by an expert non-profit body, supported by the political system so that citizens can see why it is needed - and that it is not just dedicated to depriving people of "freedom".

But this is ad-hoc cherry-picking, rather than a scientific approach to what the data points indicate. Earlier in the thread @Ken Fabian posted a curve showing the effect of LOESS (or LOWESS) smoothing on the data. I looked that up and found this description: https://www.statisticshowto.com/lowess-smoothing/ That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends. It makes sense to include a good data set from before the suspected influence starts to manifest itself, in order to see whether there is any kind of baseline, from which the trend starts to depart.

I don't think I would treat pollution, and other environmental negative impacts, as an externality. It's sort of interesting in that both state-run and market-run systems produce pollution disasters. In both cases the problem really comes down to lack of public knowledge and public accountability. I suppose, at the end of the day, what we all want from an economic system is one that innovates and thus creates wealth, for us all to share in some measure, but is accountable to us as consumers and as citizens. The political debates are all about how best to do that.