mistermack

Relying on Nuclear weapons as a guarantee of safety is a bit like using a tight-rope across the Grand Canyon as a shortcut. You can laugh at the people going the long way round, taking days for what you do in minutes, with them stumbling and tripping along the way while you are enjoying the fabulous view. You might even say "where's your evidence that I'm going to fall ? " You might even be right, and might never fall. But most people with any sense can see the flaw in your argument. It's just that nuclear war is harder to picture, than slipping off a high wire. Which is a bit odd, when you look at the people with their fingers on the trigger. Maybe Sleepy Joe might think twice, but Donald Trump might be about to rest his finger on the button, and nobody here seems to doubt Putin's readiness to shout fire, in the right circumstances. And the Israelis have never been more unstable, and Iran is working away in the shadows. And who knows who will be in power in China this time next year? For nuclear war to kick off, all it takes is for a stand-off where nobody will back down. Like Ukraine, but with nukes. And history tells us the worst can and does happen under those circumstances.

That's absolute rubbish. Where's your evidence? They could easily have retaken Georgia. But didn't. They stopped when they had control of areas that had mostly Russian populace, who had been under attack. And haven't done anything since. Crimea they re-took, but Ukraine and Crimea are a special case. Ukraine has historically been a region of Russia for centuries, and Crimea only became part of Ukraine as a meaningless gesture to Krushchev (a Ukrainian), on his birthday. About thirty years ago, Ukraine was given independence in a gesture of goodwill, and gave in return assurances that the Russian Black Sea Fleet would have continuous access to Sevastopol, and Ukraine would stay neutral. Since both of those commitments were going to be abandoned, the Russians could either roll over and take it, or do something. They chose the latter. Your claim that they intend to take back all of the former Soviet states is pure empty imagination, straight out of your own head.

I ought to add that if direct energy conversion were ever to become a success, that wouldn't mean that the heat produced would just be allowed to dissipate. You would surely have steam turbine generation alongside it. It would just help to make the overall process more productive.

While I don't disagree with the sentiment, I don't agree that your safety is guaranteed. Far from it. I live about 10 miles from GCHQ in England. Does our UK deterrent guaranee my safety? Not at all. I'm safe until I'm vaporised. Are the people of Finland safer now they are in NATO ? Of course not. Now the people of Helsinki have two or three warheads pointed straight at them, and just minutes away. They probably wouldn't have time to put their shoes on, before they got vaporised. They're safe till it kicks off. Then they're dead.

Is that the same US that won't even countenance giving up their personal assault weapons? Doesn't sound very likely.

There is work being done around that situation. Wikipedia has a very interesting page on various direct energy conversion research including high enerergy protons, and in the fission field as well as fusion. "In 1992, a Japan–U.S. joint-team proposed a novel direct energy conversion system for 14.7 MeV protons produced by D-3He fusion reactions, whose energy is too high for electrostatic converters." [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion

I don't know the answer to that, but I seem to remember reading that there is the potential for some fusion systems to do that, producing charged particles that can directly release their charge to an electrical circuit. Obviously, fusion is nowhere near doing anything of the sort at the moment, but maybe a long time in the future, that might be possible.

If you take the current state of knowledge as correct, that no physical object can exceed the speed of light in an inertial frame, does that mean that the scope and extent of intertial frames is limited? For example, if you take me as your object, then no frame in which I am moving at more than c can be a real and possible frame ? Would that be a fair conclusion?

That's far more widespread than just in people with psychological problems. It's an effective tactic in all sorts of endeavors. Take the OJ Simpson trial : "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit" !! And it worked! Every rhyming slogan that politicians use comes under the same phenomenon. Ordinary sane people are influence by nonsensical rhymes and slogans. "All the way with LBJ" helped get Johnson elected. "We too like Ike" helped Eisenhour. In fact, it doesn't need to rhyme, just catch the attention in some repeatable way, to be effective. Like Bill Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid" . Or "Yes we can" by Obama. Anything chantable and stickable has the possible power to change the world. The right words gain power in our minds. I believe we evolved the tendency to flock to a chanted slogan while we were territorial apes, fighting every day to guard our territory.

He says that it takes billions of years for a galaxy to form. I don't know where he gets that from. I'm not an avid student of cosmology, but what drips of information I have absorbed described galaxies forming very soon after the big bang. And mostly, or all, with supermassive black holes at the centre. He seems to be talking about what people thought 25 years ago. Obviously the James Webb is showing some unexpected stuff, that's what it's for. Before Webb, it was more speculation what the early universe looked like. It seems to be emerging that all, or nearly all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at the centre, and the way that they detect that is by gravitational lensing. This isn't new stuff, it's what people have been saying for ages. Maybe the James Webb is showing that that's true for the very earliest galaxies. I haven't heard that there was any theoretical reason why that shouldn't be the case.

No, I was arguing against your sweeping statement that the need for profit always means the product must cost more. In fact, a lot of companies operate on tiny profit margins, and state-owned enterprises can easily end up charging much more for the same thing. I'm in no way arguing for no state bodies. I like our NHS for example, but it does get hugely ripped off from time to time, and for some procedures, it pays private companies, because they just can't compete with them. A lot of the cost of our NHS is political. The governments don't like debt showing against their accounts, so they embarked on private financing of major projects, just to make their accounts look better. The debt is hidden in the contracts, where the private investors get guaranteed risk-free returns for decades. And of course, the opportunities for the friends of the politicians to take a lucrative slice of the action are huge. The NHS blew literally billions during covid lockdowns, on getting masks etc. And periphery friends of the ruling party became fabulously rich overnight, quite often selling useless gear to the NHS. It would never have happened if Bill Gates was running it. Having said that, I don't want the NHS to become private, as you said, some things are better suited to a national system. The US system, with all of the private health insurance companies doesn't appeal in the slightest. One thing I would do, is to massively increase the penalties for fraud. It seems to be treated far too leniently in this country, and the penalties are tiny, in relation to some of the sums involved. There's no real deterrent. It takes huge manpower to prove fraud, and then they just get a slap on the wrist.

That's ok in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. That's why Russia and China couldn't prosper as communist countries. It's easy to say that public entities can cut waste, but they don't. People operate better on real incentives. And there's no better incentive than making and spending your own money.

That's not true and ridiculously simplistic. You can make a profit by cutting out waste and fiddles. State owned entities can be and often are ripped off for huge amounts, whereas privately owned businesses are more careful with their own money.

How is a year measured? Off the top of my head, I would measure it by starting the clock when the Sun, Earth and the most distant Galaxy that's practical to use, are perfectly lined up, and then stop the clock next time that happens. (using the best kit available) Is that how it's done, or something like it?

Yeh, it's possible that the meteor was so bright that it was really much further away than it appeared, and at a much higher altitude. I had my doubts because it veered off north, but if it broke up, it could temporarily have a shape that caused it to swoop or swerve, a bit like some paper planes do. Out of the two scenarios, meteor or aliens, you have to pick meteor, we know they happen all the time, but this was just an unusual one. It's a shame that air traffic control don't have a way to record them. Way above their range, I would have thought.

This is a link to a Sky version of the same video, which might play in the US : https://youtu.be/xbhMUjprpB8?t=263 The BBC reported on it as well but it's a bit skimpy : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46181662 And CNN : https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/ireland-ufo-pilots-intl/index.html

Yes, I thought the recordings and reactions of the crews were genuine, I'm pretty sure there was something to see. I wouldn't favour a trick of the light, not with three different crews seeing it, and it being enough for them to ask the question of air traffic controllers. It could have been a stealth bomber, or a small flight of stealth aircraft. They probably wouldn't show on radar.

Big coincidence, there was a prog on UK tv a couple of hours ago, on UFOs. The part about sightings by three different airline crew, over Ireland really came across as genuine. They played the real-time audio recordings (they said) and there was no aroma of fakery about it at all, which is pretty rare. A relevant part of the program is on this youtube video, so see what you think :

Well, I'm all in favour of women faking an orgasm, so long as it doesn't interfere with mine. It saves a lot of bother.

What do you mean by male to female orgasm? That's not a term I'm familiar with.

Or what's the point of it? Psychology is a grey area science anyway. Spend ten thousand pounds on hip replacements, and people get to walk again. Spend ten thousand counselling a suicidal patient, and there's every chance they will top themselves the following week. There really should be a proper assessment of the outlay/returns of mental health treatements. You can't spend the money twice. Ten grand spent on mental health means ten grand less on hips and hearts etc. If it's not working, it needs cutting out. Where outcomes are good, that's where the money should go, regardless of the discipline. The point of trying to fit human sexual inclinations into big-worded hypotheses escapes me. It's worked so far, without it. Here we are, the living proof.

There is a tiny industry freezing peoples dead bodies after they die, in the almost cartain vain hope that they can be revived when the technology advances. They call it cryonics, and they use various methods to avoid the damaging ice crystals, including high speed freezing and non-toxic chemicals to infuse into the tissues, that prevent crystal growth. In theory that process could be done in space, or done on Earth and then moved to space for long-term storage at very low temperatures. The water boils in the video because the removal of pressure drops the boiling point past the current temperature. If the temperature is lowered before the pressure is reduced, you can avoid boiling the water at close to zero pressure. There are mountains made of water ice on celestial bodies, at close to zero pressure. The ice at very low temperature behaves like rock here on Earth. I think Pluto might be one that has water ice mountains. (not sure)

There is a difference when you are talking about casual sex. Women can get that more easily than men, so long as that's all they want, and they're not fussy who provides it. But it's not really what most women are looking for. Some do, and there are heterosexual male prostitutes out there, but not a lot. When it comes to getting the partner of your choice, I don't think that women have any real advantage over men.

It might even result in four more years. I remember when they tried to nail Bill Clinton, the whole thing left such a nasty taste in the mouth, I would have made a stupendous effort to vote him back in if I had the chance. This might well do likewise for Trump. Not for me, I'm in the UK anyway, but for wavering US voters. Guilt or lack of it comes well down the consideration list in this kind of situation. It's more of an emotional thing. Will the swing voters feel that it's a plot?, because if they do, they are likely to vote to thwart it.

Fair enough. Your posting seems deliberately short and cryptic, so I won't post to it, unless the meaning is clear. Like that for example.