mistermack

I'm betting that that joke originally had the Jewish man writing the check, but today it would be racist.

Individual predictions have become meaningless in the climate dance. There have been so many of them, so varied, that you can look back and take your pick to find the one that best bolsters your own point of view. And the IPCC predictions are pretty meaningless, because they hedge their bets with generous error bars. Their salaries can be accurately predicted. Everything else is fifty years in the future, with a big margin for error. But like I wrote earlier, in the present climate, I'm all for making the most of the more practical renewables, but not for throwing money around like confetti. Here in England, I have a friend who wanted a new boiler. He was on oil-fired central heating in an old cottage. He applied for grants, and a project has just been completed on his house. They put insulation on all of the outside walls. Put solar panels on his roof. Fitted new bigger ratiators right through the house. Installed an air-source heat pump, with all wiring etc as part of the system. Nearly all of the workers were Egyptian or Romanian etc. The total cost my friend has no idea about because he's not paying a penny towards it. He did ask, saying 'I'll bet it's about £20,000' and the boss shook his head and said it was loads more than that. And the amazing thing is that they are struggling to get people to take up the offer. How this is a good use of taxpayers money, or helping the country or the climate I can only wonder. The system works fine on warm sunny days. But struggles in the cold cloudy days. Brilliant stuff. He will be coining it in the summer, putting power back into the grid, but at a time when there is a surplus anyway. I can think of better ways of spending the country's money, especially when times are supposed to be hard.

I've been seeing dire predictions about sea ice for the last forty years. The Arctic should be ice free by now. In reality, here's the current extent :

Well I know close to zero about cameras, but if I was making a fixed focus one back in 1950, I would aim to make it most suitable for capturing family shots firstly, and background secondly. So I'd be aiming at maximum sharpness at 10 to 15 feet. So slight blurring of distant objects would be a price worth paying for sharper close shots.

At the moment, the world is buying billions of lottery tickets, without even knowing if there is a prize. It's ludicrous the way people have taken to an unproven hypothesis, just following some very well meaning but biased climate models, produced by people who are so dedicated to a cause that no dissent or contrary evidence is allowed. But it's not all bad news. Renewable energy tech can't be a bad thing, if it keeps the price of gas and oil down, and reduces the reliance on a few energy-rich exporters. And fossil fuels will of course get scarcer in the future, so it's not a bad thing to be ready for when that happens. My problem with it all is the notion the world seems to have, that if CO2 is reduced, all will be well. Ignoring the real problem of overpopulation of the planet, which IS real, and if people stopped ignoring it and did something, they could make a REAL difference for far less money than is being spent on CO2 mitigation.

Sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1880. 3.5 inches of that was before CO2 levels started any significant rise in 1950. The world has handled it quite well. And sea levels have been much higher in the past, without human activity. As for deserts, yes, some are growing. Why? Because of over-grazing on the margins because of the high birth rate in those areas. In areas where grazing is managed, the desertification can be reversed. There are other factors than CO2 at work.

You clearly only see what you want to see. Dust stirred up would be shooting out sideways, not rising vertically up. And size matters, because a small item is easy to fake. Not so easy to fake a big space craft. In fact, that 'flying' item looks like it's less than a metre in size. It looks to be closer to the camera than the barrel that you have trouble seeing. It's in sharper focus than the distant objects.

All pure speculation. If it's open season for wild claims, then a warmer world will open up vast areas of Russia and Canada for use, completely cancelling out a little bit of flooded coast. And the Sahara will green again, with the extra rainfall a warmer world will bring.

It's very possible that the number of people who have a major environmental impact will double or even treble, as more and more people demand and achieve things like cars, freezers, air conditioning and supermarket foods and packaging. Even with no increase in population, the problems get worse as more people are taken out of poverty. To stand still on the environmental front, the human population would need to be falling rapidly, which isn't going to happen.

So you say, but you haven't posted that case. And you just ignored my point that if there really is a 'ground effect' directly under the supposed craft, then it can't be more than about four feet in diameter. Do you have an answer for that, or will you just continue to ignore what doesn't suit your cause?

We've had the conversation about those pictures before, and you just totally ignore anything that points in the opposite direction for them. In the picture that you call your favourite, you point to an imaginary ground effect. Well, if that's a ground effect from a flying craft, then the craft can't be much more than four feet across, because it would be directly above the barrel shown. The craft would therefore be the same distance away from the camera, and therefore the same size. I also pointed out to you that the 'ground effect' is obviously just dried out weeds, growing around the barrel, which are there because the plough had to go around the barrel. And also, there is an identical barrel with dead weeds further down the road, about 100 metres away. And the McMinneville photos have been thoroughly debunked, and I pointed out some of the things wrong with them in an earlier exchange. You seem to be totally selective in assessing evidence. Ignoring what doesn't fit, and overstating what does. I have a camera in my phone that would take pictures infinitely better than you fuzzy favourite, as do seven billion other people today. What's the explanation for the lack of good modern evidence?

Moontanman, your best pictures are truly awful as evidence of anything. And they do illustrate my point about the numbers and quality of modern phones, and why do we not get decent evidence now that can stand up to scrutiny. It's not like the interest has gone away. Any journalist would have the scoop of a lifetime, if they could put together evidence of aliens in a story. The motivation is there, it's just the evidence that's missing.

True. But it's such a grey area that you would need a study by experts to differentiate accurately for each microorganism. While it looks like something gives no benefit to the host, there might be a bonus that we can't see. Just by being there, a 'useless' looking bacterium might be keeping more harmful varieties under control. (for example) So the answer to the OP is likely to be different in every case, and quite often non-obvious or extremely subtle.

That's not necessarily true. With many animals, the microorganisms perform some important functions. Helping with digestion for instance. They can transform foods that the animal can't process into substances they can use. Many animals need to acquire the beneficial bacteria from their parents when they are young in order to thrive. Also, in a warm blooded animal, the bacterial action produces heat, which contributes to the overall warming of the animal. You would have to read up on it to find out how much of this applies to humans.

It's hard to define something that has yet to appear. The honest answer is I think I'll know it when I see it. But I'm not holding my breath. And just like everyone else, I can be fooled too. A quality picture, or set of pictures, with massive supporting evidence from several respected sources would be a good start. Personally, I think there probably are aliens in the universe. Lots of them. But the vastness of space between them and us makes it unlikely that we will ever see signals from them, let alone encounter them. And if they did get here, I think it would be immediately obvious, and not just some fuzzy blurry shakey pictures taken by people with a slightly odd stare.

I've been told by the doctor that the pulse pressure is now considered considerably more important that the absolute values of the systolic and diatolic. So according to that opinion, the doctor would prefer to see 90 for the lower number in this case. I wasn't told why that is. Presumably the medical science is under constant statistical review.

Depends what you call a "good" picture. Faked pictures are not "good" pictures in my book. There are plenty of them, but I'm not seeing any authentic good pictures. The number that I'm aware of is a big fat zero, but maybe I get different media to you. But you can put that right by posting the best ones. It's your thread.

"Are UAPs/UFOs finally being taken seriously ?" To be honest, the notion that the reports are due to extraterrestrials have never been less likely. The number of people who own a modern mobile phone with a camera is now over SEVEN BILLION !! in stark contrast to the situation in the fifties and sixties when the flying saucer myths took off. ( I think ) Still no good pictures of the little green men, or their crafts, or ray weapons. So the odds of something being "out there" must be just a tiny fraction of what they were fifty years ago. And the odds are getting longer by the day.

I admit there's a lot different this time. It's not in the heat of an election battle, and he would find it hard to sell it as a plot to steal the presidency. But having said that, crazies are not the most logical of people, so you can't rely on common sense to prevail.

Has he lost the support he had before then? I'm not up with US politics, but I had the impression that there's a big lump of America behind him, and the crazies with beards numbered a lot more than a handful. I'd be surprised if that was all that happens, but like I said, I'm not up with the current feeling in the country. I would like to see him locked up, but I'm guessing that they would water it all down, behind the scenes. Depends on his chances of running again, I guess.

There are free programs available online that will back up your system with a click, and they work well. One good one is AOMEI backupper, I've used it myself and it restored perfectly. ( I bought a SSHD to replace the existing hard disk, to speed the pc up ). I made the image of the complete system, and restored it to the new solid state disk, and everything worked perfectly exactly as the original. It's completely free with no drawbacks at all. Another very similar one is EASUS. I think I've used it, not sure, but it's highly regarded. I found the windows own utility a bit limited, it didn't like restoring to a disk that was smaller than the original. The feature I used in AOMEI was called the 'clone disk' facility.

It seems pretty obvious that parasites that damage or kill their hosts will eventually become less numerous, if they adversely affect the survival of the population of the host. Generally the ones that do the most damage are ones that jump from one species to another, like the covid virus did. You then get an evolutionary race of parasite vs immune system. In the end, the most successful parasites will be the ones that can evolve quickest, to keep ahead of the game.

There is no good or bad. But if you take survival of a parasite's genes as their purpose, then the parasites that don't damage their hosts are the best. A lot of viruses eventually end up not damaging their hosts, and become part of their dna, so I guess those would qualify as being the 'best' parasites.

Life in a wheelchair, unable to move? I can see where he's coming from. But we're not all afflicted in that way.

It's not really a good analogue. Genes are not in storage in your body. If you don't reproduce, your genes die with you when you die. (under natural conditions). If you store your semen, or eggs, and make a baby, then that might resemble a computer restore, although only partially. You can restore a computer to an identical copy, at it's exact point in life. Reproduction involves making new individuals, very different to the previous editions, that just happen to have some of the components of the previous examples.