mistermack

Well, we're in agreement then. That's what I pointed out when I said widely held delusion. It's a human characteristic, not something mysteriously "greater". To argue the topic of the thread title, it's an appeal to a greater meaning than just biology. So I'm replying in the negative to the OP in my post.

Arguments about words are generally pretty hazy, but in this case I'm arguing that Criminality should involve something criminal Bestiality should involve animals Sexuality should involve sex somewhere along the line Individuality should be pertinent to the individual in some way And spirituality should involve a notion of a spirit. But I suppose, if you are of the opinion that reality doesn't need to involve what's real, then none of the above need apply.

It's up to each individual what the word means. There is no single, widely agreed upon definition of spirituality. I'm arguing that spirituality should involve an element of, spirit, somewhere. I define it as anything about us that is claimed to be more than just flesh and blood. If you want to include emotions that we all feel, through the workings of our brains as spiritual, then go ahead. I would class that as emotions formed by electical circuits in our brains. Calling it spiritual is stretching it too far. For me. I'm aware that lots of people disagree. They're entitled to disagree. I'm just arguing that they're wrong. 😁

This is a crazy thread. There are no spirits, so there is no spirituality. It's a widely held delusion. And there is no purpose, to animals or humans, except the subjective ones that we conjure up. It only "feels" right or wrong because of the type of brain that we've inherited through genetics, and that applies both individually and collectively. If you killed a baby today, and ate it, we would all agree that it was horribly wrong. But agreeing doesn't make it real. In a thousand years time, it won't matter in the slightest to anyone. So the answer to the question, "can you eat meat and be spiritual" is definitely no. Just like the answer to the question "can you be vegan and be spiritual"

How long is a piece of string? You need to be more precise to get a meaningful answer. For instance, many desires can OBVIOUSLY be controlled, by stopping the regular indulging of that desire. Like giving up smoking. The more you smoke, the more you want. Give up, and the desire does fade. Not altogether, but you can certainly control the desire by abstinence. The same goes for an awful lot of everyday "desires". I find, if I wake up with a repetitive cough, I can make it go away by really fighting the impulse for ten minutes. It really works. It's the coughing that keeps you coughing. Works for me anyway. There are lots of desires that you can reduce by self control. As far as I'm concerned, if you can reduce the frequency and intensity of a desire, that's control. Not total control, so that's why the question needs to be more precise. I can't think of any desires that it's possible to completely banish.

I'd like to know how it "sucks up" CO2. " Around 10 years ago, Li’s team discovered large amounts of carbon dioxide disappearing in Tarim, with no explanation over where it could be going ." How the hell did they discover that? It doesn't sound very likely. What it does sound like is the old phenomenon of scientists tacking on a global warming angle to their work, because that's where the research grant money is these days.

Maths is a nightmare to me, but I thought I'd still venture to ask for clarification. If you divide something by 3, you get 3 smaller things. If you divide by 2, you get 2 slightly bigger things. If you divide it by 1, you are not dividing it at all. If you divide it by less than one, you are not dividing it, you are multiplying it. Divide it by 0.5, you are ACTUALLY multiplying it by 2. Divide it by O.1, you are really multiplying it by 10. So divide something real by 0, you are really multiplying it by infinity, and not dividing it at all. So although 0 is a number, infinity is not. So if you write X/0 you are simply trying to express the infinite as something finite. That makes 0 a special number, you can multiply real things with it, but you can't divide by it. At least, that's how I've always seen it.

It must be great to be so easily amused. But also, a little bit sad.

What, always amusing, or generally amusing ? 😂

Paul, you seem to be talking as if there is no such thing as birth control, and planned parenthood. Many people are now deciding not to have children, and others are just having one or two. Given the reasons given on other posts, this is why a lot of countries have falling populations. It's a growing trend in developed economies, there's no mystery or debate about it.

An awful scenario. One might end up President.

Is it inevitable that sensing of CO2 in the inner ear should show up in the same area of the brain as hearing? I would have thought that it would be quite unsurprising if it showed up in the same area as other indicators of raised CO2. I find the question interesting, as my father had quite severe sleep apnea, he would apparently stop breathing when he was dozing for scary time intervals. I prodded him awake on a few occasions, and he just opened his eyes and asked what was wrong. ( he did suffer a series of strokes before his death ). Sleep apnea is linked to airway obstruction like snoring, just as SIDs is linked to babies' sleeping position or blankets etc. so maybe SIDs and Sleep Apnea could be linked in some way by inner ear conditions. It's obvious that the CO2 build up doesn't quickly cause breathing to restart in Apnea sufferers. I've tested myself for sleep apnea a few times, using a homemade rig, a tiny microphone taped just under my nose recording the sound of breathing to a visual sound wave display. Fairly easy to do. I never got a significant pause, like my father did, which was a relief. I should have another go, I haven't done it for a long time. Edit : I just looked up the Eustachian tube, and it's stated that it is normally collapsed, and only opens when you swallow. So if the inner ear is important for CO2 response, you would think that it's going to be dependent on how often you swallow. Unless the CO2 in the inner ear is more responsive to blood levels than airway levels.

Clay, you have some weird thinking going on. What about the speed of sound? I was about seven years old, when I first realised that sound takes time to travel. I saw a man hitting a steel spike with a hammer about 200 metres away, but I heard the sound after I saw him hit, so I knew that sound wasn't instant from that point on. The speed of sound has NOTHING to do with the force of ejection, as you claim above. It's the same whatever force you use. You can observe that in a pond. Make waves with different force, it doesn't matter. They move at the same rate. Sound appears to be instant, till you observe it over a distance. Light is similar, only much faster, so you need bigger distances to get a significant delay. But the fact that it seems instant to you is for the same reason that sound seems instant. It's too fast for everyday experience, that's all.

I used to have a friend who talked QM all the time. He was the life and soul of the party. Used to have a little circle of admiring friends around him, asking him to tell them more about quantum mechanics. True story.

Some of the adjusted dating is clearly impossible. The friary was dissolved in 1539 so the skeleton in question can't be from 1611 or 1657 as quoted for the higher end adjusted dates. The safest thing you can say about the carbon dating, is that it's useless in this case, whatever percentage of fish the guy ate. (30% is a lot of fish though). That leaves the coffins, that certainly were overhyped as evidence, if the skeleton in question wasn't actually found INSIDE one of them, which is the impression they gave. The dating of the coffins I would take as very reliable, given that the wood came from the same area, and the tree rings matched up. Without tying the skeleton to a coffin though, it's just a weak indication. They did talk briefly about pottery dating and written matter about the friary, but that's not a lot of help. One thing that they did mention was the flagellation evidence, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the mode of transmission of the bacteria to such a high proportion of the burials. If they used the same whip on each other, it's not very hygienic. All in all, Columbus came back in 1493 I believe, and this guy is showing clear syphilis on his bones, no later than 1539 in Hull in the North of England. It's not a lot of time to spread, but if he had been a sailor in his past, it's possible he brought it with him, or somebody did. Edit : I suppose it's relevant to ask, how long would it take for syphilis to get to the stage shown on that skeleton? They didn't go into that, but it wouldn't happen overnight.

I wouldn't say that. So far, fusion is just research and development. Fission stations produce usable electricity. It's chalk and cheese. But I would say that fusion is making good progress. The Chinese Tokamak recently set a new record, of 100 seconds plasma at 50 million degrees. It's not long ago the they were bragging about fractions of a second. I think it's pretty certain to get there, in the end. And when it does, the price will drop and drop. The half life of the bi-products will be in the range of 100 years, so handling costs will be tiny in comparison to fission materials.

Ok. I didn't know there was a difference. His wikipedia page says "Johnson graduated from Balliol College with an upper second-class degree,[67][68] but was deeply unhappy that he did not receive a first". The last bit doesn't surprise me. Maybe he didn't pay them enough. 😉

One day, someone will show you how to paste a link. It's very easy : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3413456/ I didn't take the conclusions of the documentary as gospel, only thought provoking, and came away with the feeling that their answer was interesting, but I didn't see them claiming it as scientific fact. The lady examining the bones was pretty definite that she was looking at a clear case of syphilis, and I took that as being her professional opinion and probably right. Later, they gave George Armelagos a spot to make the case for Syphilis coming from the Americas, so they did give both sides of the argument. He actually agreed that it was a clear case of syphilis, so I took that as a pretty definite diagnosis. If you accept it as a genuine case then it boils down to the dating. I don't think they claimed their conclusion at the end as a scientific certainty, although they certainly put it over as what THEY thought was right. As far as the criticism goes, I felt that their point about an alleged seafood diet affecting the carbon dating was a bit weak, they don't give any justification for concluding a 30% seafood diet for the alleged sufferer, and I find that number a bit hard to take, but anyway, it's enough to disregard the carbon dating, which I always view with caution anyway. They DID give the impression that the skeleton was linked directly to the coffins, without actually saying it outright, and that was a bit naughty. My main question, at the back of my mind while watching it, was why there is nothing in writing about syphilis before these dates, if it was about. You would think that somebody would have mentioned it, especially as it's sexually transmitted. As far as their main point goes, about peer review, I think they are living in the past. The days of peer review being something you can rely on are long gone. You have to look at who is reviewing what these days, and what is THEIR motivation.

I'm not going to hijack the thread to another topic. I'm just making the point that if carbon waste at the ocean floor takes decades to break down, then things might be looking very different over those kinds of time scales. And almost certainly will. Nothing stands still. Look at the difference between 1919 and 2000, and imagine that kind of change over the next 80 years. Only much more so, as technology is accelerating all the time.

The design that I envisaged involved a continuous plastic sheet, sunk to a depth of not more that a few tens of metres below the surface. Under those conditions, a runaway bloom could be prevented by carefully measuring the amount of pumped water from below. Also, the amount of pumped water would be low, as the nutrients wouldn't immediately start sinking. As far as carbon goes, yes, some would be coming up with the nutrient water, but you have to factor in how much would be dropping back down as waste, probably more than comes up. Also, how much carbon is released in the current methods of food production? One thing to bear in mind is that the waste that you are dropping into the depths might eventually break down into CO2, but how long will it take? The CO2 global warming scare will probably be long gone by the end of the century, as the use of renewables will have mushroomed still more, and fusion energy will be widely available, and much cheaper than fossil fuel. We might even be worrying about the new glaciation, creeping down from the poles. It's overdue.

Yes, Iter is the big one. It's budget dwarfs anything else on the horizon. Somewhere in the region of 20 billion Euros I think. The private one you quoted, "Tokamak Energy" in Oxfordshire, is a bit of a mystery. It's not the one that Boris was looking at, it appears to be a totally private venture, although it's only a few miles away from the Government run JET establishment at Culham in Oxfordshire that I linked, which is the one that the PM was referring to. They seem to have a parallel agenda, working on small round designs, but have not yet made the progress that the official JET has.

That's all I meant in my original post. If you want to bury carbon, you would calculate where to site your unit to take advantage of natural "sink" conditions.

Is it known, or theorised, what happens to a primordial black hole that is less massive than the Moon, and so losing mass? Does it go through stages, or just remain a black hole and just fizzle out to nothing?

Maybe, but organic matter IS being captured somewhere in the oceans. Presumably that's where the petroleum industries' raw materials originated. Today's "dead zones" are coastal, and are reckoned to be caused by human action, so they don't come into the equation, and wouldn't have been the source of all that oil. Anyway, what I'm talking about is producing vigorous biological activity at the surface through a small amount of enrichment from below. Yes, you may bring up some carbon from below, but according to your own posts, "down below" is higher is oxygen, so the bacteria down there would have been gobbling it up anyway. You can't have it both ways. What's the difference between leaving it down below, in oxygen rich water, and bringing it to the surface? The only difference is the sunlight up above. As far as falling matter is concerned, If it's all getting hoovered up by bacteria as you describe, that's not the end of it's story. What happens to the bacteria? i would assume that they are in the food chain, so you have an eventual increase in productivity. In any case, as I said, I'm only interested in the potential for food production, not carbon storing. If that happened, it would just be an unintended bonus.

I wonder if its possible that DM can interact at very high velocities. As was mentioned earlier, DM has to score a direct hit on the event horizon of a black hole to get trapped. But what happens to the DM that only just misses ? Presumably, it will be travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light as it skirts the black hole, and could be encountering both matter and dark matter, coming in the opposite direction at high speed, as it skims the event horizon and flies off on it's next ellipse. If there are any conditions in which it could possibly interact, I'm guessing it's probably there, just outside the event horizon. On the page I'm linking below, a UK team have found that matter falling in from the accretion disk was travelling at 30% of light speed, so if dark matter was meeting it head on ( not being caught by the disk ) they would be meeting at very high speed. https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/matter-falling-black-hole-30-percent-speed-light