ScienceNostalgia101

Ah... so if someone put a tube of air through that green pipe, and into compartment B, the air would then force the water out of compartment B while still allowing it to remain full in compartment A? Would the air pressure it takes to get air into compartment B then depend on the column height in compartment A, or on the column height in the surroundings outside of both compartments? (Ie. Assuming both compartments were at the bottom of some body of water?)

Kept forgetting about this thread until now. I did get around to listening to Baker et al. Med J Aust 2020 a few weeks ago; I don't remember all the details, though it was overall pretty interesting. However, one part of it that makes me question the author's judgment is when China was invoked as an example of the effectiveness of hard lockdowns. China has been lying about this from the start; on what basis does anyone claim to know precisely what's going on in that country? I'll need to Russell et al. Lancet 2021 6:1 to form a more complete opinion on this matter, of course, and I'll let you know when I do. But for now I want to leave you with the above question.

In this level from Super Mario Bros. 3 (the real deal, not a fan game thereof) there is a region of trapped air surrounded above and to the sides by airtight walls, and surrounded from below by water. However, the adjacent airtight compartment is filled to the top. Would it be possible to achieve this sort of thing in real life by siphoning the water out of compartment B and into compartment A, and/or siphoning the air out of compartment A and into compartment B, or would differences in fluid pressure prevent that?

Wasn't sure whether this was better for science education or here, but when in doubt, I go with "here." When I was a physics student, I always found it confusing that on ramps, the usual force components (cosine of angle off the ground for horizontal, sine of angle off the ground for vertical) were flipped for ramps. I get the reasoning for it, and I'm sure there are a bunch of mnemonics various teachers use for it, but I found that after I was no longer a physics student, and before I became a physics teacher, I spent so much time playing with programs like Paint Shop Pro that I found an even better way to remember it. First, you draw the ramp with the components into and along the ramp drawn... ...then, you rotate the image until the ramp looks like it's flat and gravity is at an angle... ...and that way, you know that whatever angle the ramp makes with the ground is the angle the force "into" the ramp makes with gravity, making the other angle the difference between that angle and 90. What do you think? Would this be a good way to simplify it for high school and/or introductory college physics students? (I know at later physics courses it gets more complicated and requires a more sophisticated understanding of geometry, but at earlier levels, I would think this kind of reasoning would be better than nothing.)

Again, they were more okay with IVF, even though it also destroys embryos. Wouldn't the popularity of ESCR be about equal to that of IVF, rather than at some sort of middle ground between IVF and abortion, if they believed life began at conception?

That's not what I was saying. At all. (And if that's how you interpreted it, why didn't you say so the previous time?) But two of the deadliest new contagions of the 21st century both came out of China. You mention swine flu and that it killed relatively fewer people. As well, wasn't it compared to ordinary influenza in its tendency to finish off the elderly while sparing the young? Coronavirus was deadlier for the elderly but claimed young lives as well. It's almost as if a secretive government not accountable to its citizens has less incentive to crack down on unhygenic practices that create especially-deadly new diseases. Funny you should mention restricting all travel. You ever notice overlap between the same kind of "global citizens" who make the 40% who say they've never left the USA out to be some kind of philistines compared to everyone else were the same people who balked at travel bans? How did that work out? The decision they made out to be an uncultural one was the more responsible one, it turns out. But no, restricting all travel altogether would be a little too drastic. I do think travel plays a legitimate purpose, not just in leisure, but in allowing people to go overseas to use a skill their home country no longer needs but some other country still does, and hopefully bring back some of the money they earned. I've always had much more respect for travel for work than travel for leisure. And a 2-week quarantine is a smaller fraction of a 1-year work trip than a 4-week vacation. But it's not "all or nothing." We had embargoes against Cuba for less than this. There is precedent. You mentioned previously, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and New Zealand. What the first three have in common is experience seeing through China's other lies, as China's been pissing off its neighbours for a lot of reasons since before the pandemic. But what distinguishes the latter is that it's not quite as worshipping of the market fairy as the USA is, on issues ranging from healthcare to education. Belief that China is at fault and that Trump is at fault are not mutually exclusive. Even if blame were a conserved quantity (not sure how you could quantify that) it needs to be assigned on a "Xi Jinping for maintaining a system that allows unhygenic wetmarket conditions to fester and prioritizes saving face over saving lives" and a "Trump for doing worse at handling this than other first world leaders." Again, another strawman. One can support travel restrictions AND "test and trace" strategies. You act as if enacting travel restrictions would somehow cause people to refrain from doing all else that is necessary. But how effective has DELAYING travel restrictions been at making people do all else that is necessary?

I wanted to use as broad a term as possible, because although Christianity seems to contribute to the most noticeable share of the opposition, I wouldn't want to diminish the role of other religions either. Islam in particular originates from the same Old Testament, is comparably popular on a global scale with potential for future influx on a local one, and has a track record of opposing some of the same things Christianity has historically opposed, like homosexuality, extramarital sex, etc. (Well, the latter until recently, as the Trump era has exposed.) Now, to whatever extent different religions, or different denominations of Christianity, have differing roles in this, that's a conversation worth having, but there's also the question of whether the "root causes" to that opposition are still shared by those other denominations, which can still cause harm on other issues. Which is why the emphasis, in the OP, was whether that "root cause" was some aspect of religion itself or some aspect of something else. I can see how a religion that says we're all born sinners, that their holy book is the only way out, that tries to make us too afraid of the devil to doubt the increasingly-discredited claims it has made, etc... could contribute to people's willingness to a form of medical research that has potential to benefit all of us, with the possible exception of big pharma which could lose a lot of money if people no longer need to purchase their treatments. Otherwise you'll get something akin to the way libertarians support capitalism while trying to downplay its role in the rise of people like Trump.

For years, I've been angry at religion over its opposition to ESCR (embryonic stem cell research). So angry at it, I threw leftism under the bus just to see of that'd help prop up anti-theism's reputation. So angry at it, I used to blame religion for everything from homophobia to the election of Donald Trump, without actually stopping to ask myself if religion's even at fault for the aspect of it that got me angry at it in the first place. See, one of its detractors' favourite talking points is "if it were really about cures, they'd tell us specifically what disease they're going to cure, how they're going to cure it, and channel the money straight into that and not into studying something else." But I had also from time to time seen it disputed whether or not it's practical to do science so narrowly. And then I found this. Listening to this video yesterday brought back all those debates from way back. Imagine if these researchers were told to stick only to cancer research, and never look into how the same methods they intend to use against cancer could be used against coronavirus. We might have denied ourselves a coronavirus vaccine. Traditionally, highly-religious-but-otherwise-progressive types; the types most likely to be offended over my "religion gave us Trump" remarks (the religious right was more likely to take it as a compliment) were never overtly against ESCR, and by the fact that Obama was re-elected after resuming government funding for it, probably not secretly against it either. These people would always blame opposition to it not on religion, but on opposition to abortion, and opposition to abortion on wanting to deter anything short of abstinence until marriage. This leaves behind a few questions. 1: Who are they trying to impress? If the vast majority of them really did only want to enforce monogamy; and plenty of people who support abortion rights are ALSO sentimental about marriage; why wouldn't a legal right for married couples to abort be expressly written into law? 2: Why, if they wanted to deter extramarital sex, would they not come up with some excuse to tax promiscuous wealthy people who can afford children, and offer the resulting revenue to lower-income married couples that can't? 3: Why, if they're looking for excuses to oppose abortion, do they not come up with a new one that doesn't involve as much collateral damage? The ones who claimed it's about "life begins at conception" could silently disappear into the night (which they should be doing anyway) after passing the torch to a new generation of anti-abortion crusaders who could say "well... zygotes aren't babies, but fetuses... vaguely look like babies I guess" and still appear, however superficially, to be meaningfully distinct from the "life beings at conception" crowd, giving them no need to defend the "life begins at conception" crap at all, and freeing them up to carve out an exception for ESCR just like they do with IVF. 4: If anyone on the right was against extramarital sex, why the hell did they let Donald Trump get away with it? The other option, of course, is to assume these anti-ESCR types are ignorant enough to think embryonic stem cells come from fetuses and not from IVF zygotes. However, I don't know how to prove that. I know a lot of these same people are also against fetal tissue research, but that doesn't prove they actually get it mixed up with ESCR. How if at all would one go about proving or disproving that?

Which is why I suggested the travel restrictions be indefinite. This isn't the first new contagion coming out of China, and most likely, it won't be the last. Testing and tracing is the ideal, but there are questions around how enforceable that is, especially among a nationality as worshipping of capitalism as Americans. As well, even if it turns out it's more enforceable than we thought, if the virus was already spreading before it was detected, doesn't that mean some sufferers will already have been sentenced to death by its presence in their bodies long before testing and tracing policies were implemented? Why should THEIR lives matter less than the convenience of some traveller from China who doesn't want to be quarantined?

I think most jurisdictions go easier on the users than the dealers because the image of someone making big bucks, no matter what risks they're facing, evokes less sympathy than a suffering drug addict. Even so, in the United States, it makes little difference; you go to prison, for using OR dealing or just about any crime unrelated to drugs at all, no one's going to want to hire you when you get out. In Norway, it makes little difference; you go to prison, the system will rehabilitate you. I'm not sure what countries are enough of a middle ground along the "deterrence vs. rehabilitation" spectrum to make whether you're a user or a dealer that big of a difference. So I see numerous references in this thread to alternatives not being offered by the businesses. But does that in and of itself not reflect a lack of consumer demand for alternatives? In our society we have consumer choice in everything from whether you want your instant coffee french vanilla or dark roast, to whether you want your almonds barbecue flavour or hickory smoked. If those kinds of choices are available, but green alternatives are not, does this not suggest that those kinds of things matter more to the consumer than green alternatives? Climate change denial, obviously, deserves a slice of the blame for that, but it is not just a matter of climate change denial. Some people don't deny it (either that or are too dishonest to bring up their climate change denialist beliefs in public) but are too apathetic to do anything about it and/or too worshipping of the "free market" to be okay with any carbon tax that would be considered an infringement on "freedom of choice." And again, when you point the finger, there are three pointing back. If blaming climate change denial for supposedly-non-climate-change-denialist voters' apathy, what about the two-faced nature of the aforementioned Greenpeace GMO study establishing some of the "lying for the environment" notion has already crept into some biology research, making it not too much of a stretch to wonder if some of it could have seeped into climate science.

That's why I said "a few towns" in which I've taught, rather than only one. If it were just my hometown obviously it could be dismissed as a one-off. I've noticed it in multiple towns, each of which routinely re-elect some of the same representatives who helped legalized gay marriage in Canada. EDIT: But you don't have to take my word for it. Just look at how split so-called "homophobes" are among each other on what kind of a problem they have with homosexuality. Religious homophobes (the kind you hear on TV) will say it goes against the Bible. Masculinity-worshipping homophobes (the kind you encounter on 4chan) will say it gets in the way of accepting a woman's sexual advances; including those of a woman to whom you are not married. (Remember, pre-Trump, religious homophobes claimed to be against extramarital sex too.) Who's to say which of these variants even led to the use of "gay" as an insult in the first place? I sometimes wonder if homophobia might've been a bit of an oversimplifying misnomer, actually. Looking down on homosexuality and otherwise respecting individual homosexuals are not mutually exclusive any more than looking down on any other facet of someone's life and otherwise respecting them are. Well, it's either that, or what biases the "insultor" thinks others have. Otherwise, why pick that as an insult at all?

That's good to know, at least you're consistent on giving the benefit of a doubt. But too often many if not most opt to jump the gun, or worse, claim it doesn't matter if they get someone's motives wrong, only which side of the issue they're on. I don't claim to know the etymology of "alright mate;" I guess it's mostly a European and/or Australian thing? But I don't think it's derived from "mating" any more than the word "roommates." It's pretty obvious there's other explanations of that etymology than that one. But "gay" and "faggot" have less room for interpretation. Individuals may have picked up the habit from "others," but where did the "others" pick it up from? As for how to make this scientific... might I ask which particular aspects of my argument need to be cited? Either way, would this thread be better off moved to the politics board?

If Europe also had mandatory quarantine on travellers from China, the disease wouldn't have gotten into Europe either, and all of this could have been prevented.

Catastrophe doesn't care for borders, but the virus can't cross them unless a person does. If China doesn't clean up their act, why can't other countries co-ordinate on quarantining travellers from there before letting them into the country, as a precaution against any other new contagions China's unique blend of secrecy and censorship allows to fester? Doesn't everyone else's right to survive take priority over their desire to travel?

While the subject has come up a couple of times on this board, it came to mind especially lately as this site seems especially convinced of the social sciences' integrity despite some infamous polling failures in recent years. One thing that has always bothered me about the gay marriage debate is that people who call everything they dislike gay, and everyone they dislike a faggot, but support gay marriage (ie. the vast majority of people in a few towns in which I taught; though I'm sure most of you can think of such towns) are given the benefit of a doubt on being more homophobic than the average person, but that people who DON'T do so, NOR support gay marriage, are not. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Why would it occur to you to to use these things as insults, if not a deep-seated sense of superiority over them? Perhaps they might just be imitating others, but the same applies, why did it occur to everyone ELSE in those towns to start using these things as insults in the first place? At least opposition to gay marriage is explainable by blind religiosity, gender role zealotry, or even merely the belief that the risk of a pregnancy in a straight relationship is the only thing that makes the nature of their relationship any of the government's business, without one needing to be more homophobic than anyone else. What's worse, anyone pointing this out is made out to be deep down against gay marriage, and when they say they support it, told they shouldn't even care if people are getting someone's motives wrong. "Misrepresenting people's motives? Who cares? You're on the same side as me on this year's trendy cause! To hell with principles!" If a referendum were held tomorrow, I'd probably still vote in favour of gay marriage (for now), but feel more conflicted on it than I used to. We hear people pretend to be "gender-neutral" about whether males are the hornier sex, or females are the pickier sex, etc... yet the virginity of a man or boy is a more often sought out subject of insult, than that against a woman or girl. And it's not because they're going any easier on the girls either... if you've ever seen the "am I the only one here who isn't a slut?" meme, you've seen the kind of intense vitriol thrown the author's way, over an easily sympathizable fear that her integrity in not resorting to makeup or revealing clothing will deny her the boys her rivals for them get. But the fact that of all the insults chosen, "virgin" isn't one of them, as if even those throwing that vitriol know that her virginity is by choice, not by circumstance. Meanwhile, a guy who expresses even the faintest of concern that women who prefer degenerate boyfriends will cause other boys to imitate said degenerates to get girlfriends will immediately and almost reflexively get met with cheap shots about his supposed virginity. Does this suggest the supposed skepticism, on males' presumed horniness and females' presumed pickiness about sex partners, was a facade from the start? If "spontaneous sincerity" is not to be considered the more meaningful clue to people's real opinions, what's the alternative? The social sciences' surveys have had dismal results in recent years. In 2016, in the lead up to the election, people were biased against facing the possibility that respondents who said they'd vote Clinton were lying. Not just left-wingers who hated bad news when they didn't know what to do about it, but right-wingers who were pissed off that respondents were being blamed instead of pollsters themselves. Hell, BOTH sides were pretty biased against facing the possibility that person A might have a reason for lying that person B might not be aware of. So what's stopping there from being more where that came from, as far as polling failures go?

Britain and America at least speak for their citizens. The CCP only speaks for the predecessors from their own party who seized power violently decades ago, not the citizens of their own country who were kept just as in the dark (and then some, since then) about this disease until now.

For someone who supposedly has a problem with my "assertions without evidence," you sure love to insinuate ones of your own. Expecting people to value integrity if the world will incentivize the exact opposite of integrity is only going to result in the people who value integrity the most being unable to compete with those who value it the least. At best, it will be a short-lived symbolic victory, as people who value integrity will be squashed too early to make any significant difference. At worst, it will be a deterrent against any integrity on the part of others.

Well, yeah. This isn't the first troublesome result to come out of letting countries like China and Russia into the UN. Start over. Have alliances between actual free countries, untainted by the influence of tyrants. If we're not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, why are we expected to negotiate with the geopolitical equivalent thereof?

A bit off the mark, but closer than most have come. The "maturing" of the organization is "maturing" it into an institution which values its connections with China over calling China out. Even if you give the WHO the benefit of a doubt on COVID-19, there's a much more clear-cut case of it for SARS. Enough is enough. Let the rest of the world represent its PEOPLE, and let the governments that only appointed themselves have no say in shit they were only going to lie about anyway. Alternatively, have 2-week quarantines of all travellers from China indefinitely until/unless it drastically reforms to become a vastly more transparent and democratic society. I think we're all getting tired of the idea that people all over the world have to die in the name of political correctness every time a new contagion comes out of that country that their government can't admit to until it's too late.

Basic integrity is only as resilient as the willpower that sustains it. If you see your rivals surpass you by being lying cheats, your willpower might not remain intact. But yeah, I don't single scientists out for this. I would've thought my mention in the OP of my thoughts on polling would've made that clear. In any case, thanks for the explanation, CharonY. I'll keep it in mind from this point forward.

Of course not, but the continued purchasing of Chinese goods and services is far more widespread than murder. Partly because murder is illegal, but not exclusively; and even to the extent it is illegal, it means a plurality of voters have accepted that allowing murder would curtail freedom more than prohibiting it would. They just haven't accepted the same regarding environmental harm or continued importing of cheap goods from China.

The social sciences by their very nature don't have as much incentive for facing the truth as the physical sciences. If you had an engineering client who couldn't handle the truth, the question becomes whether they're any better at handling a building collapse that kills their colleagues because they weren't warned. For comparison, the social sciences' "take respondents at their word" approach to surveys collapsed spectacularly in 2016 political polling, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans since, and yet people still swear by it. if people will sugar-coat respondents' likelihood to lie, what's stopping people from sugar-coating customers' likelihood to care more about keeping up with the Joneses than about freeing the Uyghur Muslims?

The fact that they continue to purchase products made by Muslims enslaved in China?

I haven't said it's justified. I'm just saying it's human nature. The average person, unfortunately, would rather buy products made by Muslims enslaved in China than see their neighbours enjoy the cheap goods they're missing out on. 😕

Mind if I ask where in the post I lost you, then? EDIT: And as a follow up question to the reply, how much time are they given to develop this treatment? Just because one hasn't gotten where one's going, doesn't mean one will never get there. What criteria do they use to gauge who's on the right track, let alone whether they are making an honest attempt to be on the right track?