TheVat

You are operating with your own idiosyncratic definition of consciousness, which seems to bear little relation to the term as it is defined in cognitive sciences or philosophy of mind. If you start defining terms any way you want, then yes, I suppose you could conjure aware magnets. Since this is a science forum, there is an emphasis on consensus on what terms mean, hence my attempt to post the SEP summary of some commonly adopted definitions of consciousness. For example... What it is like. Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous“what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view. (the encyclopedia entry also describes a half dozen other ways of defining consciousness, some focused on more objective behavioral aspects, some on the perceptual, some on access to information, and some on a sort of meta-cognition - the point to make here is that we must decide which focus to discuss, when approaching the possible consciousness of very simple neural networks like a bee's brain)

Big umbrella term. SEP provides an overview of the conceptual range of the word. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon

I know this is more a memoir of growing up than a book about chemistry, but Oliver Sach's book, "Uncle Tungsten", does introduce the reader to chemistry in a way that conveys the fun and fascination. And you pick up some concepts along the way, in a fairly painless way. Kate Biberdorf's "It's Elemental," is also a good beginner's intro.

My recent tactic with the Musk manchild is to minimize my time reading or chatting about him or speculating on his cognitive abilities (reading only on a "need to know" basis). I hear the critiques of late stage capitalism, though. Have to wonder at what point will the income gap between the 99% and the 1% trigger social upheaval and revolution - or are they now only to be found in history, now that the Digital Age provides such attention span shortening tools to pacify the masses?

A bit OT maybe, but is half of that reserve Lake Superior? So the US already has access to that. Trump can send us all up to Duluth and Sault Ste Marie with those plastic straws he's going to bring back. And is too stupid to grasp that lithium, graphite, titanium, and uranium are none of them rare earths. He keeps calling them that because no one is going to correct him - sycophants don't do that. The rest of your post states the worst case scenarios - much of that depends now on swing congressional districts where MAGA policies will be doing the most damage. I still see some chance that the 2026 midterm elections could end the House majority and toss a big wrench in P2025. It's a US territory, like Guam and Samoa.

There's some pretty interesting theorizing out there, on how early anaerobic metabolism could get started. Iron-sulfur world is one example. (this is another one depending on hydrothermal vents, of which I'm a fan) Looks at how complexity can become self-accelerating, which could be a key development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron–sulfur_world_hypothesis The carbon fixation metabolism became autocatalytic by forming a metabolic cycle in the form of a primitive sulfur-dependent version of the reductive citric acid cycle. Accelerated catalysts expanded the metabolism and new metabolic products further accelerated the catalysts. The idea is that once such a primitive autocatalytic metabolism was established, its intrinsically synthetic chemistry began to produce ever more complex organic compounds, ever more complex pathways and ever more complex catalytic centers....

The worker buyouts and layoffs in the federal government are really not helping. Also, the forcing of telecommuting staff back into the offices will probably cause some disruptions in work. There's also a hiring freeze at SSA, and new legislation, the Social Security Fairness Act, which is slowing things down. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-administration-ssa-social-security-fairness-law/

The name "heat pump," is a good reminder of what it does. I would guess that reversing an AC window unit for heat is ineffective due to its engineering specs - it is designed only to pull heat from air at or above comfortable room temperature.

Mentioned at another forum, reminded me how great was this performance. To steal from the YT comments section: this is music played by a man who can't walk, composed by a man who can't hear. (so why ever bother feeling sorry for yourself) The Rondo, here, is probably the best known movement of any violin concerto, next to the first movement of the Mendelssohn concerto in E min.

There are also hypothesized abiogenesis accelerator environments, such as around seabed hydrothermal vents, which are areas conducive to chemosynthesis, possibly the first kind of metabolism on Earth.

Bear in mind that some of us are pretty busy these days, not just with life in general, but being blasted by the new administration with a gushing firehose of flaming crap and trying to get some sense of what's happening to our country. I did want to respond to some of your comments. A lot of feral cats do end up being euthanized, so I think one could argue that adoption has multiple knock-on effects including avian species protection, improving quality of life for both the cats and the humans who accept them as companions, rodent infestation control in houses (thus reducing use of poisons, and also possible spread of disease from rodent feces), etc. I don't see simple binary answers to the thorny questions of what moral weights we give each benefit or detriment. Being vegan is not usually construed as an absolute moral rejection of carnivory in all species - that would be ridiculous. A vegan can eat no meat, but that doesn't create a world where natural carnivores like felines can be converted to veganism. Given the control we humans have over ecosystems, we do have to consider our obligations of sound stewardship. Should an excess of predators on avian species, disrupting an ecological balance, be handled primarily with culling the predators, leaving them alone, or domestication and feeding with processed foods that use waste scraps from industrial food production? I am perhaps too biased (cat lover) to arrive easily at some objective assessment.

You are reminding us that Kennedy wanting to gut the FDA will potentially increase contaminated seafood shipments. I was also imagining Trump drinking lots of raw milk, to underscore his support of Kennedy. Pasteurization is for pussies and losers!

Depends on what is planned. Our government made few plans or regulations for affordable housing. The free market failed to supply them. So we are about 3.5 to 6 million homes short, depending on metrics used, resulting in massive problems including homelessness, people unable to move to economic opportunity centers due to housing costs (so they move to affordable backwaters with dead end jobs), people who are rent-poor/house-poor (bulk of income goes to shelter, causing hardship in affording other basic amenities), people living in substandard and sometimes health-damaging units where no other option is available, NIMBY political pressure from the spoiled affluent (further worsening the problem and fostering enclave mentality), and developers struggling with haphazard and antiquated zoning laws. So, yes, planning has its place.

Dear Mr Not an Actual President, Please follow all the health advice of your newly-appointed Secretary of HHS. Sincerely, Paul Brainin Thevat

The bobbles? I read the one (Marooned) that was serialized in Analog. Good stuff. He died of Parkinson's last Spring, RIP. I also liked A Fire Upon the Deep, in his Zones of Thought series. A former GF met him at a sci-fi conference, apparently by means of squeezing through a crowd and under David Brin's armpit en route. I cannot vouch for the veracity of this account.