TheVat

Not to mention that Z. turning down NATO was not going to prevent invasion, given Putin's oft stated intentions re Donetsk and Luhansk, and multiple indications that he wants to restore the old Soviet empire. And NATO certainly didn't need the invasion to "justify" its existence - there was little chance of a "friendly" Russia that was osmotically absorbing niceness and democracy from Europe. We should never let Mack's sympathy for the devil cloud a clear view of Putin as a vicious thug who will bully his way from Kiev to the Brandenburg gate if he can.

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/03/and-consequences-after-an-amazing-series-of-unforced-errors-indictment-is-coming/ A useful summary of Trump's successes at digging himself deeper into his hole.

I was tempted to reply to Mack, but then wondered if he was doing a little leg pulling. Surely climate disaster is, by numerous indications, already underway. We're at mitigation, not prevention.

Nice to talk with someone who shares my own level of knowledge. I had heard a bit about the problems with schemes to glean tritium from a lithium blanket, but your linked article goes much farther in explaining how paltry the yield might be. Would be quite anticlimactic to discover there is no practical large-scale fusion (except for the incredibly productive reactor located 93 million miles from here, which is still billions of years away from decommissioning). If we end up needing the higher temp containments to do other types of fusion, that could be, again, decades away if ever.

Kamala Harris spoke to a child in Kaliningrad on Sept. 1? Wow, I really missed that news! We do have an unusually dynamic vice president, when it comes to foreign relations.

When they say 43 empty classified folders, does that mean to imply that all those documents are missing, and that the 27 documents listed did not match any of those folders? OTOH If you knew that 27 documents could be matched to specific folders then is the term "empty folder" simply a description of the materials as found, i.e. were they just temporarily removed from folders to be perused and then sloppily never returned to those folders? How are folders labeled, beyond their classification banner? As for the possible 16 folders that are orphaned, do we know that their contents were not returned earlier this year - i.e. could they have been returned in a sloppy form, just one big stack minus folderage? Or were they part of the other huge mass of material (some 1500 documents) that was removed from his office Sorry, I haven't followed all this in the fine-grained detail that would give me a clearer sense of whether we are looking at destruction or spectacular sloppiness or both.

Show me a sudden burst of UFO sightings or ghostly apparitions or strange hominins, centered on a town in economic distress, and I will show you a cabal of local businessmen coming up with creative ways to boost tourism. Not yeti, but soon!

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (bleak as hell, powerful) Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (wit, humor, deep perception of human nature, utter command of the science.... Atwood is a genius) Cell, by Stephen King (just bizarre, but well told story) I am Legend, by Richard Matheson (true classic, a master storyteller) Blindness, by Jose Saramago (one of the books that earned him a Nobel Prize) Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle (are there any Larry Niven novels, or co-written novels, that aren't pageturners and huge fun? I'm unaware of them, if so.) The Windup Girl, which @Ken Fabian mentioned, struck me as amazingly ambitious yet I found myself not connecting and dropping it after a few chapters. Not sure why, but it is sad when brilliant books go unread so I might check it out again. The Fifth Season, by NK Jemisin. Utterly original!

Haha! I knew the moment I typed that last sentence that I was setting up that quip. The hope I expressed was that DOJ openness will narrow the conspiracy crowd to the serious cult worshippers. All the FBI needed was a record of the proximity of the items to the classified docs. And no doubt they reckoned that keeping passports was something the RW spin machine would seize upon as more Gazpacho tactics. As the law prof in your link said, the personal items allow one to reasonably infer that the person had "dominion and control" over the documents. If it was anyone but Trump, I would feel confident that the document possessor was headed for the slammer.

I meant "defuse" in the sense that Garland himself stated, that his DOJ would be more transparent on details of the investigation partly because of the welter of wild conjectures and claims of the DOJ conducting a political hit on TFG. DOJ would not normally have released the affidavit or made an open filing on the GJ subpoena, hiding of documents, etc. These are all extraordinary moves to help nip conspiracy theories in the bud, AFAICT. I hope they work.

My sympathy to the FBI, having to release (through filings) details of an ongoing investigation. They have no choice if they want to defuse some of the Far Right conspiracy theories and violence promotion that's oozing through social media. But criminal investigations tend to suffer when so much has to be shared at this stage. IIRC, one of the redacted witness names on the affidavit released last week has already been deduced, because of a little too much transparency. That's dangerous for a witness, and hurts the investigation if other future witnesses are then scared off or less forthcoming.

How would an AI determine what is humane?? There is a reason we hand such questions (or try to) to ethicists, social workers, judges, psychologists, anthropologists....and not machines that have zero clue what it is to be a human uprooted by catastrophe.

I did not say ALL water diversions are doomed to fail - I was basing the comment on the many catastrophic failures (especially riparian containment) in the US, where specs were overly optimistic about nature's good behavior. My opinion is mainly informed by observation and living, myself, through two floods. America has had an intense obsession with progress and rapid development that often leads to political machinery that ignores warnings from cooler heads. Many water experts here are currently making the case for moving some communities to higher ground as the less costly option.

@zapatos I love "Jessica." Must have heard this a thousand times and never tired of it. Thanks for one thousand and one! Wish Duane had lived to join that session.

Yes! When I hear that phrase I think of that golden piano era when ticklers like Fats Waller, Zez Confrey and Jelly Roll Morton were wowing audiences with their superhuman fingerwork. And most keyboards were composed of actual ivory.

Yeah, Am in P might be an acquired taste for some. I connected with it (and all things Gershwin) at an early age, then learned to play some of the Daly transcription when I studied piano. (It's brutal and I can only get through a few passages) I like both Brubeck and Class Gas, and play them on the piano from time to time. Both Take 5 and Blue Rondo are within my playing ability, thanks to the fact that Brubeck when young broke his hands in a car accident and thereafter opted for chordings that favor stiff hands. A lot of his transcriptions are in the public domain, so I can just download pdf files for free.

Boaz Sharon gives one of the best renditions of Gershwin's symphonic masterpiece. Somehow, on a piano, he captures and clarifies every instrumental voice in the piece. How have only 30K viewed this??

I suspect the most viable solutions will involve conservation of water and evaporative loss reduction. Xeriscaping, drip irrigation, cover materials on reservoirs, etc. I doubt "shipping" water up grades will ever be economic, unless it's Perrier. Similarly, floodwater has a way of defeating large-scale engineering. Discouraging development of lowlands and subsidizing the move of populations to higher ground will probably be more economic than endless levee and seawall building. Too many people, through no fault of their own, live on lowlands that should have stayed as marsh and wetlands purifying water naturally and dampening storm surges. Good posts, very thought provoking, sorry to be late to the party.

One should not ignore the role of Big Pharma in promoting the chemical imbalance paradigm. As @Peterkin noted, the thread might work better without dead philosophers and multiple issues - perhaps just focus on the chemical imbalance paradigm and what clinical data is actually out there. It's so easy to cherrypick data in arguing either for or against. And blaming capitalism and its political life support systems, though an easy target, is simplistic.

You're writing a thesis concerning the recipe details of making TNT? My guess is that specific procedural details on making an explosive would violate site rules. If you had trouble locating the forum rules, you are not the first. When I first joined, I looked in announcements but only found piecemeal posts amending said rules.

Much overlap with others. Mig's list very similar to mine in HS, also heavy doses of sci-fi (IIRC, we read Childhood's End, by ACC, for a HS class. Also Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.) Nice to see someone found Borges at an early age - The Garden of Forking Paths, or anything from his Ficciones, would be an ambitious read for many high schools. I remember Tlon, Uqbar completely blowing my mind. I am assuming Peterkin's partaking of Lady Chatterly was extracurricular. If it wasn't then clearly I went to the wrong schools! Still have yet to read The Centaur, though have read a fair range pf Updike. Another Not Typical High School Fare. I liked Nevil Shute's OTB more than the film adaptation - parts of the film seemed a little contrived or didn't quite flesh out characters.

Leaching is a problem either method, and heat can aid the break-off of plastic nanoparticles into the food as well as leaching pthalates, PFAS, BPA, dioxins, etc. Best to transfer food from plastic packaging to a glass bowl, then heat. In fact, given that more thermal energy is transfered through the plastic, with your boiling method, it might be slightly worse. With microwaves, just water molecules inside the food mass are being agitated, so the plastic container is only warmed peripherally.

More affordable magnets and tech advances have the fusion community hoping for (economically viable) net positive output by the 2030s. Here's an overview of what's going on in fusion research, from the Washington Post (non paywall version is the second link): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/26/nuclear-fusion-technology-climate-change/ https://archive.ph/3L8wC

Wondering if there's some translation problem here. The OP is talking about houseflies - small flying insects.

Sealed bearings. Cleaning is sufficient.