TheVat

I've tried reviewing actions I've taken, sometimes to find a lost object. I guess that is a fairly literal retracing of steps. Sometimes it helps just to stand in the spot where I was doing something, or observing something. (e.g. looking out back window, noticing cat chewing on grass, remembering that I need to pick up more cat food. If I go to the back window later, and am trying to remember that, it will come back more easily) Occasionally, there will be something I was going to tell someone, and in that case sometimes it is helpful to try and reconstruct a train of thought. Not sure if that is really following a thread, or more like piecing together various shards of memory to reconstruct a picture. The trickiest objects to find are ones you set down to answer the doorbell. If you are like me, you don't give sufficient thought to where you are placing the item and if a long interaction follows with the person at the door it makes it harder to reconstruct memory. Maybe what OP is talking about is more like finding the way back to what started an odd topic of conversation. How did we get onto the subject of X, anyway? Didn't we start out discussing B? Then you might follow a chain of conceptual associations backwards.

I've seen that. That's in Mr Bean Takes a Holiday iirc. Doesn't he end up depositing the repulsive oysters in his napkin and then imto the purse of a diner nearby? Funny stuff. One of my favorite Arkinson lines was from Johnny English (the second one?) - Dear God, please don't let me die at the hands of the Swiss.

I don't hear a "U" in that word, Limey. Now, back to my donut... Yeah there is something about taking testimony that makes such extraordinary claims but the testifier is legally enjoined from offering any evidence. It just feeds the ongoing mythology, but not any real craving for information.

Agree with @Ken Fabian that good governance must contain the excesses, corruptions and narrow goals of a capitalist system. Capitalism seems to trend towards predation and plutocracy, especially in countries like USA where more people get their information from advertising than from books and real journalism.

When we first had two cats newly living together, one was much smaller than the other (who was a hulking 18 pound brute, none of it fat, would beat up on dogs three times his size and send them off whimpering). The little one immediately started overeating and gained six pounds. We wondered if she was trying to mass larger to reduce the size disparity. Are you suggesting people do this? I found your post a little hard to follow.

DYHACFT? 😀

While I agree that Grusch's credibility needs further testing (and apparently he saw none of these things himself and cannot present any real evidence), I can also observe that photojournalists are skilled at the art of the unflattering photo. My problem with clandestine labs that are reverse engineering saucers or chunks thereof is that I know engineers like to drink. The US government leaks like a sieve on its best days. What are the chances that this shroud of secrecy could have been maintained for so long?

73% of vote. Against an incumbent billionaire. Perhaps voters were tired of the corruption.

Restored the Constitution and threw out a repressive regime headed by a corrupt Russian puppet. It's what people who like press freedom and democracy do when a boot is positioned on their face. Zelenskiy won by a landslide. Did you know heavy consumption of right-wing propaganda kills brain cells as rapidly as huffing spray paint?

I've noticed there are impressionable ages in life, when books, lyrics, etc sink in deep. Teenage years seem to be good for that, because you are sampling adult narratives then, and there's the general excitement of entering that grownup world. Oddly, I will still recall a science fiction short story in an anthology which I only read once, because it seized my imagination and/or had a powerful emotional impact. Whereas whole novels I read just a decade or two ago tend to vanish over a mental horizon unless I talk about them a lot with others or there was some special quality e.g. a character who was very similar to someone I know, or a mind blowing plot twist, or a thematic tie-in with other artforms. Same here. Vinyl records heard as a child. Irish folk songs, from the Clancy Brothers. Pete Seeger. Satirical political songs from Tom Lehrer. Sixties rock albums my uncle played a lot. Broadway musicals. Top Forty songs from the seventies, when my peers and I first had cars with radios and eight-tracks. And all the pre-sixties classics from Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern et al, that popular crooners were still performing.

Connie Willis 1990s novel To Say Nothing of the Dog was the motive force getting me to read Jerome's classic. (I was a bit disappointed to learn that Montmorency was entirely fictitious, unlike the other characters)

Interesting committee testimony yesterday in US Congress: Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on national security that the American government has spent decades secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground, and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology, according to Grusch. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without proper supervision by Congress. In the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs. A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S. military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or by people within the government? Both. After not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and there has been considerable hype—says more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington state and crash landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more than it’s letting on. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/ufo-fever-congress-hearing-aliens/674835/

The deadliness of the disease being treated factors in too. If the drug treated pancreatic cancer, whose five year survival rate is around seven percent, then the patient would likely agree to a drug or procedure with some serious risk of adverse effect.

Or maybe lazy journalism, misusing "extraterrestrial" as synonymous with alien civilization. Given the article's misleading title, no surprise.

Everything is a little easier with liquid nitrogen. Locks that resist a hammer may succumb if the metal is made more brittle. (offered in the lighthearted mode of @iNow - it may be hard to remain unobtrusive carrying around a tank of LN and deploying it) Demo at 4:40... There's also the "outside the box" method, with bikes, of unbolting the rack which the bike was locked onto. https://bikeportland.org/2022/12/05/video-thief-unbolts-rack-and-steals-bike-in-downtown-portland-367879 If you're a municipality or business installing a bike rack, be sure to have the bolts shielded in some way.

From the article... Well, this is on Mars, so I would say it is very probable they are extraterrestrial in origin. 😀

Maybe some esoteric type of event in geoscience or astrophysics? Asteroid impact or something impacting a point on a planet or sun?

A pitbull, chained nearby. Bikes with quick release wheel and saddle. (stops ride away thefts, anyway) Be Paul Erdos (scroll down to "Personality") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős

Good post: helpful. Seems more useful when one goes with gender based on descriptive criteria rather than causal ones - on observed phenotypic patterns rather than on the underlying causal process. Those patterns are an ongoing interaction with the environment it seems. And our present environment has gotten really strange, at this point in the Anthropocene.

Just called a spherical wave isn't it? Or maybe one could elaborate and say spherical wave originating at the pole of a sphere. If we were on Waterworld, Kevin Costner could drop a big rock in the ocean at one pole and the wave would travel in the manner described in the OP (in real world, obv, it would be disrupted by other currents and Coriolis).

Think about the handheld leaf rake. Steady improvements for a few centuries and then....Perfect for its job, quiet, low-maintenance, lightweight, fuel-less. Not every technology must necessarily keep advancing rapidly. Some plateau. Wiki "mature technology."

👍

Well that all makes sense, but then why are you participating in this thread? Clearly the fate of the biosphere is not critically dependent on inclusion rules in sports. It feels like you want to have the discussion but want to dismiss the issues. This thread is located in Biology, so I took it to be about the physiology of trangender folks and how that interacts with their engaging in sports. I was not weighing its importance relative to the issues of human survival and sustainable society. I was just curious about people who have made choices of self-identification that are quite different from mine. (mine can be accessed via Eric Idle's The Penis Song)

@mistermack I think I've seen that spot in your pic. On west edge of metro Denver? It had a different joke on the sign when we drove through there.

Thanks, I think the way this was quoted was what initially led to my surprise, because it made it sound like the stat was about severe conditions. Yes, once you include all with managed hypertension, asthma, common conditions of aging like osteoarthritis (something like 25-30 percent of population), and those who have had an extended period of depression, then that figure makes sense and could even be on the low side.