TheVat

"Let them eat cake!" This guy is hilarious!

What are you, some kind of liberal socialist?

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-vladimir-putin-sculpture-pops-up-new-york-targeted-kids-2022-8 Public art is wonderful. Especially when kids can pour sand on it and squirt it with water pistols.

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T.Hanks for that!

Travis Taylor, who has a series on the History Channel concerning the Skinwalker Ranch, is apparently who he means by "Travis Trenton," so I think that helps evaluate the overall precision and attention to detail we're getting from the fittingly named Glancer. https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Travis-S-Taylor/575640599

I think he's seen the movie about this place... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinwalker_Ranch According to skeptical author Robert Sheaffer, "the 'phenomenon' at Skinwalker is almost certainly illusory. Not only was the several years long monitoring of 'Skinwalker' by NIDS unable to obtain proof of anything unusual happening, but also, the people who owned the property prior to the Shermans, a family whose members lived there 60 years, deny that any mysterious 'phenomena' of any kind occurred there". Sheaffer says "the parsimonious explanation is that the supernatural claims about the ranch were made up by the Sherman family prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow". Sheaffer wrote that many of the more extraordinary claims originated solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after the ranch was sold to Bigelow.[10] In 1996, skeptic James Randi awarded Bigelow a Pigasus Award for funding the purchase of the ranch and for supporting John E. Mack's and Budd Hopkins' investigations. The award category designated Bigelow as "the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult".[11]

A larger part of our primal nature is to rant on and on about matters we know very little about.

Even volcanoes, usually associated with global cooling events, can sometimes pump water vapor into the stratosphere and achieve a warming effect for several years. This seems to be the case wrt the Tongan blast a few months ago. (just what Earth needs right now, right?) https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

Seems like the same old Left Strawman emerging here, driven by the same RW talking points. Rather than take the trouble to define what he means by Left policies, he simply goes right to bashing caricatures that appeal to the darkest incidents of historical totalitarianism. I doubt we can actually steer this towards discussing realworld outcomes in various countries, with comparisons of living standards, happiness index, poverty rates, access to healthcare, maternity leave, elder care, etc. Because to go that direction would discover that center-left liberal democracies like Denmark or Japan get the highest marks on these quality of life metrics. When you can't pound the facts, you pound the table.

A, C, K, K2, D, copper, selenium, zinc, and a few other essential nutrients, and you would be short on methionine. This is a terrible diet and would result in multiple deficiencies and eventually severe illness. About the only thing positive I could say is you've got your fiber covered. And subbing potatoes for wheat, while it would mitigate scurvy, would further reduce some of your B complex vitamins and be less of a complementary protein with the chickpeas. Starchy tubers are generally not nutrient-dense.

The meaning of Left-wing, i.e. the specific ideologies, really depends on the location of the Overton Window at a given time and place. You really need to specify where that is and what specific policies you are opposing. Swedish liberal democracy and Stalin really aren't at all the same thing, and are greatly separated on any political spectrum. Here's a wiki definition of Left, to get started: Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.[1][2][3][4] Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated.

This whole will she won't she story has been a snoozefest. Serg's difficulty with identifying Pelosi's gender was amusing, though.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/nichelle-nichols-dead-star-trek-lieutenant-uhura-1235189880/ An interesting obit. I didn't know about her recruiting stint with NASA. Or that MLK was a Trekkie. And talked her into staying on the series when she was planning to leave Knew that she and Shatner broke the interracial kiss barrier on American tv, which required malign telekinetic beings to achieve but hey it was a start. May her hailing frequencies always be open.

Masking tape on the cut line, and a finer toothed blade? Have had pretty good results with that.

Well, better I think. Recall the traditional Jeffersonian idea of democracy was that representation was not just a passive reflection of popular wishes but also an exercise of leadership and wisdom, offering people a broad vision and educating them on a range of issues so they can more clearly see what opposed corruption and fostered civic virtue. This was why Jefferson et al so distrusted aristocracies, which they saw as self serving and prone to corruption.

@exchemist Fantastic paper. Plus one. I like Pigliucci. The Hard Problem does seem like a category error, and it's one called to our attention nearly a century ago by Gilbert Ryle. This is a good response, also, to Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment Mary in the black and white room. Which causes some philosophers of mind to go off on a mystical tangent over qualia (aka "raw feels") and their seeming mystery. Perhaps we can say that qualia are simply how brains appear from the inside. Just as green is how my wife's eyes look from the outside when viewed by a terrestrial hominin with color vision where there is sufficient ambient light. Someone deprived of mirrors isn't going to lecture us on The Hard Problem of My Eye Color.

Kind of a sticking point with "instantaneous" awareness in this chat, given that there's zero evidence of quantum processing in brains (Hameroff claims notwithstanding) and much evidence that human responses take a little time, as do nerve impulses. Things that feel instant, when tested, prove not to be. Our minds paper over time lags and provide an illusion of "instant." Subjective impressions can be deceiving. Emergent phenomena like consciousness may feel holistic and irreducible, but that's not evidence that they are. But that feeling of unity provides a useful narrative for a biological organism that has to survive a challenging environment. As is often noted, the brain is "too hot, noisy, and wet" for quantum processing. Penrose's OR remains hypothetical at this point.

When you come to a four kin the road, take it.

And bacon grease is consistent with veganism, so long as you do it by means of liposuction on free-foraging pigs. The pig is more svelte, you get the great flavor, everyone wins.

The Catch-22 on ranked choice is a problem. Even Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912, couldn't break through in spite of garnering a large coalition behind his Progressive party. Which resulted in Taft, who would have likely won, losing to Woodrow Wilson. Taft had won easily his first term. ("Bull Moose party" was the nickname of TR's Progressive party) If it actually were Biden v Trump in 2024, as @J.C.MacSwell mentioned, it does seem possible there could be some unprecedented win of a third party. That would be two uniquely poor main choices. A third option like Yang, or maybe Amy Klobuchar, could start to look pretty good.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/27/1114074697/james-lovelock-gaia-theory-dies LONDON — James Lovelock, the British environmental scientist whose influential Gaia theory sees the Earth as a living organism gravely imperiled by human activity, has died on his 103rd birthday. Lovelock's family said Wednesday that he died the previous evening at his home in southwest England "surrounded by his family." The family said his health had deteriorated after a bad fall but that until six months ago Lovelock "was still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and take part in interviews." Born in 1919 and raised in London, Lovelock studied chemistry, medicine and biophysics in the U.K. and the U.S. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Some of his experiments looked at the effect of temperature on living organisms and involved freezing hamsters and then thawing them. The animals survived...

Would be hard to explain how those five retroreflectors got on the moon, for starters. Also, there are quite a few lunar rocks which have distinctively different mineralogical signatures from terrestrial rocks. (and they are also different from lunar origin meteorites)

There is. When I hike in rocky canyons around here, a broad brimmed hat that blocks direct solar rays is insufficient because UV bounces off some minerals in rock and so I get some UV from below. A similar case is walking by water - UV will bounce off the water and come in below the brim. This reflected UV is less than from direct sun, but it is still significant from a dermatological perspective if you are exposed for more than a few minutes. Sand and snow also reflect quite a bit of UV.

Yes, good point, emergent qualities are inherently unpredictable. And that recognition of sentience will require a formidable sort of Turing Test. Something that can tweeze out all the clever artifice that might manifest in a really high grade simulation (or somehow discern what David Chalmers calls a P-Zed).