TheVat

I have seen this novel on library shelves and meant to get around to it. Thank for mentioning it.

Extra lime. Makes stucco. Regular concrete is made of cement, water and sand. Stucco is made of these ingredients as well, plus lime. One big difference between the two home exteriors is that when dry, stucco is breathable - it has tiny pores that allow water to evaporate from behind it so that moisture doesn't build up and cause rot. (and yes, Americans do distinguish between cement and concrete, as Euros do. As does everyone, I had thought, since they are two different materials)

I note that some in the American audience of the wildly popular series 24 expressed concern that since the action supposedly unfolded in real time Jack Bauer was apparently never relieving himself or (and this is sooo American) hydrating . And these worriers over Mr Bauer's kidneys and bladder were, ostensibly, adults. Nowadays, of course, a lot of streaming (ha) content now regularly shows characters using the toilet, which imposes a level of realism that I never really felt necessary. For me, it adds nothing to the narrative flow (cough) or character development. This may be where moderators step in to break away an offtopic digression. And perhaps say, "urine trouble."

Wow. Cognition and evolutionary theory is an active area of research - not sure @Luc Turpin why you keep doubling down on this assertion that it's being ignored. The cognitive buffer hypothesis is yet another example. The cognitive buffer hypothesis posits that domain-general intelligence is favoured directly by natural selection to help animals cope with novel or unpredictable environments, where general intelligence is adaptive because it enables individuals to exhibit flexible behaviour, and thus find innovative solutions to problems threatening their survival and reproduction. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5413890/ The someone was me, IIRC. I am starting to wonder if cognition is being confused with some broader range of biological stimulus and response. I will add a wiki link, in hopes that it will provide a definition that clarifies that it is something more than reacting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognition Chartres could not have been built without baguettes and marmalade! Do you know nothing of the French people??

Please do us the courtesy of responding for requests for citation. Having partially gutted a couple of century old wood houses, I can say that very little if any of the wood needed replacement. And lath and plaster walls often don't require gutting, given the way lath makes plaster repair feasible. So your implication that it is the wood that is the problem seems misplaced. As others have noted different climates/bioregions call for different materials, each with different eco-liabilities. (most lumber btw is NOT from clear-cutting virgin forest, but from what are essentially wood crop plantations - not great, often biologically diminished monocultures, but they consist of fast growing timber that rapidly absorbs carbon, so not the worst way, either) Non responsive to previous post's reasonable request for citations. Reported to mod.

Hogwash. Look into cognitive genomics. It's an active area of research. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5791763/#:~:text=A wealth of twin and,variance in diverse cognitive abilities.

Concrete production is currently very carbon intensive, while growing wood (or bamboo) actually fixes carbon and then sequesters it for a long time. As a percentage of all homes, wood structures lost to fire or flood or wind is actually quite low (and with sane zoning laws and building codes, would be even lower). What I've heard is that the cement industry has to decarbonize massively for it to be a solution. This needs more research, imo. There are wood houses in Europe that are centuries old. My house has held up quite well for 120 years, and looks to be good for another century. Woods like doug fir are quite sturdy. And in earthquake prone areas or where there is any sort of ground shifting, wood flexes. Not a virtue we usually find in concrete.

If an ethical choice can be objectively so, that would imply an agreed upon definition of ethics, would it not? And one presumes a definition grounded in objective facts about the welfare of animals. For example, it's pretty clear that animal confinement involves some suffering, so a choice to eat only wild-caught fish would reduce some suffering. And that choice would also reduce carbon footprint, given that wild caught fish "raise themselves" and, thanks to modern canning methods, can be transported far inland efficiently and without refrigerator trucks. That's just one example, but it shows there are objective facts about benefits to the environment and reduced animal suffering that can be factored in to one's menu choices. Ethics seems to me an endeavor where we try to become aware of causes and effects of our actions, rather than seeking to "be better" than someone else. (which usually engenders attitudes that are counterproductive to fostering awareness)

God is dead. - Nietzsche Nietzsche is dead. - God God seems like one of those handy concepts when a community tries to enforce ethical rules. The chief, or constable, or consigliere can't monitor everyone or resolve disputes all the time, so they promote the idea that a divine eye in the sky is watching them and they'd better be good for goodness sakes.

This timescape model is fascinating. When you read their explanation of different measures of time in the filaments, superclusters and voids, it makes you wonder what took so long to arrive at such a theory. It just makes sense. Large-scale structure, "lumpiness," has been known since what, the 80s? Could this be farewell to lambda? (tempted to call it the silence of the lambda)

@Luc Turpin I feel you are ignoring my point about how all organisms carry abundant neutral mutations that can come into play later as adaptation. It doesn't have to be "coordinated" in any teleological sense. Feathers start out as mutant follicles, which first prove harmless, then later useful in conserving heat. Then after a long time, another mutation effects loose skin flaps under the front limbs, and it happens to help tree dwellers glide to the ground when needed, a proto-flight that is later augmented by feather-hairs that allow lightweight expansion of the flap structure and rudimentary control surfaces. Each small step towards a wing is adaptive, as it allows more proficiency in moving between branches or getting to the ground without injury. In an environment that selectively favors innovations towards mobility, all these changes spread across millions of years are adaptive and not statistically unlikely. Time was vast and environments rich, in the vast warm jungles of the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. And so continues our slide into the abyss of God of the Gaps.

It's important that you understand that most mutations are neutral - deleterious mutation vanish quickly and beneficial mutations are rare. So the majority to be found are neutral. Many neutral mutations are simply codons which will yield the same amino acid. All these neutral mutations are constantly there, rising or dropping in frequency due to genetic drift, and providing plenty of chances for adaptation. A mutation for prolonged lactase production could be in random genetic drift in N Europe, until an environmental change causes widespread protein shortages and a new selective advantage to adults who can digest milk. Feathers were originally a mutation in hair production which first proved adaptive for generating greater warmth. Later, exaptation selected for a function, flight, different from the original adaptation. These changes are not purposeful pre-adaptations, they are just circumstances favoring alleles formerly neutral - in small populations, they might have drifted to either loss or fixation - a stochastic process. There's no "incredible amount of pre-adaptation," just a robust variety of alleles already there and now and then proving to be handy. This happens as a natural thing where you have the genetic diversity provided by neutral mutations in all their abundance.

The overwhelming majority of species on Earth were, and remain, single-celled, and did not eventually evolve into multicellular organisms. This suggests there is no hidden teleology, as some organisms remain single-celled quite successfully adapted to their environments while others experienced pressures towards the cooperative aggregation, chemotaxis, and cell specialization that multicellular forms bring. This article in Science may be helpful in looking at the transitions to multicellularity. https://www.science.org/content/article/momentous-transition-multicellular-life-may-not-have-been-so-hard-after-all There seems to be nothing particularly miraculous or difficult about this transition, given certain conditions, and many single-celled species are in fact already somewhat prepared for it. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved.

Always like Brubeck, and play a couple of his pieces on my 400 lb. 230 string guitar, partly thanks to hand injuries Brubeck suffered early in his career which caused him to develop a style that is easier to play for those of us with shorter fingers. Adderly very listenable, very much a poet who recites through his sax. That sextet he was in, with Davis, Coltrane, Evans, et al, really had no weak links. OM refers to a type of guitar manufactured by Martin.

Pervasive is the word. My partner, possibly even more an anti plastic zealot than I, still occasionally finds bits of a neighbor dog's toy that was stuffed with poly fill and got run over by a lawnmower several summers ago. Some bits landed in our yard and she finds them while pulling bindweed. Even years later they appear much as they did when they first burst out of the dog toy. Though less of a weeding enthusiast, I have been startled when I do weed at the sheer number of plastic scraps that blow into our yard. And, sometimes, plastic bags caught in the branches of trees (it's quite windy here).

A lot are made from polypropylene or PET or nylon, and the paper ones tend to use plastic fibers as a sealant. The OP paper detailed the release of MP particles from those with PP or nylon. Some companies are switching to bags made only with plant fibers, like sugarcane or paper. Without spamming, I will just say they are pretty easy to google. This also relates to @zapatos question - the natural fiber bags will compost. The ones with polymers, well, there is no good place for them - that's the point. In the landfill, they will leach MP particles. And they don't recycle. ETA: polyester fabric, btw, is PET. So some of the natural tea bag advocates are also big on natural fiber clothing. I'm not quite there yet, but I do limit my polyester content to 40%, on clothes that get frequent washing like teeshirts. Usually a 60/40 cotton/poly blend.

The term is possibly amusing to an American who lived through the 80s and the Game Boy onslaught, as it also breaks down into "Super Mario Nation." 😏 Which onslaught also increased plastic pollution. And the thread is rescued from the dripping fangs of off topic irrelevance as they nearly snap together upon it.

I underappreciated Yes back then, only really discovering them decades later. And Squire is amazing on bass, as in Roundabout. And, as you mention, much of Zeppelin or Deep Purple hasn't really stuck with me, though I occasionally find myself enjoying their instrumental pieces more now, like "Lazy" or "Kashmir." I was on the grassy knoll in Dallas, in 1963. Just some weeds and burger wrappers. Funny how those weird theories get so much traction. There was footage I saw on the news that evening, 9-11-2001, where it was pretty clear where the pancaking started.

They had strings, but also electronics... Supermarionation (a portmanteau of the words "super", "marionette" and "animation")[1] is a style of television and film production employed by British company AP Films (later Century 21 Productions) in its puppet TV series and feature films of the 1960s. These productions were created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and filmed at APF's studios on the Slough Trading Estate. The characters were played by electronic marionettes with a moveable lower lip, which opened and closed in time with pre-recorded dialogue by means of a solenoid in the puppet's head or chest. Thunderbirds is a British science fiction television series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, filmed by their production company AP Films (APF) and distributed by ITC Entertainment. It was filmed between 1964 and 1966 using a form of electronic marionette puppetry called "Supermarionation" combined with scale model special effects sequences.

With teabags it actually is just using them. But yes, for sure, any plastic waste that's not processed will be degrading into micro plastics in the environment. The only one of those electronic marionettes series that jumped the pond was Fireball XL5, which I remember our NBC ran on Saturday cartoons. So we were spared the posh Penelope. I discovered this about her - Later, her father was requested by the government to travel to India to organise a tea-growing community. The Indian climate did not agree with Penelope, so she returned without her parents to England, where she was put into the care of a governess... And, more importantly to this thread - She takes tea almost religiously and can communicate with International Rescue via her Regency teapot.

This study reminded me that our family's opting to use only loose-leaf tea may have been the way to go. My partner uses a tea ball infuser, I just dump loose leaves in the cup. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-commercial-tea-bags-millions-microplastics.html (this website is part of the Science X news network)

(unforeseen page break - this replies @swansont post on previous page which the edit function won't let me access) There could be wall ketchup over Musk at some point, and it's enjoyable to dream of a Trump deportation dragnet which includes Musk. In the America I used to imagine I lived in, Musk's offer to rape Taylor Swift might have been sufficient to motivate Congress to look into him being an undesirable worth purging.

Musk is a US citizen. He is electable to any position except POTUS and VPOTUS. I think he would be a viable candidate for my county's Weed Control commissioner. Though I would likely cast my vote for the opponent who didn't favor using war surplus flamethrowers. Yes. He is, and will remain, a world-class asshole.

US Constitution, Article II, sec. 1. That's where the gratitude may be sent. (not that the legal meaning of "natural born" hasn't been contested several times) (as it happens, my avatar is the noted lexicographer whose definition of natural-born was seen as establishing the meaning used in the Constitution)