TheVat

Max Tegmark, a modern neoPlatonist, seems to find a mathematical universe reasonable. His book is very provocative and carefully argued, though not persuasive to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mathematical_Universe

Have replied twice here, seems like the points I tried to offer aren't really penetrating, so moving on. If the forum heading changed vegan to vegetarian, I think the answer would be yes, beneficial. Countries like India, where 31% of population is vegetarian, it definitely makes a difference in the footprint. And countries like Germany and UK, where vegetarian population is growing rapidly (10 and 14%, respectively), the impact is growing. Germany also has 42 million who describe as part-time vegetarian. Similar growth is happening in many parts of the world, especially in younger cohorts.

I am currently designing an interocitor, which emits dark light by inducing a current of anti-plasmons through some bendy plastic straws and a chronosynclastic infindibulator. Science!

Yeah, the value of drain-out faucets is learned in one lesson. Before they were prevalent, houses here all had to have an interior shutoff valve for outside faucets. Am in South Dakota, so PEX is popular. It can balloon two to three times its nominal diameter without bursting. I was happy to live in a PEX plumbed older house... until all the dread over plastic nanoparticles ratcheted up. Now we're advised to only use the cold tap for cooking or drinking, and let it run ≥ 30 seconds first.

Well, extreme vegans are probably one percent or less of the population, so I don't see them having the power to halt the use of bees for pollination. Plus there's the absurdity of them making plant farming more difficult, when plants are what they depend on. Plus there's the fact that using bees for what they are naturally meant to do, pollination, means their chances of survival are actually enhanced if farmers are paying apiarists to keep and manage healthy bee colonies. As I said, most vegans I'm familiar with don't take the hardcore philosophy and are willing to carve out exceptions.

I don't think all vegans are opposed to using bees for pollination. There are a range of vegans. Some vegans in India call scallops and oysters "sea vegetables" because they lack a CNS, and allow them in the diet. Some vegans eat honey, some don't. A recent article mentioned vegans who will move to eating eggs if they are free range and certified cruelty free. There's lots of carving out exceptions among vegans, when they can see an ethical path to it. Realistically, humans are probably not giving up apples, melons, almonds, berries, and other foods that require bee pollination. Unless CCD (colony collapse disorder) wipes out too many of them, and even then there are alternative artificial methods.

Or perhaps because the satire was about as subtle as a sledgehammer, and none of the scientists seemed at all believable as real people. Broad caricatures are less relatable, for many viewers. And the Trump caricature was low-hanging fruit. Yes, science denial is dumb. Message received! They milked the public apathy joke for all it was worth, and padded a half hour sketch into a feature-length movie. Meh.

Would finding low prime factors be of any use? Maybe not.

I'm a bit unclear on how earth/moon would cast shadows large enough, at that distance, to much restrict the visible area. Especially if the Webb is following a system that's in orbit around the sun, which is shifting the star field for it anyway. Wouldn't the sunshield itself also impede the view in that direction, and again the star field would shift throughout the year such that no area would be blocked for long? Also: how does an "orbit" around a libration point use less fuel than nudges at the point itself? I'm sure it does, but there's something counterintuitive about it.

Well established science that grazing herds are beneficial to health and biodiversity of grassland ecologies. TBH, I had no idea this was even slightly controversial. I would Google "how grazing animals help grasslands," to get a rich sampling on this topic. I cannot tell if you read my entire post, but I exampled an indigenous species to American grasslands in the last paragraph. I did not mention how the bison recycles nutrients, grazes to prevent biodiversity-reducing overgrowths, mitigates wildfires, and other functions as well. Carbon capture in naturally grazed (not overgrazed) grassland is also helped.

There are grazing lands that are ill suited for cropping, are ecosystems that benefit from a grazing ungulate, where small herds will probably remain justifiable. Culling would yield meat as a luxury item. The present situation, where croplands that could feed people or are better off fallowed are cultivated to grow livestock feed to maintain enormous herds and daily meat consumption by 90-95% of the population, is not sustainable. And the harsh confinement conditions of animals raise big ethical issues. (I eat oysters, which lack a central nervous system, for B12, which plants do not reliably provide. I can't tolerate soy, so tempeh is not an option for B12. Also eat sardines, which have a low eco load, and are developmentally pretty close to unsentient.) The biggest issue may prove to be water per gram of protein, however. It takes a lot of water to produce meat, and we are already draining aquifers to keep pace. And with red meat, there is the methane problem, especially at present herd sizes, and types of feed prevalent. Vat (heh) meat would solve many of these problems. But the Great Plains of the US still need grazing herds, which are vital to that ecosystem. The bison, in particular, is a perfect fit, and its hooves are especially good at breaking up and aerating the soil. It would also make sense to restore wild boar populations in the Eastern woodlands, ecologically.

Nothing, but then there would need to be a splitting off of a new timeline, one in which you never existed. The original timeline would have to still exist, else how would you be there shooting Dad in the first place? And any pastward time travel that even just displaced a few molecules would create a new timeline, in this way. Time travel of this type only seems possible if Everett's Many Worlds interpretation is correct.

I had an interesting time explaining to a relative why an object at L2 couldn't "just use the Earth's shadow to keep cool." I sent along your first link, which clarifies the issues much better than I did. I did point out that at the distance of L2, the apparent disk of Earth would be too small to cover the sun adequately (even if it were possible to hold such a position). L5 is ideal for a colony, hence the name of the famous L5 Society.

Yep. Not sure Dehaene is paying attention to complexity theory there. And the human body is not an isolated system, so any supposed paradox would have to ignore the fact that it interacts massively with a complex environment and biochemical history of the planet, as it develops. This all goes back to guys like Warren Weaver and "organized complexity" and emergentism. The house analogy doesn't apply, either. A stud is a complex artifact, with complex structure produced by a tree and its ecosystem, but the blueprint doesn't have to code for all that. It just says basically "go buy a pile of studs, 92.5 inches long (USA)."

LQG is hardly being ignored. Dozens of research groups, led by prominent physicists like Carlo Rovelli, are working on it. It is very far from being ignored or suppressed.

It's quite alright- News was the better location for the topic. I buried mine in too specific a forum. And I like your OP. Thread should just import Peterkins post.

Mod: any chance we can merge this with the Wilson thread I started yesterday?

Thanks. I was tossing out bad ideas, in hopes a good one would appear. And, it occurred to me after posting, that the direction of coiling could simply be what Gould and Lewontin called a spandrel. It is just a byproduct of some other feature that is adaptive. (like, say, mooring consistency) Somewhere in the instructions for polyps attaching, as they evolved, it was simpler to have one instruction, like "extend a knot of cells for mooring the next fellow there on the upper right." If you had a binary choice of instructions, you would just get a less stable mess, so at that evolutionary fork in the road, selective pressure was strong for one path to be taken. It didn't really matter if it was left or right coiling, just that it was consistent all through the genome. BTW, I liked your Coriolis anecdote. Postscript on spandrels, for those who may be new to the concept: Gould and Lewontin defined a biological spandrel as a byproduct of evolutionary adaptation. Simply put, they’re like ‘leftovers’ of some other trait that evolved. This means that the spandrel isn’t an adaptation to anything in the environment. Instead, it is a secondary trait that arose from the development of another primary trait. The easiest spandrel to visualize is the human chin. One hypothesis about why humans are the only animals that have a chin is that it is merely a byproduct of the growth of different parts of the jaw. The word spandrel comes from the architectural feature that Gould happened to notice in St. Mark's Basilica. He wanted to distinguish between the way it was presently used and its actual architectural reason for being there.

Perhaps the common helical orientation relates to crowding effects? Where these helical strings cluster more thickly, a transient event like a storm would generate some currents even in this placid zone and the strings would bump into each other - when they have common chirality, they are less likely to get tangled in each other, and so each colony thrives more. (where they stay tangled, perhaps it's more likely some large swimming creature will run into the tangle and tear it up or uproot) This might (I know this is a stretch) exert a small selective pressure over time for a single chirality.

Linus Pauling was a brilliant chemist, he won the Nobel Prize, but he also championed the theory that Vitamin C in megadoses was a miracle treatment, which turned out to be nonsense. All the world got from Pauling's "vitamin therapy" was a mass increase in kidney stones for several years. This kind of thing, where eminent researchers stray outside their area of expertise, happens a lot.

https://apnews.com/article/edward-o-wilson-dead-biologist-bc3d64fceb5200dd88d67187ef2a5cee

The Sun is Murdoch owned tabloid garbage. You can use the paper version for birdcages, or your dog (if it is very undiscriminating in where it makes its deposits). I found this source, which might be a little less breathless. https://phys.org/news/2018-11-chinese-fusion-tool-million-degrees.html

Between the hemispheres is a description sometimes applied to Kiribati. Is that the general location? Chirality in some species, like molluscs, relates to members of a species tending to all spiral one way to ease reproduction. The adaptive advantage for coral is harder to discern. Would be interested to see larger sample than a few dozen.

My early training was in physiology, so I'm familiar with interfacial water. The author seems to have some grasp of the concept, but then seems to make a leap from electrostatics (applicable in cellular chemistry, as in all chemistry) to electrodynamics, which doesn't seem applicable. It seems like he wants there to be electrical charges in fast motion and some EMF radiation, such that tissues are "broadcasting." At that point, as Swanson noted, you need experimental support!

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ayn-rand-writes-rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer