TheVat

That is a rather precocious child! There are many things children can do to learn about scientific activities and which don't require dangerous chemicals or tools. Microscope is a good start, for sure. (she sounds a lot like me at around age 7-8, mere words can barely describe my excitement looking at my first samples of pond water, and human blood) Ant farms are classic, and fun. At the other end of the scale, there's the telescope (though those can require a bit more parental participation if you live where there is a lot of urban light pollution and need to drive out into the countryside -- an older child can join an astronomy club and join group trips to "star parties"). There are also simple kits for making electrical circuits and which don't require household current, just batteries. There's also that classic naturalist's observational tool: binoculars. Some quality instruments are a bit heavy for a six year old to hold steady for prolonged periods, so a small tripod is handy. I love the idea of a miniature greenhouse kit - neither I, nor my kids, ever tried one of those. Damn, I want to be six all over again!

Algae are one thing (eukaryotes, and they provide food to zooplankton), cyanobacteria are another (prokaryotes) and far more threat to ecosystems with toxic blooms, as @CharonY notes. Algae are also a food source for humans now, as anyone who's ventured into a health food store may notice. Switching from DHA (the most bioavailable form of omega-3 FAs) rich fish to DHA from algal oil would also allow us to eat less fish and still get the primary health benefit, which would ease pressure on stressed fisheries. The best plan for oceans is not to use them for experiments, unless the experiment is "what happens if we decrease present pollution?" We want to save phytoplankton, which are producing 70% of oxygen, and restore them to their normal levels by decreasing pollutants and nanoparticles of plastic. I've heard that, in terms of planting things in the ocean and pulling carbon, one of the best approaches that wouldn't mess around with ecosystems would be establishing big underwater meadows of seagrass. Here's a quick read on that.... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/underwater-meadows-seagrass-could-be-ideal-carbon-sinks-180970686/

There are a lot of subjects that many twenty year olds aren't looking for, but which would make them more well-rounded, smarter, and with better tools for critical thinking. Which is why I believe undergraduate education shouldn't be driven by a consumerist philosophy, i. e. by market demand. For that reason, I resist the notion of purely vocational tracks -- I think lack of cultural literacy and intellectual tools evident in diploma mill grads is what got us the abyss of the Trump years and the continuing fallout. The "liberal arts" education that was honored when I was young should be available to everyone and actively promoted as a public good.

This is soapboxing. Nothing Inbred says is supported by facts. And the constant application of "slavery" to people who live in developed countries is rather insensitive to people whose forebears were actually enslaved.

Yep. Having education be profit-centered has the same basic problem the USA has with medical care being profit-centered.

I didn't condone the sealioning, just meant I missed the Reg Prescott who brought a lot of interesting philosophy to his former haunt at my erstwhile website. When he's not playing the games, he can be quite the scholar and introduce a fascinating array of colorful characters in the philosophy of science and make them more understandable. Maybe I just don't understand the Scots.

@inbreeding -- what I fundamentally don't understand in your posts is how, if the web is stealing our minds and enslaving us, you seem to be so willing to use that web. If we were just talking about Twitter and FB, and all the clickbait "journalism," I might be inclined to agree with you on the potential for brain damage and meme enslavement. Your comments on Afghanistan are not well informed. I invite you to travel there, or to North Korea or Gaza or Zimbabwe or Russia or Cuba or Yemen or Syria or Venezuela (et al), and see how well you do there.

Another way to view scale dependence is to see some properties as emergent. If you have a couple water molecules, they aren't wet. Pull back to a macro scale, with billions of them, at the right temperature range, and you get wet. I have no problem with viewing the world as having all sorts of emergent properties, especially where you have a scale where tiny entities can be viewed in the aggregate. The way we get into trouble is when we start to assign causal powers to aggregates -- as in the case of a billion neurons giving rise to consciousness, and then we are tempted to say that consciousness itself has holistic causal powers that act on the whole aggregate. Downward causation is a challenge to the physicalist view of reality. PS - I really appreciate Reg/Davy raising issues about all this that get people thinking about how they use words to refer to large ungainly abstractions. So I'll miss him, warts and all.

@Davy_Jones, I'm fond of QBism, to get around the troubles of quantum realist interpretations. Limited time, so I'll leave it there. (Quantum Bayesianism is the longer original term. )

Thanks, didn't see that one. And reading the rest of that post, I'm seeing personal mental health needs that cannot really be met on the web. The family member getting typhoid suggests a challenging spot in a developing country. I hope there are people there working towards a more nurturing community -- sometimes it seems to me that America could, instead of trying to export our highly boasted values (often down the barrel of a gun), just send money and expertise for clean water, sustainable agriculture, green energy, and local entrepreneurship. When desperation drops, warlords and tyrants and religious zealots have less of a foothold.

Inbreed, are you quite young? Your posts may suggest some youthfulness. If you are young, then I would suggest that you are in a quite enviable position because you are at the point in life where many things start to get considerably better. A lot of pessimism is really just a temporary failure of idealism - really, I'd say most pessimists are people who started out very idealistic and then had some rude awakenings on life's difficulties. I think it's likely you will, in the next few years, encounter many people who evidence kindness and decency and these encounters will dispel some of your present gloom. Many good people who do good things are not, as you stated in a post, being "killed off." Unfortunately, modern media, in order to generate clickbait and revenue, tend to focus on a few areas of the world where there is an unusual level of violence and depratvity. They know their audiences are addicted to that sort of stuff, so that's what they focus on. Our posts do not show our IP addresses, so I don't know where you live (it's not mentioned in your profile), and of course I hope you are not trapped in some hotbed of oppression and poverty, like Gaza or Afghanistan, or someplace else where personal freedom is squelched by extremist cults or totalitarian ideologies. If you are, one thing you should consider is that you may be the true hope of that place getting better and that there are very likely others who quietly feel much the same as you do. Think of this: after 13.7 billion years, that pattern of thoughts that's called "you," gets to be alive and have the miracle of consciousness for a while. You should view this as an honor - most things in the universe do not get to be conscious or only have a minimal amount of it and are trapped by instincts and fear. You get to have special tools to get past those. Try to make the most of this moment in the light, and you will come to realize what an honor it truly is to have a human mind.

Haha. Looking back at my post, I probably could have added "the lab" to "around," in my remark about having a BEC around. And thanks for a great post on the ontological issues that arise when one tries to ascribe human macro-level realism to the world of the very tiny, the quantum realm. At some point, I wonder if we break down the root meaning of reality, we simply get "what is realized" and then only those entities where the realization is potentially shared between all. And for realization, context is everything to the truth of what is realized.

Trumpism is all memes and slogans and other things that replicate easily on social media. It rolls its angry tank treads over facts, nuance, insight, expertise, evidence, accountability, and error detection. Like fascism, Trumpism thinks the world must be simple. And people, too. So when you are beguiled by some really simple solution to a complex real-world problem, you're getting a little taste of what Trumpism is all about.

Have they? Again, the word fetish can drive otherwise sane people to make atoms to be real in the same sense that soccer balls are real. But anyone who's had a Bose Einstein Condensate around, where all the atoms merge into a single quantum mechanical entity, might wonder if they're real in quite the same way. Generally, I think "observables" describes the appearances without assigning the ontological status that we give macro-level stuff like soccer balls. OK, time for scrambled eggs and Fats Waller. I ain't misbehavin.

Around pages 16-21, this article has dozens of citations to studies of IR absorption and re-emission of CO2... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6174548/ This looks at radiative surface forcing.... https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm I hope this is helpful. And this video has a rather simple and fun experiment showing absorption.....

Inbreeding increases the rate of recessive gene disorders. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6509683 See also the link at the top of the article on the Syrian village hobbled by years of inbreeding. Google searches are your friend.

The belief in DM is based on observables. That's my point with the neutrino example (iirc some even posit certain neutrinos as candidates for DM). That's still the "real" of science, deferring to observables and inference from them. As Dr. Don said, don't get too attached to words. It's the concept underlying, no? Am out of time. Back tomorrow, which it probably is already where you are. Will stoke myself with poached eggs named Sinatra.

Plus one, KF. Positive feedback cycles with bog methane and coastal methane hydrates are scary stuff. I want to take up a couple other good points you raised, when I have time. If others don't get to them first.

When science and philosophy talk to each other, there's way too much semantic confidence placed in "reality." Davy, iirc, said something about how everyone uses the term the same way, but this heated discussion suggests not. Science defers to observables and only renders patterns and predictions about them. Dragging in Jane and the tool-using chimps only underscores that. Even ghostly neutrinos have to trigger a phototube that's picking up Cerenkov radiation from an enormous tank of water. So reality, for science, equates to some sort of observable. Something happened that's not just in my head (so to speak). The deeper existential implications of all these observables, whether they are substances or property bundles or algorithms in a vast brain (Philip Dick says hello) or shadows on a cavern wall is something that philosophers can thrash around with, using various epistemological tools and intersubjective workarounds. Mushrooms optional.

Also worth factoring in that the US subpopulations with a higher incidence of Covid also happen to be groups where childcare is less affordable and where it's more likely that grandparents are watching children. And rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, are higher in this older cohort. Among immigrant groups, extended family cohabitation is also more common, with grandparents living in close quarters with grandchildren. All these factors combine to suggest an urgent need to weigh in the risks of greater virus shedding. Which does come mainly from the unvaccinated.

AGW is also a rice-growing and ruminant livestock problem, given that they produce significant amounts of methane, a potent GHG. If more people equals more rice and meat consumption, then AGW will not be decoupled from population growth just by elimination of dirty energy. We may also be looking at switches to millet, and ways to alter the digestion of cattle (or go to vat production of beef, etc.) if people insist on traditional foods but want to keep atmospheric methane levels down. There are already experiments underway with adding a certain type of kelp to cattle feeds to lower their methane emissions. https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions-82-percent

None that you know of... I always imagine a tiny cohort of Trumpists who aren't total morons or total bigots but have naiveté in politics and cling to the idea that, flawed as he is as a human being, he is a vehicle for what they imagine as an isolationist, small-government ideology that they sincerely believe will be a good thing. I've met a couple like that. I really had to bite my lip not to say things like did someone drop you on your head when you were little?

Excellent idea, @J.C.MacSwell. A wall could also serve to confine politicians, who comprise a clear and demonstrable public menace, inside.

Abduction, possibly. You observed Davy's linguistic action and then make an inference to the best explanation of what he means by poached egg and Frank Sinatra. Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,[1] abductive inference,[1] or retroduction[2]) is a form of logical inference formulated and advanced by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce beginning in the last third of the 19th century. It starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it. Abductive conclusions are thus qualified as having a remnant of uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as "best available" or "most likely". One can understand abductive reasoning as inference to the best explanation,[3] although not all usages of the terms abduction and inference to the best explanation are exactly equivalent.[4][5] Which came first, the Frank or the egg?

I sometimes wonder at the level of mystification here. Wasn't science originally called "natural philosophy" and branched off from philosophy, developing methods particular to unraveling the mysteries of nature? I have this odd feeling that the OP question was dealt with eight pages ago, and the thread morphed into: does modern physics range beyond science and into metaphysics and epistemology ? Which goes back to wrestling matches like Neils Bohr and Einstein arguing over the Copenhagen interpretation and quantum realism. There's really no doubt that theoreticians do plenty of philosophy, especially where a wavefunction is concerned.