TheVat

Once you've got a good Faraday Cage, drop your cellphone in there, and try to call it from another phone. A pretty reliable test. (My spouse has some valuable data stored at home, so we made several FCs in case of EMP attack) Avoid things that have power cords going into them, even if they appear to be a tight metal box. Moon's trash can is a good one. Be sure it's lined with something so that your computer hardware isn't touching the walls (i.e. air gap). Antique dealers sometimes have old double boilers, or any large metal cooking vessel with a tight lid. Small items, like thumb drives, can go in old metal food tins if tightly lidded. May you never have need for this.

LoL. Apparently the moon now has an atmosphere.

OTOH, perhaps the accident was God's way of telling him to die, and so all that fine automotive engineering and medical treatment thwarted the divine will. If people often argue that we cannot plumb the mind of God, being limited creatures, then they have to accept such possibility as part of their faith. (Just playing here...)

Not downloading anything until you summarize what this is about. Advances in tillage?

Charles Trevelyan says hello! One word for you: Picard. Outstanding first season. (JK about Charles Trevelyan) Much better than tormenting tardigrades. Not that the tough little buggers can't take it.

Thanks. Yup, I found the amusing downtime thread from October 2019 ("it was perfect!") I had to read a book. Made of paper. You can't imagine the ordeal of paper cuts and tired wrists! Seriously, I think it's a lovely tradition, reminds us all of the inherent fragility of the net...

Would it be possible to know who the owner is? Like others here, I used whois search and figured out it was a failed DNR, and wondered who I could email which of course was no one. I've experienced this with a few other websites where the owner hides behind a veil of anonymity and can't be reached about issues where only owner permissions can access the problem. I wondered if one of the mods was an owner or knew the owner, so tried to find email for them, but found only a PM button for swansont at thenakedscientist website. And his last activity there was 2015. A nice site, btw, having several members who are also members here.

I come from the American Midwest, where loess is more.

In case Peterkin's formatting above is not clear, that quote begins several paragraphs of expert opinion I was greeting with skepticism. Not sure about the ground zero thing. I understand the motivation, but just haven't firmly committed. Buck Turgidson, yes. Perfect.

https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-war-bombs-us-safest-place-protection-1750293 (Text of article below video) I find some of the scenarios of survival presented in this article bordering on absurd. And the notion of "rebuilding." Rebuild what, exactly? With what food supply? Newsweek does its readers a disservice, giving a false idea that a few places blessed by distance from strategic targets, favorable wind patterns and rain shadows, and what? A decade of canned goods for all? An amazing supply of engineers, educators, physicians, stored gas and diesel and heavy equipment? will somehow rebuild civilization as we know it. My favorite expert quote in the article was: Days? Really? I rarely use emojis, but....😂 It gets better here: Sure, pal, heading to Home Depot as soon as the mushroom cloud s appear! Oh, wait, the intense multiple EMPs fried my car's electronics. More handy tips.... Aside from the idiocy of thinking you can drill a deep aquifer well after the fact, someone needs to point out that that east-of-Rockies rain shadow zone (where I live) is bristling with missile silos and heavy bomber bases and other attractive targets to an adversary in a nuke exchange. And lots and lots of loose dry surface soil...

I agree that many postmodern thinkers were engaging in a useful interrogation of science and its methods and choices of study. I was directing my earlier remark at the branch of postmodernism that construed science as a politically driven "metanarrative" that has too sweeping an explanation of how reality works. Thinkers like Lyotard (or Foucault, who rejected any chance of fundamental principles to discover truth) went too far, imo, in their characterization of knowledge as intrinsically political and ruled by a group in power. He and others seemed to say that science simply could get no foothold in objective truth and all its aims and findings should be subject to radical skepticism. Attacking the complacency of modernism doesn't have to mean dismissing the quest for solid models of objective reality. And, for sure, I think the PM scrutiny of areas like race or intelligence (IQ, e.g.) or how minds work, or realist theories of quantum physics, is incredibly valuable. Your example is one where PM critique was sorely needed. And yes, possibly this derails the topic, but what fun! 😀

First, down pillows are made to have the case removed and washed. The outer case, and liner, absorb hair and face oil keeping the inner pillow clean. The inner pillow is not meant to be washed. Down pillows need to be plumped, only. Just pat them with hands when rising in the morning and spin them in the air a couple times. You may be okay because the wet interior was in constant motion, which would make mold growth less likely. If it had just sat wet for a couple days, it would be a different story. Please save yourself a gigantic electric bill (and huge waste), and just wash the case next time.

My god that time lapse is eerie. I remember the final test ban was in 1996, but I guess not everyone signed onto that one.

Am going to try and read this thread this weekend, not only to better understand the scientific attitudes towards realism, but also how someone broke Joigus. JK. Years ago, I had this notion that entanglement was analogous too two distant astronauts tethered together. When the tether breaks in the middle, there is no FTL signal, but their state changes instantly to "untethered." Nothing spooky. Just a change such that, if we measure either astronaut for tetheredness, we will find them unmoored. Yeah. That was when I realized it was a mistake to map RW situations onto QM.

Defining such words nowadays points to one of the core challenges postmodernism has made to the classic Enlightenment idea that we can determine objective truths and arrive at principles that may be universally applied. IOW, such terms as "success" underscore the subjectivity of their use, and their critical dependence on cultural norms. If we use it in the larger sense, i.e. success in life, then it becomes clear there is no epistemological height that would allow us to determine what is best - no objective set of facts is going to sort out evidence and decide for all which life is best. Is the monk more successful than the wealthy merchant, is the physician more successful than the mechanic? Depends on all these cultural, or maybe subcultural, sets of priorities and valuations. I don't think postmodernism was correct in its attacks on science, but I think it did take Enlightenment assumptions of universal ethical and moral principles and ask hard questions, especially when one particular society could have dominance and global power and sort of erase other cultures. That's not a good sort of success.

My seventh grade math teacher could do that, too. Very effective at keeping order.

I have questions. If you use holy water and soap to wash your dishes, does that make the dishes holy? Or just cleaner? How does holy and unholy balance? Is there a way to quantify them when, say, I eat pork (unholy to Jews and Muslims) off the plates washed with holy water? Could the holy and unholy cancel out in that situation? If I drink holy water which then hydrates my stool, does that produce holy s--t? Or was drinking the water a bad action which taints my innards? Also concerned about sources like the Jordan River - if someone dumps garbage or effluent in the river, does God get irate? Will he punish the person? Were is the scientific proof you mention that Zamzam Water decreases fatigue? This needs a citation.

True. Putin's ego is such that I'm not entirely confident that he will be able to grasp the magnitude of all his losses that you describe. Like Trump, he may prove to have that pathological knack for declaring a win where none exists, and boast that the retaking of Ukrainian soil is a glorious step towards reunification of the old Empire. I'm not sure he would even be that concerned about retaking irradiated soil, though I still haven't seen evidence that he's quite that demented. One of the tragedies of Hiroshima, beyond the horrendous deaths, is that its geography was such that a lot of the radioactive plume blew out to sea and vanished. I've always had this nagging fear that some ruthless leader will see that as a way to think, "Hey, it's not that hard to contain the effects of a nuclear blast, it will just be a few square miles, we'll be fine...." and block off any awareness that detonations in the middle of a large landmass have very different consequences. I give credit to Putin for not suffering from kind of this delusion, but as INow and others noted, the NEXT guy could be better at blocking off inconvenient facts in their quest for glory.

The quote btw is not "money is the root of all evil" but rather "the love of money is the root of all evil." The finding that experiences contributed more to reported happiness than does material stuff seems generally true, though the number of Americans who cannot penetrate to that truth is sadly pretty high. An American named Henry David Thoreau pointed out that you don't own things but rather things own you. When you cease being so owned it's quite pleasant and freeing.

I'm guessing if we worked on the grammar of that sentence, we'd find you meant that anyone annihilated in a nuclear attack would get to meet God. Assuming we accept the conjecture of a personal god who created everything (and all the pretzel logic that goes with), and engages in chats with all the freshly dead, then it's not really an honor is it? If everyone gets something, then that something is not really an honor, since "honor" in this sense implies a special recognition accorded only to a select few.

A lot of call for trumpets at funerals? I'm intrigued.

Might be helpful in this chat to distinguish between work and chores. I doubt anyone here disagrees that school is the important job for ten year olds or would suggest we have them join the labor force in fields or factories. Chores are valuable for reasons addressed by several here. Pete set out the protocol for extra funds for extra work, and setting standards of quality, in useful detail. The OP asks an unanswerable question: what is a typical amount. Even knowing the context of nation, specific locale, socioeconomic condition, attitudes towards consumerism, prevailing fashions, etc, it would be hard to define "typical."

I started helping in and around the house around age 8 or so. Nothing but good came of it. My parents gave me a good home, I was happy and proud to help them out. When you work for your family, you are invested in a basic way, you are connected, you develop physical and mental competence in various areas that serve you well later. I'm not saying a ten year old must work (school is work, too, after all, and sometimes that's a lot), just that I think it can have value. Don't even get me started on a ten year old with a smartphone. I don't want to do the hod carrying of all the citations I would have to go find that point to what's wrong with that.

Per your bolded quote - wouldn't that suggest that belt-tightening and forgoing trivial pleasures would be a better approach to budget management than going into debt? Debt burdens are one of the principal economic miseries of many poor people in the United States, and elsewhere. Perhaps you would do better to offer free handbooks on how to cook healthy low-cost meals, take best advantage of mass transit and bicycle transport, conserve on utilities, cut hair at home, etc. If you look at all these financial workshops that are offered by pundits like Warren Buffett, they invariably stress the importance of avoiding debt.

Beat me to it. One way to reduce the alarming number of young adults in the world with a false sense of entitlement who think the world owes them something is to start them young contributing useful work to the family. Some of that work is unpaid, because it helps the household which is already giving them free room, board, medical care, and hopefully a whole lotta love. But you can have optional tasks that a ten year old would be able to do, if they want some discretionary spending money. Wash/vac a car, help a parent with some house painting, sweep the walks and driveway, shovel snow, wash some windows (where accessible to that age), etc. In an apartment setting, there are fewer options, but there might be other options like neighboring tenants who could use a little help especially if elderly.