TheVat

What's that old social science joke...research shows that 90 % of men masturbate, and 10% of men lie on questionnaires.

1. Overwhelming support is irrelevant to the biology question - it's a sociological factoid that has zero bearing on any data that may confirm or disconfirm a significant difference in physiological capacity between trans and cis players. Thousands of athletes could support having trained poodles on stilts in the NBA -- that wouldn't be a compelling scientific case for poodle/human parity under the hoop. 2. "Minuscule advantage" assumes facts not in evidence and yet to be determined. It is sophistry. So are emotionally loaded phrases like the snarky "do-gooders." 3. There is no equivalence (or "similar in spirit") to the hideous stain of American slavery and subsequent Jim Crow regime to be found here. Millions of people will not find themselves in shackles, beaten, tortured, worked to early death, and hunted down by dogs, if it turns out that a few women with male skeletons and fast-twitch muscle fibers and lungs find themselves in a different league than they hoped for. These sorts of "similar" comments that bring in MLK and 400 years of brutal oppression are a bit insulting to people of color, IMHO. I welcome replies, but am basically done here.

I really wanted to click upvote more than once for that comment, Joigus. While I don't disagree with the many posts lauding teamwork and discipline and camaraderie, I live in a land of many couch potatoes who might do well to find some unity and rewarding discipline in the Using Your Own Legs as Transport Freestyle event. Instead we seem to have a nation of people passively waiting for electric cars, or whatever tech they think will fix everything.

Hint : Measure in June, then in December, then consider a triangle.... Hint 2: Hipparchus did it first, albeit sloppily.

As my nom de forum indicates, I have some knowledge of the giant bourbon project. Your Canuck spelling is so quaint! Joking aside, you did con me into several minutes of dull reading on cold-water aquaculture. You may believe you've said too much, but rest assured I remain in the dark as to how an ugly freshwater cod is being deployed for border interdiction.

Well, the BBB is an epithelial layer in capillaries, basically, that is semipermeable. So, there's two ways across. Passive diffusion, which just means small thing work their way through. The other way is active transport, where special molecules help stuff like glucose and amino acids get across. I'm assuming the nanoparticles get through the first way, by diffusion. The epithelial cells have pretty tight junctions between them, and are very selective as to what they will let through, so your nanoparticles have to be small and inoffensive (e.g. they can't be pathogens that would endanger the neurons). It seems highly probable these devices would be injected, given the rigors of going through the stomach and so on.

No, you shouldn't stop, I agree. My POV was more that it might be useful to move on to how data might be gathered (this is a biology forum, my keen powers of observation disclosed to me this morning) that would address the question I have yet to see really answered here: if a man transforms into a woman, retaining deep lungs, heavy bones, and more fast-twitch explosive strength, will her new set of capacities be those of a very gifted woman (well and good) or will they be they be off the charts WRT to cis-women? Rather than just having the chat keep derailing as people strive to signal their goodness and empathy and progressive values, it would be nice to have some actual facts in hand to address the physiology part of the question. Not everyone who wants a straight answer to this has an Agenda. Sexual reassignment treatment/surgery is still a fairly new phenomenon on this planet, and curious people want to, for whatever reason, (sometimes it's just curiosity) have answers to such questions. If you traveled to another planet, where you had no stake whatsoever in their cultural beliefs, and were informed that some members of that society chopped off body parts and altered body chemistry in order to feel more truly themselves, I imagine that you would, without much guilt or deep self-reflection, want to know what was behind that practice. We can't any of us be that impartial, in this matter, because we live here on Earth and grew up with deeply acculturated assumptions about our bodies and what we do with them. I would wager that NOT ONE PERSON HERE, on first encountering the concept of sexual reassignment, before they had time to carefully compose their attitudes, was not knocked a bit off balance and perhaps even shocked. Acceptance of trans people will come when there's honest conversation about this and any question can be asked. JMO.

Given the intent, and ghastly historical underpinning of Plessy v. Ferguson, I would say none of the views here are equivalent to that. Not wild about the peg/hole analogy, either, but I guess the inner 12 year old enjoyed it. If it turns out that transgender women are notably better than ciswomen in sports where explosive strength and/or bone mass matter, then there's a prima facie case for at least considering alternatives. At this point, it seems to this noob that y'all have reached the dull plateau of endlessly talking past each other and circling back on the same arguments.

Ha! Regarding abduction with medical exams, for yokels... the obsession in the USA is with the possibility of affordable healthcare. No matter who the provider is! Can't handle the co-pay on doctor visits? Just go stand on a lonely highway in Nevada....

I don't understand the title question. What exactly do you mean by someone "manifesting" their reality? Sidenote: have you tried stepping in front of a moving bus? I've heard that resolves the "reality isn't real" question for many.

Capitalism isn't dirty, just amoral. It's a purely economic system in search of a moral compass. Absent that, you get predatory capitalism and its stress on maximal worker exploitation, tumor-like endless growth, and cynical sneers for anything like ecological sustainability. And if you go belly-up, you're supposed to grin bravely and say "well, that's the free market, in its Darwinian glory." Regulation, then, is our attempt to impose some moral compass, and not have a dog-eat-dog free-for-all. (wow, so many hyphens) It's supposed to be a reminder that cooperation is as vital an element of human nature as competition.

Like many people (I suspect) my interest here is both in fair competition and in seeing all varieties of personhood given respect and dignity. I find any position that is simple to have a tempting allure, because it might mean we can all go home and concern ourselves no further. Yet a part of me feels this pleasant outcome only happens on Earth Two, while here on Earth One we continue to fight and bicker and litigate over dozens of tangential issues while occasionally wrestling someone to the floor and chewing off a foot or hand. Short form of above: the dust will only settle after many court cases and mind-numbing quantities of interpretation.

I think the generation ship was a bit of a digression - if anything, it addresses the extreme implausibility of the ET conjecture, for reasons you neatly outline. Yes, what species that was even marginally sane would form a mission along the lines of The planet has a race of aggressive and warlike bipeds that possess nuclear fusion bombs and few inhibitions about altering their biosphere in frightening and potentially lethal ways...let us mount an expedition of a thousand years and multiple generations in order to, um, hang out on the far side of their moon for decades while sending out patrols to coyly dance and flit around the fringes of their detection systems without really establishing contact, or an embassy, or anything that would facilitate actually knowing them or offering some help. Because the benefit/resource expenditure ratio is so poor in such scenarios, I guess that's what makes the "warp drive" variant more attractive. If the ETs are way up on the Kardashev Scale, then the whole interstellar travel scenario becomes less absurd, though still implausible. It's conceivable, I guess, that an advanced civilization could have "soft power" methods of influence and reform that would be invisible to us.

While I agree that the fan mentality can lead to grotesque behavior (Red Sox fans flipping cars, soccer hooligans, fans throwing bottles from the bleachers, etc.), and the whole urge to wear a particular color shirt and feel like part of a special group can be retrogressive, I think the problems with professional sports owe a lot to predatory capitalism in general, and the way businesses try to market an "identity" to sell their commodity. In that respect, Rollerball was rather prescient. I think many of us have those moments when we see modern sports and say "FFS, it's just a GAME! It's supposed to be about fun and the poetry of the human body in graceful motion...." Or just getting outside with some pals and enjoying some fresh air and exercise. As for singing the praises of "teamwork," well, all you need to develop teamwork is any group project. You can gather a group and go help build a neighbor's garage (lots of physical prowess will be developed, trust me on this....)

Due to our bitter winters here, it's hard to find houses that leak to that degree. If a house does leak that badly, selling off a family member to fund the renovation is usually considered. BTW, the snakes are sometimes called "draft dodgers" here in the States. The cheapest fast fix I know for draughts (I really prefer the Brit spelling, because it reminds me of enjoyable libations) is the window film you put on the inside, using double-sided tape, and then making taut with a hair dryer. This is okay for windows you don't plan to open in the warmer weather. The plastic will usually adhere pretty well for several years, and then you do it all over again. It's way cheaper than buying storm windows or getting newer triple-glazed argon-filled windows (which have grown insanely expensive lately, like a lot of other construction supplies). I realize this is straying a bit from the topic of chemistry. Argon gas doesn't even have much chemistry, being noble.

People were writing speculative stuff on slow-haul generation ships as far back as the fifties (Brian Aldiss, IIRC) or suspended animation. As others noted, speed is not an absolute requirement. And there's also ground-based propulsion systems (like light-sails "pushed" by a laser) that aren't wildly beyond our technological horizon. Though deceleration might be tricky. The generation ship literature has touched many times on the ethical problems of generations whose purpose is to be ancestors to the colonists who set foot on the new world. There's often the idea that the young are indoctrinated in the sacredness of the mission... or it's hidden outright from them because they'll just accept the ship as their world. As Zapatos said, it's conceivable to live an ordinary life with all the usual trimmings, on a generation ship. (though restless young people wouldn't have any option, as they do in some restricted Earth societies like the Amish, of running off to the city to sample the alternatives).

105 is tomorrow's predicted high here, with a blood red sun from the wildfire smoke that's wafting from Oregon to Boston, so burning wood has lost some of it's fun and cozy feeling. The world doesn't need more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and PM 2.5 atm. Sincerely, the fireside Grinch

Jeff's, erm, rocket...

An obstacle for me as well. I've never been able to achieve any significant fraction of c. 😀 It does seem any ET that does arrive is part of a self-selecting group: the mere fact of their being here means they are cleverer than we are. Though I suppose, if one speculates wildly, it's possible to conceive of ETs who are actually technologically less clever but happen to have normal lifespans of a thousand years or the ability to hibernate for very long stretches.

G flat, above middle C. Hope that helps.

The section across Lakes Superior and Huron would have been quite the engineering challenge. Superior is 1300 feet deep in places. Never mind that we clever Americans have developed technology like ropes and ladders. It took us a while to catch up with the Mesopotamians, but we're very persistent people.

It seems unlikely that nations who themselves openly do GoF research (i. e. pretty much all wealthy nations) would have much basis for sanctioning other nations for doing it. Even if one nation were farcically incompetent at one of its labs, it's hard to see how a world policing body could bludgeon away incompetence, without some international accreditation/funding agreement that all the nations had signed onto.

The Atlantic recently had a piece on sorting out all the lab-leak and other scenarios... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/lab-leak-trap/619150/

Help us out here. Are you comparing the experience of a student learning the history of slavery, race massacres, Jim Crow oppression, etc. to the subtle despair dogs feel when...what? Ok, I just have no idea what this is about. Woof.

Generally in a developed nations economy, as lifespan increases and families get smaller (the "demographic shift" as it's called) there's a trend towards full employment (smaller percent of population is of working age) and the value of labor rises. As labor becomes a scarcer commodity, companies pay more for it and offer more benefits and perks to keep workers. Of course, now we have wild cards like automation, immigration, and other trends that can tinker with that simplistic formula I outlined. But I don't think any of those will prevent labor, especially the services where we really prefer people to robots, from rising in value. Dropping fertility rates (thanks to both social trends and endocrine disruptors from plasticmaggedon) will see to it that we have a society top-heavy with older folks.