TheVat

Attenuation, as I mentioned, is the big question. I think beam spread can be greatly reduced, since it is a laser. But I don't know how the imperfect vacuum of the solar system would affect that. When people say "it's not rocket science," they are definitely not describing this discussion. I will have to learn more about the tractor concept, which sounds incredibly slow-acting to me on first view.

I may have mentioned it years ago at another website, but only as a classic misinterpretation of a radiation monitoring balloon. A wiki clip: best regards, Dana Scully

I suggested a laser weapon on page one. I don't know what percent of asteroids are of a composition that would lend itself to thrust-producing outgassing on one side, but for them the beam would seem to offer precision and periodic adjustments like no other option. And maximum effect per joule. Problems include attenuation, given that our solar system is not a perfect vacuum. And expense - though maybe that compares favorably with putting hundreds of warheads on long-distance rockets.

It's throwing the baby out with the bath water. I see a world where maybe 20% of people use religion in a negative way, but that fraction receives 99% of the media coverage. The other 80% show up for religious services or ceremonies looking to connect with something larger than themselves, foster kindness and compassion in themselves, find social connections, rein in aggressive impulses, and help people who are in need. Those people, unless they're chaining themselves to a nuclear weapons facility gate or demonstrating outside a prison before an execution, get almost zero notice.

AFAICT, Unitarians and some Buddhist sects score fairly high on tolerance. (it's interesting how the word liberal has gotten rather distorted - the first definition in most dictionaries is willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.) I have noticed that an attitude of tolerance and appreciation of cultural variety vs one of Us/Them insularity seems to be a big dividing line in worldviews in the US. On religion, I'm a traditional liberal - helps some people, harms others, depends very much on the individual and what they are seeking there.

Be nice to your architect and construction crew!

Worldview, as I understand the term, is a philosophy of life that provides a specific perspective on our world that is central to a person's thoughts and feelings. For example, a metaphysics might be a worldview as it provided that basic stance. A faith healer would have a metaphysics that was a set of core beliefs on the world and their role in that world. For someone else, metaphysics could be a time-waster, and they just focused on an avocation as their source of meaning and purpose, everything from rescuing stray dogs to designing shopping malls to winning at poker. Some worldviews are more practical and "worldly" while others are more existential. Some want to change the person to fit the world, some want to change the world to fit the person. I guess my worldview is that a lot of what people consider important consists of peculiar and sometimes comical illusions adopted in order to fit into a peer group. Being human is a bit like joining a cult - not necessarily bad, like Scientology or Heaven's Gate, but definitely one where you are taught loaded language that it's very hard to question or see past the received meanings. I guess the short version of my worldview is "alien anthropologist who would like to help humanity survive itself." I bring greetings from Znurblzg.

That's très cool. As a crude structural carpenter, you folk are like unthinkably advanced aliens to me. My zen thing is more putting in a window or hanging a door, or electrical. Anything is zen that is guided by the need to always know precisely where both your hands are, and that you exist in a bubble of calm quiet. (I did once make a simple mortise, using 4x4 for work table legs and running 1x4 rails into them. Where I learned about keeping chisels sharp...)

My NB was in regard to the current arsenals, which were suggested as providing the charges for these hypothetical asteroid deflectors. Am aware of the bad old days of multi-MT blasts. A close relative lived most of his life a couple miles from the nation's foremost nuclear bomber base, and I used to live uncomfortably close to StratCom hq, so have been fairly aware of the arms race history and living in the crosshairs. The main problem with Castle Bravo or Tsar Bomba sized bombs, as mentioned in a following post, is difficulty in delivery of such massive weapons to a target. My reading of this discussion so far is that a smaller charge is easier to deliver to an asteroid, provided you have enough lead time to strike it at a great distance and thus gain the required deflection with less force.

Yes. More than I am, clearly. Thank you. It's funny it wasn't with other tools, so whoever packed that box apparently viewed it as a mystery object.

Nota bene: Only eleven percent of the US arsenal are warheads of yield greater than a megaton - those are the B83s, at 1.2 MT each. The Russians largest are 800 KT. Just pointing this out, in response to the talk of 50 MT warheads - such do not exist.

Anyone know what this is? Mystery item found in a box of miscellaneous junk.

Also puzzled as to why these particular metrics should be somehow the measure of a nation? You can keep your giant fungible junk excreting economy and Martian pissing contests and bullet trains. To many Americans like me, these are of far less importance than how we aspire to grow each person's character and freedom for learning and creative exploration - for all our citizens. There's a reason when you search the phrase "innovation hubs" on a search engine that a disproportionate number are located in the U.S.

When I read it back in the late 80s, Marooned in Realtime fairly blew my mind. That's one for me to reread. One of the best conceptual writers - I liked Fire Upon the Deep, too. Died this March - too soon. Am curious what led you to neutrons, for a beam weapon. Protons not good enough for you? 😀

Indeed, multiple causes have been identified, both external and internal. There's no magic bullet. Glutamate dysregulation is likely more an effect than a cause - chronic stress has been implicated there.

I know people from rather disparate spots on the belief spectrum who use religion to propel them towards positive social work and activism - Catholics, Unitarians, Jews. While I agree leaders have weaponized religion, or used it to manipulate, there are a fair number who use it as a fulcrum for helping others, pushing for a more compassionate and nurturing society, ending nukes, etc. These people deserve credit for moving their brand of faith past the torture/rape/murder history. Or, in a sense, moving it back to what sages like Jesus actually taught, i.e. the former spiritual core. The human craving for a spiritual life isn't going to go away, so maybe reforming religions makes more practical sense than just abandoning them.

The second half of my previous post addressed that, I hope. Truth claims are revised, as more data is available, no one disputes that. This doesn't alter basic word definitions. Just the degree of correspondence between our statements and reality. If I say "the morning star and the evening star are both the planet Venus," there is always the chance, however remote, that aliens are just projecting an image there, hacking the signals from space probes we sent, etc. Per Quine et al, we have a web of beliefs based on empirical data, that lead us to assign that scenario a low probability. If we reach the point of colonizing Venus, that will certainly strengthen the probability of the Venus as planet assertion, with a flood of new data and first-hand experience. The semantic point, as I understand the philosophers of science, is that "Venus is a planet" will be as true as it ever was, because it is either true or it is false. The truth value of statements, WRT to physical reality, doesn't change. It is our expectations that may change. An ancient Egyptian would assert "Venus is a planet" has low truth value. We assert that it's high.

I appreciate you weighing in on this. This seems to be a chronic problem, where the definition of truth that has been in common usage in philosophy for centuries gets discarded for some improvised personal definition. It is impossible to discuss a topic if people can't agree on the basic definitions of terms. No one in science would say "Saturn is farther from the sun than Mars, but that's just my truth. You may have some other truth." Once we were able to measure planetary distances, it was clear that the statement was true, and holds true so long as those planets remain in their stable orbits. Past statements held to be true that were proved false were usually statements arising from the inability to make a crucial measurement or have a longterm collection of data to reveal slower trends. Someone invented lenses that allowed a person onshore to observe the mast of a ship several miles away drop over the horizon as it sailed away. Every time our limited perceptions are augmented, our maps of reality get better. Of course, the skeptical stance is that we could all be mistaken, having a mass hallucination or living in a Matrix where our environment is just code, but that stance is just to keep us humble. Which is why empirical truth (or synthetic truth, as it's also known) can usually be viewed as high-probability statements and not absolutes. And Duhem-Quine, as @sethoflagos mentions, reminds us that most truths are predicated on a bundle of other proven hypotheses. My earlier-exampled Saturn- Mars relationship depends on background assumptions about how astronomical obervations are made and the reliability of telescopes, how planets move in regular orbits and maintain a fairly constant orbital velocity, that an eccentric ellipse orbit tends to maintain its present degree of eccentricity, etc. I think Duhem Quine allows that background assumptions can be teased out and made explicit. They don't have to remain unstated. It is just saying that it is always possible that some background assumption was overlooked and therefore a perfect falsification is not possible in the real world. I could make an exhaustive list of all the hypotheses behind saying that the Earth is not flat, and still overlook some hidden reality. We had this lovely strong web of beliefs, strongly supported by empirical evidence, but somehow missed that giant array of mirrors and force fields that the Alien OverLords set up to convey the illusion that we live in a solar system. Ockham suggests we ignore this, but it does always keep us a few cents away from proof or absolute truth statements. (this is sort of what fundamentalist Christians do when they suggest that all the fossil evidence for evolution was actually fake evidence that God, for some reason, placed in the Earth to mess with our heads or whatever...)

This is the dominant definition of truth in the past century - that truth is by definition statements that correspond to an objectively determinable state of affairs in the world. The basic idea of the correspondence theory is that what we believe or say is true if it corresponds to the way things actually are – to the facts. This idea can be seen in various forms throughout the history of philosophy, but it really got serious traction with folks like G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. So you're in pretty good company, and I would say the correspondence theory has generally been adopted by scientists. 8 billion people may entertain myriad beliefs but those cannot gain the status of truth, or true statements, unless they correspond to objectively determined facts. E.g. "I see the light is red," is subjective, but "Anyone who measures the light finds its wavelength to be 650 nm," is true because it does not change due to variations in human perception, i.e. it corresponds to a fact external to a particular perceiver. Beliefs can change. "The earth is flat" was a belief that eventually was shown not to match the reality. So it was never true, because the earth has always been an oblate spheroid. The truth has not changed with respect to the earth, our beliefs have. Now our beliefs correspond better to the fact that the earth is round. But the truth was always what it was - in that sense, it is objective, because it doesn't "care" what we believe. The epistemological goal of humans is to improve our perceptions and measurements and inferences from them to get closer to the truth - the objective reality outside our heads. Were this not the case, no one would bother with science or philosophy and we would bow to chaos. To reiterate, there is no such thing as "my truth." Truth, by its definition at least since the Enlightenment era, is that the truth is out there in the world and not something that only corresponds to one person's belief system. I keep hammering on this because I see many people veering towards solipsism (as Moon mentioned) and the incoherent notions of personal truth or alternative facts. If it's personal, and only personal, then it's an opinion or a belief or a conjecture or a feeling. Not a truth.

I am not sure if it's true, either. Just saying that geographic and cultural distance has, in most RW instances I'm aware of, meant ruling bodies that fail on empathy and analytical ability to discern that region's needs. I'm pretty sure I don't want people who think lutfisk is edible to be dictating our school lunch program policies. OK, joking, but the larger point is that many countries that are notably successful at running their own nations as Sweden is, may only be so due to having small and fairly homogeneous populations. I am skeptical that the Scandinavians can run Congo - even if they're loads nicer than the Belgians under Leopold. E.g. the Swedes might say, hey, everyone needs all your cobalt and copper because electric cars are great and will help save the planet. The Congolese citizenry, however, might have reasons to limit such production, related to important environmental and quality of life issues for millions of them. There are thousands of examples, from history, of distant governments that just don't get the local priorities.

Doesn't some of the funding comparison hinge on how Trump's team can craft legal fees as campaign expenses? Sounds like they are reporting legal expenses to the FEC, so if I'm following this, they've got this loophole and are okay so long as big donors don't sue them or pull out and take others with them. And Biden is a Boy Scout, by comparison, so all his war chest can go to actual campaign costs.

None, because you've just described colonialism. Which is terrible. Government is how societies seek to solve their particular problems on a macro scale. Swedes, no matter how well-meaning, can't do a decent job in problem solving for people in Bhutan or Congo. At best, if Sweden had really excellent forestry experts, say, they could offer them as technical consultants. There was a time when about five countries were running most of the world. (a few countries like Ethiopia managed to resist, but not many) Without scrambling for Google, I will say at a guess they were Britain, France, Netherlands, Spain and Portugal. This didn't turn out too well for most of the globe.

Heart rate is mainly a brain stem thing, in terms of regulation. You might ask your healthcare provider about vagal maneuvers, which can help the vagus nerve (the major connector in the parasympathetic nervous system which regulates the heart, breathing, digestion, and making whoopie) calm the heart and breath and reduce negative feedback loops from anxiety. The main purpose of the parasympathetic NS is maintaining homeostasis by regulating the body's visceral organs. It is the relaxing system of the so-called gut-brain axis, which counters the sympathetic NS which turns on fight-or-flight responses (and the panic attacks you described in the OP) - responses your inner hunter-gatherer ape also needs. The PNS is sometimes described as "relax and digest," which is seeking a functional balance with the SNS and fight and flight. I leave, an exercise for the reader, which system the other F depends on. (the F that fills the blank in the famous Four Fs of animal behavior - fighting, fleeing, feeding, and _____). Again, discuss particular techniques with a healthcare specialist. Some are quite powerful, but you need guidance from an expert to do them properly. I can't provide that.

Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Yeah, maybe I was leaning too hard on the humor aspect (why I originally posted in the political humor thread), owing to the risible notion that a staffer did not see a headline . Missing a bit of fine print I could believe, but a headline? Really? As your comment suggests, @iNow, the Trumpists maintain powerful filters that seem to screen out the implications of these kinds of slips. I've been reading a book (Cultish, by Amanda Montell) about how cults use language to recruit and keep members and it touches on how cult leaders use linguisic techniques like loaded language, Us v Them category terms, and thought-terminating cliches (aka semantic stop signs). She explores a vast range, from Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate, to SoulCycle (hahah), to Trumpism and Q Anon. Anyway, one aspect mentioned are "quiet rules" which shut off normal lines of communication between members so that doubts about the great leader aren't disseminated among them, and doubts that arrive from outside contacts are also snuffed out. And Trumpists, many of them, seem to be operating under such quiet rules, so when Team Trump lets some of their true nature peep out, any real discussion of such a slip is suppressed. My wife, for example, could mention some of Trump's expressions of would-be fascism to some of the Trumpists in her church, but it would not penetrate, and if she did elicit doubt in one person, the Quiet Rule would kick in. The cult structure would not allow that person to share that doubt, so they would just shrug and say to my wife, "well, God sometimes uses a damaged vessel to carry His light..." or some such nonsense. And then never speak of it again.