TheVat

Interesting, thanks. I had not realized that pinyin was so insufficient. English ambiguities seem trifling by comparison, like unionized (easily resolved by context if you are talking about uncharged atoms or organized workers). Q. What happened to the man who fell into an upholstering machine? A. He is fully recovered.

And when you are old, your cells have undergone more mitotic divisions, and there is a greater chance of cellular mutations with a greater number of divisions. This effect is actually heightened for persons with longer telomeres. While they may age more slowly, their cancer risk also goes up. Cells with very long telomeres accumulate mutations and appear to promote tumors and other types of growths that would otherwise be put in check by normal telomere shortening processes. I invite you to run "cancer and long telomeres" through a search engine. Here's a bit (in fairly plain English) about a study at Johns Hopkins on the matter: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/long-telomeres-may-heighten-cancer-risks

Meanwhile at the national zoo, Emily watched as... One nudnik panda has nematode redo tame NSA, had napkin dune, no? OK, officially ending my little sojourn in palindrome land. Weirdly addictive and somehow borderline dyslexia inducing. Hoping others may carry on, and with more coherence than I can muster. Adios, so Ida! Bonk a knob!

AI often gives flat out erroneous answers on food science questions. Its sources on such topics are heavily contaminated with commercial material promoting a brand.

Yes, I wouldn't think they would abandon it lightly. That said, the pinyin system does use diacritical marks to handle the tonalities, so doesn't seem impossible. Yikes. The cow shoe seems especially daunting to a Western learner. Re: brain areas...have heard handwriting does use different mode than reading, which. iirc was correlated in a study with enhanced creativity and cognition overall. Writing longhand v typing seemed to unlock ideas. I know some famous authors and posts swore by it.

I wonder if countries with logographic languages will eventually shift to Roman - I would think the simplicity would be tempting when you have new generations less inclined towards the rigors of literacy all over the world. Who knows, even the Roman alphabet could end up reduced in letter numbers, J tossed out, with G covering two sounds (as it already does in many words, gelatin gorillas), S picking up all the Zs, hard C handling all the Ks, Q discarded (cwite cwicly), i handling the Ys, etc. That speculation aside, there would be both gains and losses from a global alphabet...there might be nostalgia for the variety of old pictographic ways - which would look like impressive feats of memorization to a romanized world. ETA - there's sort a mild version of amnesia now in the US, where a lot of (misguided, IMNSHO) school districts are only teaching pupils to write block letters. Students are now reaching adulthood unable to form cursive letters (and reap the benefits of its greater speed in writing) or, as I encountered recently, READ cursive. Those who did have some exposure to cursive early on are now experiencing the amnesia where they can sort of recognize cursive but have forgotten how to form cursive letters.

My dislike of shellfish was somewhat culturally acquired and should be viewed as the culinary bigotry it is. Growing up, our family lived in a largely Jewish community for three years, where shellfish violated kashrut, and so were to be avoided. I tried them (scallops) on an outing in Boston, found them rubbery, and let my mind harden against them. What can I say, it was early teen years and I wanted to fit in with my circle of anti-bivalve pals. When we moved back to the goyische depths of Nebraska, I did slide back into an occasional clam chowder but to this day have never mixed milk and meat in a meal (also proscribed in kashrut law). My friend's uncle once showed me a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm - when you're twelve and someone shows you that you tend to listen to their advice. Wildly OT, though I could bring it back sort of to topic with Jewish burial law, which requires the body in the ground in 24 hours, partly to avoid the decomp odors which arise when embalming is proscribed. The casket must also be untreated wood with no metal.

Oh, I understood what you referred to. Twas joking on the "she seems to prefer to see them written in all caps." A dumb joke, yes. And I'm trying to remember the name of a coworker many years ago whose entire name was a palindrome. Will post if it ever comes to me. You've probably noticed memory works better if you leave it alone for a few hours.

(spotted this thread; not old enough to be "necro posting" but maybe necro in another sense...) I briefly worked in a stink environment and one of the recommended methods was rubbing Vicks Vaporub (camphor, eucalyptus, menthol, cedarleaf oil, etc) under the nose. Intense but effective. And they're not all that great even fresh. 😁

Emily has high standards for musical events she attends in Wisconsin. Tin Madison orchestra farts, eh, Cronos? I damn it!

Another inference might be that more than one person perceived weaknesses in your theory. Aren't you here for feedback? Cognition is a complex process with multiple functional levels. You don't provide any grounds for making homeostasis fundamental in a way that makes that particular to brains and not other internal organs and systems. I don't "explain" how a deep ocean submarine works by saying it has a thermostat. We don't fully explain something with emergent properties by pointing at one causal element in an intricate web of such elements. No doubt the thalamus is a critical hub in the brain. As is the fuse box in my house. But I cannot understand the fifth season of Game of Thrones playing on my television set simply by checking the breakers and how they're wired. That would ignore a vast web of other processes that allow talented and often blood and filth-coated British actors to manifest in our bedroom. Extreme reductionism has great difficulty accounting for emergent effects of complex causal webs.

Perfect. Might be what they call a universal joke - funny in all times and places. (A common example of the UJ is the one with the hunters and the 911 call, which I suspect everyone has heard - they did some cross-cultural study where that joke had the broadest positive reception - String's parrot joke would be a close competitor I would wager)

It's a good question. I think it's more anti-Darwinian, as Dim suggested. In the sense of maybe decreasing dog piles upon those who offend, allowing speech to be countered rather than suffocated. As an American jurist said, sunlight is the best disinfectant. But yeah, if we're talking cruel hate speech against someone young and vulnerable...then maybe sometimes you do have to just shut it down. When does intolerance become abuse is a question that arises.

Like this, then? THEM I know she likes to drink with her friend Ronno Connor - they go the pub and murder a red rum.

As one who admire Atkinson's eloquence on this matter, I feel compelled to post this quote from the address which @KJW has thoughtfully linked for us: It is what you might call The New Intolerance, a new but intense desire to gag uncomfortable voices of dissent. ‘I am not intolerant’, say many people; say many softly spoken, highly educated, liberal-minded people: ‘I am only intolerant of intolerance’. And people tend to nod sagely and say ‘Oh, wise words, wise words’ and yet if you think about this supposedly inarguable statement for longer than five seconds, you realize that all it is advocating is the replacement of one kind of intolerance with another. Which to me doesn’t represent any kind of progress at all. Underlying prejudices, injustices or resentments are not addressed by arresting people: they are addressed by the issues being aired, argued and dealt with preferably outside the legal process. For me, the best way to increase society’s resistance to insulting or offensive speech is to allow a lot more of it. As with childhood diseases, you can better resist those germs to which you have been exposed.

Thomas Hobbes: Separation of powers? Nope! Hail, sovereign! Berkeley: It's all mind? No matter! Spinoza: Everything is substance, which is God. Descartes: Brain, soul: different stuff, pineal connection. My avatar approves this message. I had a physicist acquaintance who used to say something like, "I invite anyone who thinks all reality is just an idea to step in front of a speeding bus."

Reality in itself, unknowable to us. (I. Kant) No innate ideas, all from experience. (D. Hume)

At the bakery, Emily tends to snub buns and stun odd donuts.

Same here. (And my ugrad degree was also in biology, with a pre-med focus that later shifted towards ecology) We've had some long and contentious and sometimes kooky threads on abiogenesis, like this one (you'll see some familiar faces there): https://scienceforums.net/topic/135419-gap-between-life-and-non-life-split-from-what-if-god/page/7/ Some grapple with philosophy of science concepts relating to abiogenesis, like this one I recall... https://scienceforums.net/topic/135173-addressing-the-theistic-argument-of-statistical-impossibility-of-life/#comment-1281444 And then some threads which are more speculative... https://scienceforums.net/topic/126942-what-are-men-and-women-composed-of-exactly/#comment-1203931

Good docu. And the title underscores the unfortunate trajectory of the original McD business model - escalation in portion and drink sizes. Your sugary soda, in the early sixties, was something like 8-12 ounces. Then a sort of sugar/gluttony arms race ensued between FF vendors, with doubling and tripling of drink sizes. Customers end up drinking a lot of their calories, and taking a kick in the pancreas with all the corn syrup. I hate that these places spread globally so that America was exporting its worst cultural habits. It was an analogy, making the point that it's just normal reality when some ideas don't work out very well in the real world. The inventors of the bomb thought they would keep America safe. Instead we've lived on the brink of global annihilation for seventy years, with a huge Sword of Damocles over everyone's head.

Don't forget double duty as a tent pole! Ahoy, Pinball!

Edward Teller, Richard Garwin and Stanislaw Ulam were inventors of the H Bomb. It's so sad that so many people hate H Bombs and want to dismantle all of them!

Wow. A man, a plan, a Cadillac, a dairy motor, Oto, myriad, a call ID, a canal, Panama! See thus: Noriega, sage, irons, uh, tees.

The situation in Gaza...I was thinking about the way that everything is being kept at a distance and shot through a soft lens by most of the media these days. The death figures, for example: not included in the MOH figures are those people who have died because of the war, but not directly from IDF military action. Several analyses suggest that at least 200,000 people in Gaza are dead today that would still be alive if Israel had not attacked and blockaded Gaza. That is decimation, in the original Roman meaning of the word: one in ten Palestinians. These deaths have arisen though lack of medical care and drugs, exposure, increased risks from malnutrition, epidemic diseases, lack of sanitation, extreme exhaustion from constant displacement, outright starvation, etc. And with the current starvation program that Israel has instituted, that number will grow massively. That's genocide. Mostly women and children and noncombatants, people just trying to live their lives and not terrorists who would cross a border and start killing people. I much appreciated Arwa Madhawi's column in The Guardian this morning, pointing out what's going on and asking how people will justify their inaction (or confining their actions to strongly worded letters of other statements which are sufficiently anodyne as to not imperil their careers or social circles). https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/22/israel-gaza-genocide Now, when Israel is executing a “final solution” in Gaza, when it is far too late for dissent to make any difference, the tide is slowly starting to turn. Now that Gaza is flattened, turned into mass graves and rubble, people who have kept quiet for the past 19 months are slowly starting to speak up. Now that Israel and the US are not even trying to pretend that they aren’t intent on emptying Gaza and the West Bank of Palestinians, of “taking control” of all of the land, some criticism has started to trickle in. Over in the UK, they’ve pulled out the “e” word. After 19 months of genocidal violence and almost three months of a starvation campaign the UK has decided to describe the situation as egregious. The UK, along with France and Canada, has threatened – and I’m sure Israel’s leaders are quaking in their boots over this – that there might be a “concrete” response if the mass killing and starvation continues.... ....The criticism we are seeing now is simply an exercise in ass-covering. Performative opposition, so that in the future, when the true scale of the slaughter in Gaza is clear, the politicians and media figures responsible for enabling and justifying this horror for 19 months can say: “Look! I said something! I didn’t just stand by!” And what will you say? When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? When future generations learn that, for 19 months, we woke up every morning to videos of children being burned alive – bombed with weapons that the US taxpayer helped pay for and the western world helped justify – will you be able to say that you spoke up?

Natural building materials are generally "solar powered," and I hope will continue to be innovated. Hempcrete is one - much lower carbon than concrete and superb R value. In some areas, rammed earth and adobe are good options, needing minimal energy input. In the southern US, pine forests are grown as a crop - lots of board-feet per acre and fast-growing. And there's the Scandinavian trend now with using wood laminate beams to build tall buildings that would conventionally be steel, concrete, and glass. I would imagine countries with high population densities and slow-growing northern forests would want to import some of their wood from warmer regions where growth is rapid and constitutes a cultivated crop. OTOH, wouldn't want to be cutting down the rainforest ("Lungs of the World") to be putting in construction wood plantations. My guess is that earthen blocks and hempcrete will emerge as the least problematic, provided they can be made moisture-resistant. IIRC, the other big challenge in terms of carbon load, is roofing where asphalt shingles predominate. Metal roofs seem like the best option, given their longevity and the relative ease of application, and of recycling the metal. As far as IT solutions go, I can see it more useful on other planets or remote locations where labor is in short supply, but feel that the economics on most of Earth will favor factory-built modular homes, where structural units are built on a factory assembly line and then quickly assembled on site. That has become the cheapest option in the US, and I know some municipalities are looking at factory-built for affordable housing projects.