TheVat

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/13/japan-cat-toxic-chemical-vat-fukuyama-nomura-plating-metal-plant It could be the opening scene from a new Marvel film. Residents of a Japanese city have been warned not to approach or touch a missing cat that appears to have fallen into a vat of toxic chemicals before scampering off. The search for the unlucky feline began after an employee of a metal plating plant in Fukuyama, western Japan, arrived at work to find a trail of yellowy-brown paw prints leading away from a container of hexavalent chromium, a highly acidic carcinogen. Touching the chemical can cause skin inflammation and inhaling it can lead to respiratory problems. Factory employees wear masks and rubber gloves when handling the substance, the firm said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Security camera footage shows the cat leaving the factory, its whereabouts currently unknown. There does not appear to be any footage showing how the cat came into contact with the chemical, which was stored in a three-metre-deep vat. (end quote) I'm wondering how bad this stuff is. I know this was the chemical that was the basis of a huge class action suit in California, in the famous Erin Brokovich case (subject of an Oscar-winning movie with Julia Roberts), where it had contaminated groundwater that got into tapwater. There's still dispute from industry groups as to how concentrated it must be to be carcinogenic, and also an epidemiologic debate as to what actual exposures were. I would guess that the cat's level of exposure if it was falling into a vat would be lethal, especially given that a cat's instinct with anything in its fur is to bathe itself with its tongue.

A woman's place is in the kitchen. Katie's true calling is wife and mommy - the Senator thing is just a hobby that the Patriarch of the Home has kindly permitted her to do. Never underestimate the regressiveness of the American right-wing. Sorry you couldn't access the SNL video. If I can find an all-region version, will post it.

Where I live DST actually increases fossil fuel use for the first 3 months, because March-May are still heating months and people tend to turn up their furnaces upon arising in the morning. Since early morning is when the overnight low temperature happens, this time change moves morning activities one hour closer to that overnight low and so the furnace runs longer to get the dwelling up to room temperature. And old energy use studies are somewhat dated, given that the percent of our energy that goes to interior lighting has dropped quite a bit, thanks to LED bulbs that use, what, something like 15-20% of an old tungsten filament bulb for the same number of lumens. So basing a time change on the use of artificial lighting seems flawed to me. Student performance also declines after DST starts, due to the critical need for a full night's sleep that children and teens require for normal brain function - and teachers report an increase in groggy and unalert students especially in the first classes of the morning. IMO, if it's so important that people can go enjoy outdoor activities after work with plenty of daylight for that, then employers should get on board with more flex hours for those who want to pursue activities requiring daylight.

IIRC, Y does vary somewhat between human males, though that is more in the junk coding than in the functional developmental genes. Groups of genes that govern fertility and normal development are not going to change much in their number between individuals, which is what you would expect given their critical roles in those processes. Any shift in number of those genes would likely be lethal or at least cause sterility and so would not be passed along. As for the slow shrink theory, I think that is based on a linear extrapolation that has been largely discredited.

Scarlett Johansson is an amazing actress. She didn't just read some funny lines off a prompter, like some guests on SNL do. She starts with her Katie Britt impression about 2:30 into the video.

Larry O. has one question for you.

Scutch is Bermuda grass in American English. Me pop told me that "you have to keep the fescue happy" in order to discourage Bermuda grass from being invasive. Yes. It may be that some areas, where there are longterm changes in precipitation and temperature will lose the capacity to nurture a forest and best practice will be to assist a transition to grassland or savannah. We're looking at that now in areas of the American West, where forest wildfires are bringing a longterm change and recovering the original climax community simply cannot be done. Keystone species are no longer viable in some areas, either dying out or shifting northward. (one tiny silver lining, if I dare call it that, is that grassland sends more solar radiation back into space than forest, so areas may get what's called rangeland cooling)

Yep. We are already in a different place than 1970. If the world had moved to neutral carbon back then, a significant percent of global warming would have been averted. In 2024, we have moved more to mitigation and relocation. Will be centuries before any reversal could happen.

Would agree on this for most of the MAGA minions, but Mikey is an Uber Christian spearhead of the Christian Right who publicly states that his religious views are the basis for his politics. He also has connections to the Dominionists. It might be kind of scary to anyone who believes in America as a land of religious freedom. ETA: I just read posts subsequent, so I see I'm a tad redundant.

Yes! Thanks for mentioning Tinbergen. His four questions, as they are sometimes called, are so useful that it may be worth posting - this is from Oxford's continuing education site.... The four questions are: Function (or adaption😞 Why is the animal performing the behaviour? In which way does the behaviour increase the animal’s fitness (i.e. its survival and reproduction)? Examples are plentiful and include, among many others, nurturing of young to increase their chance of survival, migration to warmer (and more food rich) habitats, escaping or avoiding attention from predators etc. Evolution (or phylogeny😞 How did the behaviour evolve? How has natural selection modified the behaviour over evolutionary time? This is typically addressed by the comparative approach, where the behaviour in question is compared among closely related species. Examples include how flight in birds may have evolved from gliding in dinosaurs or how the vertebrate and cephalopod eyes have evolved by convergent evolution, with the former having a blind spot, while the latter does not. Causation (or mechanism😞 What causes the behaviour to be performed? Which stimuli elicit or what physiological mechanisms cause the behaviour? Examples include the role of pheromones and hormones, such as increasing testosterone levels (caused by increasing day length) causing male display behaviour in many species of birds, moving shadows causing ragworms to withdraw into their burrows or contrast on beaks causing herring gull chicks to peck. Development (or ontogeny😞 How has the behaviour developed during the lifetime of the individual? In what way has it been influenced by experience and learning? Examples include how courtship behaviour improves with age in many birds and how predators learn to avoid toxic or dangerous prey with experience. I wonder if the development (or ontogeny) questions could be applied to our responses to the scent of flowers. We do come to associate certain positive experiences with nice smelling flowers. I am perplexed as to why the closing parentheses in my Oxford U quote are showing as sad faces. Are others seeing this, too? Is this a SFN glitch encountered before?

I found Johnson's display odious even by the standards of American politics. Juvenile and unprofessional and disrespectful to someone he has to work with to get bipartisan bills past the poised veto pen. But I don't think little Mikey has any real interest in anything but sabotage and bringing the country to overt theocracy.

While some attractions have an explanation in evolutionary biology, I I would think large-brained creatures can like something for aesthetic reasons, like vibrant colors and pleasing patterns and symmetries. We can enjoy things which we neither eat nor f__, just for our mental stimulation. Our cat sometimes comes in and sits on the piano when we play, apparently just enjoying the music. I can't rule out an EB explanation (e.g. behavior perceived as bonding behavior by the gullible large bipeds may increase probability of free meals and treats) but I also recognize that most higher mammals may engage in behaviors to reduce boredom.

Mine's a flipphone. So far, no one's asked me if I'm "holding." Maybe I'd need more visible bling? Or a few days beard growth? One of my offspring IS a drug dealer,* but they have a smartphone. There are computers everywhere, so just don't feel the need to carry one with me. For me it's a plus if I take a trip and have no smartphone, as it enforces a break from the Net, something I seek occasionally (like the last five days, as it happens). If there's some unusual need to go online, I go to a public library or take a small tablet to a spot with public wifi. If I'm on a hike, I take this ancient artifact made from pulped tree fibers called a "topo map." * they work in a pharmacy Apparently, when one sees this joke opportunity, resistance is futile. Unfortunately this happened today when the missus needed to expand our drop-leaf table for some project, and said innocently, I need twelve more inches for this job. You would think she'd know better by now.

I used to think teslas were oddly large, until I understood how they were SI derived and really useful for rating industrial strength magnets, particle accelerators, MRIs, etc. And a white dwarf's field is around 100 T (which would be what, a million gauss?) The superconducting magnet built around the CMS detector at CERN is 4 T. The superconducting ITER magnet system is 13 T. But my favorite magnetic field is the one required to levitate a frog (by diamagnetic levitation of the water in its body tissues) according to the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics: 16 T. No idea how the frog is doing, after that.

Reminds me of a recent piece in The Atlantic where Bidens liabilities are examined, while still advocating him as the best choice to run against Trump: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/case-biden/677591/ Biden’s age is so concerning that many Biden supporters now believe he should step aside and let some other candidate become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein made the best-available case for this view recently in a 4,000-word piece that garnered intense attention by arguing that Biden is no longer up to the task of campaign life. “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago,” Klein writes. “The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.” In one sense Klein is correct. As the political strategist Mike Murphy said many moons ago, Biden’s age is like a gigantic pair of antlers he wears on his head, all day every day. Even when he does something exceptional—like visit a war zone in Ukraine, or whip inflation—the people applauding him are thinking, Can’t. Stop. Staring. At. The antlers. Biden can’t shed these antlers. He’s going to wear them from now until November 5. If anything, they’ll probably grow. That said, there’s another point worth noting up front: Joe Biden is almost certainly the strongest possible candidate Democrats can field against Donald Trump in 2024. Biden’s strengths as a candidate are considerable. He has presided over an extraordinarily productive first term in which he’s passed multiple pieces of popular legislation with bipartisan majorities. Unemployment is at its lowest low, GDP growth is robust, real wage gains have been led by the bottom quartile, and the American economy has achieved a post-COVID soft landing that makes us the envy of the world. He has no major scandals. His handling of American foreign policy has been stronger and defter than any recent president’s.... Here's a paywall-free link https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/truth-decay-experts-hilary-putnam/677590/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYgFR401awbUQPgvR5BkL2xk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Bodyguards try to stay fit and avoid rich foods, I've heard.

I live not far from the ones mentioned in South Dakota. The old munitions storage site was nicknamed Igloo. The information provided has a significant error: Nope. My geodesic calculator shows the distance from "Vivos xPoint" to Ellsworth AFB (a key nuclear target) is around 70 miles. If you buy, be sure to ask for the ICBMs Landing Nearby Discount!

Some background reading (not necessary for the discussion but I found it informative) on the history of the US Supreme Court and how we had best not expect it to swoop in and save democracy. https://www.vox.com/scotus/24086594/donald-trump-supreme-court-trial-immunity-never-going-to-save-us

I wish it would speak for itself because I can't make the slightest sense out of what you're saying. Perhaps you could open a thread under a forum heading where such mechanics would be relevant. With (sigh) some evidence for such phenomena and their underlying principles.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

We saw the Pluto energy on the moon a few years ago... This was what de Toqueville and John Stuart Mill were warning about when they spoke of "the tyranny of the majority." They saw an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. The minority needs a voice and to participate in policy making.

Less screen time and more fresh air and direct human contact can help reduce depression and misery. (yes, some irony in that sentence) Counseling is useful, but its longterm goal is to further more engagement with life and with people who aren't being paid to talk with you. Counselors guide, they don't fix. You fix. That's what the existentialists were on about: you are the one who must tap into creativity and create meaning in life - you can't count on a world full of absurdity to tell you who you are or where your bliss will be. You must go find it. The journey is difficult. Assume it will be difficult and you are less likely to get discouraged. Sweat is good. 🙂

This seems to go to the core of the current problems. Populism is predicated on the notion that leadership matters. Democracy, on the notion that facts, laws and principles matter. The allure of populism is the notion that a great leader will determine what is true, relieving people of the burdens of ambiguity and clashing ideas. Democracy requires fact acquisition in a public space where truths are larger than any one person, no matter how "great" they are. When American culturally shifts towards placing authority in politicians and celebrities, then the authority of laws and facts and principles suffers and we start to export "crazy." As a nation among nations we need to stop talking and start listening. Stop imagining ours as the most important voice in the global room.

I used to think a shift towards the Global South might be a geopolitical good, but then came Modi, Bolsonaro, et al. I still have hopes India could become more of a center. I have doubts that the US can really promote democracy effectively by gunboat diplomacy and supporting genocide. And our defense contractors have the power of oligarchs.

They are if you feed them legumes.