TheVat

In the US, am getting a message that the domain name has lapsed. Since today is the DN registration date for that site, I figured the annual DN payment was not made. Well, I hope this isn't something where US regs are pissier. And I know the experience of starting threads that don't take off. A contentious element does seem needed. Then again, it isn't needed, Tyndall faked his results, the ice age is about to start and you are all clearly insane!

Your labeling of PKin's responses as "over the top," could reveal some emotion on your part, as well. Since PK has written a novel that includes such issues of sustainability, I would give the BOTD that they have researched rather thoroughly and are not posting idly or with disregard of relevant facts. I would post a link, but that might technically constitute doxxing, so I can't.

Noticed today that another sister forum (the dot com that several members here also visit regularly) seems to have gone down. I had to wonder if the owner (no idea who it is) might have noticed how much of recent posting there is more on political, social/economic or religious topics. SFN seems to do a little better, in terms of sticking to science and tamping down offtopic personal disputes. Probably helpful that SFN has several moderators, whereas SFC is down to one. If SFC is a goner, I will miss the skeptics v believer threads there, which were often both entertaining and informative. It's a nice bunch of interesting people over there, so I would have no problem with inviting them over here if they feel homeless. (getting email addresses would be a hurdle, though, if that site is permanently down - I have not personally corresponded with any of them outside of using the site's PM feature)

Well, the scale is just crazy. Somewhere (if anyone asks for citation, I will do my best) I've seen estimates that if we humans were to live as hunter-gatherers, the carrying capacity of the planet would be somewhere between 200-500 million - at most 1/16 of today's population. And pre-industrial revolution, the population stayed under 1 billion, which is probably a reasonable guess at a ceiling on low tech agri, with animal-powered cultivation. A regression to anything like that now would likely be even fewer people, given the prevalence of depleted soil, fisheries, aquifers, etc. Politically, culturally....yeah, I have no idea if any current society is really going to exert maximum consumer force on agribusiness to do humane and sustainable meat production. Right now, it's just a niche, among many. Probably won't change until there's a crisis, or society evolves towards some kind of post-capitalism, post-oligarchy. Or there's massive eco catastrophe, wiping out 9/10 of the population. That tends to get attention towards sustainability issues. If they don't eat all the historians before they can remind people how they got into that reduced condition.

See my previous post. Using only grassland unsuitable for cropping, elimination of the CAFO system, and free grazing with natural herd bonding and culling, would allow meat at least as an occasional treat and help maintain the prairie ecosystem which needs the trophic cascade and soil breaking (hoof action helps aeration) of large herbivores. Manure runoff and water waste is an artifact of CAFO systems.

True, some areas like the higher semiarid plains near me do not support cropping, and are ecosystems which work best with herds of large herbivores. There are ranchers out here who are trying sustainable free range beef, as an alternative to the cruel feedlot system (called CAFOs). Most people couldn't eat meat all the time with such methods, the product is expensive, but that would encourage the more plant based diet where meat is an occasional luxury - my experience is that "mostly plants" is great for the health, and there seems a lot of research to support that. Certainly a heavy meat diet for 8.2 billion people is not sustainable, just on the basis of water and crop feed requirements.

I remember seeing the shtreimels when I was in Brooklyn - those were Hasidim, a subgroup of Haredi Judaism. They were mainly Ashkenazi, but not exclusively. There are some Sephardic people in the various Haredi groups. I hope Israel can get Netanyahu out and in jail where he belongs, and make some real progress towards a two state solution.

Muslim voters basically agreed to punching themselves in the face. Pretty much like the rest of the Stay Homers and the 70 million Trump voters. The ballot may as well have read, I hereby consent to a minimum of four years of punching myself in the face, in order to teach the Democratic Party to focus their entire platform on rent and groceries.

This is why I support the Constitutional right to arm bears. As was crafted by John Grizzly Adams.

Ah, this answers my question in another thread. Apparently Rufus mistakenly thought I had downvoted him, and conferred a revenge DV. TBH, I hadn't really paid any attention to his posts or formed any opinion on them. Perhaps best to find out where DVs originate before accusing people, hm?

Do we no longer do logic humor here? Show yourself, oh downvoter, and articulate what has vexed thee.

It leads either to an issue or a wife with steady hands

I wrote to NASA today to ask if their Global Temperature pages and Climate Change pages are staying up and unaltered. They are a fine public information resource and educators resource. Anyone can contact NASA here: https://www.nasa.gov/contact/ I have also drawn up a list of addresses of my congressional representatives, as well as members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. And will start firing off letters if such web pages are altered in a partisan way, or removed. I am encouraging others to do the same, though of course exercising discretion as regards possible job security, e.g. writing as a concerned citizen from a non-work email, etc. I think it would also be good for people to start flooding the comments sections at major news outlets of all formats and leanings - this is something the Right Wing and assorted fascist trolls are really good at, maybe it's time for the rest of us to get better at that game. The thing with Musk's crew getting access to the federal treasury payment system...was kind of a splash of icewater in the face for me. Navel gazing and post mortem time is over - we the people need to start working on ways to push back right away.

Sounds like there is that element of anxiety, as there has been here, that the right-wing can come back to power at any time. I think you are correct that climate change info will be thoroughly purged from government websites and there will be little chance of even veiled references to it. I think our Department of Interior also has quite a bit of climate information online. I wonder if this suppression virus will also spread to public universities, especially those in Red states and those more dependent on federal money. I expect the U of Maine, for example, would be vulnerable, given their institute for climate change.

Speaking as an Independent (40+ years), I find it easy to recognize a partisan ideologue hiding behind the facade of independence. One big clue was the conflation of elected and hired positions in LA municipal and county government. Key positions are elected and therefore DEI is irrelevant. And the grievance, that current bad government was somehow an overarching cause (vs, say, bad zoning and building codes over the past 70+ years, or profiteering developers running amuck in the urban/wildlands boundaries) of the fires, is transparently partisan and, as Swanson noted, something of a racist dog whistle. I think Hitchens Law may be invoked and the shrill notes dismissed.

El Douche admin orders shutdown of the USDA's websites on climate change. (x-post w/Ken F) I am wondering if USDA scientists will be devising ways to slip some of this information into remaining live webpages. Dark times https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/31/trump-order-usda-websites-climate-crisis On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to unpublish its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis. By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.” (....) On Friday, USDA officials clarified that the content should not be deleted. “USDA needs to adhere to requirements around records retention, so Archive or Unpublish [sic] landing pages focused on climate change,” an email sent to agency public affairs directors read. As of publication, the USDA’s Climate Hubs – helpful sites that connect producers to local programs and research – are still live, but many sites were down, including the USFS Climate Change Resource Center, Climate Action Tracker, and the National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change. The sites featured important tools and information to help mitigate the effects of climate change and research. For now, the administration has effectively barred access to dozens of programs set up to help a wide range of communities – from farmers to firefighters – as they navigate changing conditions...

Seems a small semantic knot over how physical is defined. My understanding was that all events that can be measured, i.e. which interact with something else, be they force-carriers or massive particles or monopoles (if they are ever discovered), constitute "the physical." So "nonphysical" seems to be more of a philosophic postulate. A neo-Platonist for example would view natural laws as nonphysical, i.e. they can somehow exist independent of physical interactions. A dualist, for another example, would view mind as nonphysical, capable of existing independent of brains. Since we are physical entities who use physical means to apprehend our universe, there are no readily available testable hypotheses about nonphysical, i.e. noninteracting, things. So far, it looks like a "law," rather than being something that exists independently (perhaps written in some ethereal tome called How to Run a Universe), is an abstraction derived from the observation of the physical world which refers to a perceived regularity in the patterns of nature. But it's very easy to start confusing abstractions with things - in philosophy that's called reification. That's how one falls into intellectual potholes like "the ghost in the machine." Or "mind was there, before matter."

This administration parodies itself.

I love latkes. My Scandinavian relatives also cooked them, called them raggmunk. Served with lingonberry jam they were heavenly, and took care of calorie needs on a winter day. Jewish friends would eat them with applesauce and sour cream.

Funny how this thread OP is asking if God is a jerk, which strikes me as an entirely theological topic, and it's stuck looping endlessly on abiogenesis and the creationist totally not creationist totally metaphysically neutral conjecture that it couldn't arise from natural chemical processes and spontaneous local decreases in entropy via self-organizing structures.

But egg prices are dropping. Someday. Trump will talk with the birds. Bird flu will be over in a week. Nobody wins when they play chicken with Trump!

Seems to reduce oxidative stress and apoptosis. < 4%. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5731988/#:~:text=H2 mediates oxidative stress,gas in the human body. It was previously considered physiologically inert in mammalian cells, and was not thought to react with active substrates in biological systems. Recently, H2 has emerged as a novel medical gas with potentially broad applications. Dole, et al. first reported the therapeutic effects of H2 in 1975 in a skin squamous carcinoma mouse model [10]. Thereafter, inhaling high pressure H2 was demonstrated as a treatment for liver parasite infection-induced hepatitis [11]. In 2007, Ohsawa and colleagues discovered that H2 has antioxidant properties that protect the brain against I/R injury and stroke by selectively neutralizing hydroxyl radicals (·OH) and peroxynitrite(ONOO-) [1]. To date, H2 preventive and therapeutic effects have been observed in various organs, including the brain, heart, pancreas, lung, and liver. H2 mediates oxidative stress and may exhibit anti-inflammatory and anti-apoptotic effects [12–14]. H2 not only provides a safe and effective disease treatment mechanism, but also prompts researchers to re-visit the significance and benefits of medicinal gas in the human body. This review summarizes recent progress toward potential preventive and therapeutic applications of H2 and addresses possible underlying molecular mechanisms...

Not the founder. Ibn al-Haytham five centuries before Bacon was an early pioneer in the scientific method, setting out much of the empirical and experimental framework that later Renaissance scientists adopted. I really tire of seeing this founder myth of Bacon perpetuated.

The scriptwriter of The Devil in the Dark episode of Star Trek was more attentive to other bonding issues when it came to silicon based life forms...

Ha! My favorite line in the handbook description is Arsole is only moderately aromatic. Our class jokes were more like...